The Unexpected Everything(59)

It was the way her whole funeral had felt—like it actually wasn’t about her at all. I watched as her friends and her students looked around at the Secret Service agents, at the president, and crumpled up the pieces of paper they’d brought with them, looking doubtful, not wanting to get up and talk about my mom—talk about who she’d really been—in front of the leader of the country. And so there hadn’t been any great or silly or funny stories about her. The words that were said could have been said about anyone, and the whole thing felt wrong, like I was letting her down. Like we all were.

“Sorry,” Clark said, still sounding embarrassed, and I started to feel bad. I closed out of the screen and handed him his phone back as he slid mine over the carpet toward me. After all, it was public information. If I’d had the time before Bertie had gotten sick, I would have no doubt been googling Clark and his books. “I didn’t realize your dad had run for vice president.”

“Almost,” I corrected, though a lot of people made this mistake. “He had to drop out before it was official.” I looked down and traced a circular pattern on the carpet.

“How’s he handling all this recent stuff?” Clark asked, and I looked up at him, fixing a smile on my face.

“Oh, just fine,” I said immediately, reaching for some of the lines Peter had written for me when everything was starting to fall apart. “Obviously, it’s a time of transition, which is always hard, but . . .” I looked at Clark, and it was like I suddenly realized where I was. In a laundry room, with a vomiting dog, wearing someone else’s clothes, with a boy who was not, to my knowledge, a member of the media. I could, I realized with what felt like a physical shock, tell him the truth.

It went against everything I’d been told my whole life—sometimes explicitly, but more often not. It was just what I’d learned, before I knew I was learning it. Stay on message. Don’t tell people what you really think or feel—unless it’s been vetted and approved. Keep people at arm’s length and your feelings to yourself. And I’d done it, for years now, until it was second nature. And where had it gotten me?

“Well,” I said slowly, feeling like I was going against a lifetime of training, “I’m not sure. It’s been . . . weird.”

Clark was looking over at me, expectant. I knew other guys would have just nodded, maybe said “bummer,” and then we would have moved on—gone back to fooling around, or to safe, easy topics. Topher would have known what I meant and not asked any follow-ups, because none would have been needed. But it seemed like Clark actually wanted to know—that he was waiting for me to go on.

“He’s home,” I said, shaking my head. “Which he never is. And it’s really strange to have him there all the time. And he’s not allowed to work, so he’s been watching ancient basketball games. . . .” My voice trailed off. I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him about the terrible dinner we’d had and all our awkward silences, which were made that much worse because it was like my dad didn’t even notice them. “I think he’s waiting for the investigation to clear him, so he can go back to work.”

There was a small pause, and Clark nodded, then asked quietly, “And what if he can’t? I mean . . . if it doesn’t come back in his favor?”

This was the very question I had been trying not to ask myself since it happened. “I’m not sure.”

“Well, what did he do before?” Clark asked, then smiled. “I didn’t get that far on his Wikipedia page.”

“He was a public defender.” I could hear the pride in my voice when I said it. I had always liked the idea of it: my dad, helping out the people who couldn’t afford their own counsel, righting the wrongs of innocent victims—and a lot of scumbags, too, based on the stories I’d heard. “It was actually how my parents met.” I couldn’t quite believe I was saying this, but the words were out before I could stop them. The story that the media had was that my parents had met while working together, which was technically true, but without any of the details. “She was putting herself through art school working as a police sketch artist,” I said, feeling myself smile even as I had to swallow hard. “And my dad was furious that one of her sketches looked exactly like his client, and they started fighting about it.”

Clark leaned forward. “Did the guy do it?”

“Stabby Bob?” I asked, and Clark laughed. “Totally. But it was enough to introduce them.” At the farmhouse, a framed sketch of Bob—long white beard, tattoos, a gleam of crazy in his eyes—had hung in the entryway, startling almost everyone who came over. I had no idea where it was now. Like most of my mother’s art, it hadn’t been hung up in the new place. I assumed he was in storage somewhere, no doubt carefully wrapped, but put away, out of sight.

“That’s kind of how my parents met too,” Clark said, and I felt my eyebrows raise in surprise. “Well, minus the stabbing guy,” he acknowledged. “My dad went to audit a dental practice where my mom was working as a bookkeeper. She’d had the books so organized and could answer every question he threw at her, so he hired her away to work for him.”

“So both your parents are accountants?” I asked, and Clark nodded. “That must have been rough.”

“Tell me about it,” he said, shaking his head. Then he looked at me and gave me a smile, like he’d decided something, before going on. “This one time, I think I was eight, they’d sent me to the store and told me to bring back change. But when I was walking back, I saw a new Batman comic. . . .” As Clark went on, telling his story, I realized that I wasn’t trying to stop him, or control the conversation, or keep him from asking me something I didn’t want to answer. It was like talking to my friends—and I would just have to see where the conversation took me. And so, surprising myself, I leaned forward to listen.