The Unsinkable Greta James(26)

Ben glances back at her, and Greta bites her lip, realizing what she’s said.

If it weren’t for her.

The glacier comes into view again, a narrow slice of it between trees. Ben drops back, falling into step beside her, the fabric of their jackets whistling each time their shoulders brush against each other.

“How’s he doing with all of it?” he asks.

“Okay, I guess.” She steps to the side to let some other hikers pass. When they’re gone, she says, “This is the first time I’ve seen him since the funeral.”

Ben turns to stare at her. “You haven’t seen him in three months?”

“I told you, we’re not very close.”

“Yeah, but…he must be so sad.”

“So am I,” she says, and it comes out more bitterly than she meant it.

“Well, he must be lonely.”

“He’s got my brother.”

“Have you ever tried talking to him about all this?” Ben asks, clearly unable to get his head around it.

“He’s not that kind of dad.”

“How do you know unless you try?”

“Come on,” she says with a wry smile. “I was a kid who carried around a notebook full of terrible song lyrics. You think I wasn’t pouring my heart out to my parents every chance I got?”

He laughs. “Fair enough.”

“Whenever we argued, I’d write these ridiculously long notes that explained all my feelings—trust me, I had a lot of them—and slip them under their bedroom door. You haven’t seen melodramatic until you’ve seen a twelve-year-old’s handwritten rebuttal to her parents’ decision not to let her go to Casey Huang’s first coed party.”

“I’m suddenly dreading the tween years,” he says with a grin.

“They always worked on my mom. She’d come in later that night and crawl into bed with me and we’d talk it all through. But my dad never even bothered to read them.”

Ben looks shocked. “He didn’t?”

Greta shakes her head. “This one time, he opened their bedroom door just as I was slipping the envelope underneath. My mom was still downstairs, so it was just him, and I could tell he was still furious with me. I’d borrowed their credit card to get a CD—”

“Which one?”

“The new Sleater-Kinney. Obviously.”

He laughs. “Obviously.”

“Anyway, he asked if I’d come to apologize, and I told him everything I had to say was in that letter, which was of course about how my allowance should be higher so that I could buy CDs for myself. But he just picked it up off the floor and ripped it to pieces.”

“That’s awful,” Ben says with real feeling. “No wonder you wrote that song.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugs. “You had to find another way to make him listen.”

Greta stops and looks at him, amazed to be so effortlessly understood. Above them, the birds are chirping, and a single column of sunlight works its way through the trees. The glacier looks enormous from here, dramatic in the mist. They both turn to gaze at it for a moment, then begin to walk again.

“You know,” Ben says, his boots making sucking noises in the mud as he follows her, “when Emily first got pregnant, I was really scared. I’d just finished my PhD, and was teaching a full course load, and working on the book, and I would’ve been more than happy to just keep going like that. I bet you’ll understand this more than most people, but I have a tendency to get lost in my work and forget about everything else.”

Ahead of him, Greta tilts her head to one side to show that she’s listening.

“Even when we got engaged, it was only because we went to nine weddings that summer and then got into a fight on the drive home from the last one because we’d apparently been together longer than any of those couples and I still hadn’t gotten around to proposing.”

“Why not?” she asks, letting him catch up to her.

“Honestly? It never occurred to me.”

Greta smiles. “So how long did it take you to do it?”

“I asked her right then,” he says with a laugh. “We were hungover and stuck in traffic, coming back into the city from the Hamptons. She pulled over to the side of the road and made me at least get out of the car and onto one knee.”

“And she said yes?”

“She said yes,” he tells her. “But the kid thing—that felt different to me. Bigger. Scarier. We weren’t even really trying, so it caught me completely off guard. The day we found out, I made a list of things I wanted to be as a dad. Honest. Supportive. Kind. And then Avery came along and it was all crying and dirty diapers and middle-of-the-night feedings, and there’s not really any time to think about a bunch of adjectives when you’re covered in spit-up.” He glances over at her. “The truth is, being a parent is mostly just reacting. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don’t. You give what you can. And at the end of the day, most of it is just being there.”

Greta opens her mouth to speak, but before she can, Ben hurries on: “Look, I realize we just met, and I don’t know much about your dad. It’s entirely possible he’s the world’s biggest jerk. But he could also be a guy who’s mostly just been reacting his whole life, trying his best and maybe not always getting it right. The important thing is that it seems like he wants to be there right now. And he clearly wants you to be here too.”