“What?” I asked, looking at my father. “What was that, Dad?”
“I was just saying,” my dad said, mostly to my sister, who was glowering down at her plate, “that you also had a new, challenging experience today. But unlike your sister, you are taking it in stride.”
Crap. “Um,” I said, glancing at Warren, trying to see if I could silently communicate with him, and get him to distract everyone, or tell us how something else was invented. But Warren just yawned and helped himself to more fries. “Right. About that…”
“Taylor’s not quitting,” my father said. I cleared my throat, hoping that I could get him to stop somehow without looking like the flakiest person on earth. “And I’m sure her day wasn’t easy. Was it?”
He turned back my way, and everyone in my family looked at me, Warren’s fry raised halfway to his mouth. “No,” I said honestly.
“There you go,” my dad said, giving me a small wink, making me feel terrible about what I was about to do. But then I thought of Lucy’s face when she’d realized I was working there, and how lonely it had been, eating lunch by myself.
“Look,” I said, realizing that this might be my best chance to extricate myself from a situation that, I was sure, was only going to get exponentially worse as the summer went on. “It’s not that I don’t want to work. It’s just that the snack bar wasn’t… um… exactly what I expected.” My mother glanced over at me, her expression indicating she knew exactly what I was about to say. I looked away from her as I continued. “And, given my academic workload next year, I think I should use this summer to—”
“I don’t care!” Gelsey wailed, sounding on the verge of tears. “I don’t want to play tennis and I shouldn’t have to. It’s… not… fair!”
Warren rolled his eyes at me across the table, and I shook my head. This was what came of being the baby of the family. You got to throw tantrums years after you were officially much too old to do so. Gelsey started to sob into her dinner napkin, and I realized that the moment to announce that I was quitting my job had probably passed.
So I’d suffered through two more shifts at the snack bar, mostly just so that I could quit and still save a little bit of face with my dad. They were pretty much the same as my first day—Lucy barely spoke to me, and I spent the entire workday counting down the minutes until I could go home, more convinced with each passing hour that this was not worth the minimum wage. I’d planned on taking my day off to go down to the clubhouse, tell Jillian, leave a message for Fred (who would undoubtedly be fishing), and then tell my family once it was a done deal. But that afternoon, as my dad set aside his work and prepared to go to Stroudsburg for his doctor’s appointment, my mom called me out to the porch.
She was sitting on the top step, combing my sister’s hair. Gelsey was one step below her, a towel around her shoulders, her head tilted back slightly as my mother pulled a wide-tooth comb through her damp auburn curls. This was a ritual the two of them had. They didn’t do it all the time, just when my sister had a bad day or was upset about something. As I watched her getting her hair combed now, I wondered if this was because of the trauma she’d suffered at her tennis lessons (which she hadn’t been allowed to quit) or something else. Years ago, I’d wanted my mother to do this for me, when I was much younger. I’d eventually realized, though, there was probably no point to it. My mother and Gelsey had the same reddish-brown hair—long, thick, and curly. And I had fine, pin-straight hair that never got tangled and that I barely needed to comb myself. But still.
“What?” I asked. Gelsey made a face at me, but before I could respond in kind, my mother turned her head back so I could only see her profile.
“Would you go to Stroudsburg with your dad today?” my mom asked.
“Oh,” I said. This was not what I had been expecting. “Is he okay?”
“He just has his doctor’s appointment, and I was hoping you could go with him,” my mother said, her tone even, as she drew the comb from the crown all the way down to the ends that were already starting to curl into ringlets. I looked at my mother closely, trying to see what she meant by this, if there was anything truly wrong, but my mother could be inscrutable when she wanted to be, and I couldn’t tell anything. “You’re all set,” she said, smoothing her hand down Gelsey’s hair, then whisking the towel off her shoulders.
Gelsey stood and headed inside, crossing to the door in a series of fast twirls. I stepped aside to let her pass, totally used to this, since for several years now, when she was in the mood, Gelsey would seldom walk when she could dance.
“So?” my mother asked, and I turned back to see her plucking the loose hairs from the comb. “Will you go with your dad?”
“Sure,” I said, but still felt like there was more to this than she was telling me. I took a breath to ask when I noticed that my mother was tossing the stray hairs into the air, where they were lifted by the faint breeze that had been ruffling the trees all afternoon. “What are you doing?”
“It’s why you should always comb your hair outside,” she said. “This way, mother birds can weave the strands into their nests.” She looked down at the comb, then started to head inside, folding the towel as she went.
“Mom,” I said, before she reached the door. She looked at me, eyebrows raised, waiting, and I suddenly wanted nothing more than to be able to talk to her like Gelsey could, and tell her what I was really afraid of. “Is Dad okay?”
My mom gave me a sad smile. “I just want him to have some company. Okay?”
And of course I had agreed, and my dad and I drove the hour into Stroudsburg together, my father behind the wheel—I felt like I’d learned my lesson as far as questioning him about that. My dad seemed to be treating this excursion, brief as it was, like a real road trip. He stopped at PocoMart for honey-roasted peanuts and sodas for us, and put me in charge of radio duties as we headed out of town. This was perhaps the most unexpected part of the afternoon, since whenever we’d been in the car together before, he was always either on the Bluetooth talking to his office, or listening to the financial report.
When we’d arrived at the hospital, my dad led the way up to the oncology wing, and as he headed into his appointment, he promised me it wouldn’t be too long. But it had been twenty minutes now, and I was starting to get restless.