I had to clear my throat before I could speak again. “It is,” I murmured.
“I don’t know how many of these I’ve missed, or just taken for granted,” he said, his eyes on the lake. “And I told myself I was going to get up for one every morning. But I have to tell you, kid,” he said, looking over at me, “I’m just so tired.”
And as he said it, I realized that he did look exhausted, and in a way that I’d never seen before. There were deep lines in his face I didn’t recognize, and bags underneath his eyes. It looked like the kind of tired that a good night’s sleep wouldn’t come close to making up for, the kind of tired that went down to your bones.
There was nothing I could do to fix this, or make it better. So I just nodded and pulled my chair a little closer to my dad’s. And together, we watched the sky lighten and transform, as another day began.
chapter thirty-two
I FINALLY GOT WHAT DICKENS WAS TALKING ABOUT. IT WAS THE best of times and the worst of times, all mixed into one. Because things were great with Henry, with Lucy, at work, even with my siblings. But every day, my father got worse. The FedEx truck bearing my dad’s work documents stopped coming, and I’d thought it was just an anomaly until three days went by. Mom told me when my dad was napping one afternoon that his firm had pulled him off the case. This sent my father into a funk like I’d never before seen from him. He didn’t get dressed, barely combed his hair, and snapped at us when we tried to talk to him—making me realize how much I had relied on him being who he was, the cheerful and punning father I’d taken for granted.
But it did give me an idea. Leland and Fred both agreed, and it was arranged while my dad took his late-afternoon nap. When he woke up, Warren helped him outside, where the Movies Under the Stars—Edwards Family edition—had been set up. Leland had agreed to run the projector, and we’d spread out blankets on the back lawn, down by the water, to watch what my father had always promised was the perfect bad-day antidote.
It was a much smaller crowd than normally assembled at the beach—just us, Wendy, Leland, the Gardners, and the Crosbys. I turned the introduction duties over to my dad, and we all got very quiet while he did his best to raise his voice so he could tell us, in no uncertain terms, how much we were all about to enjoy The Thin Man. And as we watched, I was able to pick out my father’s laugh above everyone else’s.
The movie helped shake him out of his funk, but just seeing him like that had been enough to scare me. The next couple of weeks fell into a pattern almost like a pendulum, with the good and the bad in constant flux, and I could never fully enjoy the upswing because I knew that there would be a downswing coming shortly thereafter.
We all started staying in at night, and spending the time after dinner sitting around the table, not rushing off to meet our dates (me and Warren) or catch fireflies with Nora (Gelsey). After much protesting from my mother, we excavated the old battered Risk board and set it up in the living room, where it became a shrine to strategy. And later on, when it got too dark or cold to stay on the porch, we all came inside to play the game, until my dad started yawning, his head drooping, and my mother would declare détente for the night and she and Warren would help my dad upstairs.
“Because,” I said as angrily as I could, to my mother, “I haven’t trusted you since you left me for dead in Paraguay. That’s why.”
“You tell her, Charlie,” my brother said in a monotone, as my mother flipped pages, frowning.
“Sorry,” she said, after a minute, as Kim and Jeff both groaned. “I don’t—”
“Page sixty-one,” Nora hissed. “At the bottom.”
“Oh, right,” my mother said. She cleared her throat. “I’ll ruin you, Hernandez,” she said to me. “I’ll wreck you and your whole family until you beg for mercy. But mercy won’t come.” She looked over at Kim and Jeff and smiled. “That’s very good,” she said, causing Nora to throw up her hands and my dad to applaud her performance.
Because we weren’t going out, people started to come to us. The Gardners occasionally stopped by, mostly to use us as impromptu actors to hear the current draft of their screenplay read aloud. Nora would take notes for her parents, and they kept casting my mother, despite the fact that she was constantly pausing mid-scene to offer her opinions.