I nodded, looking down at the scratches on the wood table, totally unsure how to respond to that. We all knew what was happening with my dad, but we hadn’t really talked about it since my birthday, and I had no idea what to say.
“Well,” my dad said more quietly, after a pause. “Back to it.” He started typing again, and even though I’d intended to leave and start unpacking, it suddenly felt wrong to just leave my dad working alone on his last case. So I sat next to him, the silence punctuated only by the tapping of the keyboard, until we heard the crunching of the car’s tires on the gravel, and my mother’s voice, calling for us to come to dinner.
The bathroom wasn’t big enough.
This became massively apparent when we all ended up trying to get ready for bed—what Warren called his “evening ablutions,”—at the same time.
“You didn’t leave me any space,” I said. I nudged past Gelsey, who was brushing her teeth with excruciating slowness, to look in the medicine cabinet. It had been filled with Warren’s contact paraphernalia, Gelsey’s retainer case and lip balms, and too many tubes of toothpaste to make any logical sense.
“You should have gotten here sooner,” Warren said from the doorway, making the already-small space seem smaller. “Can you hurry?” he asked Gelsey, who just gave him a toothpaste-filled smile and started brushing even more slowly, which I wouldn’t have believed was possible without seeing it.
“I didn’t know that I would have to claim cabinet space,” I snapped, as I shoved some of his boxes of contacts to the side, trying to make room for my face wash and makeup remover.
Gelsey finally finished brushing her teeth and rinsed off her toothbrush, placing it carefully in the holder. “You can keep stuff in the shower if you want,” she said with a shrug as she pulled back the striped forest-green shower curtain that had been there forever. “I’m sure there’s some room—” Gelsey stopped talking abruptly, and started to scream.
I saw why a second later—there was a huge spider crouched in the corner of the tub. It looked like a daddy longlegs, which, I’d learned long ago on some nature walk, were actually not dangerous. But that didn’t mean that I necessarily wanted to see a spider the size of my head just hanging out in our tub. I took step back, and bumped into Warren, who was also scrambling out of the way.
“Daddy!” Gelsey shrieked, bolting for the door.
When my father appeared a few moments later, my mother behind him, the three of us were huddled around the doorway, and I was keeping my eyes on the spider in case he decided to make a break for it.
“Spider,” Warren said, pointing toward the tub. “Pholcidae.” My father nodded and took a step into the bathroom.
“Are you going to kill it?” Gelsey asked from where she was practically hiding behind my mother—which seemed a tad melodramatic to me.
“No,” my father said. “I’m just going to need a piece of paper and a glass.”
“On it,” Warren said, hustling out and returning with one of my magazines and a water glass. He handed them across the threshold to my dad, and then the rest of us all hung back. It wasn’t only arachnophobia—my father took up almost the whole of the small bathroom. He’d gone through college on a football scholarship, playing linebacker, and still was big, despite some of the weight he’d lost recently—tall, with broad shoulders and a booming voice, trained over years to carry across courtrooms to jurors’ ears.
A moment later, my dad emerged from behind the shower curtain, holding the glass pressed to the magazine. The spider scrambled frantically from one end of the glass to the other, over the features of the starlet who adorned the cover. My dad grimaced as he straightened up, and my mother immediately took the magazine from him and thrust it out to me.
“Taylor, set this free outside, would you?” She took a step toward my father, and asked, her voice more quiet, “Are you okay, Robin?”
While Robin was my dad’s full name, he went by Rob, and the only times I heard him called Robin was when my mom was angry or worried, or my grandfather was visiting.
My father was still wincing, and I didn’t think I could stand to see it, something I’d almost never seen before—my dad in pain. Magazine and trapped spider in hand, I turned away, glad for an excuse to leave.