He let me take the keys from his hand, then walked around to the passenger side of the car without a word. As I unlocked the car, I looked down and saw the scattered licorice bits at my feet, the plastic bag trapped under the tire of a minivan two parking spots away. I climbed into the car and reached over to open the passenger door. I caught a glimpse of the girl, still standing in the door of the pet shop. She raised a hand in a wave, and I nodded back, trying not to notice that she still looked worried.
My father settled himself into the seat a little more gingerly than he had only an hour ago. I dropped the bakery box and my bag in the backseat and moved my seat way up—even though I knew how tall my father was, this never seemed as clear as when I was attempting to drive a car he’d been in before me, and my feet couldn’t even reach the pedals. I started the car, and we drove in silence most of the way home, his head turned to the window. I didn’t know if he was still in pain. But for whatever reason, I couldn’t seem to form the words to ask him. After we’d had the dining room conversation on my birthday, we had talked very little about the realities of his illness. And I hadn’t really tried. He clearly wanted to pretend that things were just normal—he’d said as much—but in moments like this, everything that we hadn’t said seemed to prevent me from saying anything at all.
“Did you see the name of the pet store?” I asked after driving in silence for as long as I could stand it. I glanced over and saw the corner of my father’s mouth twitch up in a small smile.
“I did,” he said, turning to look at me. “I thought it was a little ruff.” I groaned, which I knew he expected, but I was also feeling a wave of relief. It seemed like the air in the car had become less heavy, and it was a little easier to breathe.
“Wow,” I said as I made the turn onto Dockside. “You came up with that one without taking a paws.” My father let out a short laugh at that, and gave me a smile.
“Nice,” he said, which was the very highest compliment he gave, pun-wise.
I pulled the car in next to my mother’s and shut off the engine, but neither of us made a move to get out of the car.
“It really is good news about the job,” my father said, his voice sounding tired. “Sorry if that got lost in…” He paused, then cleared his throat. “Everything.”
I nodded, and ran my finger over a spot on the steering wheel where the leather was cracked and could probably be coaxed to come off, if I worked hard enough at it. “So,” I started, hesitantly. “Should we… you know… talk about it?”
My father nodded, even as he grimaced slightly. “Of course,” he said. “If you want to.”
I felt a flare of anger then, as sudden and unexpected as if someone had set off a firecracker. “It’s not that I want to,” I said, hearing the sharpness of my tone, regretting it even as the words were spilling out of me. “It’s just that we’re all here, we’re all up here, and we’re not talking, or…” I seemed to run out of words and anger at the same time, and was left with only a sinking feeling in my stomach, since I knew that the last thing I should be doing was yelling at my father. I started to take a breath, to apologize, when my father nodded.
“We will talk,” he said. He looked away from me, straight into the screened-in porch, as though he could see the time in the future when this would be happening. “We’ll say… all the things that we need to say.” I suddenly found myself swallowing hard, fighting the feeling that I was on the verge of tears. “But for now, while we still can, I just want to have a little bit of a normal summer with all of you. Sound good?” I nodded. “Good. The defense rests.”
I smiled at that—he used the legal expression whenever he wanted to declare a subject closed—but I couldn’t push away the question I’d had ever since he’d been diagnosed, the question that I somehow never felt I could ask. “I just…”
My father raised his eyebrows, and I could see that he already looked better than he had a few minutes earlier. And if I hadn’t known, if I hadn’t seen it, I might have been able to pretend that it hadn’t happened, that he was still fine. “What is it, kid?”
I felt myself smile at that, even though I still felt like I might start crying. This was my dad’s name for me, and only me. Gelsey was always “princess,” Warren was “son.” And I had always been his kid.
As I looked back at him, I wasn’t sure I could ask it, the thing that I’d been wondering the most since he’d told us, sitting at the head of the dining room table. Because it was a question that went against everything I’d always believed about my father. He was the one who checked for burglars when my mother was sure she heard a noise outside, the one we yelled for when confronted with a spider. The one who used to pick me up and carry me when I got too tired to walk. The one I’d believed could vanquish dragons and closet-dwelling monsters. But I had to know, and I wasn’t sure I’d get another chance to ask. “Are you scared?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper. But I could tell from the way that his face seemed to crumple a bit that he had heard me.
He didn’t say anything, just nodded, up and down one time.