We ended up at the beach, which was only a few minutes’ drive from Main Street, sitting at one of the picnic tables, and looking out at the water. I’d cleaned myself up with the paper towels in the backseat of the car, and some hand sanitizer I found in the glove compartment, and now I no longer looked like I was going to pose an ice-cream hazard to everything I came in contact with. Despite the fact it was getting late, the beach was crowded, a line forming at the snack bar.
As I looked over, I found myself wondering if it was just Lucy working, or if Elliot was on duty as well. As though sensing this, my dad rotated his cup, searching for the ideal bite, as he asked me, “How are you liking it, working here?”
I realized this was my opening, the moment to tell him that while I’d really given it a shot, it just wasn’t going to be a great fit. And maybe after I mentioned it to him, I could go over to the administrative offices, quit, and have this whole thing resolved before dinner. “So here’s the thing,” I said. My dad raised his eyebrows and took a bite of his (nearly finished) ice cream. “I’m sure that working at the beach is a great experience. But I just don’t think it’s necessarily the right fit for me now. And maybe, like Warren, I should really be focusing on academics….” I trailed off as I ran out of excuses and realized that I didn’t have any siblings or distractions to interrupt me—just my dad, looking at me with a level gaze, like he was seeing right through me.
“Tell me, kid,” he said after finishing his last bite and setting his cup aside, “did I ever tell you how much I hated law school when I first started?”
“No,” I said, not even having to think about it. My dad rarely talked about himself, so most of the personal stories I’d heard either came from my mom, or my grandfather, when he was visiting.
“I did,” he said. He reached across with his spoon for what was left of my ice cream, and I tilted my cone toward him. “I’m not like your brother. Things didn’t come so easily to me in school. I had to work like hell just to get in to law school. And once I was there, I thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. Wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.”
“But you stuck it out,” I said, feeling like I knew where the story was going.
“I stuck it out,” he confirmed. “And it turned out I really loved the law, once I stopped being scared I was going to make a mistake. And if I hadn’t stayed with it, I never would have met your mom.”
That was one story I did know—how my parents had met at a diner on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, my dad a third-year student at Columbia Law, my mom having just finished a performance of The Nutcracker.
“Right,” I said, feeling like my window to get out of the job was rapidly closing. “But in this case…”
“Is there something wrong with the job? A real problem you have with it?” My dad reached toward the cone with his spoon again, and I just handed it to him to finish, having lost my appetite for ice cream. It wasn’t like I could really tell my dad that it was because my former BFF was being mean to me.
“No,” I finally said.
My dad smiled at me, his blue eyes—the ones I’d gotten from him, the ones nobody else in our family had—crinkling at the corners. “In that case,” he said, like the matter had been decided, “you’ll stick it out. And maybe something good will come of it.”
I doubted that entirely, but I also knew when I’d been beat. I looked at the snack bar for a moment, dreading the fact that I’d now have to return there tomorrow. “Maybe so,” I said trying to sound as enthusiastic as possible—which, even I could hear, wasn’t all that enthusiastic.
My dad laughed and ruffled my hair with his hand, the way he always used to do when I was little. “Come on,” he said. He stood up, wincing slightly, and tossed away the ice-cream cup. “Let’s go home.”
After dinner, out of nowhere, it started to rain. It caught me off guard, and seeing the world that had only been sunny and warm transformed by a sudden thunderstorm was jarring, a reminder of just how quickly things could change.
I ducked under the screened-in porch gratefully, wiping the droplets from my face and kicking off my flip-flops in the pile of sandals that inevitably accumulated by the door. I had taken the trash out to the bearbox, thinking that with an umbrella I wouldn’t get too wet, only to have the rain pick up in intensity and the wind pick up in speed the second I stepped outside.