“Surprise,” he said, and then he tickled the bottoms of my feet, which were sticking out from under the sheet. I felt myself giggling uncontrollably—that had always been my most ticklish spot. I yanked my feet under the covers as I heard my father leave the room. “Meet you outside,” he called. “Five minutes.”
I tried to keep my eyes shut, and attempted to return to the dream that now seemed very far away—but I knew it was futile. Between the light streaming into the room and the tickling, I was now wide awake. I opened my eyes, sat up, and checked my watch. It was nine a.m. So much for a day off.
I had gone back to work yesterday following the movie debacle, and it had been fine—Lucy continued to be slightly more cordial to me, and nobody brought up how terrible I had been. But I was still happy to have a day away from the site of my most recent humiliation, and had planned on spending it sleeping until noon, and then maybe sunbathing out on the dock while reading a magazine. But that was clearly not going to happen.
Ten minutes later, I walked through the kitchen, glancing briefly at the calendar as I went, looking at the days that had been crossed off, a little unable to believe that it was June already. My dad was on the porch, pacing around, and he appeared entirely too awake for how early it was, especially considering that he’d been sleeping in lately, and usually hadn’t been up when I’d left for work.
“What’s the surprise?” I asked, as I joined him on the porch and looked around. I saw nothing except my father and the cars in the driveway. I was slowly getting the feeling that I’d been duped.
“Well,” my dad said, rubbing his hands together and smiling. I noticed that his clothing had relaxed very slightly—rather than a button-down shirt, he was wearing a polo shirt with his khakis, and ancient boat shoes. “It’s not so much of a surprise, per se. It’s more of an outing.”
I looked at him. “An outing.”
“You got it,” he said. “We’re going to get breakfast.” He looked at me, clearly waiting for a reaction, but all I was thinking was that it was very early, and I was awake when I didn’t want to be, and had been promised a surprise. “You need a good breakfast,” he said in his best persuade-the-jury voice. “It might be a big day.” When I still didn’t move, he smiled at me. “My treat,” he added.
Twenty minutes later, I found myself sitting across from my father at the Pocono Coffee Shop, aka the diner, at a table by the window. The diner did not seem to have changed at all in the time I’d been gone. It was wood-paneled, with red booths covered with cracked leather. The cream on the tables was in squeezy syrup bottles, something that had provided endless entertainment for me and Warren when we were younger. There were framed pictures of Lake Phoenix though the ages covering the walls, and the one next to us showed a beauty pageant of some sort, girls with forties hair and sashes across their bathing suits, smiling at the camera as they lined up along the beach, all in high, stacked heels.
“What looks good?” my father said as he opened his large, plastic-covered menu. I opened mine as well, and saw that nothing on the menu seemed different since I’d last seen it, even though I was pretty sure that in the past five years, there had been some important discoveries about cholesterol and saturated fats. But maybe the management figured that adding healthier options would hurt their reputation—after all, the sign by the door read WALK IN. ROLL OUT.
“Everything looks good,” I said honestly, my eyes scanning down all the egg-and-meat combination options. I had been running so late for work every day this week, I’d usually been eating a granola bar as I drove.
“You folks set?” A middle-aged waitress, glasses on a chain around her neck, approached our table, her pencil already poised above her order pad. She was wearing a name tag on her red uniform T-shirt that read ANGELA.
My father ordered a short stack of the blueberry pancakes and a side of bacon, and I got what I’d always ordered, the Pocono Omelet, which was distinguished by the fact that it mostly contained eggs and different kinds of meat and cheese, without any vegetables whatsoever.
Angela nodded and wrote down our order as she walked away. And I looked across the table at my dad and felt suddenly on the spot.
It wasn’t that my father and I had never eaten together, just the two of us. We had certainly gotten ice cream together more times than I could count. But it was rare for it to be just the two of us at a meal, and, frankly, to have his undivided attention at all—no siblings, no BlackBerry constantly buzzing. I wondered if this was the time to do what I’d been thinking about ever since I’d gone with him to the hospital—the moment that I should tell him I loved him. But just as I thought this, Angela reappeared with her coffeepot and poured cups for both of us, and I felt that the opportunity had passed.