‘But…come on. You’re wonderful.’
‘No.’
‘Dad.’
I leaned into the crook of his neck, but he refused to touch me. ‘I can’t have you mad at me. You’re my good girl.’
‘I’m not mad at you.’
‘Yes you are. You want to leave.’
I leaned against the fridge. It’s a huge opportunity, Dr Hughes said about the fellowship. You’ll be away from home. I had told my father about the fellowship-that it was a prestigious chance to study in my field. I changed one detail, however: I told him it was in New York, not wherever the interesting fieldwork was happening overseas-in my case, Dublin. I didn’t know I was going to get this far in the application process. It just happened. Dr Hughes had said, Apply, you’ll certainly get it, we all believe in you, but I really hadn’t thought she’d meant it.
Later, I told myself. Tell him later. Tell him everything later. I thought of the flyer I found the other day, the one with her name printed in large block letters, a date, a place, a topic. I’d kept that from him, too.
He looked straight at me. ‘I’m terrified, Summer. Of tomorrow. I don’t know if I want to do it.’
Then don’t, I wanted to say. ‘But it might help you feel better.’
‘What if it doesn’t?’
‘It will.’
I didn’t want to take him to the procedure tomorrow, either. It sounded medieval. When trying to imagine how it might work, I felt like I was wandering into a wilderness where I had no compass or bearings.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked.
I nodded furiously. ‘The doctor says eighty per cent of patients feel better.’ I held on to anything. I held on to percentages, hearsay, catchphrases.
‘Eighty per cent? But that means there are twenty per cent that don’t.’
‘You’ll feel better,’ I assured him. ‘Don’t worry about it. So what are you going to do today?’
He shrugged.
‘Do you want to do something? Go out to lunch?’
‘I don’t think so.’ He glanced at me. ‘You know what you should do today? You should give that coat back.’
I half smiled. I had taken a poncho from someone at a party; I’d told him it was an accident, but he wouldn’t let it drop. ‘The coat’s owner lives in the Bronx,’ I said. ‘That’s an hour away by train.’
He opened Vogue to the middle. ‘You really shouldn’t go around stealing coats that aren’t yours. At least you could have taken one with money in the pockets, you know?’
‘True,’ I laughed.
He leaned in for a hug. He smelled as he always had, like cinnamon gum and soap. It was comforting to think that his smell hadn’t changed, even though everything else about him had. If I closed my eyes and breathed in, I could almost imagine him as the man he was when I was eight, the father in the leather-framed picture on the credenza. It had just snowed, and he was standing on a hill in Prospect Park, a plastic sled in hand, a red, pilly hat coming to a point on the top of his head. I was running toward him, burying myself in the soft folds of his coat, and in seconds, we would pile onto the sled and go down the hill together.
There were certain things I wished I hadn’t turned my head to see. Once, I saw a car hit a bicyclist head-on, his spandexed body flying into the air and landing jaggedly on the pavement. He did a whole flip in the air. He may have broken his back, maybe his neck. I didn’t stand around to watch; enough people already were. Another time, I saw a Chinese man slap his kid, a six-year-old girl, across the face, as she was coming down the slide at a park. All she was doing was sliding.
My father used to make me look at skin cancer photos, to deter me against smoking or drinking or going into the sun without sunscreen or putting anything carcinogenic into my body. A woman had an enormous melanoma on her leg; it had gotten so bad that the black, puckered welt had eaten straight to her bone.
I could have walked right past the flyer last week without seeing it. There weren’t any others of its kind on other phone poles or parking signs. But my head turned that direction; I walked by it and saw it and there it was.
The Learning Annex Presents Meredith Heller, it said. Acting For Beginners.
And then a description: Pennsylvania native and stage actress Meredith Heller teaches you the basic techniques of acting. Beginners welcome!
It gave a date a few weeks in the future. And a location-the Mayflower Hotel, on Sixty-first Street and Central Park West. And a time.