So I guess it was my job to not be like her. Not be a regular girl.
I steeled myself before he turned around. I made myself remember all the ways he’d failed, left us, messed us up. It wasn’t hard.
Then he did turn, with his big smile, his Russ True charm-and-con smile. His hair had more gray than I remembered, and he wore it shorter, with a matching little gray goatee. Sunglasses resting on top of his head. He had on jeans that weren’t too ratty for someone who’d never kept a job, and a Skin Yard T-shirt with a flannel over it, and he had a small brown backpack slung over one shoulder.
“Gem, baby,” he said, and opened his arms.
Despite how I’d prepared myself and despite what Mom had said, despite what Dad had done and not done, despite how he’d described me in the letter in which he hadn’t used my name . . . hearing it in that moment, my name on his lips and in his scratchy smoked-out voice, I went to him. And for that ten seconds or whatever it was, I held on. I pressed my face into the soft flannel. I let him put his rough cheek to mine and whisper: “See? I’m here.”
When I pulled away, I saw that Mr. Bergstrom had appeared in the office. He smiled a wide, fake smile I’d never seen him use. “Is this your dad?” he asked me. He stuck out his hand. “Mike Bergstrom.”
“Russ True,” Dad said, shaking it, and matching his cheerfulness. “Are you the principal, or what?”
“He’s the school psychologist,” Dixie said.
Then Mr. Bergstrom extended his hand to Dixie. “Hi. We haven’t formally met.”
She shook it and we all stood there, and Dad said to Mr. Bergstrom, “Just taking my girls out a little early today to do some catching up.”
“Sure, sure,” Mr. Bergstrom said, with that smile. Then, “Hey, Gem, quick question if you have a sec before you go?” He motioned me toward the hall that led to the administrative offices. I didn’t move. “About your schedule next week?”
I glanced at Dad, who said, “Go ahead. But make it quick, we gotta run.” He threw a wink at Ms. Behari, who was not smiling.
In the hall, Mr. Bergstrom led me to an empty office and pulled the door most of the way closed. “Ms. Behari called me down as soon as he got here. What’s going on?”
“Just what he said.”
“You didn’t tell me he was coming.”
It sounded like an accusation, or at least that’s how I heard it. “I have to go.”
“You don’t have to. Is this what you’ve been worried about?” He waited. Then: “Ms. Behari checked, and there’s nothing on file that says he can’t be here, but if you don’t want to go or you need to tell me something else, now’s the time to say it, Gem.”
What I wanted to say was, Why couldn’t it be true that my father was there for exactly the reasons he said? To catch up with us, see us, because he was our father and he loved us. Why couldn’t Mr. Bergstrom, who didn’t know even half of everything, believe in that moment that my father had come for those simple fatherly reasons—and that I deserved that as much as anyone, as much as Dixie?
I didn’t believe it, but why couldn’t he?
“It’s fine,” I said. I looked him in the eye. “It’s fine.”
“Now listen,” Dad said as we walked away from the school building, “Dixie told me Mom would be out all day today. The apartment should be empty now, yeah?”
It sounded like he and Dixie’d been talking since the letter had come, though I didn’t know how Dad had gotten ahold of her, or her of him.
“Maybe,” I said.
“She has an appointment,” Dixie said to me. “Then she’s taking one of Margot’s early shifts and working a double.”
So Mom hadn’t totally been freezing Dixie out the way I’d thought, had still been telling her things. Dixie had Mom. Dixie had Dad. I stepped apart from them as we walked down the street, scared I would let my guard down if I wasn’t careful, wanting a different version of us to be real.
“My idea is let’s go home,” Dad said. “I know it’s kind of a long walk home, but let’s do it, I want to see everything. We’ll go clean the place up and make it nice. We’ll go shopping and fill up the fridge, the freezer, everything.”
Dixie must have also told him about how things had been, our food situation. What she obviously hadn’t told him was that Mom already knew he was coming back, because if she had, he wouldn’t be so excited. I tried to focus on the facts, on what I could know, what was happening right now in reality. We were going home, and then to the grocery store. That’s all.
“Can we get bacon?” I asked.
Dad laughed. “Sure. Whatever you want.” He stopped walking and turned to me. He held his arm out. “Come here. Hey. Gem.”
I went to him. The regular girl I was trying not to be went to him, while Dixie watched.
“Let me see you.” He put his hands on either side of my face, his fingers gentle on the skin behind my ears. His eyes searched mine and I let them. “You’ve grown up. You really have.”
For a few seconds it was only us standing there on the street, my father and me, people and cars around us fading away. I was here first, I reminded myself, and silently reminded Dixie. For a couple of years, I was the only daughter they had, the only one they loved.
Then, keeping one hand on me, he put the other on the back of Dixie’s neck, pulling her close, too. “We’ll make everything perfect, then we’ll wait up for Mom and surprise her. You girls need to wait up with me, okay? She’ll walk in and see me and you and the clean house and the food, and she’ll be happy.”
“I don’t think she’ll be happy,” I said.
He dropped his arms. “Okay,” he said, nodding. “Fair enough. She won’t be happy.” He laughed then, like Mom being mad would be a fun adventure. “I’ll get out of there fast and give her some time to warm up to the idea. I just want her to see us all together. You know there’s never been anyone for me but your mom. Not in my heart.”
Not in his heart. But there’d been plenty of other people in his bed, other people in his daily life in place of us.
“Is that all your stuff?” I asked.
He gripped the shoulder strap of the backpack. “Some of it. Just some clothes and business things.”
“Where’s the rest?”
“At a friend’s. I don’t have much. I’m starting over all the way.” He took a deep breath of the cool air. “Goddamn I missed this place. Don’t ever go to Texas, that’s my advice.” We rounded the corner of our street. He put one arm around each of us. “I got some breaks. Things are coming together. This is going to be good, okay?”
We heard a shout from across the street. “Russ! Hey, Russ!”
A short guy with stringy hair and a big grin came over, dodging a car before he got to us. Dad dropped his arms and moved in front of me and Dixie in a way that seemed protective. “Do I know you?”
“Yeah, you know me, shithead,” the guy said with a laugh. “It’s Bongo.”