My dad looked at me evenly over his reading glasses. “Don’t make me call Sabrina again.”
“I withdraw the question,” I said, stacking up my breakfast plates and preparing to take them into the kitchen. I watched my dad reading for a few moments, making marks on the paper with his mechanical pencil, before I asked, “So what is that?” This was how I had been used to seeing my father—always working, always reading, head half-buried in a stack of papers or fixated on the news. Seeing him like this again was making me realize just how long it had been since I’d seen him in work mode.
“This?” he asked, looking down at the sheaf of papers in his hand, and I nodded. “It’s for a case,” he said, looking back down again. “An old friend in the public defender’s office asked me to take a look at something.”
“Oh,” I said, leaning back against my chair, trying to figure out what this meant. My dad had not been talking at all about what he was thinking about doing with regard to his job, and for the most part, it was something I’d almost forgotten about. It was like we were both on summer vacation, and none of the real rules for either of our schedules seemed to apply anymore. This was probably made much easier by the fact my dad wasn’t allowed to have any contact with his office, as it really did seem like that whole part of his life had just faded out. “Are you . . . ?” I started, then bit my lip, not sure exactly what I was trying to ask him, or what I wanted him to reply.
“I’m just looking at something for a friend,” my dad said easily, seeming to understand what I was trying to get at. After a moment, though, he set the papers aside and took off his reading glasses, turning to face me more fully. “It is something I’ve been thinking about, though,” he said. He cleared his throat and rolled his pencil between his palms before he asked, “What would you think about that? If I didn’t run again in the fall?”
“What about the investigation?” I asked, thrown. As far as I’d understood things, we were still waiting for the results to come back. I hadn’t known my dad not running for reelection in November was even in the cards.
“Even if it comes back in my favor,” he said. “I don’t know. It’s just been on my mind lately.”
I looked at him for a moment, then looked back down at the stack of plates once again, trying to get my thoughts together. It hadn’t been that long ago that I couldn’t picture my dad without his job. But now it was getting harder to remember when things hadn’t been like this, our lives overlapping. It was in the way my dad knew to make sure that the fridge was stocked with Diet Coke, the way I knew his paper-reading hierarchy—national news, sports, business, comics (he was especially invested in the family hijinks of the Grants in Grant Central Station). It was how when he’d been running late to dinner at the Crane last week, he’d called and asked me to order for him, and I’d done it without needing to ask him what he wanted. It was last Sunday, when Clark had come for dinner and then Tom and Palmer had stopped by afterward to hang out and we’d all ended up playing Pictionary, my dad teaming up with Tom and Clark, the three of them strategizing and taking it way too seriously (and winning, not that I was bitter). It was this, now, watching movies on a rainy Sunday and not wanting to be anywhere else.
“So if you didn’t run,” I said slowly, trying this idea out, “you’d be here?”
“I would.” My dad looked across at me. “What do you think?”
I looked down at my hands for a moment, twisting them together, trying to gather my thoughts. The idea that this summer wouldn’t just be over as soon as news came from Washington was something I really hadn’t let myself think about before. I cleared my throat before I spoke. “It would be okay with me. If you were around, I mean.”
“Good,” my dad said, tapping his pencil once on the coffee table.
“After all,” I said, making my tone faux serious, “Palmer might do another scavenger hunt. And we’d need you for backup.”
“Well,” my dad said, matching my tone, “I wouldn’t want to miss that.” He smiled at me, then settled back against the couch and picked up his papers again.
I’d planned to bring the plates to the kitchen, take a shower, and get ready before Clark came over for dinner. But I found myself curling back up in the chair. I just wanted to sit there, in the quiet, with my dad working, letting myself imagine, for the first time, what October or February could look like. No train rides down to D.C., no Peter. Being able to tell someone who was actually interested, and not being paid to listen, how my day had been. And so, even though I knew I should probably get moving, that Clark was on his way over, I stayed there, perfectly still, letting myself picture it, playing it out in my head like a movie—seeing what, just maybe, could be.