I waited until I was sure she’d left before lowering my menu again. “You okay?” my dad asked, looking at me with his eyebrows raised.
“Fine,” I said immediately. “Just fine.” I opened my menu, then set it aside immediately, since I always ordered the same thing here. My dad set his menu aside as well, and we looked at each other in silence. I suddenly wished I’d pretended I needed more time with it, just to have a prop in front of me. “So,” I said, after we’d gotten our drinks and given our orders and I wasn’t sure I could stand the silence any longer, “um, how was your day?”
“Fine,” my dad said automatically. It seemed like that was all there was going to be to it, but after a moment he went on. “Yesterday was the last day I could have any communication with the office. The investigation started today, so I’m officially not working.”
“Oh,” I said, a little taken aback. I’d realized, in theory, that my dad would have to stop working when he took his leave of absence. But like all good theories, I’d never seen it put into practice. My dad worked all the time; it was just who he was. Even before he’d been a congressman, I used to hear stories about his public-defender days, sleeping on couches and eating vending-machine dinners, standing up for the people nobody else was going to defend. It looked like he was still working—he was wearing a suit and a collared shirt, but no tie, which was what he wore when he wanted to seem professional but not stuffy. “So,” I said, “um . . . what did you do?”
“I went to the library,” he said, “got some books I’d been wanting to read for, oh, the last decade or so. And then proceeded not to read any of them. Did you know that we have a channel that shows classic basketball games?”
I shook my head. “I did not.”
“Well . . . we do,” my dad said, giving me a slightly embarrassed smile. “I may have watched one from the eighties. One or four.”
I smiled at that. “Even though the outcome was decided years ago?”
“Ah,” my dad said as he unwrapped his chopsticks, separated them, and set them to the side of his silverware, “but there always seems like the possibility that something might change this time around.” Silence fell again, and I was about to take a breath and say something about the decor, or the size of the restaurant, when my dad asked, “So what about you?” He cleared his throat. “I mean . . . how was your day?”
“Oh,” I said, “well . . .” I knew I should probably tell him about my job; with Maya trusting me to work on my own, it seemed likely that I wasn’t going to get fired. But I didn’t want to see his expression when he heard what I was going to be spending the summer doing. I knew I’d have to tell him eventually, but not today, not when I’d just begun to feel like I was getting the hang of it. “It was fine,” I said, and without warning, my mind was suddenly back on the text he’d sent. “Um . . . you texted earlier that you were on East View?” My dad nodded. “Were you . . .” I took a breath and made myself ask it. “Were you at the old house?”
My dad looked up at me, his brow creasing. “The farmhouse?” he asked, like we had so many other old houses, he needed to clarify. I nodded, not even sure what I wanted his answer to be. There was a piece of me that wanted him to say that he’d been over there. That maybe he went all the time when he was back, and since I had never asked him, I never knew. It would be some kind of proof, at least, that he thought about my mother occasionally, that he remembered the life we’d all had there together.
My dad sat back in his chair, and it was like something crossed his face briefly before his normal expression returned again. “There was traffic on the Merritt, so I got off at the exit by East Loop and drove over here from there,” he said, then shook his head, like he was still trying to understand me. “Why would I go to the farmhouse?”
“I . . . just . . . ,” I said, reaching forward and taking my own paper-wrapped chopsticks, unwrapping them mostly to have something to do with my hands while I tried to sort out what I wanted to say. “I don’t know.” I took a breath and realized that even though I might not know exactly what I wanted to say, I was pretty sure I knew where it was coming from—it was like something had been churned up since the press conference. I wasn’t sure if it was seeing my mother’s painting, or reading what my dad had written, or even if it was just this, the reality of the two of us struggling to talk to each other when there were no distractions to hide behind.
I looked down at the table, wishing I’d never brought it up. Wishing I hadn’t asked. I should have known the answer would be something like trying to avoid the traffic.