School, parent-teacher conference a few years back. His daughter was the same age as Nell.
“Chris. How’s it going? How’s your daughter…”
Cap paused, struggled.
“Ruthie,” said Chris, unoffended. “Yours is Nell, right?”
“Yeah, Nell.”
“Mine’s giving me a heart attack. Literally. I go for a checkup last week, my blood pressure’s 140 over 90. He asks do I have more stress at work, am I eating more salt? I say no, I got a sixteen-year-old girl at home. He goes, that’s it, then.”
Cap nodded and smiled and did the man commiseration thing. He pictured himself and Nell playing Texas Hold’em at the kitchen table last Saturday night.
“Everything’s a fight too. Tonight she’s going to that dance, and it’s like negotiating with the goddamn UN trying to get her home at a decent time.”
Cap stopped him, held out two calm fingers.
“There’s a dance tonight?”
“Yeah, over at St. Paul’s. Nell’s not going?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she forgot to tell me.”
“Watch that, brother. It’s very convenient what they forget.”
Chris kept talking until Cap said he was running late. They shook hands again. Cap put the beer in his trunk and drove away. Why hadn’t Nell told him about the dance? The real question was, why wasn’t she going? The even more real question: Why didn’t she want to go?
It wasn’t like she didn’t have friends. Sophie Kenton and Carrie Pratt were always around, and now that guy, Nick, who was definitely gay even if he wasn’t telling people yet. Why wouldn’t they all go together?
She ran cross-country in the fall, played soccer in the spring, got mostly A’s, played tenor drum in the marching band, organized student trips to the local soup kitchen and the children’s wing of the hospital. Cap thought she was beautiful, but she had inherited Jules’s dramatic features, a long, distinguished face and nose. Jules, a Women’s Studies professor at Lehigh, said Nell resembled a young Virginia Woolf. Cap knew teenage girls did not want to look like Virginia Woolf; they wanted to look like red-carpet movie stars, all lips and breasts and curved tan backs.
Cap was sure it was his fault, certain that the divorce four years ago had permanently damaged his daughter’s self-esteem. They’d done the right things, sent Nell to a therapist; both he and Jules were careful to tell her it wasn’t her fault, but still, always, shit got through. Cap truly believed there was nothing harder than being a kid. You were always an alien trying to learn the earth rules.
He pulled up to the house and sighed. It still made him sigh and sometimes laugh that he had gotten the house with all the ghosts. Jules got to move to a new condo with white carpeting and vertical blinds.
The place had come in handy when he started his business, though. He’d converted the mudroom and the den into a small office and had his clients come through the side door.
And more important, Nell liked it—she liked the three narrow floors and the bathroom fixtures modeled after the original ones that were installed when the house was built in the ’20s, the dusty living room set and the small grave markers in the backyard for Elmer the parakeet and Nigel the goldfish. She even loved their crazy neighbor Bosch and his crazier mother, Iris. So every time Cap felt like putting his fist through the crooked kitchen doorframe and the sunken bottom stair, he thought of Nell under an old blanket, reading a book in the chair by the window while it rained outside.
He came through the front door and saw her in the kitchen, taking the lids off takeout containers.
“Hey,” she called.
“Hey.”
She examined the food with her arms crossed, reviewing the evidence.
“They forgot duck sauce, I think,” she said.
“Christmas is ruined,” said Cap.
Nell chuckled. It was an old joke.
“Got enough beer there, Dad?” she said, sitting down, picking out orange chicken bits with chopsticks.
“I’m not drinking it all tonight, Bug.”
He opened the fridge and heaved the case in. Took one out and opened it.
“How’d the stakeout go?”
“Good for me. Bad for Mr. and Mrs. Svetich.”
“That’s sad. Isn’t it sad?”
“Yeah, it is, of course it is,” said Cap. “Just the job, though.”
“What about the deadbeat dad?”
“Slippery guy. Hasn’t used a credit card or had a bank account in eight months.”
“Dirtbag,” said Nell.
“Generous word for it,” said Cap. “How was the parade?”
“Drumline’s solid,” she said, making a fist. “The flutes were all over the place—whatever. Try this,” she said, sliding a foil bag across the table.
Cap opened it and pulled out what looked like fried fish sticks.
“Mrs. Paul’s,” he said, taking a bite. “Shrimp, right? Is it shrimp toast?”
“Yeah, isn’t it good? I had it at Carrie’s house. Her parents are doing this pescatarian thing.”
“Pescatarian?”
“You know, just fish and vegetables, no meat.”
“Sounds boring,” said Cap.
Nell shrugged. “Who knows. They read some article.”
He watched her eat, use the chopsticks like a professional like he taught her. Jules with all her intellect couldn’t do it, tried until she got splinters in her fingers. There was a time toward the end of the marriage when Cap showed Nell how to pick up ice cubes with chopsticks, just so Jules would feel left out. How desperate and stupid, he thought later. If he were to title the last year of their marriage, it would be “Desperate and Stupid.”
“What’re Carrie and Soph up to tonight?” he asked.
Nell didn’t look at him, pushed her food around with the sticks. About to lie, Cap thought.
“Ridgewood, maybe,” she said.
She didn’t elaborate. She was good. Answer only the question asked. No additional information.
“I ran into Chris Morris at Valley,” he said. “Ruthie Morris’s dad.”
Nell laughed and pointed at him.
“I totally made you, Caplan.”
“What?” said Cap.
“Let’s go over the scenario,” she said, drawing an invisible chart on the table. “You run into Chris Morris, exchange hi-how-are-you’s; the conversation turns to your daughters, and somehow the subject of a dance at St. Paul’s comes up. He says, Ruthie’s going, isn’t Nell going too, and you act cool like, Oh maybe she just forgot to tell me about it. But you want to be subtle, and you figure I’ll crack if you ask about Carrie and Sophie’s whereabouts, because chances are they’ll be at the dance. Yes?”
Cap leaned back in his chair and smiled. How could you not love the critical mind of this girl? She was literally the best of him and Jules—smart, funny, honest, kind. How could she not have twenty boyfriends? His answer was that she was too good for them. Her answer, if she would ever share that with him, would be considerably more frustrating: that those little Proactiv-smearing, dubstep-listening, malt-liquor-drinking punks at school weren’t interested.
“What am I going to say next?” he said.
Nell thought about it.
“Why aren’t you at the dance, Nell?” she said.
“Pretty good.”