But I was too lazy to do either of those things, and my coffee—despite being served in a truly humiliating mug emblazoned with my seventh-grade portrait—was still hot. And if I was honest with myself it was actually a little bit nice to be sitting on the couch with my dad, both of us bed-headed and bleary-eyed, with our tube-socked feet propped up on the coffee table. It felt almost normal, until I turned to look out the window and saw the snowy cityscape instead of Mom’s lilac bushes.
I felt for my phone on the cushion beside me as the golfer stared intently at the tiny hole onscreen, adjusting the belt on his bright orange pants. Riveting entertainment. I knew Mom had sent a bunch of texts the night before, around 10:30 L.A. time, when I was already passed out; I saw them lined up on my lock screen when I woke up, to check if there was anything from you. (The night before, at dinner, you’d casually asked for my number “in case you want to run lines sometime,” which had made my entire night. I’d chosen not to tell you that I already had your number programmed into my phone, and that I’d even given you your own ringtone.)
“You know, it is possible to live without that thing attached to your hand,” Dad said. He had a thing about phones, a recent and incredibly annoying thing he had picked up on a meditation retreat. Apparently being too “plugged-in” interrupted the mind’s ability to be silent, which was the key to true knowledge. Or something.
“I’m not even doing anything,” I said. “I’m just holding it.”
“But holding it means you’re waiting for it to do something, and if your attention is focused on that, it can’t be focused on this.” He gestured to the cluttered living room.
“What, like golf and Nana’s vitamin collection?” I asked. Dad gave me a withering look.
“Well if you’re going to ‘just hold’ it, would you do me a favor and text your mother back?” he asked. “She’s getting on me now.”
“Jesus, it’s been like twelve hours. Tell her to chill.” I wished I hadn’t called her from the movie theater. I never actually called her, let alone left her a message, so she probably assumed I was out on a ledge somewhere.
Dad held up his hands—or one hand, anyway; his other had his coffee mug in a death grip. “I’m staying out of it,” he said. I turned off the phone and tossed it onto the coffee table, on top of a stack of New Yorker magazines.
“Happy now?” I grumbled.
“Would you look at that, a double bogey,” Pop-Pop said. “He’s off his game today.” I looked at the TV but all I saw was a big, green nothing. I couldn’t even guess where the ball was supposed to be.
? ? ?
Nana got bacon and bagels from Zabar’s like she did every Sunday, and by one o’clock the table was set with a spread that could have fed a reality show family with three sets of triplet farmhands. Golf was off and the radio was on, tuned to some jazz station. It wasn’t exactly the stuff crazy weekends were made of, but at least it was dependably uneventful. I was on my second plate—and second hour of phoneless daydreaming—when the doorbell rang.
“Did you order a package?” Pop-Pop asked Nana, looking up from his section of the newspaper.
“Who delivers on a Sunday?” She took off her reading glasses and walked over to the buzzer while I went back to my bacon. I’d barely registered the exchange; my parents used to joke that every time they talked, it sounded like the grown-ups in the Peanuts cartoons, just a bunch of dull, wordless wah wah wahs. So when the doorman’s voice crackled through to say that someone named Libby was there to see me, it took me a few seconds to catch up.
It felt like slow-motion, Nana’s barely contained look of delighted surprise, the way she said, “It’s for you, Davy,” using the nickname that made me feel like I was six years old again and sitting with her in the planetarium at the Museum of Natural History, counting the minutes until the show was over and we could go to the gift shop for astronaut ice cream. Then the mental dominoes started falling and I realized that I didn’t know a Libby, and that it had to be you standing downstairs in the lobby, talking to Bobby the weekend doorman, and that Nana was already telling him to send you up, and that I was still in tube socks and boxers, and that Dad was doing tree pose in spandex bike shorts like some sort of statue erected in the center of the living room to commemorate the utter humiliation of my life.
“Call back!” I pleaded, leaping up. “Tell him I’ll come down!”
“Who is this girl?” Nana asked. “One of your school friends?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have time. “Dad!” I yelled, sprinting into my room. “Put on regular pants!” I ran my fingers through my hair, taking in my unmade bed with the faded Mets comforter, my open suitcase of dirty clothes, the framed bumper sticker over the dresser that read IMPEACH TRICKY DICK. I grabbed the nearest pair of jeans and pulled them on, shoving my feet into my boots so fast I almost tripped over a dusty medicine ball. My T-shirt didn’t smell great, but I pulled a sweater on over it and hoped for the best.
I got back to the living room just in time to see Dad rolling up his yoga mat, still in the bike shorts. “Come on!” I said. “This isn’t funny.”
“It’s a little bit funny,” Pop-Pop said. He hadn’t moved from the dining table and was watching me with a glint of amusement in his eyes.