The elevator doors open.
“Millie, what is that supposed to mean?”
I push my way out the front door, and Oliver is still hot on my heels, clearly hoping against hope that I’ll say something that undoes what I just said. Good, some part of me thinks. This is it, then. I’ll cut him out of my life clean and easy, and there will be no missing him at precollege, no wondering what might have happened if I stayed.
“It means I’m exactly what you always thought I was. A brat. A diva. Pick one of the above.”
But Oliver doesn’t take the bait, following me all the way out to the curb. “If you were really here just to piss your dad off, you could have taken any job in the city. Why was it this one?”
There are precisely ten dollars in my pocket, which is enough to hail a taxi and get at least ten blocks away from this place before it spits me out. I throw my hand up and see a driver signal his way over to the curb.
“Do you really hate me that much?”
I can’t answer him, because if I do, I might tell him something worse than what I already have: I might tell him the truth. I might tell him that I did hate him. That I don’t know if it was the last two weeks or the last three years, but something has shifted, and now I couldn’t hate him if I tried. I can’t answer him because if I do, it will only make this harder than it has to be, when I can put a stop to it all right now before it is anything at all.
The taxi pulls up to the curb, and I open the door.
“Millie—”
“I’m sorry,” I cut him off. That much I can tell him. But I already know before I watch his face disappear in the taxi window that it’s nowhere near enough.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The taxi driver, who seems very disinterested in my drama, is more than happy to drop me off at the piers so I can moodily walk up and down the Hudson until I’ve decided what exactly it is I’m going to say to explain myself when I get home. I don’t know how long it’s going to take to un-burn down my brain, but I’ve got the whole day now. I pick a direction, put my headphones on, and walk.
But I don’t even make it through the opening number of Next to Normal before I glance ahead and see a man in khakis squinting at the water, his hands in his pockets, his glasses already sliding down his nose. I should have guessed it. My dad was the king of moody river walks long before I was born.
I walk up to him and he startles before he realizes it’s me, and then he startles all over again. For a moment neither of us says anything. Then my dad’s lip twitches, and I feel the dad joke coming before it even fully enters his brain.
“Huh. You look just like my daughter,” he says. “But she’s supposed to be at work.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Funny story. So’s my dad.”
“Well, then. I’m glad they’re both putting the hours in,” he says. Then he tilts his head at me. “I don’t suppose you came out here to follow me?”
I wait for the rest of it to come—the volcanic eruption. The tidal wave. The Millie Mood to end all Millie Moods.
But my dad’s here, and that’s enough to stop it. Like all that chaos just rolled over his back before it could hit mine.
“No,” I say. “Just … taking in the view.”
He blows out a breath. I brace myself for whatever’s coming next, like my dad’s spinning a wheel of “Disappointing Things My Daughter Did.” Will it land on the fight we had before he left and never resolved? The shit show of last night? The fact that I am unrepentantly playing hooky right now?
In the end, it’s none of the above. “Some summer we’re having, huh?” he says instead, looking out at the water.
“That’s … one way of putting it.”
He cocks his head toward one of the benches. “Should we sit?”
The sun is already high enough in the sky that it’s beating down on us, making me feel like every inch of me is exposed. He picks a shady spot, but when I meet his eye I see that same flicker in them—that same wariness, like something is about to get opened that we can’t put back.
“So.” He clears his throat. “Heather tells me you’ve been trying to find your mom.”
I don’t bother trying to deny it. Instead I just nod, staring down at my legs. It’s a conversation I should have been anticipating all summer, but now that it’s happening, it’s almost excruciating—the push and pull of wanting to know so much, and suddenly being scared to know anything at all. Steph is real to me now. A living, breathing person to hold myself up against like a measuring stick. Someone who can understand me or disappoint me. Someone who could just as easily fade into the background of my life and be nothing at all.
I pick at a hangnail, mostly just so I don’t have to look at him. Mostly so I can have a few last seconds to think about her on my own, before my dad says anything that might change it.
It happens faster than I think it will.
“She said you mentioned a woman named Steph?”
It’s humiliating to have to ask. Like screeching to a halt some train that was already moving full speed ahead in my brain. “It’s not Steph?”
My dad shakes his head. “I don’t know any Stephs. Certainly not any who could be your mom.”
I want to push back. He’s friends with her on Facebook, so he must know her. But then again, he only logs on every few months and doesn’t seem to bother with much beyond hitting “Share” on the pictures Heather posts that I’m in. He doesn’t exactly use it to keep in touch with people from his past.
And even if he did—he’s telling the truth. Or at least the truth as he knows it. If Steph were my mom, I’d know by now. I’d have seen it in his eyes before I heard it in words.
“Is that— Are you okay?” my dad asks.
I probably shouldn’t be. I almost want to not be okay, because then it would give me a concrete thing to feel. But mostly right now I’m just tired. Tired and sorry and confused.
“I don’t know.”
I’m so used to being full to the brim with things to say that we’re both expecting there to be more to it than that, but there isn’t. For once, my dad’s the one who has to take the reins of the conversation, keep pushing it to whatever place it’s about to go.
“I don’t know how you found this woman—or Farrah or Beth, for that matter—but I’m sorry that you felt like you had to do it on your own,” he says.
Ah. So Heather did very much connect the dots on the Millie Mia. My face burns, partially out of embarrassment for what I did, and partially out of shame that my dad seems so willing to forgive me for it.
“I’m sorry, too,” I mumble. “I should have talked to you.”
My dad sighs. “I know I haven’t made that easy. I haven’t exactly been … vocal about her. And part of that was because she asked me not to be.” Out of the corner of my eye I see him fidgeting the same way I am, his hands flexing and unflexing. “But some of that was just me not really knowing what to say.”
I’m afraid he’s going to fall back on that now and handle it the same way he has for years. By brushing it off, or pretending not to remember that much, or distracting me with a milkshake.