“So am I,” she says, and it comes out more bitterly than she meant it.
“Well, he must be lonely.”
“He’s got my brother.”
“Have you ever tried talking to him about all this?” Ben asks, clearly unable to get his head around it.
“He’s not that kind of dad.”
“How do you know unless you try?”
“Come on,” she says with a wry smile. “I was a kid who carried around a notebook full of terrible song lyrics. You think I wasn’t pouring my heart out to my parents every chance I got?”
He laughs. “Fair enough.”
“Whenever we argued, I’d write these ridiculously long notes that explained all my feelings—trust me, I had a lot of them—and slip them under their bedroom door. You haven’t seen melodramatic until you’ve seen a twelve-year-old’s handwritten rebuttal to her parents’ decision not to let her go to Casey Huang’s first coed party.”
“I’m suddenly dreading the tween years,” he says with a grin.
“They always worked on my mom. She’d come in later that night and crawl into bed with me and we’d talk it all through. But my dad never even bothered to read them.”
Ben looks shocked. “He didn’t?”
Greta shakes her head. “This one time, he opened their bedroom door just as I was slipping the envelope underneath. My mom was still downstairs, so it was just him, and I could tell he was still furious with me. I’d borrowed their credit card to get a CD—”
“Which one?”
“The new Sleater-Kinney. Obviously.”
He laughs. “Obviously.”
“Anyway, he asked if I’d come to apologize, and I told him everything I had to say was in that letter, which was of course about how my allowance should be higher so that I could buy CDs for myself. But he just picked it up off the floor and ripped it to pieces.”
“That’s awful,” Ben says with real feeling. “No wonder you wrote that song.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugs. “You had to find another way to make him listen.”
Greta stops and looks at him, amazed to be so effortlessly understood. Above them, the birds are chirping, and a single column of sunlight works its way through the trees. The glacier looks enormous from here, dramatic in the mist. They both turn to gaze at it for a moment, then begin to walk again.
“You know,” Ben says, his boots making sucking noises in the mud as he follows her, “when Emily first got pregnant, I was really scared. I’d just finished my PhD, and was teaching a full course load, and working on the book, and I would’ve been more than happy to just keep going like that. I bet you’ll understand this more than most people, but I have a tendency to get lost in my work and forget about everything else.”
Ahead of him, Greta tilts her head to one side to show that she’s listening.
“Even when we got engaged, it was only because we went to nine weddings that summer and then got into a fight on the drive home from the last one because we’d apparently been together longer than any of those couples and I still hadn’t gotten around to proposing.”
“Why not?” she asks, letting him catch up to her.
“Honestly? It never occurred to me.”
Greta smiles. “So how long did it take you to do it?”
“I asked her right then,” he says with a laugh. “We were hungover and stuck in traffic, coming back into the city from the Hamptons. She pulled over to the side of the road and made me at least get out of the car and onto one knee.”
“And she said yes?”
“She said yes,” he tells her. “But the kid thing—that felt different to me. Bigger. Scarier. We weren’t even really trying, so it caught me completely off guard. The day we found out, I made a list of things I wanted to be as a dad. Honest. Supportive. Kind. And then Avery came along and it was all crying and dirty diapers and middle-of-the-night feedings, and there’s not really any time to think about a bunch of adjectives when you’re covered in spit-up.” He glances over at her. “The truth is, being a parent is mostly just reacting. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don’t. You give what you can. And at the end of the day, most of it is just being there.”
Greta opens her mouth to speak, but before she can, Ben hurries on: “Look, I realize we just met, and I don’t know much about your dad. It’s entirely possible he’s the world’s biggest jerk. But he could also be a guy who’s mostly just been reacting his whole life, trying his best and maybe not always getting it right. The important thing is that it seems like he wants to be there right now. And he clearly wants you to be here too.”
“Except,” Greta says, “it was my brother who suggested I come.”
Ben smiles like a lawyer about to rest his case. “But if your dad really didn’t want you on this ship, I doubt you’d actually be here.”
This hadn’t ever occurred to Greta. When she’d finally called Conrad to suggest joining him—a few days after she’d promised Asher she would—he’d been quick to dismiss the offer. “I don’t need a babysitter,” he’d said, much to her relief, and her halfhearted insistence had done little to change his mind.
But the next day, she woke up feeling guilty. It was something about the way he’d answered the phone, his voice less gruff than usual, more plaintive. She pulled up the website for the cruise line to see if they still had any available cabins, and when she saw that they did, she sighed. The second time her dad picked up, she didn’t ask him. “I’m all booked,” she said, and a few beats passed before he replied: “Okay.”
She and Ben continue to walk in silence, Greta deep in thought as they trudge up a slope leading back to the visitors’ center. After a while, the rain starts up again, falling in fat drops now, and Ben glances over at her apologetically.
“We should’ve turned back sooner,” he says, squinting at the sky. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she says. “I don’t mind walking.”
“Me neither. That’s my favorite thing about being back in the city, actually. I can wander for hours.”
“Me too. Especially when I’m writing. It helps me think.”
“Same. Where do you live?”
“East Village.”
He nods, as if he expected as much. “I bet you’re one of those people who never goes above Fourteenth Street.”