I tip my head and give him the don’t-gross-me-out look.
He laughs. “I’ll keep it G-rated, I promise. Anyway, after a long day of skiing, we stopped in at this tiny hole-in-the-wall mountain restaurant to warm up and eat our weight in food. Your mom was there. Her family owned it as you know, and she more or less ran the place at that point.”
He gets a look in his eyes as he swivels in his chair and slides his glasses back up onto his head. “She spoke civilly, but she looked at me like I was a stray dog someone had made her take in and feed. That just needled me. She wasn’t the first haughty European I’d encountered with a sour opinion of American soldiers. So, I ribbed her back. I understood enough about Swedish culture that I knew plenty of ways to offend her. I purposefully committed every faux pas I could think of. Came on too strong, bragged, didn’t say thank you enough, made too much small talk. Said hi every time I saw her. I drove her nuts.”
A silent chuckle slips through my throat.
“But then we got snowed in.” Dad smirks. “There was no going anywhere. I was stuck there for four days, and the first two, I was pretty sure she was going to poison my morning coffee. I wasn’t unconvinced I didn’t want to spit in hers either. I kept up with the torture, late to every meal, asking for all kinds of extras to dump in my coffee and tea, botching my Swedish. I left a mess everywhere I went, smiled too much.”
What I can hear of his laugh is deep and tinged with nostalgia.
“But at some point on the third night, we were up late. Got a little drunk, and she invited—not challenged of course, too much aggressiveness in that for a Swede—she politely invited me to a game of chess.”
He takes a sip of iced tea, then folds his hands across his stomach. “She kicked my ass, crowed with victory. Now she was the one committing the faux pas. She’d not only made her guest lose a game but eviscerated him, and celebrated in his face, which is against every code of hospitality and humility in their culture. She was embarrassed and rather than let it go, I just kept talking about her win, teasing her for her hotdogging.
“She got madder and madder as I got nicer and nicer. The angrier she got, the calmer I was, and before I knew it, she’d smacked the chess game off the table, climbed it and was kissing me senseless.”
My jaw drops. This is not the meet-cute story I’ve heard told at family functions, but then again, this anecdote would have scandalized plenty of our family and made my Swedish grandmother faint dead away.
I’m blushing. I press a hand to my cheek to cool it, and it makes Dad laugh.
“Your mother.” He sighs. “I knew it right then: I loved her. I mean, I didn’t know that I knew right then, if that makes sense. I was still too twisted up in my frustration with her. But when I look back…” His shoulder lifts as he sips his iced tea again. “That was it.”
Why? I text him. How does that make sense to you? How do you look back and know?
Setting down his drink, Dad rests his arms on his desk. “Hate, enmity, rivalry are all passionate responses. My personal theory is that they are incomplete expressions of one core human emotion: love. It’s like that parable about the men who felt different parts of an elephant and each mistook it for something else. Love is a many-faceted feeling. It’s anything but one-dimensional. Sometimes when someone’s in love, certain emotions and behaviors, more than others, present themselves first.”
I swipe open my phone and type, That logic is terrifying.
He leans in. “But it is logical. Think about it. We don’t bother with people we’re indifferent to. We provoke and prank and tease those who get under our skin and make us feel, people who incite our passion.
“That’s why, when it came to your mother, I can look back and see I was doing everything I could to provoke her, not because I liked to tease her—”
I cock an eyebrow which earns his chuckle.
“Okay, I like to tease her a little. But back then, it was because I felt passion for Elin. And no, it wasn’t clear at first why that was the case—just because we butt heads with someone, doesn’t mean we’re in love with them—but when I came back a few months later, and she was still there, I had perspective. All those unresolved, convoluted feelings of exasperation and tension were no longer partial and incomplete. Affection, protectiveness, the impulse to drop my defenses and soften up, completed the picture, so I could see the truth: I liked her.
“Being around her made me wake up and sit straighter. Simply existing in her sphere made my blood run hot, my heart beat hard. After that, we still needled and teased, but we stopped denying that we were attracted to each other. We listened to our intuition and gave the other person a chance to be someone we could love. Turned out we were right.”
My appetite is nonexistent. I slide the paper bag aside and tug my ball cap lower, hoping my dad doesn’t see written on my face how upsetting this information is.
Dad taps the desk, earning my attention. “You okay? You seem upset.”
I nod, try to smile reassuringly, and rip back open my sandwich bag, forcing myself to attack my food with a singular focus. I can’t sit here and brood. It will raise his suspicions, if they aren’t raised already. I force down bite after bite, trying not to think too hard about the abundant parallels between my parents’ rocky beginning and the rough start Willa and I got off to. The shift at some point when I looked forward to her snarky comments about my lumberjack flannel, when I started growing hungry to find out not only what made her irises burn angry ruby red but also satisfied toffee, sweet with a lick of bite. When I started wanting to sweep her up and protect her from everything—garden snakes, club creeps, asshole professors who take things too academically far, anything that makes her eyes dim and that fiery spark extinguish inside her.
We finish our food while Dad prods me for more information about school, about my friends. He taps his ear, then mouth, looking at me sternly. “Your mother and I want to talk to you about that over Thanksgiving. We’re going to get this ball rolling on next steps, insurance or not, though I’m hopeful insurance is coming through now. Don’t even think about trying to get out of it. I know your penny-pinching, wily middle-child ways.”
I scowl at him for a long moment, then dip my head to type and change the subject, asking how Oliver and Ziggy—my littlest brother and sister who are the last ones at home—are doing. I ask about Mom and her Thanksgiving cooking preparations for the cast of thousands to come. We bullshit as much as you can for ten minutes, and when I stand and start to clean up our mess, I inadvertently knock my water over all his haphazardly placed files. We’re both quick, yanking the manila folders off the polished wood surface and dropping them to the carpet. Once I’ve dried off the table, I turn and crouch down, focusing on wiping away the excess water left on top of the files.
I’m a doctor’s son. I know about patient-physician confidentiality and I’m not a snoop. I honestly try not to think about all the sick people my dad cares for each day. Cancer’s depressing, and selfishly, I’m absorbed enough in my own damaged body not to want to think about other ways our bodies fail. So it’s not like I’m looking or even noticing labels until a last name practically screams itself at me.
Sutter.