“Monday,” I said. And then a second later, crossed my fingers on both hands, just in case.
“Well, good luck,” my dad said. “Not that you two have anything to worry about.”
“Dad!” I cried, leaning over to knock on the wood of my headboard. “Don’t jinx us.”
“What’s the article?” Stevie asked.
“It’s about technology,” he said as I sighed and scrolled through my phone again. I’d heard this spiel far more than I wanted to. “And our addiction to it, and how some of us are unprepared to deal with the world without it.”
“And apparently it’s also about shaming your daughter for her perfectly normal behavior.”
“Oh no,” Stevie said immediately, looking from me to my dad. “I’m sure he didn’t mean you, right? Just technology in general?”
“No, I was actually thinking about Kat specifically,” my dad said, reaching in for more candy. I yanked the bag away from him. “And how she’s never without that phone.”
“You’re never without your phone,” I pointed out. “Everyone everywhere always has their phones. Why single me out?”
“It is interesting,” Stevie said loudly, and I could tell that she was trying to shift the conversation, move it to something less contentious. I’d told her, over and over again, that we liked to argue in my family—but she never seemed to believe that this wasn’t stressful for me like it was for her. “Because I was reading this article about how the things that used to be there to help in the olden days from when people didn’t have phones have all disappeared because of technology. Like there’s no more pay phones, or maps, or anything.”
“I don’t know if I would call them the olden days,” my dad said, looking pained. “I mean, there are still maps… and some pay phones… probably…” His voice trailed off, and he looked so consternated, I relented and held out the candy bag to him.
“Thanks,” he said, a little grudgingly, helping himself to some sour cherries. “So how are you, Stevie? How’s the museum?”
She smiled. “It’s good, thanks.”
Stevie’s grandmother, Mary Anne Pearce, was a legendary art collector. She’d donated her art collection to the town, along with a grant to build a museum—the Pearce, which I’d been going to since I was little for drawing classes and craft workshops. The museum had kept acquiring since her death, and Stevie’s mom was now the curator.
“Good afternoon.” I looked over and saw Grady, my ten-year-old brother, standing in the doorway, a book tucked under his arm. Grady tended to dress—and act—like he was a middle-aged stockbroker, and not a fifth grader, for no reason we’d ever been able to figure out. His eyes went wide behind his round-framed glasses. “Kat, what are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at rehearsal?”
“List isn’t up yet,” my dad said, reaching over to ruffle Grady’s hair, but Grady quickly sidestepped him. He carefully combed it every morning, in his preferred look of divorced bank manager.
“What are you reading?” Stevie asked, nodding toward Grady’s book. “What day are we diving into now?”
“April 14, 1912,” he said, and Stevie squinted at the cover. My brother was obsessed with a book series, Today’s the Day, that all took place over a single day during different historical time periods. I didn’t get the appeal. How exciting could a single day really be? He’d insisted that I just hadn’t read the right one yet; I very much doubted this.
“What happened then?” Stevie asked.
“Titanic sank,” Grady and I said at the same time. He looked at me with raised eyebrows, and I raised mine back at him. Honestly, if our teachers really wanted dates to stick with us, they should just make epic action-romance movies about all major world events.
“Yeah,” Grady said, running his hand over the book’s dust jacket. “It’s okay. Not as good as some of the other ones I’ve read, like the ones about Leopold and Loeb or the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, or the Manson murders.”
“Wait, what?” my dad asked, pulling the book out of Grady’s hand and flipping through it. “You’ve been reading about what now?”
“But it’s one of the days that’s incredibly impactful, but nobody living through it realized it at the time. It was only later that we could understand it.”
“Sounds cool,” Stevie said with a smile. “I’ll have to check it out.”
“Can I have a snack?” Grady asked my dad.
“Sure,” my dad said, brightening. He always used getting us snacks as an excuse to partake too. “Want some chips?”
“I’d prefer plain almonds.”
My dad sighed and turned to go, then stopped, like he’d just remembered something. “Oh, Stevie, I just wanted to say I got the kindest note from your mother. Please tell her thanks for me—and that I loved working with her, too.”
“I will,” Stevie said, her voice polite, but we exchanged a quick look. This summer, my dad had written an article for the Times Sunday magazine, about incomplete art collections—either by theft or just circumstance. He discussed the famous heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and the empty frames that still hang there; and a Russian billionaire who’d spent decades and untold sums of money trying to track down one Basquiat, without ever getting it. And he’d also featured Stevie’s mom, who’d taken over her mother’s hunt for one particular painting.
Neither one of us had liked the few weeks when my dad was spending so much time talking to Stevie’s mom. We were fine with our parents chatting postshow or at school events, or when we were all taking prom pictures, or whatever. But this regular contact had unnerved us both, just because it was in an environment we couldn’t control. Over the years there had been a lot of times that I’d been “sleeping over” at Stevie’s house when we both went out to a party, and when Stevie was “staying the weekend” at my house, but was actually at Beckett’s while his parents were at a play festival in Scotland. What we really didn’t need was our parents starting to compare notes and stories.
“Why were you working with Stevie’s mother?” Grady asked as he adjusted his glasses.
“It was an article about a painting Stevie’s mom has been trying to find,” my dad explained, his face lighting up the way it did whenever he was about to go into detail about one of his articles. “By Hugo LaSalle.” He frowned at my brother. “You know who that is, right?”
“I’m guessing a painter?”
My dad sighed. “We need to get you into a museum.”
“I like museums. Like the one in the stock exchange.”
“An art museum.”
“Oh. In that case, no thank you.”
“Stevie’s mom,” my dad said, taking a deep breath like he was trying to will himself to find patience, “has been trying to find one particular painting for a long time now.”
“Starting with my grandmother,” Stevie said, giving Grady a smile. “It’s a multigenerational art search.”