“I’m going go and say hi to my dad,” I said. “He’s working late, so he’ll still be in the office.” In the back of my mind, I was secretly hoping that once I was there, he’d realize that he could, in fact, take the hour or so off and come have dinner with me. It wouldn’t need to be something fancy like Josephine’s. Or I could even pick something up and bring it back to the office, and we could eat together. After what a stressful night it had been, the thought of getting to still have a win—getting to have dinner with my father after all—was too appealing to ignore. I was hoping that he wouldn’t be too mad about me coming in without permission. I could catch him up on my night—or an edited version of it. Somehow, I knew that he’d like that I’d spent time with Matty and Margaux.
The doors slid open on floor seventeen. “Meet you down in the lobby in ten?” Matty asked as he stepped out.
I nodded as the doors started to slide closed. “See you soon.” I figured that if my dad was free to take some time to hang out, I could just run down and get the key from Matty.
When the doors opened on floor thirty-eight, I stepped out, looking around. Even though it was a Friday night, the office was far from deserted. These kinds of hours were one of the things my parents had fought about, even though they tried to keep it from me. As if I wasn’t sitting on the top of the stairs, or in the bathroom with the vent that led to their bedroom, straining for every word. As if I couldn’t sense that something was wrong. It was a slap in the face, honestly, that they’d tried to keep me in the dark for so long even when we all knew it wasn’t working, a horrible farce with stilted lines that we were all performing at the dinner table and on holidays. It was like they were saying they thought so little of me—what I could pick up on, what I could understand. When they finally came out and told me, on vacation in a rented vacation condo in Colorado, there was a big part of it that was a relief. That at least we didn’t have to go on pretending any longer.
But they’d argued a lot about the hours he worked. My dad telling my mom that he was a partner in a New York firm, that it was an hour for him to come back and forth from Stanwich each day, and if he’d missed dinner with us anyway, it was just easiest to stay in the city so that he could keep working. My mom protesting that he was missing everything, missing things with me, and I’d had to grip my legs hard so I wouldn’t jump up, burst in, and promise that he wasn’t missing anything, that I was fine, that there was no point in fighting. And it was the worst kind of fight to overhear, since it was the kind that went around and around in circles, the facts of the case never changing. My dad’s work was in the city; my mom’s was in town. She couldn’t change that and neither could he. All they could do, it seemed, was have the same argument over and over again, sometimes dressed up in different clothes, but always the same thing underneath. Until, finally, they’d decided that they’d rather not have it at all anymore. And they’d both walked away.
As I walked into the office, I stopped short—shocked by how different it looked. The color scheme was different, the font on the sign with the partners’ names had been changed, and all the décor was new. Had it really been that long since I’d been here? I knew everything had gotten busier in the last few years—school, rehearsals, my dad’s work… but I wouldn’t have thought it had been that long.
I was hoping his office would be in the same place—back in the corner suite, with windows that looked out onto Fifty-Third. As I got closer, I could practically see it in my mind—what it had always looked like when he worked late on something. And even though it had been a while, I knew what to expect, because it never changed—all the lights in his office blazing, the opera he always played when he needed to keep his energy up. The scattered Coke cans spread out over his desk, the candy bars he would pretend that someone else had left there for some reason he couldn’t explain. I felt myself smile as I got closer. He was going to be so surprised to see me. And it had gotten almost impossible to surprise him, now that we didn’t live in the same house together, and everything always had to be so scheduled.
As I rounded the corner, I saw his assistant, Carla, looking frazzled, sitting behind her desk, the one just outside my dad’s office. She had three stacks of paper in front of her, and she was pulling pages from each of them and sorting them together. “Hello,” I said quietly, trying not to disturb her and make her lose track of whatever it was she was doing. But even so, she jumped and looked up at me, her annoyed expression turning confused for just a moment before she smiled.
“Stevie?” she asked, standing up. She shook her head. “Look at you! All grown up.”
“Oh,” I said, giving her a smile back. I never knew what to say to that. Thank you? “It’s so good to see you again.”
“Likewise. It’s been too long,” she said, giving my hand a pat.
“I was just going to say hello to my dad,” I said as I started to head around her desk.
“Oh, I’m sorry hon,” Carla said, sitting back down and glaring at the piles of paper. “He’s gone already, I’m afraid.”
I paused, blinking at her for a moment. “Gone?” I took a step around the corner and there, sure enough, was my dad’s office. But it was dark and quiet, the desk clean—no piles of paper, no soda cans, no Turandot. But maybe he was working at home, back in his apartment—
“Yeah, he took off around seven. Said he was going to have dinner with Joy.”
I staggered back a step. It felt like someone had just slapped me. “He did?” I finally managed.
“He’ll be sorry to have missed you.” Carla was back to sorting the papers, not looking up at me. “So are you in the city with friends? Seeing a show or something?”
I swallowed hard. I could feel my eyes brimming with hot tears, and my chest was tightening. It was getting harder to breathe. “Yeah,” I said with a tremendous effort that took absolutely every bit of my acting ability. “Yeah, something like that. Good to see you again, Carla.”
“You too, hon. Take care,” she called.
I turned to walk back to the elevators, my chin quivering wildly, out of control, the way it only ever did when I was crying for real, not stage tears. I kept my eyes on the dark-patterned carpet, trying to keep it together. I just needed to make it down the hall to the elevator. Then I just needed to make it down the elevator. It was how you eat a whale, after all.
But this technique was no longer working, as the reality of the situation crashed over me like a forty-foot wave. My dad had bailed on my birthday dinner. He’d lied to me about it, then gone to have dinner with Joy instead. And the worst part of it was that, deep down, I wasn’t actually as shocked by this as I should have been. It had been obvious for years now—that my dad had had other priorities. He had moved on, and I wasn’t nearly as important to him as his new family.
I pressed the button for the lobby through a haze of tears, then just prayed for the doors to close without anyone else getting on. I truly felt like I couldn’t endure this ride with a cheerful paralegal, no matter how well-meaning. As the doors finally, blessedly closed, I let myself fall apart, sobbing into my hands—big, ugly, openmouthed sobs, the kind that I would never have done onstage.