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Suddenly Emma looked up. "Really, we're sorry," she said. "You were so nice, Lucy."
"Don't hate us, Lucy," said Amy.
I wasn't sure what to say. I mean, I didn't exactly hate them. But I didn't exactly trust them,
either. I looked around the table. My dad took a bite of his moo-shu pancake, and I thought I
caught a glance pass between him and Mara.
"Lucy, now it's my turn to apologize," said Mara. "I should have trusted you wouldn't have done something to endanger Emma and Amy."
Were we in an alternate universe? I nodded at her. She grabbed a paper napkin from the pile next
to her and handed it to me. "Here," she said. "For your lap."
So we were in the real world. "Thanks," I said, taking it.
Nobody said much for the rest of the meal. When we finished eating, my dad brought over the
big kitchen garbage can and we dumped all the paper plates and empty containers and disposable
chopsticks into it.
I was pretty sure it was the first time since San
Francisco that I hadn't been asked to clear the table.
***
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Later my dad came downstairs just as I was setting my alarm.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," I said. I checked the volume and made sure it was set to go off in the a.m., not the p.m.
"So I'm going to work out of the New York office for the next couple of weeks," he said, leaning over the banister. "Like I did today."
I put the clock back down on the floor next to my bed. "Sure," I said.
"That's the best I can do for now."
"Okay," I said.
He waited, like he wanted to say something else. Or maybe he was waiting for me to say
something else, I wasn't sure. But what was I supposed to say? I guess everything's okay now.
Emma and Amy said they're sorry, you temporarily relocated to New York, and Mara let us have
Chinese food and eat in the kitchen! Bibbitybobhityboo!--we're one big happy family.
As it was, my dad and I just ended up looking at each other in silence for a while.
"So I guess I'll see you tomorrow," he said.
"Yeah," I said.
"Well," he said, "good night."
"Good night."
It took me forever to fall asleep.
What my dad had said made it impossible for me
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to stop thinking about how my life would change if he really was working in his firm's New
York office instead of flying out to the West Coast every Sunday. The idea of him opening the
front door each night when he got home from work made me so happy I almost started crying.
How easy would it be to sit through di
was there, too; if afterward he and I watched a game together or went for ice cream like we used
to? If he was around, wasn't it possible my home life would actually become ... bearable?
Finally I made myself roll over and go to sleep. Because while my fantasy was certainly a nice
one, the reality wasn't so pretty. "Two weeks," I said into my pillow. "He said two weeks."
That's the problem with fairy tales. Every good thing happens for a limited time only.
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Chapter Twenty-eight
All week prom gossip flew fast and furious. In math, while Mr. Palmer droned on about graphing
parabolas, I taught Jessica what a point spread was, using the latest rumors about which couples
would make it to Saturday night and which wouldn't. Even though I was doing it while he was
talking about something else, I thought Mr. Palmer would have been proud to hear me explain,
when we got to Jane and Sam, that you can't solve an equation if you don't know whether
something (i.e., Jane's bitchiness) is a variable or a constant. I realized that despite my math
teacher's being clinically insane, I'd actually learned something in his class.
Having just been talking about him in math, I was surprised when Sam didn't show up to art, and
I was even more surprised when he wasn't there the next day, either. It wasn't until the end of the
week that
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I asked Ms. Daniels where he was, and while she was telling me all about the colleges he was
visiting and how she hoped he'd seriously consider RISD, I suddenly remembered the daydream
I'd had about us slow dancing at the prom. It made me feel really self-conscious. First I have a
weird vision of us dancing together and then I'm all concerned about why he isn't in school? Just
as I was starting to seriously regret having bothered to ask Ms. Daniels about Sam's whereabouts,
I saw Jessica and Madison standing in the open door of the studio. Jessica pointed at her watch
and I cut Ms. Daniels off, explaining that I had to run.
My worrying about why I was worrying about why Sam was absent didn't last very long. By the
time we were halfway down the hall and I'd heard Jessica's new-and-improved unofficial polling
data indicating that Co
remembered I'd been talking to Ms. Daniels, much less what we'd been talking about.
Meanwhile, having my dad at home was almost the sugar-coated fantasy I'd spun in my
imagination. Almost.
As I'd hoped, we watched a game together and we went for ice cream (well, gelato). And it
wasn't Mara interrupting the game so my dad could look at fabric samples for the chair in their
bedroom or Emma and Amy coming with us on our dessert run that made his
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being home less than perfect. It was the big red X's I kept drawing on my mental calendar.
Thirteen. Eleven. Ten.
Because even while I wanted to celebrate the fact that I'd gotten my father back, I couldn't help
measuring how happy I was now against how bad I was going to feel when he left again for San
Francisco.
The morning of the prom I woke up to my cell ringing. I could tell from the light managing to
fight its way through the tiny basement windows that it was going to be a beautiful su
"We're meeting at Madison's at four, right?" It was Jessica.
"Yeah, right," I said, yawning. "Four o'clock."
"I told Kathryn she should come over, too," said Jessica. "To get ready and everything."
Only half awake, I wondered if I'd heard Jessica right. "Kathryn? I thought she wasn't coming."
"Oh, yeah, well, she and her boyfriend had this mondo fight last night. She's coming stag."
Jessica laughed. "I said she could come in our limo. Isn't that cool?"
"Ah, yeah, it's pretty cool."
Is it still called going stag if your plan is to arrive alone but leave with someone else's date?
"So you'll be here at four, right?" Jessica asked.
"Right," I said. "I'll be there at four."
My dad and Mara were gone when I got upstairs.
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There was a note, gone antiquing. Of course. Of course. Hadn't I known it was only a matter of
time before we went back to business as usual? Probably they'd forgotten about the prom, too,
forgotten I needed to be at Madison's at four. Good thing I had the Glen Lake cab company on
speed dial.
At three o'clock, just as I was getting out of the shower, I heard my dad's car pull up in the
driveway. A few minutes later there was a knock on my door.
"Yeah?" I had an open bag on my bed full of stuff for the prom and the Hamptons.
"Lucy? Can we come down?"