Page 27 of You Say It First

Tonight she ate her strip steak and scalloped potatoes, chatting gamely about WeCount and the carnival and the paper she was writing for her independent study about Rebecca Latimer Felton. Sometimes as the two of them sat across from each other in a booth or a corner table, both of them casting around a little bit frantically for topics of conversation, it was hard to believe her dad was the same guy who’d changed her diapers and taught her to ride a two-wheeler and carried her screaming bloody murder out of an IMAX movie about dinosaurs when she was seven. They used to sit in easy silence for hours at a time watching Japanese monster movies on Blu-ray. Now she kind of couldn’t imagine being comfortably quiet with him for five minutes at a stretch.

“So,” he said now, sitting back in his chair as the waiter cleared their plates, “I’ve got some news.”

“Uh-oh,” Meg joked. “The last time you said that, you told me you and mom were getting a divorce.”

Her dad laughed awkwardly. “Well, hopefully this is happier,” he said, then took a deep breath. For a moment, he looked more uncertain than Meg ever thought of him as being—young, somehow. “Lisa and I are getting married.”

Meg was hallucinating—she must be. It was like what he was saying didn’t make sense in the English language, like he’d suddenly switched to Dutch without warning or recited a bit of poetry in Sanskrit. She only just barely caught herself before she laughed out loud.

“Wait, seriously?” she asked, the words coming out before she could think better of them. Then, schooling her expression into something more acceptable as she realized this wasn’t some kind of emphatically un-hilarious joke: “Um. That’s great!” Holy crap, she really had not thought he and Lisa were that serious. They’d only been officially dating for a year.

“Well, thanks,” her dad said, his cheeks pinking up a bit as he fussed with his napkin. “It means a lot to me that you think so, obviously. We’re thinking Memorial Day weekend, somewhere here in town.”

“Wow,” Meg said, blinking about a thousand times. “That’s soon.”

Her dad nodded. “Lisa’s kids leave to be with their dad in Chicago pretty soon after school lets out,” he explained. “And then you’ll be at college...”

Lisa’s kids, Meg remembered suddenly. Right. Her future stepsiblings. Lisa’s kids were fine; they were young and kind of boring, but not offensive or anything. She’d only met them once.

“Um,” she said, realizing abruptly that she was yanking her bottom lip so hard she was starting to hurt herself. She dropped her hands into her lap. “Does Mom know?”

“Not yet,” her dad admitted. “I was thinking maybe you might want to be the one to—”

“What? No,” Meg interrupted, suddenly panicked. “You have to tell her. And you can’t tell her that I knew first.”

“I—okay.” Her dad looked at her closely. “Meg, honey,” he said, and his voice was very quiet. “Is everything okay? With your mom, I mean?”

“Of course,” she said too quickly. “Everything’s fine.”

Her dad frowned. “You could tell me if it wasn’t.”

Meg shook her head. She knew what the right response was here—she didn’t want to be some stereotypical teenager who was an asshole about her dad’s remarriage—but there was something about it that felt so profoundly unfair to her, that her dad got this new life while her mom got a huge old house that needed renovating and a recycling bin full of empty wine bottles. And sure, they’d both made their choices, but she couldn’t get over the feeling that somehow the options weren’t the same for them both.

“Um,” she said, pushing her chair back too quickly. Suddenly, she was absolutely, horrifyingly sure that she was going to cry. “Excuse me.”

She stared at herself in the mirror in the cavernous, marble-tiled bathroom, her hair frizzing a little around her temples and the beginnings of a pimple on her chin. She sat down on a green velvet couch and dug her phone out of her pocket, scrolling through her messages until she got to Colby’s name. She hadn’t texted him back last night, trying to teach him some kind of lesson she wasn’t entirely sure how to articulate and that felt vaguely embarrassing now, twenty-four hours later, when it turned out he was the only person on Earth she actually had any interest in talking to.

She paused for a moment, thumb hovering, then changed her mind and flicked up to Emily’s name instead. She’d said something about going out with Adrienne and Mason and Javi tonight, Meg thought—she hadn’t really listened to the details, since she knew she had plans, but suddenly it felt imperative that she get out of this restaurant as soon as she possibly could. What are you guys doing? she keyed in.

Emily texted back almost right away: We’re at Cavelli’s, she said. How’s dad dinner?

Meg texted back a row of upside-down smiley emojis. I’m going to come meet you, okay?

A pause, longer this time, the three dots appearing and then disappearing twice before Emily responded. Yup, she said. See you soon!

Normally, their dorky dad/daughter schtick was to order whatever two desserts were biggest, then split them, but now that she’d located an escape route, even a giant slab of chocolate cake wasn’t enough to entice her to stay one minute longer than she had to. “I actually told some friends I’d meet them,” she explained when the waiter came by with the menu. “Sorry.”

“Oh,” her dad said, and she could tell he was a tiny bit hurt; no other commitments on dad dinner nights was one of their implicit rules, though she was pretty sure he wouldn’t say anything about it, and she was right. “Okay. We’ll celebrate another time, then.”

“Absolutely,” Meg said. “Another time.”

She pulled into the parking lot outside of Cavelli’s twenty minutes later. There was something reassuring about the sight of it: the neon beer signs glowing in the windows, the rickety benches lined up along the sidewalk for people waiting to pick up takeout orders. Inside it smelled like fry oil and garlic. She took a deep breath and smiled at the surly middle-aged hostess, as glad to see her as if she were Meg’s own grandmother. This much, at least, was the same as it had always been.

She hadn’t bothered to ask who we was, but as she scanned the restaurant she realized it was just Emily and Mason sitting across from each other in a duct-taped booth by the window, a pair of Cokes in red plastic cups and a mostly picked-over plate of toasted ravioli on the table between them. “My dad is getting married again,” she announced, flopping herself onto the bench seat beside Emily. “Also, hi.”

“What?” Emily’s eyes widened, her gaze cutting quickly to Mason and then back again. “Holy crap. To the lawyer?”

Meg nodded miserably, launching into the whole long story as she dragged a toasted ravioli through the little bowl of marinara. “It’s not even that I’m not happy for him,” she finished, although in fact she wasn’t. “It just feels... I don’t know.” She shrugged, glancing from Mason to Emily and back again. It wasn’t until then that it even occurred to her to ask, “So, um. Where’s everybody else?”

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