Page 10 of Borrow My Heart

“Shower?” I finished for him.

“Yes,” he said.

“I’ll make some dinner.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“Is Zoey here?” Zoey was my older sister. She had moved out a year ago with some friends, but she dropped by often.

“No,” he said.

“Okay, dinner for two.”

He headed for his room and I went to the kitchen. The fridge was basically empty. Tomorrow was one of my days off work and, by default, grocery day. In the pantry I found a pack of spaghetti and a jar of sauce, so I started some water boiling.

Twenty minutes later, my dad came downstairs, hair wet from a shower, wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. He was broad-shouldered, with short salt-and-pepper hair and kind browneyes that always looked tired. We looked nothing alike. I looked almost exactly like my mom in photos I’d seen of her at my age: tall with long brown hair and judgy blue eyes. When I was twelve, I chopped all my hair off because of the similarities between us. Kamala’s mom had to fix my kitchen-scissor massacre. I feared that the impulse to cut all my hair off actually made me more like my mom than the long hair ever did. It’s been long ever since.

“I need to shop,” I said when my dad looked at the plate of spaghetti and canned green beans on the table.

“No, this is good. Thank you.”

“You know, I bet if you owned your own place your boss would let you go home before seven o’clock at night.”

“I have a feeling my boss would be a hardnose.”

I smiled. “True, heiskind of uptight.”

“Do you have fifty grand I can borrow?” he asked.

“I hear the bank lets people borrow money, but I might be wrong.”

He pushed the green beans around his plate before saying, “Yeah, I should look into that.”

He wouldn’t. My dad wasn’t a risk-taker. He was safe, predictable.

“Well, I should go to bed.” And by bed, I meant binge a show on my laptop for a couple of hours.

“Good night,” he said. “Oh, and your mom wants to call this week.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

I didn’t want to talk to my mother. She’d walked out on us seven years ago and never looked back. Since then, she’d been astring of unfulfilled promises. Well, technically even before she walked out she’d built up a nice habit of not following through on her word, of living from moment to moment, spontaneous and impulsive. But leaving pretty much sealed the deal. And so, for my own sanity, I’d put up some boundaries. Talking to her when I wanted to was one of those. But my dad didn’t need to know all that. He already worried enough.

“He’s rich,” I said, turning my phone toward Kamala. We were sitting in her living room, windows open, fans blowing, watching television. It didn’t get hot often on the central coast. The Pacific Ocean, our very own climate controller, made every day mostly the same. But several weeks during the summer, when the breezes died down and the sun beat heavy, I longed for air conditioners to be standard like they were in other places. Today was one of thosedays.

“Who’s rich?” she asked, looking at my phone. “Is that…?”

“Dale.”

“Are you cyberstalking him?”

“I’ve been trying to find Asher for the last couple of days. I was hoping to message him and tell him I’m not really Gemma. But he doesn’t exist online.” Between chores and work and a proper trip to the beach, I hadn’t spent much time looking, but the searching Ihaddone led to nothing. “You know people without social media are suspicious.”

She gasped. “You are practically nonexistent online!”

“I know! And I’mverysuspicious. Not to be trusted at all. You should add the social media rule toyourlove list.”

“I don’t have a love list. You make enough rules for the bothofus.”

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