Page 92 of The Seven Year Slip

And if Jamesdidwant to see me, he knew where I lived, though it seemed even the apartment didn’t want me to see him again.

36

Tourist Season

The worst part ofquitting my job, however, was figuring out how to break it to my parents, who excelled in everything they did. My parents, who never quit anything. My parents, who had instilled that same ethic in me.

My parents, who demanded that they celebrate my birthday this weekend, like they always did.

My parents, who I said yes to because I loved and didn’t want to disappoint them.

And I feared I would anyway.

“Oh,sweetheart!” Mom called, waving me over to the table where she and Dad sat, even though I could walk to the table blindfolded by now. They came into the city for my birthday weekend every year. They asked for the same table in the same restaurant on the same Saturday before my birthday, and they always ended up ordering the exact same food. It was the sort of tradition that went back as far as I could remember—a ritual at this point.

We would get lunch at this adorable little diner over on Eighty-Fourth Street called the Eggverything Café, where my mom would order the number two—two pancakes, two eggs sunny-side up, and two burnt sausage links. Not cooked, butburnt. And my dad would get the egglet supreme, which was just an omelet with bell peppers and mushrooms and three different kinds of cheese, hold the onions, and a cup of decaf coffee. I used to play a game where I never got the same thing twice, but after coming here for almost thirty years, that was an impossible endeavor at this point.

If my aunt was the kind of person who always tried something new, my parents excelled in the monotonous mundane, over and over again.

It was kind of their charm. A little bit.

As I came over to their table, Dad stood and gave me a big bear hug, his beard scratchy against my cheek. He was a big man who was spectacular at hugs—the back-breaking kind. He picked me up and spun me around, and when he set me down, the floor tilted a little. “Daughter!” he cried, and his voice bellowed. “It’s been forever!”

“Look at you! You look so tired,” Mom added, grabbing my face and planting a kiss on my cheek. “You need to get more sleep, young lady.”

“It’s been a weird few weeks at work,” I admitted, as we all sat down for lunch.

“Well, now you’re here! And as the birthday girl, you aren’t even going tothinkabout work for the next”—Mom checked her smartwatch—“four hours atleast.”

Four?

“Don’t look so enthused,” Dad added wryly because a long-suffering look must’ve crossed my face. “You never come see your parents, so we always have to make the long trip to the city to see you.”

“It’s notthatlong,” I told them. “You live on Long Island, not in Maine.”

Mom waved me off. “You should come visit more often anyway.”

The server remembered our faces, and she knew by now what my mom and dad ordered, and she looked at me expectantly, ready for me to try something new, but as I browsed the menu, I realized I’d tried everything on it already. “How about the blueberry waffles?”

Her eyebrows jerked up. “Didn’t you have that last time?”

“I’ll try it with that Vermont maple syrup you have,” I amended, “and the largest coffee you can get me.” She jotted it down on her notepad and flitted away.

My mom made small talk by commenting on the new upholstery on the train seats on the ride here, and how the construction on their stretch of the LIE was takingforever, and how she had to change to a new doctor who knew nothing about her medications—Mom was very good at complaining. She did it often, and with great gusto, and my dad had learned early on to just nod and listen. Mom was a universe apart from her sister. They were opposites of the same coin, one tired of new things, the other searching for them wherever she went.

My stomach had laced itself in knots, because at some point today they were going to ask about my job, and at some point—

“So,” Dad said, “how’s the book thing going?”

Too soon. It came too soon. “I, um—”

The server brought our food out, which immediately distracted my parents, and thankfully they went on to talk about how there must have been a new chef in the back, because Mom’s eggs werenotcooked the way she remembered. I picked at my blueberry waffles, which seemed fine enough, especially slathered in Vermont maple syrup. My parents asked about how the apartment wasdoing, and I asked them about Dad’s bird condominium (a series of birdhouses all stacked together like a designer resort—I told him that he’d find himself overrun with pigeons if he built it, but he didn’t believe me until, lo and behold, he was overrun with pigeons).

After we’d finished eating, Mom excused herself to the bathroom, and Dad scooted his chair a little closer to me, stealing my last bite of blueberry waffle. “You know your mom didn’t mean it—that you look tired.”

I flipped my butter knife around and glanced at my reflection. Anyone could see that my parents and I looked related—I had Dad’s reddish nose, his soft brown eyes, and my mom’s frown. I never really had much of Aunt Analea in me, though maybe that was why I tried to be so much like her. “I don’t lookthattired, do I?”

“No!” he replied quickly, from years of Mom pinning him in that trap herself. “Absolutely not. That’s why I said you didn’t. You look happy, actually. Content. Did something good happen at work?”

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