Page 26 of Ten Years and Then…
“What do you think, Pumpkin?”
What Nora wanted to say was, “You could just have printed ‘I’m having a mid-life crisis’ on a T-shirt and saved a lot of money.” She almost did say it, but she was caught short by the sight of someone in the passenger seat. A woman. A very blonde woman. A very blonde woman who looked far too young to be with her father.
“Looks great, Dad!” She tried her best to sound enthusiastic, but it was difficult. The blonde couldn’t be more than thirty years old, and probably closer to twenty-five. She was smiling brightly at Nora. “Hi,” she said to—she assumed—her father’s new girlfriend.
“Hi, Nora! I’m Joelle. Your father’s told me so much about you, but it’s so cool to finally meet you in person!” She got out of the car, and somehow folded herself into the back seat without even reclining the front seat. If nothing else, she was definitely flexible. “You get up front with your father, I know he’s been missing you.”
Joelle. What kind of a name was that? Was she even really blonde? What was she doing with her father? Why would she want to date someone who had a kid nearly as old as her?
“Thanks, I appreciate it.”
Nora obediently climbed into the passenger seat and they were off. Her father asked her two or three questions about school, and then the conversation turned to Joelle, and what college had been like for her, and Nora barely got another word the whole drive. She hadn’t exactly been looking forward to a long, awkward conversation with her father—but that would’ve been way better than listening to him fawn over a woman who was, like, ten minutes older than her.
Twenty-two days. Twenty-two days and she’d be with Daniel again, and they could laugh about this. As long as she didn’t reach for the steering wheel to drive them into traffic just so her father would shut up about his new barely-legal girlfriend. She could tolerate this for a few more minutes. Couldn’t she?
Daniel, around the same time
“I’m not saying these marks are terrible, Daniel. Just that we know you can do better.” His father had been going on for almost ten minutes now.
“I understand, Dad. I just—I guess I was a little distracted over finals week. I’ll do better next term.” He hadn’t mentioned Nora. He hadn’t had the chance to mention much of anything.
“I know you will, son. I just,”—his father put an arm around his mom—“we just want you to get ahead in life. We saved up—I’m not saying this to make you feel bad—we saved for years so you and your sister could get a good education. So you’d have a better start in life than we did.”
He knew all that. And he did appreciate it. More than his parents knew, probably. And if that was true, it was on him for not making sure they knew. Then again, big emotional declarations were not a regular feature in the Keller household.
“I know, Dad. You and Mom have done everything for me. Maybe I don’t tell you enough, but I’m really grateful for it. And I won’t waste it.” He tried to put everything he felt for his parents into that, and it seemed to work.
His father clapped him on the shoulder, smiling. “That’s all we ask, son. Now why don’t you go upstairs, get unpacked, and we’ll all go out to dinner. Okay?”
Dinner probably meant Dad’s favorite Italian place over on Lincoln Avenue. Maybe over greasy pizza and a family-size bowl full of mussels, he’d find the nerve to tell them he had a girlfriend.
Maybe.
Nora, a few minutes later
Nora’s father and Joelle took her to her favorite pizza place for lunch. Well, it had been her favorite pizza place when she was a kid. She hadn’t been there since her thirteenth birthday party, but at least Dad remembered she’d liked it once upon a time. That counted for something, she supposed.
She spent the first few minutes suppressing every snarky remark and cynical comment that came to mind about her father dating Joelle. It wasn’t her fault, and she seemed like a genuinely nice person.
Nora’s mind was so busy controlling her sarcasm that her self-control slipped in another way. When her father asked if any of the boys at college had caught her eye, she didn’t even realize she’d said Daniel’s name out loud until Joelle suddenly perked up.
“Who’s Daniel?” Joelle asked, all wide-eyed curiosity.
She heard herself talking in a faraway voice. “He’s the best. He’s so sweet, and he’s smart, and he thinks I’m funny, and he has the prettiest eyes.” As she spoke, Nora felt her hand rummaging through her backpack—why had she even brought it into the restaurant?—to pull out his Christmas gift. “See what I mean?”
Joelle took the photo frame out of her hands and examined it critically “He really does have pretty eyes, you’re right. And who took the picture? It looks almost professional.”
“It was from one of those photo booths, you know, with the little tiny strip of pictures?” Joelle nodded. Her father just sat there, an unreadable expression on his face. “And Daniel took that little tiny picture, and he used the computer to do his magic. He enlarged it and cleaned it up and—I don’t even know what else he did. He made it perfect.”
“I think he’s a keeper, Nora,” Joelle said, handing the photo to Nora’s father. “See, Richard? See how she’s looking at him? That’s exactly the way you look at me sometimes. Like father, like daughter. Isn’t that cool?”
Nora did not think that was cool.
What she did think was that the queasy sensation she was feeling had nothing to do with the four pieces of pizza in her stomach.
Daniel, bedtime
Daniel didn’t tell his parents about Nora at dinner. He’d just about worked up the nerve to talk about her on the drive over to the restaurant. But then Lisa showed up right after they were seated, and that was that.
