Page 36 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
She’s at her best in the mornings, when I slip into her dawn-blueroom before school and sit on the edge of the mattress. Sometimes she’s still asleep, and I try not to wake her. Sometimes I tell her how MASH is doing, or describe Dad’s weekly special at Beans, or show her one of Maren’s black-and-white photographs. Almost always, I think of all the times I fell asleep at her house growing up, how she’d wake me with a cool hand brushed across my forehead. The way she’d murmur,Come back to me, Rosie. Come on back from dreamland.I wish I could wake her now. That the place she was going was somewhere so simple as sleep.
“I’m sorry,” I say, turning to Dad. “I’ll back up, I shouldn’t have—I should have asked you. But this is huge, I mean.” I hesitate, staring at the familiar jut of the shoulder he’s turned against me. “I can go, right?”
“No.” Dad’s voice is flat. “There’s so much going on here, and this thing is consuming your whole life—”
“It’s not athing.” I should let him speak, but I can’t help myself. “I made it. I’m proud of it. And it’s really taking off and I have to see it through and I don’t understand why you can’t see that.”
“I see it,” Dad says, finally looking at me. “The difference is I see other things, too, and I’m not sure you do anymore.”
“What does that mean?”
I can tell he wants to say something and decides against it. He shakes his head and turns back to the soup without answering me.
“You’re just going to ignore me?” I say, taking a step closer. His back is tense under his T-shirt. “Your only kid? Who made something that people really love and is proud of herself and maybe you should be, too, but instead—”
“Listen up,” Dad shouts, and the tenor of his voice steals the rest of the words from my throat. We are not a loud family; he almost never yells. His eyes, the exact same shade of brown as mine, look like sparked kindling. “I love you. You are my best thing, Ro.”
I retreat half a step, paralyzed by the rift between his anger and what he’s saying through it.
“Iamproud of you. And when you think I’m being unreasonable, it’s because I see something that you don’t. It isalwaysbecause I love you.” His eyebrows lift like an underscore. “Do you understand? The last few months you’ve been so absorbed in MASH that you aren’t willing to look past it, but there are other things happening here that need to matter to you.” He points toward Vera’s room. “That’s one. College is another. I’m not asking for all your attention, but I do need some of it. And as long as you’re living in this house, you don’t walk through my front door and tell me you’re getting on a plane toanywherewithout asking first. Got it?”
The soup is boiling, steam hissing from the crack beneath the pot lid. It moves in white clouds behind my father so he looks like he’s just risen from the depths of hell.
“I see Vera every day,” I tell him weakly. I say it like it’s an apology because it should be.
“Yeah?” Dad says. “I hope you feel like it’s enough, Ro. Because—” He breaks off, eyes still on mine.
I know what he was going to say:Because soon she’ll be gone.He stops himself because he’s my dad, because he’d never stoke my guilt so pointedly.
“Because she loves you, too,” he finishes, finally. “And she wants to share your life with you.”
“I want to share my life with her, too.” My voice cracks on the words, betraying me. Dad steps forward and hugs me, the world going dark as my face presses to the space between his chest and his shoulder. The same spot I’ve cried into a thousand, thousand times. But my eyes are dry: when the tears come, I know, I’ll have admitted this to myself.
“You can’t make her better by pretending she’s not sick,” Dad says over the top of my head. His voice is quiet now, and gentle. But I don’t want to hear this; I’d rather he was shouting again. “You can’t make this go away by not looking at it. I know you want to, Ro. But you can’t.”
I step back, rubbing at my eyes, my cheeks. “I’m not pretending anything,” I tell him. “I’ve just been busy. I just—there’s school, and XLR8, and interviews, and Maren’s got this new girlfriend, and it’s just a lot. There’s a lot and I’m just. Busy.”
Dad studies my face, his gaze moving from my left eye to my right and back again. Like he’s testing for vulnerability, weighing which one might let him in. I’m quiet, square-jawed, until he finally says, “All right.”
“I promise,” I tell him, but even I’m not sure what I mean. I promise what? I feel, acutely, like I’m letting both of us down.
“All right,” Dad repeats. He turns back to the soup, silent for so long I think he’s not going to say anything else at all. But finally, just as I’m turning away, he speaks. “You can go to New York, but you can’t miss Christmas. And if I agree to this for you, you haveto apply to college.” He looks up, our eyes meeting. “For me.”
“Dad—” I start to protest, but he holds up a hand.
“I want you to have every option available to you, Ro. Come spring, you can still pick your favorite one. I won’t take that from you. But I want you to have choices.”
Vera’s voice rises, then, feeble from the back of the house. “Rosie?” she calls. “Are you home?”
And instead of finishing this fight, instead of telling Dad my choice is already made, I go to her.
21
My father—classically trained chef, business owner, one-day-hopefully restauranteur—has always hated Thanksgiving.We celebrate food every day in this house, he’ll huff anytime I push him on it. He hates the press of people at the grocery store; he hates the tourists that fill the rental houses on the lake. Truthfully, I think he loves food so much he feels cheapened by a holiday that makes a gluttony of it. But whatever the reason, I grew up spending Thanksgiving Day giving thanks for something else—not the food before us, but the mountains around us.
We hike the same trail every year, a six-mile loop into the spread meadow of an old mining town where rotted-out wooden structures still stand, windowless. Sometimes there are others: Adult children visiting their parents, out hiking while they cook at home. College students who can’t fly back to whatever state they came from for such a short break. Solo trekkers who always make me wonder: Do they have no one to spend the day with? Or do they prefer to spend the day here, on their own with the earth?
Usually, for most of the trail, it’s only Dad and me. Our steady footfalls on the just-crunchy leaves, the thin winter air turning our lungs clean and cold. We bring coffee in thermoses and Dad’s bear-deep laugh floats up the aspen trunks and every year, no matter what else, this day is the same.
