Page 24 of The Someday Daughter
AUSTIN
My father is preternaturally loud. His inside voice can only be classified as a shout; his outside voice is so deep and booming it sounds like it’s coming from the earth’s core—like a seismic, apocalyptic event orchestrated with the express purpose of blowing out all of humanity’s eardrums at once.
When he bellows, “Mouse!” at me from the front porch of Patsey’s, all three people within a twenty-foot radius flinch. I motion at him to lower the volume, pushing my hands up and down through Austin’s soupily humid air. We’ve been in Texas for two days and the Colorado girl in me is still having trouble breathing.
“Please don’t scream,” I say as he hops the two steps off the porch toward me and lifts me clear off the ground. When he spins me around, he shouts right in my ear: “Sorry!”
I wince, and he sets me back on the sidewalk. “Are you taller?”
I look down at myself: tank top, flip-flops, denim shorts with my phone shoved in one pocket. Two unanswered, outgoing calls to Ethan sitting in its log. “No?”
“You look taller,” Dad says, holding me at arm’s length with both hands on my shoulders. He’s in his customary band T-shirt and jeans, gold aviators he’s had my whole life. “Maybe I’m shrinking in my old age.”
Maybe if you saw me more, you’d remember how tall I am.But I don’t say it, just swipe a hand over the top of his head. His hair is the same dark brown as mine. “Doubt it.”
“Where’s your mother?”
I feel myself frown, my whole face pinching with it. Dad landed in Austin this morning for a show along the tour he’s managing this summer—we have exactly three hours of overlap in our schedules. Three hours that we discussedexplicitlywould be Camilla-free.
“She wasn’t—” A white town car slides up to the curb right beside me, its back passenger door clicking open. My mother’s ankle juts out of it, and I watch her leather Hermès sandal make contact with the sidewalk. “—invited.”
“I invited her,” Dad says. “And really, mouse, you forced my hand by ignoring all my calls.”
“I didn’t—” I splutter, but he’s already hugging Camilla, and the rest of my sentence disappears into the commotion of them reaching over me to get to each other.
He eyes me over her shoulder. “You did.”
Goddamnit. I look back toward South Congress, the twenty-minute walk I took to get here from our hotel. Of course Camilla drove. Of course my dad would ambush me like this. OfcourseI can’t get out of it now.
I’ve spent the days since Taos holed up in my hotel room, catching up on the Penn readings and course notes Ethan’s sent. But we haven’t talked through anything but email; every time I’ve tried to get ahold of him, he’s sent me straight to voicemail.
“Hi, honey,” Camilla says, finally letting go of Dad and turning to face me. I sat with Sadie and the interns again on the flight from New Mexico, and to be honest I haven’t seen her upclose in a few days. Avoiding, self-preserving, whatever you want to call it—we aren’t really speaking. “Thanks for including me.”
I can’t quite tell if this is a dig or she’s just that blithe, that used to the world reorienting itself around her.
“Ames?” the hostess calls, southern twang ringing over the front porch of this house-turned-restaurant. “Roger Ames, party of three?”
“Here!” Dad hollers, and before I realize what’s happening, Camilla and I are looking at each other, our simultaneous eye rolls connecting behind his back.So loud, she mouths at me, and I jerk my gaze away before this can turn into A Moment.
Dad’s rented out the private back room of the restaurant, a bricked-in space that looks like it was a sunporch in a past life. Half the eyes in the restaurant follow us through to our table, the other half jerking hastily our way as soon as someone points out my mother. I forget, when I’m away at school, what it’s like to move through the world with the conspicuous obstacle of Camilla next to me.
“I’ll send your server over right away,” the hostess says, hesitating behind Camilla’s shoulder like she’s debating whether or not to say something.Don’t, I think, and she doesn’t, and we sit.
When the door to our room is firmly shut, Dad says, “My girls.” He reaches over to squeeze both our shoulders, and I lift my menu to cover my face. “The apples of my eyeballs. Tell me everything.”
This is for my benefit, I’m sure. Clearly Camilla has been tattling on me to Dad, or he wouldn’t have staged this reunion-brunch-turned-intervention. But my mother just looks at me across the table, smiling patiently.
“Mouse?” Dad prompts, when neither of us have spoken.
“Can I at least order a coffee before the firing squad begins?”
“Hey, there’s no firing squad here—”
“Roger, honestly,” Camilla says, glancing toward the glass panes in the door. A few people in the dining room are still staring. “Lower your voice.”
Dad ducks his head, leaning closer to us over the table. His lowered voice is one decibel below the kind of projection you’d expect at an a cappella performance. “Of course you can order a coffee, Audrey. But we aren’t a firing squad; we’re your parents. We love you.”
I look at him as he says it. I can feel Camilla watching me, but I can’t bring myself to glance her way. She lets hiswedo the heavy lifting and keeps her mouth shut.
