SWNOVELS : Chapter 26
I PLAN ON saying good night to Dad and Starfire at our apartment and sending them on their way. Then I make the mistake of Googling their motel.
“Dad!” I say. “This is forty minutes away, and the first three reviews mention bedbugs.”
“Everything closer to the water books up a year out, apparently,” he tells me.
I scroll down. The reviews that don’t mention bedbugs focus instead on cockroaches. Yet another reviewer complains that their room didn’t have a bed. “Just a rust-colored outline where the bed should’ve been,” I read aloud to them.
“I’m sure if they give us a room without a bed, they’ll let us move for free,” Starfire volunteers.
I shoot Miles a frantic look.
“Anyone want water?” he chimes in. “Daphne—wanna help me?”
We beeline for the kitchen, ignoring their protestations that they’re fine, it’s been hours since they drank that wine, they should get on the road, etc.
While Miles pulls glasses down, he says under his breath, “What do you want to do?”
“We can’t let them stay in that place,” I whisper back.
“We can,” he says. “But we don’t have to. It’s up to you.”
“What other option do we have?” I say.
“I could let them use the air mattress, and I take the couch?” Julia says, making me jump as she walks into the room. “Not ‘getting water,’ then?”
“Working on it,” Miles says; then, more quietly, “Just trying to figure out what to do about this. I don’t think we can ask two sixty-something-year-olds to sleep on an air mattress.”
“I’ll take the couch, Julia can stick with the inflatable, and they can take my room,” I say.
“No, don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “They can take my room, and I’ll take the couch.”
“How is that any less ridiculous?” I say. “They’re my parents. Or . . . my dad and my . . . Starfire.”
“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” he asks.
“For tonight,” I say. “Tomorrow we can look for a hotel that’s less . . .”
“Infested?” Julia finishes.
“That,” I agree.
“If you’re sure,” Miles says.
I haven’t been sure of much in the last few months. “Close enough,” I say.
“Really appreciate this, kid,” Dad says. “We would’ve been okay at the motel.”
“Yeah, well, this way you don’t take bedbugs to Starfire’s family,” I say.
He gives me a hug good night, an awkward kiss atop my head, and when we separate, Starfire is waiting, arms out wide to reveal her baby-blue nightgown.
“Good night, Starfire,” I say, accepting her tight squeeze.
“Good night, sweetie,” she says. “And if you want, you can call me Mom.”
“Oh, that’s . . . I’ll stick with Starfire, but I hope you sleep well!”
I close the door behind me on my way out. Julia is in the process of dragging her air mattress toward Miles’s room, and I hurry over to help.
We agreed it made more sense to put her in there, because if we left the mattress in the cramped living room, there’d be no way for me to get off the couch without stepping on her.
Given how many times I can pee in one night, that seemed impractical.
We unroll the rumpled air mattress in front of Miles’s closet doors, and while she gets the pump going, I bring her tangle of bedding in from the living room.
“Thanks for being up for this,” I tell her, when she turns the pump off and we start making the bed.
“No problem,” she says. “Honestly, I’m just taking this as a sign it’s time for me to get back to Chicago and get the rest of my stuff and my car.”
“Have you talked to Miles about it any more?” I say.
“What is there to talk about,” she says.
I hesitate. “Did something . . . happen in Chicago?”
She flops down on her mattress and pulls the quilt up to her chin, her face steely. “Can you turn off the overhead on your way out?”
“Sure,” I say. “Sleep tight.”
In the dark living room, I make a nest on the couch. The bathroom door creaks open, tendrils of light reaching toward me. Miles steps out in a cloud of steam, his hair damp, the little wet spots around the collar of his camel T-shirt making the fabric cling to him in a vaguely suggestive way.
“I could’ve made it myself,” he whispers, padding over.
I go back to tucking the blankets in. “Why would you make my bed?”
“Because it’s not your bed, it’s mine,” he says.
“Says who,” I say.
“Says the person who owns the couch,” he says.
I stop what I’m doing and face him. The bathroom light licks at the right side of his face while shadow covers the left. “Take my bed,” he says.
I grab a pillow and fluff it.
“You’d be doing me a favor,” he says. “Julia and I have never shared a room in our lives, and for all I know, she yodels in her sleep.”
He pulls the throw pillow out of my hands and steps closer. “Daphne,” he says, “would you please do me the honor of sleeping in my bed?”
Every single one of my nerve endings prickle. I know he didn’t mean it how it sounds.
So I respond, very naturally, “Starfire told me I could call her ‘Mom.’ ”
Miles chokes over a laugh. “Does it make you feel better or worse that she said the same thing to me?”
“It makes me want to buy her a dictionary,” I say.
He swallows a snort of laughter.
When it settles, all that’s left is this pull between us, knitting us together.
Through the walls, Dad gives a hacking cough, the faint smell of weed seeping through the door, and the spell breaks.
Some invisible cloche lifts from around us. Reality rushes back in.
“Sleep well,” I tell him.
He holds an arm out, gesturing me toward his room. “You too.”
And I do.
I dream about fireworks, about cool hands, the rasp of a jaw, the taste of ginger and smell of woodsmoke.
With Ashleigh recovering from her trip to Sedona, Julia having flown back to Chicago earlier that afternoon, and her brother already clocked in at Cherry Hill, it’s just the three of us. I’m grateful that Miles recommended a place with giant Jenga and a bocce court on the patio so we have something to do other than stare directly into each other’s eyes.
They fill me in on their day exploring the dunes, for which Starfire has donned a gauzy, dramatically patterned maxidress that makes her look like one of the Real Housewives on a desert vacation.
She shows me roughly two hundred pictures of sand, before Dad gently turns the conversation toward my day.
“It was pretty standard stuff,” I say. “We had a Puzzle Swap this morning. One patron showed up with a custom puzzle she’d had made of her thirty-year-old boudoir shots, and another tried to walk out with three Star Wars puzzles hidden inside his trench coat.”
“Sounds like you’ve got quite a cast of characters,” Dad says, tossing his final bocce ball of the round down the sandy lane.
“The library is, like, the single best cross section of humanity,” I tell him. “You meet all kinds of interesting people.”
“And here I thought you were in it for the free books,” Dad teases.
I’m surprised how normal this feels. How nice it is to imagine this version of my father—the one who asks questions about my work, who not only shows up for my birthday, but thinks to tell the server to bring a cake with a sparkler stuck in it—sticking around.
And yes, the attention from paid strangers, forced to sing on my behalf, is fairly far from any gift I’d ever want, but it strikes me as the kind of thing normal dads do. Year-round fathers, who measure their kids on doorjambs and teach them to ride bikes and drive them to their first E.R. visit.
He’s still the dad I’ve always known too: the one who managed, today at the dunes, to just “bump into” someone who owns an entire hotel on Mackinac Island and bond over a shared love of the Grateful Dead to the extent that the hotelier gave Dad his phone number and promised to hook him and Starfire up with free rooms anytime they wanted.
But he’s also asking, “What’s your favorite thing you do at the library?”
And he’s listening with interest as I tell him about the Read-a-thon, about the sponsorships I’ve gotten, about how happy Harvey was about the cash donations Miles has helped me rack up.
“Your passion!” Starfire says, hand to her heart. “Just like your father’s!”
And he’s giving her hand a squeeze, saying, “No, she’s way better than her old man. She’s always had direction.”
I don’t totally understand it, why his pride in me matters. But it does. It matters.
After dinner, he suggests we visit Miles at Cherry Hill, so we leave our car at the brewery to pick up later and take a cab up the peninsula.
The winery is bustling.
Miles waves at us from behind the bar, but he’s too busy to come talk. He murmurs something to Katya, who flags us down at the very end of the bar, sliding an open bottle and three glasses over. “On the house,” she shouts over the noise.
We take our bottle and glasses out to the circular tables on the lawn, the sky turning periwinkle at the edges while the sun holds on for a few more breaths.
I scan the lawn. “No open tables.”
“Chairs are bad for you anyway,” Starfire replies, a curious but confident pronouncement. She removes her bedazzled sandals and lowers herself to the ground. Dad and I follow suit. With the sitting, not the shoe removal, but the grass is so intoxicatingly cool that I don’t blame her for wanting to feel it between her toes.
Dad pours the wine, then passes out our glasses, and there we watch the colors melt across the sky.
“I could see us here, Star,” Dad says, and she sighs.
“Me too. We should ask Karen what she thinks.”
“Karen?” I say.
“Our psychic,” Starfire says.
“The one who told you about the Titanic?” I verify.
She nods. “That’s why we were so surprised about you and Miles. Karen told us you and Miles would go the distance. She’s never been wrong before.”
Not sure how Starfire has confirmed that her past life was indeed an Oscar-winning film, but I let it go.
Even as the lawn clears and the tables empty and the sky goes dark, we stay half-reclined on the grass, watching the string lights pop on, listening to the occasional bat flap past.
When Miles clocks out, he brings us a half bottle of red left over from his shift, and pours each of us a small glass.
Dad proposes a toast: “To our gracious hosts.”
Starfire adds, “To my beautiful new family.”
I feel a twinge.
Of guilt? Like I’m betraying Mom if I let Dad back in?
Or maybe just fear. That I’m doing what I swore I never would: making space in my heart for someone whom experience has taught me not to trust.
People change, I think.
I can.
Dad can.
Miles shifts in the grass beside me, his knee brushing mine like a question. Are you there? Are you okay?
I can be.
I can be here, in the moment, instead of watching for smoke, ready to run.
I lift my glass into the ring we’ve formed. “To family.”