“THE BOAT” IS an old pontoon that belongs to a friend of Miles’s. The hardware store / barbershop owner where he gets his tools/haircuts. Miles has an open invitation to use the pontoon whenever it’s available. I drive and Dad rides up front, with Miles, Julia, and Starfire wedged in my backseat, Miles giving verbal directions rather than using a GPS, because he doesn’t remember the guy’s address.
I’d assumed we’d be boating on Lake Michigan, but there are dozens of smaller lakes further inland from the twenty-two-thousand square miles of Lake Michigan. We’re going to one of those, a lake in the more traditional sense of the word, with rustic cottages lining the water and reeds swaying in the shallows.
We park down a long wooded drive in front of a gorgeous A-frame that’s either halfway through being built or halfway through being renovated. My guess, based on the overgrown grass around a parked camper trailer and old truck, is the latter. That this place belongs to a do-it-yourselfer who’s taking their time. Exactly the kind of person who’d operate a hardware store / barbershop.
“You guys go ahead and get on the boat,” Miles tells us as we get out into the buggy heat. “I’ll grab the keys from inside.”
“I thought your friend wasn’t home,” I say, but he’s already bounding up to the back deck, sliding open a door that was, apparently, unlocked. Julia and I pull the cooler out of the trunk and carry it between us down the grassy hillside toward the water’s edge.
“What a gorgeous day for this!” Starfire says brightly. She’s said it seven times so far. I’ve been counting.
“Couldn’t have asked for better weather,” Julia agrees, for the fourth time. We’ve been taking turns, and by now, I think she’s caught on and is making a game out of it.
“Like Michigan rolled out the red-carpet treatment,” Dad says, clapping a hand on my shoulder right as Julia and I set foot on the short dock that juts into the reeds. I wobble, but luckily manage to regain my footing before falling off the narrow pier and taking the cooler and Julia with me.
It’s seen better days—one board is missing, with two others snapped in the middle—but the boat looks to be in good shape. Not that I know what makes a boat in good shape, but it’s not on fire or anything.
Dad kicks off his shoes, picks them up, and hops aboard, helping each of us down by the hand. He passes Starfire down last, and makes a big show of kissing her hand. She giggles and looks between me and Julia like, Are you seeing this? What a guy!
I try to look pleasant and vaguely encouraging: Yes, I saw my dad Gomez Addams you, and I think it’s great!
It is sweet, honestly. Again that weird mishmash of emotions swirls in my rib cage.
I like seeing him like this. I also resent it, wonder for the millionth time why Mom and I never inspired this kind of attention or commitment.
“Got it,” Miles calls, jogging down the dock. He unties the boat and jumps in, starting the engine, then pulling his shirt off.
Starfire gasps at the assortment of disjointed tattoos this reveals. My initial blush-and-avoid-looking tactic quickly dissolves into looking for a giant heart with Petra’s name in it, but apparently that’s not one of the many tattoo-related capital-C Choices he’s committed to.
I do, however, realize for the first time that in addition to his Popeye anchor, he also has a full-on Popeye on his calf. This does surprisingly little to dampen the impulse to cross the boat and run my tongue over his skin.
“What beautiful body art!” Starfire coos. “What’s this one mean?”
She touches his upper biceps as he’s starting to steer us deeper into the lake. He subdues his smile. “Well,” he says, “it’s a mermaid.”
She nods with wide-eyed intrigue. “And?”
“I liked how it looked,” he says.
“It’s gorgeous.” She gives it a firm pat.
The lake is surprisingly hopping. Over the roar of our motor, we catch snippets of radio hits blasting off the boats we pass: Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer” and Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up the Sun” and Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.”
After ten minutes of cruising, wind in our hair, motor rattling in our ears, we find a good spot to stop and relax. Miles turns on our radio, drops anchor, and passes out cans of seltzer and beer from the cooler to the rest of us. Julia and I slather ourselves in sunscreen, but Starfire wastes no time shucking her clothes off and jumping off the back of the boat, a blur of hot-pink one-piece and a whoop!
Dad whistles and applauds when she resurfaces. Julia peels off her shorts and jumps out after her.
“Is it cold?” I call to them.
“Sort of,” Julia shouts back, right as Starfire says joyfully, “It feels like rebirth!”
Within a few minutes of cajoling, Dad’s gotten in too, and then he’s badgering Miles and me from the water, while Starfire backstrokes with impressive grace.
“You getting in?” Miles asks me, shielding his eyes against the sun to peer at me. It makes the moment feel strangely private, intimate.
“How deep is it?” I ask him.
“Don’t be a chicken!” Dad calls, the illusion of privacy shattering.
Starfire makes a hyperrealistic chicken sound. She’s really in her element here.
“What exactly”—I step up to the gate at the back of the boat—“would I be afraid of in this scenario?”
“The fish!” Dad cries, like this should be obvious.
“The fish?” I repeat.
Dad affects a look of disbelief. “Are you kidding? You were terrified of them when you were a kid! Remember? I took you fishing and you had that meltdown?”
I don’t remember ever going fishing in my life, but if I did, I’m guessing the meltdown had less to do with the fish and more with having to pull a metal hook from its mouth. “Are you sure that was me?”
He laughs. “I think I remember my own daughter! I took you fishing, and we forgot sunscreen, and I knew your mom would be mad, so we went to the grocery store and I got you this bright yellow sun hat. Matched your bathing suit. You looked like Tweety Bird,” he says, shaking his head. “You were obsessed with that hat.”
I think about the beanie he sent me, wonder if he conflated it with the hat from this memory.
Honestly, I wonder if it’s even a real memory, or just some scene in a movie he overlaid my face onto after the fact.
“You really don’t remember?” he says.
I shake my head. This clearly bothers him, but I can’t think of anything comforting to say. The fact is, the most memorable parts of my childhood are the ones he missed, his absence exactly what gave them their weight.
“It was a really special day,” he murmurs, treading water in place, mouth turned down in a frown.
I hate that I feel guilt right now. I don’t want to feel like Dad can still trigger that in me. Like all I want is to make him happy, make him proud, earn his shine.
Miles catches my eyes, his smile gone, his hand cupped around his eyes against the sun, creating that illusion of seclusion again.
It’s a look like, You good?
Or maybe like, I’m here.
And I know he won’t be forever, or maybe even very long, but it helps knowing that right now he is. That can be enough.
I turn toward the water, pulling my dress over my shoulders, sun beating against them. “On the bright side,” I say, “since I don’t remember that, I’m definitely not afraid of fish.”
I toss my dress at the bench, step through the open gate, and leap into the water.
The cold rushes over my head, needles through my every pore.
When I come up, when the sun hits the crown of my head and I see Miles standing at the back of the boat, Julia and Starfire and Dad swimming in lazy circles in the sparkling water, I think of what Starfire said.
It does feel like a rebirth.
People can change, I think.
I’m changing.
As soon as we’re seated, Dad sweet-talks the host into taking an order for a bottle of wine. When the server arrives a minute later, Dad asks for recommendations on appetizers, and she lists six or so. He orders one of each, “for the table.”
I feel my first ping of anxiety in hours, imagining Dad nonchalantly telling our server to split the check evenly at the end of the night. I’m trying to do the math in my head to figure out whether I can cover Julia’s and Miles’s portion of these things they decidedly did not order.
But everyone’s in a great mood, tipsy on the sunshine and wine and the barbershop quartet practicing on the gravel patio of the ice cream shop two doors down.
By the time we make it through the appetizers, we’ve polished off the pinot blanc. Dad slips off to use the restroom (smoke in a stall) and comes back announcing he’s ordered champagne so we can toast my birthday along with his and Starfire’s nuptials.
She’s barely touched her first glass, instead devoting her full focus to peppering me with questions about my childhood. It strikes me that Miles is right, that the key to being able to talk to anyone might just be curiosity.
But it also takes a kind of fearlessness, to invite someone into your space and ask to be invited into theirs. I can, a little too easily, imagine hanging up a needlepoint encouraging me to Be More Like Starfire.
Even when her questions lead to yet more proof that my father wasn’t actually around for my childhood, she shows no visible signs of disappointment, just shoots a follow-up question my way.
I try to ask her things too, and she answers easily—yes, she grew up in Vermont, she was on the ski team at her school, she’s been a vegetarian since birth, she has six siblings, all of them brothers—but she ends every response with a new question for me.
Meanwhile our server, who clearly loves Dad, brings out three off-menu offerings from the chef. On the house.
While we’re eating our main courses, Julia and Starfire compare their birth charts, and have the kind of conversation about water signs that’s indecipherable to nonastrology people. Dad asks Miles about work, and excitedly pitches the idea of going for dinner tomorrow at the winery once I’m off work. “If you’re not too sick of it,” Dad says to me. “Don’t know how often you eat there.”
“We can go there if you want,” I say.
“Oh! And we have to go see Daffy at the library,” Starfire puts in.
“You should go on Saturday, so you can see Story Hour,” Julia volunteers.
“What’s Story Hour?” Dad asks.
“It’s just when I read to a group of kids,” I say.
“She does the voices,” Julia adds.
“Does she?” Dad’s eyes light up. “Like that one gal at the old library we used to go to! What was her name? Leanna?”
He definitely should know her name, since he briefly dated her. Afterward, I noticed we started frequenting a different branch.
“How did you get started at the library, anyway?” Starfire asks. “Did you always want to do that?”
I couldn’t feel more exposed if I’d unzipped my skin and poured my innards onto the table.
“Bet I know the answer to that one,” Dad says.
I can’t decide if that makes it better or worse.
He sets his elbows on the table and leans forward. “When Daphne was little, she was a big-time reader. And I had this girlfriend who worked at a bookstore, got a huge discount. So I’d always bring books when I came to visit.
“But me and Holly—Daph’s mom—neither of us really had ‘disposable income,’ per se. So I always got in trouble with her. I’d get Daphne the first book in a series, or worse, the second, and then Holly would have to buy her the first. She finally told me she wanted me to stop bringing presents. Thought I was trying to buy Daphne off.”
He rolls his eyes as he says this, but also shoots Julia a wink. “Maybe a bit. Anyway, we compromised. I’d take Daph to the library every time I was in town instead. You’d think I’d brought her to Disneyland. Put this girl in a room full of books, and she’s happier than anyone I’ve met. Never understood it myself, but it was cute as hell to watch her stack up as many as she could carry and slide them onto a desk higher than her forehead to check them out.”
Starfire puts a hand over her heart at this.
My own is beating a little fast, uncomfortably.
His telling of it feels so different from my own memory. What loomed so large for me, bigger even than the magic of being surrounded by bright colors and free books, was being excited to show him what I’d found. Wandering the stacks in search of him. Finally spotting him flirting with a librarian, hardly aware of me there, waiting for his attention.
One of my earliest memories of joy, and one of the first times I realized I’d always come in second.
“Excuse me.” I push back from the table and stand. “I’ve got to use the restroom.”
I serpentine through the tables on the deck into the restaurant, adjusting to the dim Edison bulb chandeliers before cutting over to the bathroom hallway.
Both are occupied, but it’s not that I needed to pee so much as I needed to breathe, while I wait out this confusing torrent of feelings. I lean against the gilded wallpaper and close my eyes, willing my heart to slow.
“You okay?” comes a soft voice.
I open my eyes. Miles steps uncertainly into the hallway.
“Yep. Mm-hmm. Fine!” I say. “Bathroom’s in use.”
He nods. “Then I’ll leave you to it.” He turns away, and I feel this desperation.
To let it out, or just to keep him here a moment longer. “I never know how to feel when he’s around,” I blurt.
Miles turns, considers for a moment. He walks back and leans into the wall beside me. “Somebody recently told me that feelings are like the weather. They just kind of happen.”
I try to force a smile. “Sounds like she has no idea what she’s talking about.”
“She’s very smart,” he says. “And hot, if that’s relevant.”
The glow in my chest isn’t strong enough to break up all the dark clouds churning in there. “He’s being so nice,” I say weakly.
Miles thinks about this for a second. “It seems like it, yeah.”
“So why am I upset?” I say.
“Maybe because . . . when he’s nice, it’s hard to be mad at him.” He takes my hand gingerly. “And you are, so then you feel bad about that.”
“Maybe,” I say. Then, “Maybe exactly.”
He pulls me into his chest and winds his arms around me. Warm, friendly, familiar Miles, and it surprises me how much it hurts to be this close to him. How it only seems to underscore that I won’t be any closer.
“We can run if you want,” he murmurs.
“Dine and dash?” I say. “I’m appalled at you, Miles Nowak.”
“More like, pay on the way out,” he says, “and take a speed-limit-abiding cab somewhere they can’t find us.”
“We couldn’t do that. Julia would end up along for the ride to Vermont. Next thing we’d know, she’d be taking steroids and training for the Women’s Olympic Ski Team.”
“She can hold her own,” he says.
“So can I,” I argue.
He draws back to look into my face. “I know,” he says. “I just don’t want you to have to.”
I look toward the deck, blinking back the rising emotion. “The truth is, he seems different.”
“Is that bad?”
I shake my head. “No. I just . . .”
I don’t want to trust him.
I don’t want to be disappointed.
“I made my peace with how things have always been between us,” I admit. “It took me a long time to stop expecting more than he’d give me.”
“That makes sense,” Miles says, tucking my hair behind my ear.
I don’t want to go back to feeling unsteady. I don’t want it to hurt every time he lets me down.
I already feel it again: the aching emptiness where my dad’s love should be. And this time, I don’t have my mom nearby, or Peter and the Collinses to fill the gaps.
And no matter how genuinely nice Starfire is, it doesn’t change the fact that she’s a woman who paid someone actual money to recount the plot of Titanic to her as a prophecy, and she is worthy of Dad’s love, when I never have been.
Just like Petra is worthy of Peter’s.
Just like Peter is worthy of the commitment of all those friends from whom I’d worked tirelessly to earn approval since we moved here. The ones who had no time for me since the breakup. Still worthy of Sadie’s love, after I’d stopped being so.
Life isn’t a competition, and neither is love, but I’m still the loser.
A frown creases Miles’s forehead as he cups my chin.
I shake my head. “I just want it to be real.”
“What?” he says.
“The memories he has of us,” I whisper. “This visit. I want to believe it all means something.”
“Maybe it does,” he says.
The bathroom door opens behind us, and his hand falls away as we press ourselves against the wall to let the emerging man slink past. As he goes, he finishes tucking his dress shirt back into his pants and eyes us with unbridled suspicion.
“He one-hundred-percent thinks we’re doing a drug deal,” I say.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “He at least fifty-percent thinks we’re having an illicit affair.”
We both smile at our feet. “So where do you want to go,” he asks. “Back to the table, or out the front door?”
“Table.” I tip my head toward the open bathroom door. “Just give me a minute.”
“I’d give the bathroom a minute,” he says. “That guy had the face of someone who just did something ungodly.”
“Wish I could.” She’s holding her hands up in surrender. “The older gentleman already picked everything up.”
“Really?” I say. “You’re sure?”
“He was adamant the bill not make it to the table,” she replies.
I thank her and walk back to my seat, slightly dazed. As soon as I’ve sunk back into my chair, a crowd of servers files through the restaurant’s back door onto the deck, carrying a chocolate cake lit with a sparkler.
“Happy late birthday, honey,” Dad says, right before the staff begins to sing.
“Thanks, Dad,” I say, voice disappearing into the chorus of voices.
“It’s nothing,” he murmurs, squeezing my arm atop the table. But he looks relieved, or maybe pleased.
Like my happiness has made him happy. And suddenly my eyes are stinging and heat is rushing up the back of my nose. I focus on the blue-gold sparks shooting off the cake so I won’t crack.
A hum, a gasp, a sigh, ripple through the beach’s stragglers. One streak of light pops, explodes into a shivering purple blossom. Two more quickly follow, on either side, pink and gold.
Kids shriek and squeal and run circles around their adults, Popsicles and ice cream cones melting down their wrists. Dad and Starfire strike up a conversation with a couple around their age standing near us, and Julia is down on the ground, taking selfies with a shaggy Great Pyrenees sprawling in the sand. Even with the sulfuric smell hanging in the air, I can still pick out the gingery kick of Miles beside me.
“Good night?” he asks, a fresh wave of fireworks making his face shimmer with greens and oranges.
“Great night.”
He smiles and faces forward, the back of his hand brushing mine. My heart feels like a present unwrapped, my body relaxing.
For the first time, I let myself really imagine this lasting.
All of it.
Dad and Starfire. Ashleigh and Julia. Waning Bay.
Miles.
I could be happy here. I could belong.
