NATE
I kept glancingat Evan from the corner of my eye as I drove home. Sure enough, my mom had been right. Something had happened to kill that light that had finally started to shine again.
She hung her head as if trying to hide behind the curtain of her hair. Her shoulders were slumped like she was attempting to curl in on herself. I tried to start a conversation a couple times, but all I got were short answers with as few words as possible
When we got home, I asked if she wanted to help me with dinner, since she’d shown an interest in learning to cook from my mother, but she started right for the stairs, announcing she had homework.
I chopped and sautéed, boiled and strained. I threw myself into cooking, all the while, my head was spinning. Things were unsteady with the two most important women in my life, and somehow, fucking somehow, I had to figure out how to fix it. Once dinner was ready, I called Evan, hoping that something might have shaken loose in the last hour, and she’d come downstairs like nothing had happened.
I wasn’t so lucky. She skulked down the stairs and slunk into her chair. “What is this?”
Ah, she speaks, I thought, hoping for a breakthrough. “Shrimp and mussel linguine with a garlic butter sauce.”
I’d done a pretty damn good job if I did say so myself, and the whole apartment smelled incredible, but as I started eating, all Evan did was push the food around on her plate with her fork.
“Everything okay?” I asked, silently willing her to tell me.
“It’s fine,” she muttered, keeping her head down.
I tried again. “How was your day?”
I didn’t even get a verbal response that time, just a shrug. That did it.
“All right, that’s it,” I snapped, my tone much harsher than I intended, but for Christ’s sake, how much was a man supposed to endure, huh? “Something’s going on, and I want to know what it is right now, damn it.”
There was a short sniffle, then Evan burst into tears.
“Ah, fuck. Fuck me,” I grunted as I shot back in my chair and moved to my daughter. Crouching down beside her, I wrapped her in my arms and held her tight as her tears soaked the shoulder of my shirt. “Jesus, sweetheart. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you like that. Please don’t cry, honey.”
I considered myself a pretty tough guy, or at least I liked to think I was. But when it came to female tears, I was more worthless than tits on a bull. But when they were my daughter’s tears? It took me to my fucking knees.
“I’m sorry, Evan. I swear. Please, just stop crying, yeah? I won’t yell again. If you don’t want to tell me what’s wrong, that’s fine. I won’t ask again.”
She pulled back, reaching up to rub the wet from her face with the heels of her palms. “I-it’s okay. It wasn’t you. You didn’t make me cry.”
I reached back and grabbed the chair I’d abandoned, pulling it forward so I could sit down while still close enough to hug her if necessary. “You want to tell me what it’s about then?”
“It was Mom,” she confessed in a barely-there voice.
My back went stiff, but I tried my hardest to keep a neutral tone. “What happened?”
She let out a sound of disgust and shook her head. “It’s so stupid, really. I shouldn’t be upset. It’s not like I didn’t already know what she was going to say.”
I stopped her before she could go off on a tangent and get lost on the journey. “Ev, sweetheart. Tell me what happened.”
She inhaled deeply and released it nice and slow before diving in. “Well, there’s this dance coming up at school next month.” Ah Christ, if this involved a boy, I was going to be sick. “Apparently there’s some town tradition that all the girls in my grade and their moms are supposed to put everything together for the dance. It’s a pretty big deal, I guess.”
“Shit, I remember that dance. They still do that?”
“I guess so,” she said with a shrug. “Anyway, they were talking about it in homeroom today, making this big deal out of it, and I thought it sounded kind of cool.”
Oh shit.
“I figured I’d call Mom and tell her about it. There’s still a lot of time between now and the dance, and I thought maybe, if she had enough notice, she could come up here on a weekend or something and do it with me. I know it’s a long drive, but road trips are kind of fun.”
A ball of lead had formed right in the pit of my stomach. “That was a good idea, honey. What did she say?”
“She said—” The sniffles started again and the tears that had just begun to dry up grew in intensity. “She said she couldn’t because she met some guy. She’s been seeing him for a while now, and he just accepted a job in San Antonio. She’s moving there with him.”