“You didn’t go?” Neal was shocked when she’d told him. You could tell he was shocked because he raised his left eyebrow two millimeters. (Neal’s face was like a flower blooming—you’d need time-lapse photography to really see it in action. But Georgie’d become such a student of his face, she could read most of the twitches.)
“I didn’t know him,” Georgie said. They were sitting on the foldout couch in Neal’s parents’ basement. It was the second or third Christmas after they were married, and they’d come to stay for almost a week.
His mom put them in the basement, with the foldout, even though there was a double bed up in Neal’s old bedroom. “She doesn’t want us to disturb the sanctity of your bedroom,” Georgie teased. His parents hadn’t touched Neal’s room since he left for college. All his high school wrestling clippings and team photos were still taped to the wall. There were still clothes in the closet.
“It’s like when you go to Disneyland,” Georgie would say, “and they show you a replica of Walt’s office, exactly as he left it.”
“Would you prefer dog photos?”
“To weird sweaty photos of you in a nineteenth-century bathing costume?”
“It’s called a singlet.”
“It’s incredibly disturbing.”
Neal’s mom kept all their family photo albums in the basement. The week Georgie and Neal stayed there, she hauled out the whole stack. “If you’re ever President of the United States,” Georgie said, a large floral-patterned album spread over her lap, “historians will thank your mom for taking such good notes.”
“Only child,” he said. “She wanted to get all the memories she could out of me.”
Neal had been a solid, stolid child. Round and wide-eyed as a toddler. Looking frankly at the camera on his fifth birthday. More hobbity than ever during grade school—with his T-shirt tucked over his tummy into his maroon Toughskins, and his shaggy ’70s hair. By middle school, he’d started standing with his feet planted and his shoulders slightly forward. Not daring you to knock him down—he wasn’t that kind of short guy. Just looking like someone who couldn’t be knocked down. By high school, he was broad and steely. An immovable object.
Georgie sat on the couch looking through the albums, and Neal sat next to her, idly playing with her hair; he’d seen all these pictures before.
She stopped at a photo of Neal and Dawn dressed up for some high school dance. Jesus, they really were right out of a John Cougar Mellen-camp video.
“Yeah,” he said, “but still . . .”
“Still, what?” Georgie smoothed the plastic over the photo.
“He was your dad.”
She looked away from high school Neal, up at the Neal sitting next to her. Neal at twenty-five. Softer than in high school. With less tension around his eyes. Looking like he’d probably kiss her in a minute, when he was done making whatever point he was making.
“What?” Georgie asked.
“I just don’t understand how you could skip your father’s funeral.”
“He didn’t feel like my father,” she said.
Neal waited for her to elaborate.
“He was only married to my mom for ten minutes—I don’t even remember living with him, and he moved to Michigan when I was four.”
“Didn’t you miss him?”
“I didn’t know what I was missing.”
“But didn’t you miss something? Like even the idea of him?”
Georgie shrugged. “I guess not. I never felt incomplete or anything, if that’s what you’re asking. I think fathers must be kind of optional.”
“That is a fundamentally wrong statement.”
“Oh, you know what I mean.” Georgie went back to the photo album. There were dozens of photos from Neal’s graduation day. He looked pained in these—like, after eighteen years, he’d finally lost patience with his mom’s photo-vigilance. His dad was in nearly every photo, too, looking much more tolerant.
“I really don’t know what you mean,” Neal said.
Georgie turned the page. “Well, they’re nice, if you have one—if you have a good one—but dads aren’t necessary.”
Neal sat up straighter, away from her. “They’re absolutely necessary.”
“They must not be,” she said, turning toward him on the couch. “I didn’t have one.”
Neal’s eyebrows were grim and his mouth was flat. “That doesn’t mean you didn’t need one.”
“But I didn’t need one. I didn’t have one, and I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.”
“I am so,” she said. “How am I not fine?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“You’re being uncharacteristically irrational,” Georgie said.
“I’m not being irrational. No one else in the world would argue with me about this. Dads aren’t optional. My dad wasn’t optional.”
“Because he was there,” she said. “But if he wasn’t there, your mom would have filled in the gaps. That’s what moms do.”
“Georgie—” He pulled his arm away from her shoulders and hair. “—you’re being warped.”
She hugged the photo album against herself. “How am I being warped? I’m just sitting here being the product of a perfectly well-adjusted single-parent family.”
“Your mom isn’t well adjusted.”
“Well, that’s true. Maybe kids don’t need moms, either.” She was teasing now.
Neal wasn’t. He stood up from the couch, shaking his head some more.
“Neal . . .”
He walked toward the stairs, away from her.
“Why are you getting so mad about this?” she said. “We don’t even have kids.”
He stopped halfway up the stairs. He had to lean down below the ceiling to make eye contact with her. “Because we don’t even have kids, and you already think I’m optional.”
“Not you,” she said, not wanting to admit she was wrong—not really wanting to sort out what she did mean. “Men, in general.”
Neal stood up again, out of sight. “I can’t talk to you right now. I’m going upstairs to help with dinner.”
Georgie pushed the photo album back down into her lap and flipped to the end.
“Where are you flying today?” the woman behind the counter asked without looking up at Georgie.