He looked at me. “I know. And he’ll miss you. You’ve been the one bright spot in what was otherwise a pretty hard summer for him. I appreciate all you’ve done.”
“Of course,” I said. “He’s my brother.”
At this, he smiled. Then, we just sat there for a moment, in silence. If they were really leaving, it was all the more reason to handle this one last piece of our unfinished business. Maybe this, right here, was fate giving me that in. Now I just had to be accountable for what I did with it.
“I’m really glad you guys came down here this summer,” I began. “Even if the reason wasn’t, you know, so ideal.”
He smiled wryly, taking a sip of his coffee. “That’s a kind understatement.”
I took a deep breath. Here goes, I thought. “Truthfully, until that day you called, I was thinking I might never hear from you again.”
Again, it was instant, how he reacted to this last sentence: his entire body tensed, from his face to his shoulders, directly into fight-or-flight mode. “I told you, we don’t need to talk about all that,” he said, his voice stiff. “It’s in the past.”
“Maybe,” I replied. “But it was still really . . . hurtful to me. And confusing. I didn’t understand why—”
“Because I was getting a divorce,” he finished for me, his voice sharp. “Because I thought I would have the money, and then I didn’t. That’s why.”
It took me a minute, but finally I spoke. “Money? You think that’s what this is about?”
“I think,” he said, “that it’s bad enough that you’re having to go to a state school after all the work we did to get you into Columbia. The only thing worse is that you continue to feel the need to berate me about it.”
“Berate you?” I said. “You won’t even talk about it.”
He threw up his hands. “What are we doing right now, then?”
“This,” I said, circling my own hands in the air between us, “is only because I came here and forced the conversation. If it was up to you, I’d just suck it up, all that hurt and confusion, all because you don’t like feeling uncomfortable.”
“What I don’t like,” he shot back, “is rehashing my failures. I tried to help you, I failed. There. Is that what you want? Happy now?”
For a moment, I was speechless. Finally I managed, “I got a full ride at a good school. That’s not failing.”
“It’s not Columbia.” He sighed, rubbing his face.
“Wait, so that’s just it?” I asked. He looked at me, his expression weary. “Just because things aren’t exactly what you wanted, they’re nothing?”
“I was disappointed,” he said.
“Disappointment,” I reminded him, “is part of life. Just like change. You told me Benji should already understand that. Why can’t you?”
“You don’t understand!” he said, his voice rising. I’d never seen him upset, didn’t know this side of him, and I felt my skin flush, my own fight or flight. But I stayed put. After all that silence, for so long, I was ready for some noise. “Columbia was my chance to fix everything for you. To get you out of here, give you a life not like your mother’s, or grandmother’s. And I couldn’t do it.”
I swallowed, making myself take a breath. I felt eerily calm as I said, “I was never broken. I didn’t need you to fix me.”
He shook his head. “That’s the whole point, Emaline. You don’t know what you need.”
“What I needed,” I said, picking my words and tone carefully, “was for you to reply to my graduation invitation. To come watch me walk. To be proud of me no matter where I went to school.”
“I wanted the best for you,” he said, his voice clenched. “Only the best.”
“Well, too bad,” I said. “When you have a kid, you sign on for the whole package: good, bad, everything in between. You can’t just dip in and out, picking and choosing the parts you want and quitting when it’s not perfect.”
“I was going to get you out of this place,” he shot back.
“I’m still going!”
“Two hours away.”
“Yes, at first,” I said. “But from there, I can go anywhere. It’s supposed to be a start, not a finish.”
“You’re so young,” he groaned, slapping a hand onto his forehead. “You have no idea how one bad choice, one stupid mistake, can change everything for you. And once it’s done, believe me: it’s done. But the sick part is, you’ll still spend your whole life trying to fix it.”
One bad choice. One big mistake. One summer. One girl. One Emaline.
“You say it,” I said softly. “But you mean me. Right?”
He bit his lip, but didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. Because right then, suddenly, irrevocably, I understood. All this time, from the day at Igor’s when he’d first brought up the subject of college, I’d thought this was about what he wanted for my life, my future. But it was never about me.
My mom had taught me a lot of things. But one of the big ones was that if you made a mistake, you owned up to it, learned from it. My father, I saw now, wasn’t able to do this; he couldn’t even get past trying to fix it. That was his problem, though. No matter what he thought, I wasn’t a problem or mistake. I was his daughter. And despite all of this, and him, I was going to be just fine.