“Well, thanks.” I stuff the ten-dollar bill in my hand—part of last Wednesday night’s winnings—into the jar.
“Jonah,” he puts in, without me asking.
“Thanks, Jonah,” I say.
He beams. “Have a good day, Daphne.”
On my walk home, my dad tries to call me and I accidentally hang up. I forgot to call him back last week, which isn’t like me. But it’s not like him to call me, period.
At this point, we’re sustaining more of a casual texts every few months kind of relationship.
At a stoplight, I text him: Sorry, can I call you back in just a few? I’m terrible at multitasking even when the two tasks at hand aren’t as demanding as (a) navigating small talk with my semiestranged father and (b) navigating crowds of ice-cream-sandwich-carrying out-of-towners zigzagging in every direction.
No need, Dad replies. Just wanted to confirm the address your mom gave me.
So he’s mailing me something. Right when I’ve finally started clearing out the wedding junk.
If this surprise package is anything like Dad’s last few, I can look forward to an intriguing assortment of miracle-cure vitamins, essential oils, and weed gummies I did not ask for and likely are an actual crime to mail. For good measure, sometimes he throws in something vaguely nostalgic but ultimately misguided. Like a yellow snow hat he found in his attic and is convinced belonged to me as a kid.
In that case, I so thoroughly did not recognize the hat that the only logical explanation was: it belonged to whoever owned the house before Dad, and since he could only afford the place due to the fact that a violent crime had been committed there, you’d better believe that hat went straight into the trash.
I did, however, briefly burn the sage he sent me, in the general vicinity of the trash can, before tossing it in after the snow cap. I figure we reached net-zero on that particular “gift.”
Inside our apartment building, I check my phone again. The address Dad sent for confirmation is, in fact, Miles’s place. Still, I dial his number as I’m trudging upstairs, determined to talk him out of sending me anything.
The call rings out. I try once more. A message prompts me to leave a voice mail as I reach our door.
After the beep, I say, “Hey, Dad.” My key jams in the lock, and it takes some wiggling to get it to turn. “Sorry I missed you. Just give me a call back when—”
The door swings open.
I don’t open it.
Someone on the other side does.
A middle-aged woman with a 1960s-esque beehive and cleavage to her chin.
She looks every bit as surprised to see me coming into my apartment as I am to see her already standing inside it.
“Daphne!” she shouts, with pure ecstasy.
“Hiiii,” I say, trying furiously to place her and getting nowhere.
My dad steps out of the kitchen, into view, slipping one hand over the woman’s shoulder. “Hey, kid,” he says. “Surprise!”
24
THURSDAY, AUGUST 1ST
16 DAYS UNTIL THE READ-A-THON
My gut instinct is to step back into the hallway, close the door, and try again. See if anything else greets me.
Dad yanks me right into a hug, thwacking my back so heartily it makes me cough.
“You sick, kid?” He draws back, gripping my shoulders as his sparkling green eyes give me a quick survey.
“A little,” I say, because suddenly I do feel feverish.
“Come on in, come on in,” he says, like this isn’t my home. He spins me toward the kitchen. “You finally get to meet Starfire.”
A wordless squeal emanates from behind him. He sidesteps, presenting with a full-arm flourish the woman who opened my apartment door.
Several feet behind her, Miles hovers in the entryway, looking as flustered as I’ve seen him. Which is to say, technically not very. But for Miles, every bit like a man who was just forced to let two strangers into his apartment.
I barely have time to register Starfire’s bubblegum-pink lip gloss before she’s wrapping me in a bone-crunching hug that smells like the inside of a Bath & Body Works minutes after a gaggle of preteens rolled through hyped up on Frappuccinos.
“You. Are. Just. So. Cute!” She rocks me hard back and forth in time with her pronouncement.
“Oh,” I say. “Thanks.”
When she releases me, she keeps one of my hands in hers, her long, baby-blue fingernails slightly clawing into me. “Finally,” she says tearily. “At first I thought you were the tall one.” She jerks her head over her shoulder toward Julia, whose face plainly projects: I have already been through what you are currently experiencing.
My eyes flick toward Dad, trying to communicate that I have no idea who this woman is.
But my father and I never had the time to develop anything resembling an unspoken language.
He just beams. “You have no idea what it means to me to see my two girls together.”
For one second, I genuinely wonder whether Starfire is a half sister I never knew existed.
But whereas all Dad’s previous girlfriends easily could have fit that bill, Starfire has to be within a decade of Dad’s own age—though with the kind of filler and Botox that make it impossible to tell whether she’s ten years younger or ten years older than him.
“Should we go into the living room,” Miles pipes up, already guiding Dad down the hallway. “Daphne and I will grab some wine and snacks.”
“Sounds great!” Julia chimes in, dutifully looping an arm through Starfire’s.
Starfire, for her part, makes another wordless baby-talk coo in the back of her throat, and squeezes my cheek before she’s dragged off, a huge grin turned over her shoulder all the way, so that she keeps bumping into Julia and almost toppling over in her four-inch blue spike heels.
Miles ushers me into the kitchen, whispering, “They just showed up.”
“And you let them in,” I whisper back.
“He said he was your dad!” he hisses. “And that you were expecting him! I didn’t know what to do.”
“I mean, in the loosest interpretation of the word,” I say, “that’s my father, but I’m never expecting him.”
