“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.
We eat dinner at Jesse’s Table, a farm-to-table spot with a deck overlooking the water. I’m pink-cheeked-and-nosed from the day in the sun, while Dad’s, Julia’s, and Miles’s tans have only deepened. Starfire is bright red but unbothered. “It’ll turn into a tan by tomorrow,” she told me when I offered her aloe back at the apartment, between the boat ride and the restaurant.
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.
