It was sometime after midnight when my dad came down and popped his head into my cave.
“You’re still awake?” he said.
“Looks like it,” I said. I was very carefully sprinkling silver glitter on a strip of the canvas of my mixed-media piece. I needed something that looked like rain, and that was the closest thing I could think of. One false move, and . . .
He chuckled briefly. “Well,” he said. “It was so quiet down here, I didn’t think you were . . . I was just going to turn the light off.”
“You can leave it on,” I said, pushing some stray glitter into place with my fingernail.
Silence descended. I finished with the glitter. It looked okay, I guessed. I could figure it out better later, once I went away and came back with some perspective. I carefully put the lid back on the glitter and went over to wash my hands in the oversized sink. I jumped when I saw my dad was still standing on the landing. I’d thought he’d gone back upstairs.
“Uh,” I said.
“What did your mother want?”
I wiped my hands on my jeans. “She gave me some mail.”
“Mail?”
“Yeah. Some of my mail had gotten sent over to her place.”
“Oh.”
“I got an issue of Cat Fancy,” I said. “Can you believe that?” I laughed incredulously as I thought about the ridiculousness of it.
“Yeah,” he said. “I saw that in the trash this morning. I was wondering about that.” He was smiling.
“How was your date?”
He looked a little sheepish around the edges, but the inner part was proud and confident. “It went well.”
“That’s good.” He liked her, whoever she was. I could tell.
“About that . . .”
I shook my head.
“You’re not . . .?”
“No.”
I smiled in a humorless kind of way. He wanted to know if I was mad at him. I wasn’t. I was still surprised, but I wasn’t mad. I could understand, even, in a way. He didn’t want to deal with Joy any more than I did. But even so . . . well, no. I still wasn’t mad. Most of me didn’t even give half a damn. I was too weary to work up a real smile. But I wanted to convince him anyway.
He seemed relieved and suspicious all at once. I guess he’d thought I was going to let him have it, demand to know why he hadn’t rescued me. Fuck it. Who cared?
Labels: january brings few faces
