"You're just in time."
Sara set her bag down at the foot of the stairs and made her way down the hall in the direction of her dad's voice. The unmistakable aroma of sautéed garlic, not to mention his limited cooking proficiencies betrayed his 'surprise' dinner: spaghetti.
She sat down and poured two glasses of wine as her father placed a steaming plate in front of her, then another at the place to her left. The kitchen was small but functional.
Cozy
, she thought.
They sat in silence for a moment, each enjoying the other's company. She raised her glass and said warmly, "The Three Musketeers." It was their special name. After her mom died when she was seven, her dad tried to lighten the mood and make the rest of their lives sound like an adventure.
We're the Dynamic Duo
, he said.
No,
she corrected,
the Three Musketeers.
Who's the third?,
he asked.
Whiskers,
she said.
The goldfish?
, he asked. As a five year old, she named the goldfish Whiskers and the cat Goldie. It made perfect sense to her child mind.
What about the cat?
He doesn't count.
And so it was, the Three Musketeers. Just the two of them. She adored her father and thought she would marry him when she was old enough. That, too, made perfect sense.
"The Three Musketeers," he echoed. It was good to have her there, to make this new place feel like a home, to have someone there who loved him.
When they had finished eating, he held up the bottle with a quizzical look. "Not yet," she said, "I still have a lot of stuff to bring in."
They walked to and from the car, each hauling what they could: a few boxes, bags stuffed with clothes, a small old tv. It wasn't much. Sara had sold most of her stuff in an effort to stave off foreclosure, but in the end it wasn't enough. In less than a year she went from a house, a fiancée, and a job to homeless, single, and unemployed. It was her dad's idea to come stay with him until she could get back on her feet.
Besides,
he said,
it'll be good for the both of us.
"Which one's mine?" she asked, looking back and forth between the two small, mostly empty bedrooms on either side of the hallway. Why he decided to buy a house with so many bedrooms was beyond her.
Midlife crisis
.
"Whichever you like. But this one has a bigger closet," he said, pointing to the left.
"OK, well maybe I'll use the other one for exercising." Sara frequently bought DVDs of the latest workouts. She never stuck with one for more than a month or two but the aggregate result was that she kept in pretty nice shape.
"About that..." her dad began. "It's not just going to be the two of us this summer." He paused. "Jeremy is going to be here to."
"What!?" she screamed. "You've got to be fucking kidding me? Why on earth would he—? Didn't you divorce that bitch – isn't that why you're here in the first place?"
Sara hated her stepmom and was glad when their marriage ended. They had married two weeks before Sara's ninth birthday and her dad even implied that a new family was her birthday gift. It didn't matter that he also bought her a new bike. Julia criticized her constantly and made Sara sleep in her own bed. She was always defending Jeremy and blamed Sara when things got broken.
He's just a child
, she would say,
you're old enough to know better.
It'll get better
, her dad would say when she would start crying.
He's only four. You can still play together.
But he's a BABY
, she would protest. She resented Jeremy's freedom from culpability and Julia's condescension and their new 'family' and the way that their names both started with J and the fact that they were now living in
her
house, wedging themselves into her father's heart. When her dad and Julia divorced last year she thought her prayers had finally been answered.
"Sara, it's more complicated than that. Things didn't work out between me and Julia but it's different with kids. I'm the only father he's ever known."
"Yeah but he's not a kid anymore. He's 18! Can't he just grow up and deal with it the way you always said that I needed to?!"
Her dad just stood and stared. He knew this was coming.
"What's he coming here for anyway?" she asked with disgust and spite.
"He got an internship for the summer but they're not paying him and he asked if he could stay here since he didn't have enough money for an apartment. I didn't know you were going to move in – I thought you were going to make it work on your own."
"Oh, so now it's
my
fault? What, I'm a burden?"
"That's not what I meant and you know it. I just meant that for the first time in a long time I was living on my own and, well, it was kind of lonely. I thought having Jeremy here would make it easier. And any problems that his mother and I had were not because of him, or you, for that matter."
With that Sara didn't know what else to say. She looked at her father, his defeated countenance, and understood. He felt the way she did, alone, vulnerable. She hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. "How 'bout that refill now?"
* * *
Sara woke up late with the warm sun streaming in through the thin curtains. She crossed the room and started toward the bathroom, rubbing her face and trying to convince herself that she didn't have a slight hangover, when the sound of a ringing phone reminded her that she wasn't alone in the house. Quickly she retreated to the bedroom and grabbed a pair of yoga pants that we sticking out of one of the bags full of clothes, pulling them slowly over her calves and bouncing slightly to work them around her hips, all the while holding a doorknob so she wouldn't fall over. She brushed her teeth and washed her face then made her way downstairs.
She noticed her father sitting outside, shirtless, talking on the phone. She grabbed a cup of coffee, and joined him on the cramped patio. He hung up just as she was sitting down, taking in her surroundings. It wasn't much, 10x10 maybe, just big enough for a grill and a few chairs, a handful of friends. It looked big enough to lie out and tan. At least it was fenced so the neighbors couldn't see in. "That was Jeremy. Apparently he's coming sooner than I thought."
