Page 53 of The Design of Goodbye
Liam’s face fell when he saw me.
“Who’s this?” asked the man. “You skipping work to be with a girl?” He snorted with laughter. “Like any girl would ever want to be with you.”
Liam ignored him and walked over to me. “Madison, what are you doing?”
“Your glove,” I said, handing it out to him. “I found it.”
“Boy!”
Liam swung around. “I’m coming!”
The man grunted and slammed the door, leaving us in painful silence.
Hesitantly, I asked, “Who was that?”
“That was”—he took his glove from my outreached hand—“my dad. Sorry you had to see that. He’s pissed I’m late.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “So, I really need to go. Thanks for finding my glove.”
He walked away, but I got an overpowering need to tell him something and called, “Hey, Liam?”
His hand paused on the front door. “Yeah?”
“I had fun, too.”
He looked so happy, and those terrifying butterflies from earlier returned with a vengeance. I could feel it. An inkling of something building within me, and I knew, even though I didn’t want to admit it to myself, I was in trouble.
* * *
In the time it’d taken me to drop Liam off at Gary’s Auto Shop, my dad had cleared the kitchen counters of our dinner dishes and changed into his pajamas. He was leaning over our kitchen table now, moving around pictures like a jigsaw puzzle.
If this was a normal night, I’d go straight to the basement, where I’d try to find solace in my mom’s sewing room.
Sidenote: I never did.
But this hadn’t been a normal night, and I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to it. I’d wake up tomorrow, and everything would be back to how it once was: that palpable brokenness between my dad and me, and the necessary but painful avoidance of him in case I did something that made him leave me, too.
So, tonight, I walked over to him instead. “What are you doing?”
He failed to hide his surprise. “Trying to choose which pictures should go on the Charlevoix lake house printed listing.”
My dad didn’t travel out of town for work often, but when he did, it was for lake houses. He said lake houses held a special place in his heart because he and his mom had stayed at one during a rare weekend trip. That weekend seemed like the only good memory he had of his normally absent mother.
He’d been trying to sell the Charlevoix lake house for two years. His client, Mr. Sanderson, was a man in his seventies with strange dreams and high expectations. My dad had finally convinced him to take the lake house off the market earlier this year for significant renovations. The only reason Mr. Sanderson agreed was because he lived in Florida now and wasn’t that inconvenienced.
Now that the renovations were done, Mr. Sanderson was insistent on putting the lake house back on the market, even though December was notoriously the worst time of year to list a house for sale. The open house was three weeks away, and my dad was starting to worry over every little detail. He wanted this open house to beit. I couldn’t blame him.
“It looks so good,” I said, inspecting the pictures he’d laid out.
Before, the lake house had been outdated with dark cabinets, strange green carpet, and too much unwelcome leather furniture. Now, it was inviting, with its white cabinets, gray carpet, and comfortable-looking couches.
“I think so, too,” said my dad, pleased. “The problem is, I can only fit five pictures on the listing, and I can’t decide which.”
He rubbed his face. I frowned as I took in his wrinkles and graying hair—probably results from stress he tried to hide from me.
“I can help,” I offered. “I mean, if you want me to.”
