“This is important, Barb.”
“To who?” She turned toward him, to where he stood unmoving in the center of the bedroom.
“To her,” he said.
“To her?”
He said nothing in response. He knew what she meant. Of course he did. But it was not true that the school was important only to him or at least he believed it was not true and so he had not thought there had been any possibility that she would actually choose the public school over the academy. Such an outcome seemed impossible. Then he had started the training and Quinn was in eighth grade and then summer was upon them again and he had simply assumed that the plan they had discussed and decided upon remained in place, had believed it so strongly that when Barb told him that Quinn had decided not to go to the academy, that she wanted instead to attend the regular high school, the information made so little sense that he did not know how to respond and so responded in the only way that would come to him, that it was not her decision to make; it was his decision and, perhaps, Barb’s, but if Barb was not going to support it then it would be his decision alone. Had he only been there every day, talking to her about math and science, pushing her along the path of her destiny, then perhaps she would not have drifted away from it the way she had and then he was angry at Barb for allowing her to deviate from that path or, short of this, for failing to keep him better informed. And then when he talked to Quinn he did not even understand what she was saying. She talked about her friends and the clubs and activities she was involved with at the junior high and how much better it would be in high school and he sat and looked at her and wondered where she had gone or how he had so totally failed to understand her or how she had so totally failed to understand herself.
“It’s like you have a choice between Harvard and state college,” he told her, “and you’re choosing state college. I don’t get it. If you can go to Harvard, you go to Harvard.”
She was prone upon her bed, looking at a magazine of some kind — fashion or gossip or something similar — and she continued to stare down at its pages, not looking at him as he stood in the doorway, but not ignoring him either, hearing him even if she did not respond.
“I just want the best for you,” he continued. “I didn’t have this kind of opportunity when I was your age. I had to wait and wait and wait to learn the stuff I wanted to learn. I dreamed of a school like the academy. I really did. But there just wasn’t anything like that then. At least not that I knew of or that we could afford. But you can do this.”
“Maybe you should go to the academy then,” she said. She still did not look at him and then he saw that tears had begun to streak down her face.
“Oh Quinny,” he said.
He reached for her and she said, “Don’t,” her voice quiet even as she shrugged away from him. He was silent for a long time and then he said, just as quietly, “OK.”
He turned out of the doorway now and moved in the direction of the living room. As he did so he could hear the sound of the door swinging shut behind him, not slammed in anger but closing gently as if in resignation or defeat.
It was well past eight in the evening but the midsummer days were long and yellow sunlight streamed through the kitchen windows and across the living room floor. Still at least a half hour until sunset. Barb out with her girlfriends. In the absence of the closing door there were no sounds anywhere except those he himself made.
He took a beer from the refrigerator and went to the slider and opened it, moving outside in his socks and brushing off one of the lawn chairs there and sitting down. He tried not to think of the conversation he had just had or had failed to have but of course it was impossible not to and he continued to feel irritated and, yes, disappointed, although this latter he still did not want to admit to himself. He opened his beer and took a long drink.
The coming evening surprisingly cool and the light filtering through the mulberry tree shuffled in the faint, thin breeze. A white glow, then green, then white again. The hum of a distant lawnmower. The voices of children somewhere.
The sun was lower in the sky when the slider shushed open behind him. He half turned to see Quinn in the doorway. “Can I sit out here with you?” she said.
“Of course,” he said.
“Can we not talk about stuff?”
“We don’t have to talk about anything.”
Her face showed no expression. She moved forward onto the concrete and pulled a second lawnchair beside his, close enough that it was almost touching, and sat next to him and they watched as the day ended and the light paled to chartreuse and then shifted into a deep radiant blue and then began to yellow into sunset.
They remained together like that for a long while, unmoving, not speaking. At some point he reached out his hand for her in that silence and her fingers wrapped into his own. Her hand so much bigger than he remembered it. Not the hand of a little girl now but becoming a young woman. And yet the gesture was the same and the feeling of her skin was the same. The air had become the color of night, the sun dropping beyond the mulberry, the light of the town all around them rendering the sky a dusty emptiness devoid of stars, as if some quiet blanket had been pulled over them.
He would have held that moment forever. She would have done the same.
A month later Quinn began her freshman year of high school. He knew that he could not have changed her mind and anything he would now say would simply result in her pulling further away from him. But it felt like a reversal of roles somehow, not between he and his daughter but between he and Barb as her parents, for her willfulness had seldom been directed against him. He remembered that span of days — it had turned out to be nearly a week — in which Barb had flown to Atlanta to attend to the death of her father and how he had been concerned that Quinn might prove difficult to manage. But that had not been the case. It was Barb and Quinn’s teachers who found her difficult to manage; he had always found her willing to accommodate most reasonable requests. He and Quinn had shared some kind of bond then, which he had thought to be permanent because it had been based upon their actual selves, their beings, the people they were, which had fit together with such fluidity that her talent, her gift of numbers, seemed like a natural progression. It was almost to be expected. And yet now she had made up her mind in a direction that made no sense to him, which indeed seemed counter to everything he cared about or desired or believed about her.
It was only her choice of schools and yet it was also much more than that. Indeed it seemed to him that the whole of her had changed while he was away at training and he hardly recognized the new tall brightly dressed teenager she had become. What bothered him even more was realizing that she had not signed up for any math classes whatsoever and hearing slightly later, from Barb, that Quinn had made the freshman cheerleading squad. He did not know that she had tried out or had even been interested in doing so. Barb had been a cheerleader but Quinn was not like her mother, although now he was not sure he knew his daughter very well at all. Indeed, it was as if the vacant rooms in that infinite hotel they had spoken about had somehow all been filled and no further expansion was possible, the sets of infinity eliminated, cardinality vaporizing all at once into a dull gray mist that drifted, became transparent, and was gone.
The plan had been that Keith would finish his training and when he was officially an active-duty astronaut Barb and Quinn would finally move to Houston and they would be a family again. He knew that Barb would not want to move, knew also that Quinn would be saddened by the decision but that she too would want to remain and continue her high school in the town where she had grown from a child into a young woman. Nonetheless when he was at last presented with the silver lapel pin indicating that the training period had ended and he had entered the roster of active-duty astronauts, he collected some information on relocating to Houston from the personnel office, a thick envelope of printed materials lauding the myriad cosmopolitan aspects of the city, and when he returned home he handed the entire packet to Barb and then watched, for a full week, as those pages remained on the kitchen counter, unread. He asked her if she had thought much about where she wanted to live or if she wanted him to poll those NASA employees he already knew who were living in Houston but her response was vague and he was left to wonder when the argument would come. When it finally did, it was exactly as he knew it would be. Barb maintained that he would be gone so often that it made little sense to move to Houston, particularly as Quinn was already established at her new high school.