“Dad.” She gave the word almost eight syllables. “You’re supposed to knock.”
“I did, but you didn’t hear me. What are you doing?”
“Listening to music.” Melodramatic eye roll and a huge, heaving sigh, but for whose benefit? He already knew that his daughter thought he was an idiot, and no one else was in the room.
“You blue because summer’s almost over?”
“What?”
“Jesus, turn it down for a second.” She dialed down the volume but wouldn’t pull the little clips from her ears. Lenhardt remembered when the Walkman had been the big thing, the modern wonder. What was next? What technology, ten or twenty years in the future, would make his jaded daughter feel nostalgic for this little box on her belt while her kid sighed and heaved and rolled her eyes? God, he hoped he lived long enough to see Jessica being driven crazy by her children.
“How you doing?”
“Fine.”
“Your mom mentioned that you might want to quit swim team.”
Another eloquent shrug.
“I mean, the whole world is in love with an Olympic swimmer from Baltimore County, and you want to quit. That strikes me as kind of funny timing.”
“Well, I’m not going to make the Olympics, so what’s the point?”
“If you enjoy it, you should do it. If you don’t, you shouldn’t. It’s that simple.”
Jessica looked at the ceiling, as if amazed that someone could be ignorant enough to proclaim her problems simple.
“Honey, do you even know what makes you happy?”
“Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.”
“Because I want to know, okay? Your mom and I both do.”
“I’m happy.” Her voice was stormy, as if she had been falsely accused of some infraction.
“Okay. But you’d tell me if you weren’t, right? You’d tell us if something was bothering you, no matter how hard it was? It’s important that you know you can talk to us about anything. About parties and boys”-he choked a little on the last word-“and…well, pressure. Anything that’s upsetting you. You’ll tell us, right?”
“O-kay.” This was exhaled from a clenched jaw as if a huge concession had been made, and perhaps it had. Lenhardt patted his daughter’s hand and stood to leave, but he was stopped at the door by her voice-her real voice, as he thought of it, the voice of the little girl who just a year ago had let him take her in his lap, a voice without those drawn-out vowels and curlicues of sarcasm.
“Dad…what if I have a problem that you and Mom can’t fix?”
From the mouth of babes-but while he would concede this point to himself, almost, there was no way he would admit it to his daughter. Lenhardt liked to tell himself that was the difference between him and a guy like Hartigan. He knew he couldn’t do everything for his kids, that he couldn’t keep them from disappointment and heartache. Lenhardt liked to tell himself that, but he also knew he was full of shit. His first daughter, Tally, was as lost to him as Kat Hartigan was to her father, and for less fathomable reasons. He couldn’t stand in judgment of anyone.
“You just come and talk to us, Jessie, and we’ll take it from there.”
Dale Hartigan could see the red-and-white Long & Foster sign outside the Snyders’ property even in the encroaching dusk. That made sense, with Binnie going away to school and feelings still running high over Peter Lasko’s death. It was so odd. Because the grand jury met in secret, the circumstances of Kat’s death-and life-were still largely unknown in the community at large. Yet everyone was aware that Cyrus Snyder had killed Peter Lasko. Now Snyder felt that he had to leave, while Dale Hartigan continued to receive sympathetic looks and warm handshakes on the rare days he ventured into Glendale. Even Chloe was kind to him. Too kind. Earning Chloe’s ready forgiveness only convinced Dale that he was beyond hope.
Look at her now, he thought as she opened the door to him. It was almost unbearable, the way she gazed at him, the gentle voice she employed, as if Dale were a wounded animal.
“The deed was in my safe-deposit box,” he said, handing her a manila envelope. “An oversight. You know how papers flew back and forth in the divorce.”
“I never would have sold if Kat-Well, you know how much she loved our little patch of woods. But there’s a buyer for the Snyder farm, and he offered so much for my acres. Enough for me to move wherever I like, maybe even go back to school. It seems like fate.”
“Sort of the opposite, if you think about it.” Inviting her to castigate him, to connect the dots, to articulate how he had brought them here. But Chloe had completely lost interest in punishing Dale now that he was doing such a good job.
“Let’s just say it’s meant to be. How’s Susannah?”
“Fine. I told her, you know. Made a clean breast.”
“About what?”
“Us. That night.”
“Oh, Dale.” Just hearing the pity in her voice was like fingering a bruise, for it reminded him that Chloe had never entertained the same rosy hopes of reconciliation, not even while making love to him. He was the only one who had imagined starting over.
“I’m simply trying to be honest.”
“It’s possible to be too honest, Dale. Just because you need to say it doesn’t mean anyone else needs to hear it.”
“Well, she forgave me. She took me back. Susannah says that everyone deserves a second chance.”
Yes, he was reproaching Chloe in his own way, reminding her that some women were capable of forgiveness. He didn’t mention his sneaking suspicion that Susannah was delighted to have something so dire to hold over him, a card he could never trump. For Susannah Goode to be good, Dale was realizing, she needed the contrast of someone else’s badness. For years that person had been tempestuous, unpredictable Chloe. Now it would be Dale.
“I have plans tonight, so if there’s nothing else…”
“Plans? Like a date?”
“Dale.”
“Okay. None of my business. Just make sure he’s not after your money.” It was a pathetic attempt at a joke, and it fell flat, as it deserved to. “Chloe…when you’re getting ready to move, I’d like first crack at anything you get rid of. Especially Kat’s things, of course.”
“Even the painting?” She raised an eyebrow, capable now of making jokes at her own expense.
“Actually, I would love to have that painting. More than anything.”
“It was always yours, Dale. Remember? I gave it to you for Christmas, the year Kat was eleven.”
“Ten.” But they smiled at the old disagreement. Their fractiousness was a memory now, a reminder of a time when they could afford such petty irritations.
Heading down the drive a few minutes later, Dale saw three small figures cutting across his land. Chloe’s land, he corrected himself, and soon to pass out of the Hartigan name altogether. Enjoy it now, he wanted to yell out. If Snyder’s property was already in escrow, bulldozers would probably be here by Labor Day, grading the land for the forty or so houses the site would accommodate. Would Muhly sell as well? No, he was too stubborn, too proud of being able to say he worked a farm that had been in his family for five generations. The old Meeker farmstead had stayed in Dale’s family for three-which, as it turned out, was the end of the Hartigan line.