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Natalie

“Now do it again,” her father says. “If you can get her to do it twice in a row, it’s more likely to stick.”

Natalie takes another crumb of cheese off the cutting board, and Lickie’s tail wags immediately. “Speak.”

Her tail thumps the kitchen floor, but she doesn’t bark.

“Lickie, speak!”

The dog barks exactly once.

“Good girl!” Natalie says, feeding her the cheese.

“The soup is ready,” her father says. “Can you cube the avocados? Just use a butter knife. In a grid pattern.” Her dad draws invisible lines over the avocado. “Then turn it inside out over a bowl.”

“Sure, okay.” She washes her hands first.

He cracks open the oven door to peek at the progress of the crackers he’s baking.

Cooking dinner together was his idea. He was waiting in the kitchen when she got home from her discouraging day of applying for jobs.

He didn’t ask how the day went, and this somehow makes it easier to tell him about it as she dries her hands. “The bio exam was brutal. And then Tessa didn’t like any of my job ideas. She only wants to apply to places that are too bougie to hire us. We filled out a bunch of applications, but I bet none of them call us back. That might actually be her plan.”

“Hmm,” he says, closing the oven door.

“She also doesn’t want to work weekends because her parents have a place on Sebago Lake.”

“Must be nice,” he says.

The front door clatters open out in the living room. Then she hears her mom’s computer bag hitting the floor.

“Mom?” She puts the butter knife down and trots over to the doorway. “We’re making dinner! It’s almost ready!”

Her mother is basically a blur, headed for the staircase. “I can’t, baby. I have a work thing.”

“What kind of a work thing?” Natalie tracks her movement as she jogs up the stairs. Why are her eyes red?

“The stupid kind.” Her mom disappears from sight.

Natalie deflates. She thought her mom might appreciate her father’s home-cooked meal. And that he’s scraping the old paint in the den in his spare time, just like she’s always intended to do. “I’ve got the time,” he’d said when Natalie asked. “It’s no trouble.”

Her mother could just thaw out a little . Like, 10 percent.

She goes back to the kitchen and dices the avocado very carefully into a bowl, while her father pulls a baking tray of crackers out of the oven. Actually, it’s one giant cracker until he grabs a fork and gently cracks it into rectangles along lines that he’d scored in the dough before baking it.

“That’s a good trick,” she says.

He plucks one off the tray and hands it to her.

It’s warm and salty and basically perfect. “Where did you learn to make these?”

“The last restaurant where I worked had homemade crackers. Looked so easy I tried myself. Baking bread is a cheap hobby. All you need is a bag of flour and some yeast.”

She watches her father’s long hands as he moves the crackers to a cooling rack. “Maybe set the table?”

“Sure.”

From the cutlery drawer, she pulls out three spoons. But then puts her mother’s back. She’s not going to beg.

While she’s getting the napkins, her mother calls her name from the top of the stairs.

“ What? ” she yells back.

“Can you put my hair up? I’ve got ten minutes to get out of here.”

She lays the spoons on the table and walks out into the living room. Her mother stands on the staircase in her bathrobe, looking agitated.

“So this is, like, fancy?” Natalie asks. “What’s the occasion?”

“Historical Commission banquet.”

Yawn city . “What are you wearing?”

“God only knows.” Her mother looks truly flustered. “Will you do my hair?”

“Sure. You could wear that new dress. The one you bought for dinner with the guy .”

“No can do.” She waves a hairbrush. “It’s too much.”

“Too much... cleavage?”

Her mother gives a miserable shrug.

“Figure it out, because you can’t put a dress on once your hair’s done. I’ll get my stuff.” Natalie follows her mother up the stairs, turning into her own room for the styling products and the hair pins. She’ll do a French twist. That’s quick, and always a winner. She grabs her makeup kit on the way out. “Can I do your eyes?”

“Lightly?” her mother says from the bedroom. “I found a dress.”

Natalie pokes her head into the room, where her mother is squinting at a navy-blue dress on a hanger. “That’s nice. I mean, that color doesn’t say much, but the fabric is pretty.”

Her mother frowns. “I was going to get rid of this and now I don’t remember why.”

“Find me downstairs on the couch?”

Natalie sets up in the living room, all the pins lined up on the back of the sofa. Her mother hurries down two minutes later, carrying a clutch purse and a pair of navy heels so cheugy that Natalie has never bothered to borrow them.

“Can you finish the zipper and do the hook and eye?” her mother asks, dropping the shoes.

“Sure, but sit down.” As soon as she lands on the sofa in front of her, Natalie pushes her hair out of the way and fiddles with the hook above the zipper. “There’s no... thing? It’s just the hook, but no loop.”

“ Shit . I knew there was something wrong with this dress. Maybe we can find a really small safety pin in the sewing box?”

“Where’s the sewing box? Oh—wait.” It’s actually in her room. Natalie turns and jogs upstairs again. Luckily, the sewing box is easily located under a pair of dirty leggings and a hoodie.

Downstairs, she hands the box to her mother. Then she grabs the brush and stands behind the couch, taming her mother’s hair. It feels misty from the shower.

“We don’t have a tiny safety pin,” she grumbles. “We don’t even have a medium one. It’s only these honkers.” She holds up a fat safety pin. “I’ll have to change. Or cancel. I’d rather cancel.”

“Got a needle? I can tack it.”

They both swivel to see her father standing in the kitchen doorway. “If this is a wardrobe emergency, I’ll stitch it for you while Natalie does... whatever Natalie is doing.”

Her mother blinks. “That’s not necessary.”

He actually rolls his eyes. “You want to get out the door in five minutes or what?”

She sighs. “Okay. Thank you. I’ll thread a needle.”

Natalie twists her mother’s hair carefully into a roll at the back of her head and pins it liberally. “This isn’t going to be very elaborate...”

“Good,” her mother says. “I don’t have time for elaborate.”

“All right. Then hold your breath.”

They take a gulp of air in tandem, and then Natalie mists the back of her mother’s head with setting spray, while her father watches with an openly amused expression.

When they both exhale, Natalie hustles around to sit on the coffee table. She grabs her makeup kit and roots around for a gold eye shadow.

“Don’t make it sexy,” her mother says, pausing to snip a length of dark thread. “I don’t want to send the wrong message.”

“Fine. Be boring.”

Her father’s lips twitch. He reaches over and plucks the threaded needle from her mom’s tense fingers.

“I didn’t tie the knot yet.”

“Yeah, I have eyes, Rowan.” He takes Natalie’s old spot behind the couch, licks his thumb, and expertly ties a knot at the end of the thread.

They both lean in toward her mother at the same moment, her father gathering the two halves of her mother’s dress. Natalie has the strangest sensation. Like she’s having a very lucid dream where she’s swapped places with a girl whose parents aren’t strangers.

“Close your eyes,” Natalie demands.

Her mother closes her eyes.

Natalie strokes gold eyeshadow across her lids. But then her father puts a hand on her mother’s bare shoulder, causing her to jump.

“Easy, Gallagher,” her father drawls. “Let’s not add ‘stabbing’ to my rap sheet.”

“Sorry, sorry.”

He gives her mother’s shoulder a quick squeeze, and Natalie is fascinated. She’s never been able to picture them as a couple, but suddenly she can. Her mother would be the high-strung one. Smart and ambitious and a little neurotic. Her father must have been the bassline—the calm, beating heart in the background.

He bends over his work, looping a tiny stitch between the two edges of the fabric with steady fingers.

Natalie puts the eye shadow away. “Mascara real quick,” she says. “And then lipstick.”

“I’ll do lipstick in the car,” she says. “Do you hear a car?”

“No,” she and her father say at the same time.

“He said he’s coming to get me at six.”

Natalie tenses. “ He? ”

“Hank Wincott.”

“Oh,” Natalie sniffs. “The boss man.”

Her father suddenly goes very still. Then he takes a visible breath. “Pass the snips?”

Her mother hands the scissors back over her shoulder.

He frowns over the back of the dress for another moment, like a surgeon finishing up with a patient. “Okay, problem solved.” He hands back the scissors just as they hear a car approach. “I think he’s here.”