Page 12 of Spectacular Things

The Q in Question

The man’s name isQ.

On the drive home, he reaches into the back seat to shake Mia’s hand like she’s an adult.

“How do you do?” Q asks. His hand is rough but his smile is warm.

He reminds her of the stray cat who sometimes sleeps under their porch—Q seems nice enough, but it’s hard to know how he’ll behave if they bring him inside.

After pulling into their driveway, Liz asks Mia to walk with her to the beach while Q prepares dinner.

Passing the jetty where they usually train, Liz plants herself in the sand and pats the spot next to her.

“Let’s talk,” she says, and Mia sinks down beside her, happy to fold under her mother’s wing.

Liz opens by saying, “Q is for Quimby.” Mia is still wondering if she should recognize that name when Liz adds in a swift pelting of words and information, “And Quimby is your dad.” She delivers this news with the same resigned matter-of-factness as the weather forecast for a rainy weekend.

“But I’m not sure how long he’s staying, so it’s probably best if you just call him Q like I do, okay? ”

“Okay,” Mia says, because the question feels like when her mother holds up her hand for a high five, and Mia never wants to leave her mom hanging. She has no idea if it’s okay. She is not even a whole hand old yet.

Over the next week, Q makes Liz a different kind of happy than Mia has ever seen.

Even if he weren’t constantly suggesting bike rides and movies at the drive-in and all-day hikes with packed picnics at the summit, Mia would love him for the way her mom laughs when Q picks her up and throws her over his shoulder.

For the way he calls her “Lightning Liz” when she and Mia race past the eight houses on their block after their morning training sessions.

For all the cooking and cleaning he does when Liz is at work, and for the fancy cocktail he hands her when she walks through the door.

It’s clear to everyone that Q isn’t going anywhere.

“He adores you, too,” Liz tells Mia one night when she’s tucking her in.

“I hope you can grow to love him as much as he loves you.” Mia assures her that she can, that she already does.

The three of them go to Funtown Splashtown in Saco, and the beach, and on long drives up the Maine coast, which her mom knowingly refers to as “Downeast.” They construct forts in the living room and devour pancakes at midnight and hold hands around the town of Victory as a trio that, Mia can’t help but think, is not unlike a family.

In addition to being Mia’s father, Q is also a full-grown man living in her house, which proves infinitely fascinating.

He likes to fix things. Mia keeps Q company as he cleans out the gutters, sharpens the knives, replaces the lightbulbs, and paints the garage.

He unclogs the kitchen sink, snakes the shower drain, wipes down the baseboards, and forbids Liz from entering the kitchen until he’s plated the dinner he’s prepared.

Whenever Liz discovers something Q has mended, improved, cleaned, or concocted, she runs to him declaring, “Love of my life!”

Q mows the lawn and fortifies Liz’s anemic hydrangeas with liquefied kelp he purchases from a fancy plant store in Kennebunkport.

Mia goes with him on that errand, and in the checkout line he surprises her with a glass bottle of Coke, which he says came from Mexico and tastes better than the regular Coke in the grocery store.

“Your dad is right,” the cashier says as she rings them up.

Mia and Q smile at each other. Anywhere they go, everyone assumes Q is Mia’s father because they look so much alike.

It’s a welcome change from the eager parents who approach her mom at the mall, or Hannaford, or even the pediatrician’s office, and immediately ask her what she charges for an hourly rate. They all assume she’s Mia’s babysitter.

On the ride home from the plant store, Q explains how the color of a hydrangea is based on its levels of pH—for example, pink hydrangeas have a higher pH than blue hydrangeas.

Mia looks at him and thinks how lucky she is to have such a smart father.

As he speaks, they pass the soda back and forth, not even wiping the bottle lip between sips because they have the same germs and, according to Liz, the same face.

Sometimes, when it’s just the two of them, Q is extra goofy, almost a kid himself.

In the car, he likes to do big loopy swerves when there aren’t any vehicles coming in the opposite direction.

He’ll walk up to perfect strangers, introduce Mia as his daughter, and say she’s going to be the best soccer player in the world, just wait and see.

Out to lunch, he’ll pretend to fall asleep right before the check comes and then tell the nervous server who wakes him that Mia is paying, which always gets a laugh.

One time, he even gets kicked out of the arcade for climbing up the Skee-Ball lane and plopping the balls directly into the hole for one hundred points each.

After Mia is forced to hand over her gigantic teddy bear to the same manager who then escorts her father off the premises, Q explains to Mia that sometimes adults lose their sense of humor.

“Life is one big running joke,” he tells her. “Don’t forget that.”

In early August, Mia takes a break from the neighbor’s sprinkler in the middle of the day when she can feel her skin burning.

Q’s car isn’t in the driveway, but the door to her mom’s bedroom is shut, which means she’s making phone calls for Dr. Green’s office.

Mom is calling patients, so I must have patience, Mia tells herself, delighted by the homophone.

Her teacher recently called her “exceptionally bright” and “a sponge,” but Mia isn’t sure how those two can both be true because the sponge in their sink is dark blue.

Regardless, Mia grabs the Highlights magazine Q bought for her and sits down at the table to attack the word search.

“Ladies?” Q calls from the front door, over the rustling of bags.

“In here!” Mia answers. She abandons the Highlights to help him unpack. Q has promised to grill the best ribs of her life, which shouldn’t be all that hard to do because Mia has never tasted ribs before.

Decades later, Mia will see ribs on a menu or at a neighborhood cookout and still think of Q.

That night, he does, in fact, grill the best ribs of her life.

The sweet yet savory meat is unlike anything she’s ever consumed, and so it’s impossible to decipher whether it’s the flavor or the novelty that makes them so memorable.

It could have been the way Mia’s mother laughed through the entire meal—bent forward, clutching her stomach, begging for mercy—as Q turned his stack of discarded ribs into fangs, fingers, and, most creatively, a scroll of revised Ten Commandments (“Thou Shalt Not Pee in the Pool!”) that made the meal unforgettably delicious.

Regardless of why those ribs tasted so good, there’s no doubt in Mia’s mind why she never orders them at a restaurant, prepares them at home, or nibbles them off a paper plate during a block party.

It’s because that night, Q tucks her in and kisses her on the cheek.

“I love you, Mia,” he says. She says it back to him, her eyes wide open to find his in the dark.

It is the first time they say it to each other, and it feels like a satisfying completion of something they started, like when she and Liz fold multiple loads of laundry and, at the end, every single sock has a match.

It feels like the double-knotted bow Q tied around her wrist at the Victory Summer Carnival so her balloon wouldn’t float up into the sky and vanish.

It feels like what they’ve been working toward all summer, and here they are. Finally.

But when Mia wakes the next morning, Q has disappeared, and so has her mother.