Promises to Keep - Ann Tatlock [55]
“Your mother,” he said abruptly. “How is she?”
“She’s fine.”
“She’s working,” he said. It was a statement, not a question.
“Yeah. She’s working at Grandma Marie’s store. She’s there right now.”
He nodded, seemed to study his hands clutched together on the tabletop. “And Valerie? She doing okay?”
“She’s fine, Daddy.”
He let out his breath. “I can’t tell you, Roz, how much I miss that baby girl. I bet she’s grown just since I’ve seen her last, hasn’t she?”
I wasn’t sure she’d changed all that much, but I nodded anyway.
“I want to see her grow up, Roz. You and Valerie both. I want to see the two of you grow up.”
I didn’t say anything. A thick silence hung between us.
“Listen,” Daddy said finally, “you want something to eat? A hot dog or something?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You know, they’ve got the best dogs in town here,” he said, smiling briefly. “I should know. I eat here pretty often.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. Here or . . . well, never mind.”
“Daddy?”
He looked at me expectantly.
“Do you live here too now? I mean, in Mills River?”
He didn’t answer my question. Instead, he looked around the café and said, “You know what this place reminds me of?”
I shook my head.
“No? You remember Sweet Pete’s, don’t you? That ice cream parlor up in Linden Hills where I used to take you and the boy for ice cream – ”
“You mean Wally?”
“And you’d always get that hot fudge sundae with the peppermint ice cream. Remember that?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Those were good times, weren’t they? I mean, we had some good times together, didn’t we?”
“Sure, Daddy.” I liked the way he smiled at that, so I added, “And it was fun when you took us swimming at Lake Calhoun too.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, tapping the table with one finger. “You remember that, right? That sandy little beach on the north shore of the lake, not far from the boat rental place, remember?”
I shrugged. “Sure, Daddy, I remember all right.”
“We had good times, didn’t we, Little Rose?”
I nodded and he smiled again. He leaned closer to me and said, “Listen, how’s school? Is the school any good here?”
I thought a moment before saying, “Well, yeah, it seems like an okay school to me. I’m doing good. Not so good in math, but good in everything else.”
“That’s my girl. And listen, you doing okay otherwise? I mean, you’re all right, aren’t you?”
I almost said yes until I remembered what was coming up. “I have to get my tonsils out.”
“You do?”
“I’ve been having sore throats, and the doctor decided it was time for my tonsils to go.”
“So when are you getting them out?”
“Friday.”
“This Friday?”
I nodded. Daddy’s eyes veered off toward the wall, and his lips moved slightly, as though he were calculating something. Then he said, “That’s October the twenty-seventh.”
“Yeah, I guess so. I’m kind of scared, Daddy.”
“Ah now, Roz. Don’t worry.” He reached for my hand again, which had sneaked out from under the table. I let him cover it with his own. “Listen, you might have had them out two weeks ago, on Friday the thirteenth. Then I wouldn’t have been so sure. But the twenty-seventh, that’s not a bad luck day, huh? So nothing to worry about.”
Daddy had a system of bad luck and good luck days, the most obvious of which was Friday the thirteenth, which was definitely a bad luck day. I can remember him refusing to go to the job site, calling in sick rather than taking a chance of being hurt or even killed in a construction accident whenever the thirteenth fell on a Friday. But Daddy didn’t stop there. He had a complicated and, to me, incomprehensible system of determining good and bad luck days, though Mom called it all nonsense and refused