“Always been the best at … keeping in touch,” he said, finally. He shook his head, as though he were disagreeing with himself. “But the past is in the past.”

And now there was a little silence, a pause, in which he could not even bring himself to look at me, to see how I’d received this. Of course, I thought, I understood the transaction now: job offer as apology for a lifetime of neglect. It was clear to me, and yet I was not made of stone; I could not help but thaw to him a little.

“That’s very generous of you,” I said. “The offer, I mean.”

He shrugged. The waitress had brought over his ice water by now, and gingerly, as if one could not be sure even of such a familiar beverage in an establishment like this, he took a sip.

“Think it over, if you want,” he said.

I nodded. I had a brief, hideous vision of myself in a convertible, driving down a sunny avenue lined with palms. The conversation with my father and its unexpected offer of employment had cast my present situation in a different light. It was probably foolish to think that a provincial, gray, rain-soaked place could keep me happy for a lifetime. And it was true that the love affair had given me pleasure, but a little voice, one I’d done my very best to ignore, told me I would never have it quite the way I wanted. After all, I thought, I was only twenty-three. Was there not, I thought, some other, better love around the corner?

By the time this long and strange remembrance of my father was over, my spaghetti had grown cold. I had to start the microwave again. When it was done, I sat down at the plastic table and ate—the noodles now unpleasantly rubbery—in silence.

18

It was just like me, I thought, back at my desk again, to dwell on the past. I had not thought of that visit of my father’s in a long time, perhaps not in years, and I had been taken aback by just how vivid it had been. Still, there was nothing to be gained from going over matters like that again and again, like a dog with a bone.