Page 61 of The Progressions

“I know,” I agreed. I’d noticed how nice they were, but I hadn’t seen any polish on him. “You gave him some good genes to work with.” I thought about his hazel eyes, so different from hers.

“Some women might be concerned about what came from the other side,” she mentioned. “He must have told you some about his father, since you knew that we’d been on the run for all those years. But Tyler’s not like him. He doesn’t have that mean streak. I met his dad when I was fifteen and I saw it then, but I thought…” She didn’t finish.

“I was basically bananas when I was younger,” I said. “I met a terrible guy too, and I would have stuck with him if I’d had the chance. I also thought I was the next Emily Dickinson, and I’m embarrassed to admit that out loud. I even believed that my mom would come back. Isn’t that silly? I pretended to myself that she wasn’t actually dead.”

“Oh, baby,” Miss Gail said. She put her palm over her heart.

“I got over it by the time I was about ten,” I assured her. “But I used to tell myself that for some reason, she’d gone to Europe for a while. I used to look up pictures of Poland and imagine that she was there, and a few times, I wrote letters and I really mailed them. I say, ‘Dear mayor of Gdansk, please tell my mom to come home to me and my dad.’ I thought that she’d be back someday and we would be a family again.”

“Come here, Kasia.” She hugged me hard, regardless of all the work she’d done on my hair and face.

“It’s really ok, now,” I said, to make her feel better. “I’m good, and so is your son. I don’t see any mean streak at all in Tyler. When he fights and acts like a booty hole, it’s not because he’s a bad person.” I had other ideas about his booty hole behavior, some of which he’d already admitted to me.

She let me go and smiled, but she blinked away tears, too. “I’m glad you agree,” she said. “I’m very glad. Come on, we don’t want you to be late.”

Tyler was ready and waiting in the living room with baby Balderston. “Wow, Kasia,” he said when I walked out. “Where’d you find that getup?”

“My clothes? They’re Iva’s.” She had lent me the skirt, which was a little shorter on me than it was on her, and the shirt which Miss Gail called a “top.” It was kind of tight and dipped a little lower than I was used to, since all of my own tops covered my collarbones. “Your mom did my hair.”

“You made it flatter,” he remarked to her, and they discussed various products as he handed over the baby. He must have gained a lot of knowledge due to living with Shay Galton, who’d moved a box of hair stuff to Michigan that was so large, it wouldn’t have fit into the trunk of my car. Nothing else would either, not at the moment. When I’d gone home to pick up my dad, I’d tripled down on the wire and the trunk was permanently closed.

Yes, she had made my hair less frizzy and more controlled, and she’d given me a slight trim because apparently, I had some split ends. I had eventually switched from my dad’s barber to astylist who was more familiar with women’s cuts, but I couldn’t remember that woman’s name or where she was located, which told me it might have been too long since I’d visited her.

“Kasia has very nice natural body,” Miss Gail said. “I wanted to, um, compress it a little so we could also see her fine bone structure.”

But Tyler’s eyes were on the rest of my body, which felt quite exposed. I didn’t feel cold, because it was so hot in this condo, but there was a lot more skin on display than was normal for me. It wasn’t bad, just different—and I didn’t mind how it had attracted his gaze.

We had to leave to make the reservation and I asked Miss Gail to text and let me know how my dad was, how he was for real, when he returned with Iva. I could track his location, of course, but he would probably only say that he was fine. I wanted to know the truth.

“I’ll tell you,” she promised, and Tyler and I went out toward his car.

“This can’t go too late,” I said. “I need to get my dad home at a normal-ish time.” What I meant was that we wouldn’t be able to linger over dinner, which was a shame because lingering was a better way to make friends—but he’d been the one to invite me tonight, so it was his own fault. I also meant that he’d have to drive a little faster, somewhere above the pace of a slug.

“My mom was looking into transport vans,” he said. “They have those up here, to get people around who aren’t able to drive themselves.”

“I know what you mean,” I answered. “They always told me about them when I took him to therapy, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Why?

“Because he doesn’t need them. I’m available.”

“Don’t you think he’d like to get out and around, without you?”

“No,” I answered plainly. “I can hardly pry him out of the house. Although, it wasn’t hard to get him to leave today.” He’d been ready and at the door, and he’d even called me to make sure that I gave myself plenty of time to pick him up so that we wouldn’t be late.

“You think you can do everything better,” Tyler said. “You told me that before.”

“What? No,” I repeated. “No, I didn’t say that!”

“You did,” he countered. “You told me that you understood how I was feeling about my mom’s surgery, that I’d want to take care of her myself because no one else could do it with the same love.”

“I mean, maybe that’s part of it for me,” I allowed. “I’m afraid of my dad being with some weirdo on the road, some guy who was just behind the garage smoking pot before he goes to pick up a load of people who are too frail to drive themselves. And then he would take corners too fast, and what if someone was on oxygen? That bus would go up in flames like the Hindenburg.”

“Has that happened around here?” He sounded shocked.

“Well, no,” I said. “But doesn’t it sound like it could?”

“It sounds like you’re afraid of something happening to your dad.”

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