Page 112 of This Time Around
“I’m sorry.” He started to reach for her hand, then stopped himself. He placed his palms on the table and sighed. “I’m sorry you believed in me and I let you down.”
Allie nodded. Her arms prickled with gooseflesh. She stared at her father and felt a rush of anger and confusion and guilt and fury and sadness all mixed together in one big, salty, powerful wave.
“I love you,” she told him. “But I’m not sure I like you very much right now.”
“That’s understandable.”
Her throat felt raw and there was a good chance she was going to lose her lunch. She scrubbed her damp palms down her thighs and stood up. Her knees were wobbly, but her legs still held her.
“I have to go,” she said.
Her dad stood, too, frowning as he glanced at the still-unmoving guard. “You won’t do anything rash, will you?”
She shook her head, feeling sorry for him while at the same time wanting to grab the cactus in the corner and thread it up his nostril.
“I’m going to do the right thing,” she said. “After this long, that’s not rash at all.”
“Don’t put that in your mouth.”
“Sorry.” Allie handed the pen back to Wade, but he waved it off with a shudder.
“Keep it,” he said. “Now that it’s covered in your cooties.”
Allie sighed and set the pen down. “So now what happens?”
Wade folded his hands on his desk. “Now we wait for the county clerk to call us back and we go from there.”
“And I’m still within my acceptable window of time to post it in the newspaper.”
“Correct,” he said. “Do you want help with that?”
Allie hesitated. “I want to do it myself. I think—I think that’s important.”
Wade nodded. “Okay. Let me know if you need me to proofread.”
“Thanks.”
He reached across the desk and gave her hand a friendly squeeze. “You’re doing the right thing, Albatross.”
“Then why does it feel like I just hit myself in the forehead with a cricket bat?”
Wade cocked his head. “Have you ever held a cricket bat?”
“No.” She frowned. “I might be confusing it with that thing hockey players use.”
“A stick?”
“Right.”
“You’ve played hockey?”
Allie picked up the pen and tossed it at him. “It was a metaphor, Wade.”
“You used like, so technically I think it’s a simile.”
“I don’t care what it is. It feels lousy.”
“Right.” He grabbed the pen from where it had landed in the zen garden on the corner of his desk, which probably screwed up Allie’s zen six ways to Sunday. He set the pen back in his chrome desk organizer and looked at her. “Sometimes doing the right thing feels really fucking shitty.”
