“Midnight’s late,” I said.
She knew there was no point denying when she got in. I never got to sleep until I heard her come into our house on Hill Street and lock the door behind her. I guessed she’d been out with Patty Swain, who was also seventeen, but gave off a vibe that she was a little more experienced than Syd with the kinds of things that kept fathers up at night. I’d have been naive to think Patty Swain didn’t already know about drinking, sex, and drugs.
But Syd wasn’t exactly an angel. I’d caught her with pot once, and there was that time, a couple years back, when she was fifteen, when she came home from the Abercrombie & Fitch store in Stamford with a new T-shirt, and couldn’t explain to her mother why she had no receipt. Big fireworks over that one.
Maybe that’s why the sunglasses were niggling at me.
“What those set you back?” I asked.
“Not that much,” she said.
“How’s Patty?” I asked, not so much to find out how she was as to confirm Syd had been with her. They’d been friends only a year or so, but they’d spent so much time together it was as if their friendship went back to kindergarten. I liked Patty—she had a directness that was refreshing—but there were times I wished Syd hung out with her a little less.
“She’s cool,” Syd said.
On the TV, Matt Lauer was warning about possibly radioactive granite countertops. Every day, something new to worry about.
Syd dug into her eggs. “Mmm,” she said. She glanced up at the TV. “Bob,” she said.
I looked. One of the ad spots from the local affiliate. A tall, balding man with a broad smile and perfect teeth standing in front of a sea of cars, arms outstretched, like Moses parting the Red Sea.
“Run, don’t walk, into Bob’s Motors! Don’t have a trade? That’s okay! Don’t have a down payment? That’s okay! Don’t have a driver’s license? Okay, that’s a problem! But if you’re looking for a car, and you’re looking for a good deal, get on down to one of our three loca—”
I hit the mute button.
“He is a bit of a douche,” Syd said of the man her mother, my ex, lived with. “But those commercials turn him into Superdouche. What are we having tonight?” Breakfast was never complete without a discussion of what we might be eating at the end of the day. “How about D.A.D.?”
Family code for “dial a dinner.”
Before I could answer, she said, “Pizza?”
“I think I’ll make something,” I said. Syd made no attempt to hide her disappointment.
Last summer, when Syd and I were both working at the same place and she was riding in with me, Susanne and I had agreed to get her a car for nipping around Milford and Stratford. I took in a seven-year-old Civic with low miles on a trade and snatched it up for a couple thou before it hit our used-car lot. It had a bit of rust around the fender wells, but was otherwise roadworthy.
“No spoiler?” Syd cracked when it was presented to her.
“Shut up,” I said and handed her the keys.
Only once since she’d gotten this new job had I dropped her off at work. The Civic was in for a rusted-out tailpipe. So I drove her up Route 1, what I still thought of as the Boston Post Road, the Just Inn Time looming in the distance, a bleak, gray, featureless block on the horizon, looking like an apartment complex in some Soviet satellite country.
I was prepared to drive her to the door, but she had me drop her off at the sidewalk, near a bus stop. “I’ll be here at the end of the day,” she said.
Bob’s commercial over, I put the sound back on. Al Roker was outside mingling with the Rockefeller Center crowd, most of them waving signs offering birthday greetings to relatives back home.
I looked at my daughter, eating her breakfast. Part of being a father, at least for me, is being perpetually proud. I took in what a beautiful young woman Syd was turning into. Blonde hair down to her shoulders, a long graceful neck, porcelain skin, strong facial features. Her mother’s roots go back to Norway, which accounts for her Nordic air.
As if sensing my eyes on her, she said, “You think I could be a model?”
“A model?” I glanced over.
“Don’t sound so shocked,” she said.
“I’m not,” I said defensively. “I just never heard you talk about it before.”
“I never really thought about it. It’s Bob’s idea.”
I felt my face go hot. Bob encouraging Syd to model? He was in his early forties, like me. Now he had my wife and—more often than I liked—my daughter living under his roof, in his fancy five-bedroom house with pool and three-car garage, and he was pushing her to model? What the fuck kind of modeling? Pinup stuff? Webcam porn to order? Was he offering to take the shots himself?
“Bob said this?” I asked.
“He says I’d be a natural. That I should be in one of his commercials.”
Hard to pick which would be more demeaning. Penthouse or hawking Bob’s used cars.
“What? You think he’s wrong?”