Up All Night by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult Fiction, Short Stories; Collections & Anthologies, Social Themes, General, Mysteries & Detective Stories, Fantasy, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780061971648
Google: vQlZysYGe6oC
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2009-10-05T23:00:00+00:00

A half hour later Diana is passed out on the bathroom floor, her arm wrapped around the toilet base like a cherished friend. Justine and Holly have been put into the second bedroom under blankets Maggie recognizes, blankets that used to be in their linen closet at home. It’s just Maggie and her dad and Bill on the long camel-back sofa across from a wall of mirrors. She sees them reflected there like those speak-no-evil monkeys on a cigarette break. Bill has thrown on a terry-cloth robe that’s gone flat with washing. Her dad is dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. His auburn hair sticks up in stiff tufts that might look rocker cool except that it’s her dad and so it doesn’t. His eyes are the same heavy-lidded blue as hers but older, like a time-lapse photography exhibit of her next twenty-five years.

Bill isn’t what she expected. He’s solidly built, like he could have played football when he was younger but now he’s got a little bit of a belly on him. His face is soft and shadowy with stubble. He wears cheap brown plastic glasses. Put a white button-down on him and he’d look like any bean counter in an accounting firm.

“The place is nice,” Maggie says, eyeing the dinette set in the corner, the arched chrome lamp, the china cabinet housing shiny white plates and bottles of wine, all of it Bill’s, all of it foreign.

“Would you like a soda or some tea?” Bill asks. “I’ve got some oolong.”

Maggie doesn’t know what oolong is, but she wants to be agreeable so she says yes. She follows her dad and his lover into the bright white kitchen. Bill hands the kettle to her dad, who fills it under the faucet while Bill reaches into a cabinet for a box of tea bags. They move around each other in easy harmony, and the one time they screw up—Bill opens the fridge, and her dad nearly bumps into the open door—they grin as if it’s some private joke they share. Maggie has seen her dad happy and sad, pissed off and preoccupied, but she’s never seen him this way. She does not yet know this dad, the one moving so easily around his kitchen, handing his lover eggs to crack in a bowl, taking a milk carton from his hand and placing it back in the fridge. He has unpacked someone new here, and she will have to learn the way of him.

Her dad licks a dollop of sour cream from his fingers, and Bill automatically extends a dish towel.

Maggie clears her throat. “Um, I thought I’d go see the pool.”

“Swim hours aren’t until eight,” her dad explains.

“I was just gonna stick my feet in. If that’s okay.”

Her dad looks to Bill, who shrugs.

“As long as you’re quiet, nobody really cares,” Bill says.

The pool is only a few feet from her dad’s condo. It’s a long, chemically blue rectangle surrounded by a white metal fence and lots of lounge chairs. Maggie sits at the edge of the deep end and tests it with her toes.

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