52.

Dad opened the door and shooed us inside, as if he were pulling us into shelter from a tornado. “I worried about you two all night. Where did you go? Where did you sleep?”

“Mom’s,” I said, putting Ian down on the living room floor with the pack of playing cards Mom had given us. It seemed like I was always plopping him on the ground, like a sack of potatoes.

He looked at me intently. “Well, I’m glad you’re back.” He shifted his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. “I think we both could have handled things last night a bit better, don’t you? I think we both have some apologizing to do.”

“I guess so,” I mumbled. Inside my head I was saying to myself, Come on, be an adult. Apologize. But I couldn’t get the words out. Ian flung the cards all over the rug, and Dad and I watched as he tried to bend them back into the pack.

“Thea, you’ve got to bear with me,” he said, leaning against the living room wall. “Your mind works at this clip. So like your mother. I didn’t mean that, exactly. Christ, I don’t know what I mean. Just that it’s hard with you sometimes.”

“What’s hard?” I asked. “I’m doing everything you want me to do.”

He shook his head vigorously, as though trying to clear his head of my voice and gather his thoughts. “You’ve got to stick with it, kiddo.”

“Anyway, that doesn’t matter,” I said, kneeling on the floor. “Last night doesn’t matter. What matters is, I have to make this work for me. I can’t go crazy. I can’t lie down and die. I’m his mother, and I love him and I’m a good mom, no matter what anyone says. But I have to dig myself out of this hole.”

“You’re in a hole?”

I laughed. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Well, I don’t like to hear you say that.”

“You can take it,” I said.

He started to say something, but his eyes fixed on a Newsweek on the coffee table. For a second I thought he was actually starting to skim an article the magazine was open to. But then he looked up. “I don’t understand how we got here, Thea,” he said, searching my face. “I try and figure out how we all got here.” His eyes crumpled into something I hadn’t seen before and he hid his face behind his big knuckles, like I was the sun and he was shielding his eyes from me. He retreated with his hands like that till he reached the hallway, then turned around and went to his room.

“Dddddsss,” Ian said from the floor, sprinkling spit down his chin. I reached over and wiped it with my sleeve, the living room weirdly silent and empty. After a few minutes Dad came down the hall with his suit jacket on and the features of his face in their usual placid formation. “Okay, well, I should get going.” He paused in front of us on the floor, tugging his shirt sleeve.

“Dad, you know what?” I blurted out. “It’s not the end of the world, what happened last night.”

“I know it isn’t.” A quick, almost embarrassed smile flashed across his face, but his eyes stayed fixed on me; it was like an understanding passed between us that we both, in some hazy way, had been thinking of Mom and the old fights.

“You’re really not enjoying that job, are you?” he asked.

“Uh, no,” I said. “But enjoying it’s not the point, is it?”

“Well, it’s not meant to be torture.” He laughed stiffly. “I just want you to get a glimpse. It’s not always patently obvious to people what path they should pursue, based on their talents or skill sets or what have you.”

“It’s patently obvious that I don’t want a career in private equity,” I said. “It’s patently obvious to me that I want to sell crocheted bikinis. And maybe crocheted skirts. It may sound silly or frivolous to you, but it’s not.”

“Let me ask you this, Thea,” he said, clearing his throat. “How long does it take to make one swimsuit?”

“One bikini?” I said, standing up and taking my jacket off. “A couple of days. I’m getting really fast.”

“And theoretically, how many orders would you expect to receive?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But those three that just sold, and that first one I made, they all sold very quickly.”

“How much do you think you could sell them for?”

“They each sold for three hundred,” I said. “Remember, I told you?”

He brushed the shoulders of his suit jacket. “So if you made, say, ten a month, to be safe, that’s well under three thousand dollars, given store commissions. Pre-tax.”

“Yes, but there are those women in Brooklyn who could help.”

“How many could they make?” he asked. He took a drink from a glass of water sitting on the stereo console, probably left there the night before.

“I don’t know, fifty a month?”

“They’d make fifty,” he said evenly.

“I’m not sure of the numbers yet, but that’s what I was thinking.”

“All of this is irrelevant since we’re not clear on the numbers,” he said, picking his briefcase up from the chair in the hallway. “But the point is, how much do you want to make on every swimsuit? You’d have to figure out how much you could sell the swimsuits for and then how much you can afford to make them for. Depending on how many stores have interest in your swimsuits and whether you could get someone to make them for as little money as possible or whether—”

“I don’t have those answers yet,” I interrupted, his repetition of the word swimsuit making me crazy. “Is this how you are with your clients? Someone comes in with a great idea and you just … shove it right up their asses?”

“You might say that.” He smiled, fiddling with the lock on his briefcase. “That’s what they pay me for.” He opened the door and looked back. “You going to be home tonight?”

I nodded, thinking, How could it be any clearer: we had nowhere else to go.

When Monica arrived, I jumped in the shower, got dressed and kissed Ian goodbye. Monica had left her phone at our apartment, on top of the fridge, so she’d never gotten my text asking about Ian’s bruise, which was barely visible at that point, so I decided to let it go. I got to work and Daniel ignored me, giggling into his headset. I couldn’t believe I’d almost had sex with him. Malcolm didn’t make an appearance all morning, and when I finally asked Daniel, he murmured something about his being in Canada.

Sue from Human Resources came by and said I could leave early if I wanted to, so I neatened the pile of forty files I’d just put together and left at three. I let Monica go and took Ian to the park in Union Square, where I pushed him in a swing for the first time. As I pushed him, his body flopped backward and forward inside the black rubber swing, and he had a sort of anxious look in his eyes and a tightness in his lips that made him look alarmingly like Dad. A bunch of little kids ran around with big sand-filled balloons, and the whooshing sound surrounded me as they punched them into the air. I remembered Dad, spouting his wisdom about my bikinis that morning, and thought, Maybe he wasn’t critiquing my bikini dreams for pure sport or to make me feel like shit. Maybe he was trying, in his that’s-what-they-pay-him-for, tutorial way, to help me.