Fake Skating(33)

I nearly had a heart attack when my phone started ringing with a FaceTime call, sounding crazy loud in the big empty rink. I was shocked to see it was my dad, because this was the second time he’d FaceTimed me since we’d arrived in Minnesota.

We didn’t usually dothat at all, much less twice.

We’d always been way more into tense telephone calls filled with guilty silences.

“Well, hey,” I said in a perky voice as I answered, smiling when his face appeared on my screen.

“Hi, honey,” he said back, wearing the beige T-shirt that was like a second uniform for him after-hours. He squinted and said, “Where the heck are you?”

It was dumb, but I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to tell him I was at a hockey rink. My dad had always acted like Minnesota, and everything tied into it, was a problem. My grandparents, Sarah, my mom’s childhood… it was all bad in his eyes.

When I was a kid, Southview was something he rolled his eyes about but begrudgingly let my mom run away to for a month every summer. He’d always had zero interest in joining us, but he accepted it for what it was.

His wife wanting to go home.

But the more they argued and didn’t get along, the more he behaved as if it was part of the problem. It was like he was jealous of the things that’d mattered to her before him.

“I’m actually at a hockey rink,” I said, smiling as if I’d never wanted to be anywhere more. “I might be helping out the hockey team just to keep my extracurriculars where they need to be for college.”

“Dear God, there’s not anything better than hockey for you to do?” he said disapprovingly, his dark eyebrows down. “I would think something like math club would be far better, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s a whole thing here where it’s too late for me to join most clubs,” I said.

“So your mother picked a fantastically backward school—got it.”

I didn’t want to have a conversation about his opinions on Southview or my mom, so I said, “How are you doing?”

I wanted to say I miss you, but we didn’t talk to each other like that.

“Everything is going well, Daniella, but something came up that I need to discuss with you. Do you have a minute or should I call when you are notat an ice rink?”

He said it with the same tone he would use if I’d said I was at a circus.

“Actually, I’m waiting around for things to finish, so your timing is perfect. What’s going on?”

“Well,” he said, “I was in a meeting earlier, discussing my potential next assignment, and as it turns out, there is a very good chance that I might end up at Offutt.”

“Really?” Offutt Air Force Base was in Omaha, which was only like a five-hour drive from where we were.

That would be amazing.

Because I hated the reality that I couldn’tsee him if I needed to. I knew he was hard-edged half the time, but he was my dad and I wanted him around. I wanted him to be able to come to my graduation and I wanted to be able to smell the mix of aftershave and soap that’d always made him seem like the cleanest man on the planet.

So him moving closer was the best news I’d heard in ages. “When will you know?”

“Really it’s less a question of when I’ll know and more a question of when I’ll decide what I want to do.”

“Wait—you get to decide?” I asked with a laugh. “That’s very un–Air Force–like.”

“It’s a complicated situation, but basically there are parties who would really like me in both places, so I kind of have the upper hand. That being said, I want to discuss where you would like me to end up.”

“At Offutt for sure,” I said, looking around to make sure nobody heard what an excited little kid I sounded like. “This is the best news!”

“I’m glad to hear that,” he said, sort of smiling but maintaining his composure like the officer that he was. “Because if it were simply about location, I’d probably stay here; I likeRamstein.”

It was true—he did.

My mom and I, on the other hand, had notliked Ramstein. Germany had been incredible, but on a daily basis we’d felt a million miles away from everything familiar, stuck on a faraway military base.

“But the opportunity to be with youtrumps location,” he said, and warmth shot through me, because my stern father was admitting he missed me. That meant everything.

“Obviously your mother and I will have to carve out the details on how it would work, because it’s too far to do the every-other-weekend type of thing, but I think it’d make sense for you to come live with me at Offutt until school ends. It’s fine if she wants to run around up there, but you shouldn’t have to be stuck in the tundra just because she’s reliving her childhood, right?”

I looked at his face on my phone and was confused for a second.

“You can spend the summer with her before you go away to school, once the weather’s nice up there.”

“Wait. What?” I couldn’t be hearing him right.

He wanted me to leave my mom?

“Well, I prefer Germany, but I prefer my daughter’s company more, of course. So if you want to live with me, then I will take the offered assignment. If you want to stay up in Minnesota with your mother, then I will probably re-up my assignment at Ramstein.”