Forever

My father relayed this information to my mother. There was a pause. “She is saying that she will take you to Duluth for something called high/lowlights. Wait, is this about your hair? I’m not really a fan of —”

“I really don’t want to go,” I interrupted him. “I had plans.” Then a thought occurred to me. “What are you celebrating again? Is this about the wolf hunt?”

“Well, yes, but we won’t be talking about that all night,” my father said. “It will be fun. We’ll —”

“Good. Fine. I’ll go. Tell mom I need a haircut more than color. Not with that doofus guy she likes, either. He makes me look like a soccer mom. I think he learned how to do hair from nineties sitcoms.” I climbed into my car and started it, trying not to think about the evening ahead of me. The things I did for Grace and Sam that I would never do for anybody else.

“This makes me happy, Isabel,” my father said. I frowned at the steering wheel. But I kind of believed him.

Every time we came to Il Pomodoro, I wondered how it had managed to suck in my parents. We were Californians, for crying out loud, who should know a quality culinary experience when we saw one. And yet here we were at a red-and-white-checked table listening to some poor college graduate sing opera at the end of our table while we perused the menu and snacked on four different kinds of bread, none of which looked Italian and all of which looked Minnesotan. The room was dark and the ceiling was low and made of acoustic tile. It was an Italian American tomb with a side of pesto.

I had done my best to stick to my father during the seating process, because there were about fifteen people, and the whole point of coming to this thing was to be close enough to hear what he said. Still, I ended up with a woman named Dolly sitting between us. Her son, who looked like he’d done his hair by standing backward in a wind tunnel, sat on the other side of me. I picked at the ends of my breadstick and tried not to let my elbows touch either of my neighbors.

There was a flash as something flew across the table, landing directly inside the neckline of my shirt, nestling on my br**sts. Across from me, a fellow wind-tunnel survivor — a brother, maybe — was smirking and shooting glances at my neighbor. Dolly was oblivious, talking across my father to my mother on the other side of him.

I leaned across the table toward the crumb-thrower. “Do that again,” I said, loud enough to be heard over the opera singer, Dolly, my mother, and the smell of the breadsticks, “and I will sell your firstborn child to the devil.”

When I sat back, the boy next to me said, “He’s annoying, sorry.” But I could tell that what he really meant was What a great conversation starter, thanks, bro! Of course, Grace would have said, Maybe he was just being nice, because Grace thought nice things about people. Jack would have agreed with me, though.

Actually, it was really hard not to think about how the last time I’d been here, Jack had been sitting across the table from me, the rows and rows of wine bottles behind him, just like the kid across the table from me now. Jack had been a jerk that night, even though I tried not to remember that part. It felt like I wasn’t missing him properly if I let myself remember how much I’d despised him sometimes. Instead I tried to remember what he looked like when he was grinning and dirty in the driveway, though these days it felt more like I was remembering a memory of a memory of his smile instead of remembering the smile itself. When I thought too hard about that, it made me feel weightless and untethered.

The opera singer ceased singing, to polite applause, and moved to the small stage on the side of the restaurant, where she conferred with another person in an equally demoralizing costume. My father took the opportunity to knock his spoon against his glass.

“A toast, for those of us who are drinking tonight,” he said. Not really standing, just half rising. “To Marshall, for believing this could be done. And to Jack, who can’t be here with us tonight” — he paused, then said — “but would be bugging us for a glass of his own if he were.”

I thought it was a crappy toast, even if it was true, but I let Dolly and the neighbor boy knock their glasses against my water glass. I sneered at the boy across the table and withdrew my glass before he could lift his to mine. I’d get the crumb out of my shirt later.

Marshall sat at the end of the table, and his voice boomed in a way that my father’s didn’t. He had a carrying, congressional sort of voice, the kind that sounded good saying things like Less of a tax burden on the middle class and Thank you for your donation and Honey, could you bring me my sweater with the duck on it? He said, conversational and resonant, “Did you know that you folks have the most dangerous wolves in North America?” He smiled, broad and pleased to share this information with us. His tie was loosened like he was here among friends, not working. “Until the Mercy Falls pack became active, there had been only two confirmed fatal wolf attacks in North America. Total. On humans, of course. Out west, they had quite a few livestock taken down, that’s for sure, that’s why they put that two hundred twenty wolf quota out there in Idaho.”

“That’s how many wolves the hunters could take?” asked Dolly.

“You betcha,” Marshall said, a Minnesota accent presenting itself so unexpectedly that I was surprised.

“That seems like a lot of wolves,” Dolly replied. “Do we have that many wolves here?”

My father broke in smoothly; in comparison to Marshall, he sounded more elegant, more cultured. Of course we were sitting in Il Pomodoro, so how cultured could he be, but still. “Oh, no, they estimate the Mercy Falls pack to be only twenty or thirty animals. At most.”

I wondered how Sam would take this conversation. I wondered what he and Cole had decided to do, if anything. I remembered that strange, resolute look on Sam’s face in the store, and it made me feel hollow and incomplete.

“Well, what makes our pack so dangerous, then?” Dolly wondered, her chin resting in a circle of her fingers. She was performing a trick that I’d done often enough to recognize. The interested ignorance routine was excellent for commanding attention.

“Familiarity with humans,” my father answered. He made a gesture at one of the waiters: We’re ready. “The big thing that keeps wolves away is fear, and once they have no fear, they’re just large, territorial predators. There have, in the past, in Europe, India, been wolf packs that were notorious man-killers.” There was no trace of emotion in his voice: When he said man-killer, he was not thinking Jack-killer. My father had a purpose now, a mission, and as long as he was focused on that, he would be fine. This was the old Dad, powerful and frustrating, but ultimately someone to be proud of and awed by. I hadn’t seen this version of my father since before Jack died.