He humored her, taking a drink, then propping himself on the split-rail fence, arms crossed, then leaning on his ski poles, then grinning.
“I didn’t say to smile,” she scolded.
“I can’t help it. You’re so serious about your work.”
“And this is funny?”
“Nope. I just like watching you. Now, put the shutter on timer and come get in a picture with me.”
“Dad—”
“Humor me. I don’t have enough shots of us together.”
Understatement. Of course he and Sophie had many photographs of the kids growing up. And for him, one of the saddest, most wrenching moments of the divorce had occurred, not when they were divvying up wedding gifts of expensive crystal and silver, but when they went through photo albums, marking the pictures they wanted duplicated. Halfway into the first album, Greg had paused at a shot of blond, laughing Sophie holding the toddler Daisy aloft like a trophy she’d won. They looked so beautiful it made his eyes smart, like staring too long into the sun. At that point he had shut the book with a thud and said, “I’m sending everything off for copying.”
Sophie had not argued, he suspected, because it was as painful for her as it was for him to page through album after album crammed with all the moments they’d shared. Because that was the thing about photographs. There was a reason they were called Kodak moments. When the camera came out, people put on a happy smile every time. You didn’t get shots of screaming tantrums, of couples giving each other the cold shoulder after a long day, of teenagers coming home from school to announce they didn’t want to go back.
When Daisy set the camera on its retractable tripod, triggered the shutter and then stood next to Greg for the shot, he couldn’t tell whether or not it would be a Kodak moment. She just kind of leaned against his arm while they both looked straight ahead.
They did a few more shots together, and then he got the camera and pointed it at Daisy.
Predictably, she protested. “Hey. I don’t need any more pictures of me.”
“I do.” He fired the shutter several times. One nice thing about digital was that you never worried about wasting a shot. “Humor me, okay? I like taking pictures of my kid.”
“Sure, whatever,” she said, and gamely smiled for the camera. After a few shots, however, something changed. An angle of the light. A shift in the breeze. The shadows on the snow.
It took Greg a moment to realize that the change was in his daughter. It was subtle but unmistakable, something he’d seen earlier in the day—a flicker of trouble in her eyes, a softening of her mouth, which, he suspected, was a prelude to tears.
“Daisy?” He lowered the camera.
Something about her melted, as though her bones had gone slack and she had to lean back against the split-rail fence for support. “Daddy.” Her voice was faint, pleading.
“What is it?” His mind raced through the possibilities. Daisy had dished out a lot in her adolescence. She had admitted to drinking, smoking cigarettes and pot. To skipping school, flunking tests on purpose, getting failing grades until they had to withdraw her from school. But none of those had caused her to look at him the way she was now.
“Honey?” he prompted.
“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it.” She took a deep breath, looked at the sky and then back at him. She released the breath with a cloud of mist formed by her next words: “I’m pregnant.”
The words didn’t even register. It was as if she had spoken in a foreign language he didn’t understand. He could see her mouth moving, forming the syllables, could hear the sound coming out, but it made no sense. The announcement simply hung there, suspended and meaningless between them. Then something happened—another shift in the breeze, maybe—and the full impact of her words slammed into him like a bullet shot from point-blank range.
I’m pregnant.
All the air rushed out of him. Daisy was pregnant. His daughter—his little girl—was standing here telling him she was pregnant.
Only one thought streamed through his mind. Oh, holy shit. Oh, holy fucking shit shit shit. The words raced through his head until they lost their meaning.
He saw a line of tracks in the snow between them. A dividing line. Ten seconds ago, he was struggling to be a father. Now he was—oh, sweet Jesus, Mary and Joseph—on the verge of becoming a thirty-eight-year-old grandfather. Shit. Shit. Shit.
All the usual questions crowded up into his throat—How did this happen? Are you sure? How could you be so careless? But as the words spun through his mind, he realized they were merely recriminations cloaked as questions.
Questions to which he already knew the answers.
How it happened was simple biology.
Was she sure? Good God, only absolute certainty could induce her to say this to her father. There was no way she would drop this bomb if she wasn’t absolutely a hundred percent certain.
And how could she be so careless? She was seventeen. It was what teenagers did—careless, stupid things. He’d done them himself. He had been wild, maybe even wilder than Daisy. And like her, he’d been trapped by his own wildness. He and Sophie had met when they were both counselors at Camp Kioga, just having finished their first year of college. It was no great secret that they’d “had” to get married. Anyone who did the math from Daisy’s birthday could figure it out. And now Daisy was in the same damn place. Ah, dammit. Shit, shit, shit.
“Daddy,” she prompted, her voice a rough whisper. “Say something.”
“I’m standing here thinking, ‘Oh, shit,’” he admitted. “That’s about as far as I’ve gotten.” He stabbed a ski pole deep into the snow. “Damn it, Daisy. How the hell could you—” He stopped himself. The words echoed across the empty golf course and died away. He knew exactly how she could, the
