Page 18 of The Apparent Trap

I need an air horn to blare in my ear as a reminder that that gaze has nothing to do with me. This is just who he is. He’s a shallow flirt who can tell a girl she’s funny and charming and a little bit weird and not even remember it the next day. He’s the kind of guy who was seductive enough at sixteen to get a girl pregnant. And leave. Whatever amends he’s made, tigers don’t change their stripes.

I’m about to let that narrative give me the strength to propel me out of this room—out of this useless conversation—when he puts his head in his hands.

“Ezzie, I can’t fuck up my relationship with Carmen right now,” he mumbles, as though if he looked up again, he’d have to commit the crime of being openly vulnerable. “I want so badly to fix things with her. This is the first real chance we’ve ever had. And if I say anything about this, I’m going to lose the very small amount of trust we’ve been building.”

“So you have your answer, then,” I say, hoping that maybe that’ll end this conversation, along with whatever his presence does to me. “You just have to let it run its course.”

“You don’t think this is icky?” he asks, looking back up.

“I don’t know, if people could root for Monica and Richard on Friends, then maybe we’re just being judgmental,” I say, tossing out a flimsy nonanswer I clearly don’t even believe.

“That’s a terrible example—their entire storyline ended up with both of them heartbroken because their different life stages were untenable, and their age gap was only twenty years, not almost thirty.”

“Sorry,” I say, my mind unhelpfully stuck on one point. “You watched Friends?”

“I’m a forty-two-year-old man. Generationally, how could I have avoided it?”

“Maybe at the time, but not enough to remember a deep-cut plot point!”

“It’s soothing on Netflix, okay?” he says with an exhale. “And yeah, I googled it last night because I had the same thought. It didn’t make me feel better.”

I want to snicker, because here goes this man upending my expectations again. But we have more important problems at hand. “Look, I’m not going to pretend like it’s not deeply frustrating that you giving your daughter daddy issues is now affecting my dad. But there’s nothing that can be done about it.”

“And it’s not deeply frustrating to me that your dad is taking advantage of a woman younger than his daughter?”

“Taking advantage?”

“She just moved here, she doesn’t know anyone . . . and yeah, okay, she probably does have daddy issues.” I snort. I have to admit I’m shocked by another dose of his self-awareness. “But then he should recognize that’s a factor and see that under normal circumstances, she would date someone her own age.”

“So this is my dad’s fault? My sweet, kind widower dad versus the woman who asked for his number and then invited him on a date without him even realizing it was a date?”

“She . . .” He seems genuinely surprised by that. “I didn’t know that.”

“Well, yeah,” I spit out.

We’re silent for a moment, both of us seeming to realize that maybe we took that a step too far.

He shakes his head, like we need to get rid of this unhelpful divergence into blame. “Why can’t you say something to your dad?”

I scoff. “Obviously I’ve thought of that. But he’s a grown man, and this isn’t my business.”

But I can tell by the way his gaze has sharpened that he’s onto me. “Daughters tell their dads what to do all the time. It’s kind of the hallmark of the relationship. Why can’t you just say ‘Hey, have you thought this one through?’”

“Because I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not appropriate.”

“Not appropriate?” he says, his tone disbelieving.

“It’s not my place to butt into his personal life.”

“Are you otherwise not involved in his personal life?” My silence speaks volumes. “Aren’t you more concerned with him getting hurt than having a mildly uncomfortable conversation?”

“Of course I am.”

“Then why can’t you say anything?”