Page 33 of The Apparent Trap

My dad doesn’t care, because he’s happy playing a game, and especially a game he’s winning. However, next to him, slowly but surely, I can see Carmen getting frustrated. For someone so in control in her everyday life, it’s a little amusing to watch her competitive streak come out in force. Seeing her fight against pouting at all the questions she couldn’t possibly know the answers to is kind of funny. Especially because she doesn’t seem to be cutting my dad any slack in her silence toward everyone.

But eventually that frustration has to peak. And it all really comes to a head with a question I never could’ve anticipated being such a lightning rod.

Carmen lands on a Geography space, and Lee pulls out a card. “Okay,” he says. “What capital city was Pan Am’s first international passenger destination in 1929?”

Obscure, and I certainly didn’t know it.

But I wasn’t expecting Carmen to say “What’s Pan Am?”

And I definitely didn’t expect my dad to laugh.

“What?” she asks, confused.

“Oh,” he says, realizing that it wasn’t a joke. “I just . . .” He stops and looks over at me. But I couldn’t save him from this even if I wanted to. “Well, everyone knows Pan Am. Or rather, I thought . . . you know what, never mind.”

“No,” she says, serious. “Not never mind. Is it like . . . a train?”

“It’s an airline,” my dad replies. “Or it was—probably the most famous airline when I was a kid. But I think they eventually went bankrupt in the nineties, maybe?”

He looks to Lee for confirmation, and that’s the death knell. I can see it register on Carmen’s face. It’s so subtle, but it’s there, that realization that her boyfriend and her dad share this kind of generational information.

And then Lee, looking so casual but clearly so dastardly underneath, pushes it a smidge further. “Yeah, I don’t think it was around much by the time I was a kid,” he says, that extra knife slipped in to remind her that her boyfriend is not just older, but significantly older than her own dad. “But it was definitely legendary for sure.”

“Well,” Carmen replies succinctly, her expression unreadable and her silence speaking volumes for a moment. But then like the pro she is, she slaps on a smile. “You really do learn something new every day! Obviously I have no idea, so it’s your roll, Ezzie.”

She looks to me, and I immediately grab the dice. As much as I want them to start actually considering the depth of their age difference, watching them realize it in real time is seriously awkward.

But it doesn’t linger. My dad and Carmen don’t seem even close to being at odds. I actually have to reluctantly admit that for as much as this dinner was a ruse, this wasn’t the worst group to spend a holiday with.

There’s cognitive dissonance to the entire evening. On the one hand, seeing Carmen and my dad sitting together is never not going to feel profoundly weird and a little (a lot?) gross. I want to shake them both and ask what they think the end result of this can possibly be.

But on the other hand . . . it’s been nice to have a real-seeming holiday. When my mom was alive we were still a small family—three’s not so different from two—but we did more with it. We had a turkey every Thanksgiving. Sure, maybe my mom bought it instead of making it. But we sat around a table and talked about gratitude and soaked each other up with the kind of food that families all over the country were also eating. Why were we so willing to fully give all that up? Sure, for a year or two after she died, I can understand it maybe being too painful. But when did we commit to insularity? When did we decide without words that we were going to cling on to each other and never even attempt to find our way back?

Maybe, as much as I am profoundly ready for this impossible discomfort to end, something good can come out of it. Maybe that’s what this is meant to be—a reminder that he can love, a reminder that we’re okay with more than just each other. Maybe I can still find the good in this, even as I still can’t fully ignore the bad.

We finish the game. My dad wins easily.

And I think that maybe, just maybe, I’m going to end the night feeling grateful for it. A fitting end to a long Thanksgiving.

But of course, that’s just not my luck.

“Ez, you’re okay to get uptown, right?” my dad asks as he opens the coat closet to pull out all the layers of coats and scarves one needs for late November in New York City. For a moment, his question doesn’t register.

“Yeah, I figured we’d just take the train back up together.”

He looks at me, uncomfortable, and suddenly it registers. Carmen lives in the Village. No one is taking the train with me.

“Oh, um,” I finally say, when he also seems at a loss for words. I wonder if it would be this hard for him to spit it out if his girlfriend was his own age. I wonder if he’s not as clueless about the optics of their relationship as I want to believe he is. “It’s fine,” I say with a wave. As much as I hope they break up in general, right now I want to spare myself this awkward torture. “The 6 train is close to here, I’m totally fine. And besides, I should stay for a bit and help Lee clean up. But you guys go ahead, it’s getting late.”

I’m not used to the kind of confusion that’s written on my dad’s face. Maybe we buried our grief together and ignored it, but that’s much deeper below the surface than whatever we’re dealing with now. Yet I’m realizing that it’s all the same—we’ve thought we were “there” for each other, when really we’ve both just gotten perfectly practiced at avoiding the hard stuff. So of course that confusion wipes away and is replaced by a smile. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” I reply.

“Alright,” he says, and gives me a kiss on the cheek. “Happy Thanksgiving, my love.”

Chapter 11

“You don’t have to actually help me clean up,” Lee says once the door is closed.