Page 105 of Across His Line

“He landed on a car.”

“That’s worse. The car doesn’t give.”

“He’s fine. Look at him.”

“He’s not fine. He’s an actor. The real guy would be dead.”

I don’t argue. She’s probably right.

She goes back to the movie. I go back to the ceiling. Somewhere far below us, through the floor, somebody laughs, and a door closes.

“You went around the back of your own house,” she says after a while.

She isn’t looking at me when she says it. She’s looking at the screen.

“Yeah.”

“Is your dad always like that?”

I think about the table downstairs. The napkin in his hand. Sit down.

“Pretty much,” I say.

She nods like she’s putting it somewhere. She doesn’t ask anything else for a while.

Then, she asks, “Why were you at the business building the other day?”

I turn my head. “You saw that?”

She gives me a look. “Your dot was in there for an hour on Monday. And you had an accounting book in the hallway. A big red one.”

Of course she saw.

“I changed my major,” I say.

“To business?”

“To business.”

“Why?”

I think about a hotel lobby in Massachusetts with bad coffee. A table in a lounge at ten at night with her spreadsheet on it.

“Turns out I don’t hate business,” I say. “I hate my father telling me I’m going to do it.”

She gets it. I watch it go across her face, quick.

“Those aren’t the same thing,” she says.

“Took me eighteen years.”

“Nineteen.”

I look at her.

“You turned nineteen last week,” she says.

Something happens at the corner of my mouth. I don’t stop it.