One Last Thing Before I Go

cringe outwardly and he is ridiculously overjoyed.
    “Look at you,” Jack says to her. “How old are you these days?”
    “Eighteen.”
    “Wow, that makes me feel old.”
    “No, I think it’s probably your age that’s doing that.”
    “Shazam!” Jack says. He does that sometimes. They don’t know why.
    Casey rolls her eyes, essentially negating Jack’s existence, and looks at Silver. “I need to talk to you.”
    “Is everything OK?
    She appears to contemplate that for a moment. “Everything is peachy.”
    “You want to go sit by the cabanas?” he says.
    “Sure.”
    As she walks ahead of him, he catches a glimpse of color, a flash of red on her shoulder.
    “What’s that?”
    “It’s just a rose,” she says defensively.
    As far as tattoos go, it’s fairly restrained; a bloodred rose, with a single leaf, tattooed onto her scapula. Even shitty fathers can cry from something like that. But he has long since squandered any rights to paternal indignation, so he figures he might as well score a point.
    “Nice.”
    Casey smiles wryly, on to him. “You should see the one on my ass.”
    “Jesus.”
    “Focus, Silver. We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
    “Such as?”
    She turns to face him, still smirking, but her eyes are wide and he can see her trembling.
    “Such as,” she says, “I’m pregnant.”
    There are moments when you can literally feel the planet spinning beneath you, so much so that you instinctively need to hold on to something. He gently grabs Casey’s arm and looks into her eyes and they stand there, with the world coming apart around them, both of them waiting to see what it is that he is going to say.

CHAPTER 5
    “W ow.”
    That’s what he says. She doesn’t know what she was expecting, really. Drew Silver is not exactly famous for knowing what to say in a pinch. Or out of one. Ever, really. But in his defense, here are the things he didn’t say:
    “Are you sure?”
    “Who did this to you?”
    “You’re not the girl I thought you were.”
    He doesn’t get angry, he doesn’t yell, and he doesn’t look away. If there’s a perk to having such a fucked-up father, it’s that he’s in no position to judge. Silver looks right at her and takes hold of her arm, which normally would piss her off, but right then, having just said the words out loud for the first time, she kind of needs someone to grab her arm. And as soon as he touches her, she feels something, some long fossilized knot inside of her, shift and loosen.
    He says “Wow” again. He doesn’t yell it, his jaw doesn’t drop, nothing like that. The “wow” is just filler as he absorbs this sad fact and all the secondary information that comes along with it, like someone who has spent a good part of his life absorbing sad facts, and she understands now that this is why she came to him.
    And even though he’s a lousy father, and she knows he’ll almost definitely disappoint her sometime in the next five minutes, in this moment she could cry from how much she loves him, even as she hates herself for it. So she does. She cries. In front of these sad broken men and the half-naked hotties lying out over at the shallow end—and who lets those girls in here anyway? That Russian doorman acts like he’s guarding the White House, for God’s sake. It just goes to show you how far you can get if you’re rocking a nice set of tits.
    And Silver, he pulls her into this kind of one-armed hug, like he’s not sure how to do it, like he’s scared he might break her, and how the hell do you go through life without learning the basic mechanics of a hug? Usually she hates it when her pity for him interferes with her anger, and she compensates with extra nastiness, but now she closes her eyes and disappears into the rough, weathered cotton of his T-shirt for a few moments while she gets her shit together. She breathes in his familiar smell, the one she thinks of as Eau de Deadbeat, a mixture of aftershave and talcum powder. And even as she holds on to him like she’s drowning, she can feel the familiar anger returning, like an old song that you’ve heard so many times it’s not even a song anymore, just a wasted pathway in your brain that you can never reclaim.
    She feels the anger rising up inside her—at him, at herself—and she shakes herself out of his inept embrace, maybe a little more roughly than she’d intended. He takes a step back, confused. She knows this expression well—that dumb, startled look, like the