Behind her, the door opened. Claire didn't turn around. She expected the cane, the slow uneven step. Instead she heard heavier feet, and the creak of the porch boards, and then her father sat down beside her on the step in his robe and his socks, in the snow.
He didn't say anything for a while. Neither did she.
"I didn't know," he said finally.
Claire looked out at the street. A neighbor's kid was dragging a new sled down the sidewalk, the runners scraping where the snow was thin.
"I know you didn't," she said. "That's sort of the problem, Dad."
Her father took a long breath and let it out in a cloud.
"What do you mean," he said carefully, "that's the problem?"
Claire pulled her coat tighter. Her jeans were getting wet from the snow on the step, and she didn't care. Somewhere in the house behind them, her mother's voice rose and fell, and her grandmother's answered, low and steady, like a cello under a violin.
"I mean you didn't know," Claire said. "You didn't know I had a job. You didn't know I applied to UVM until Grandma asked at dinner. You didn't know my stocking's been on the broken hook for nine years. You don't know that I've bought my own winter coat since I was fourteen, or that I paid for my own SAT, or that when I had the flu in October I drove myself to urgent care because Mom was at Madison's volleyball tournament. You don't know any of that, because you don't look."
She hadn't meant to say so much. Once it started, though, it was like pulling a thread on a sweater. Things came loose.
"In sixth grade I won the district spelling bee. Do you remember that? No. Because the same night was Madison's dance recital, and Mom said the bee wasn't really a performance, it was just a test, and you could hear about it later. Nobody asked me later. I put the trophy in my closet. It's still there."
Her father was staring at his hands.
"When I turned sixteen, Madison got a party for her fourteenth that same spring with a DJ in the backyard. I got a cake from the grocery store and you said happy birthday, kiddo, on your way to work. And that was fine. It was fine, Dad. I'm not a little kid, I know a cake is just a cake. But I used to lie in bed and try to figure out what I did. What I did wrong, that made her like that with me. I used to make lists."
"Claire..."
"I don't make them anymore. I figured out it wasn't anything I did. It's just how it is. Madison's the one Mom wanted. I'm the one who's there." She wiped her nose on the back of her glove. "And you're just... at work. Or asleep. And I get it, you're tired. But you're my dad too."
For a long time Greg Hollis did not say anything. When he finally did, his voice was rough in a way Claire had never heard.