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“You’ll like Alaska,” her dad says.
She snorts. “What’s to like?”
He smiles – a strange, secret smile. She’s been seeing this particular smile a lot lately. Never before his heart attack last year, but now it seems to be a daily occurrence. She finds it unsettling.
“It’s open,” he says, as though that is some sort of selling point. “Nothing but wilderness for miles.”
“So’s the Sahara. Doesn’t mean I want to settle down there.”
The look he gives her is patient and more than a bit patronizing. “It’s a trial run. Just a month. You can survive a month.”
“Do they even have cable there? The internet? Cell phone service?” She purposefully pushes his arm off the armrest and lets her own arm take up residence there. “Mom will kill you if she can’t talk to me at least once a day. Just to make sure I haven’t been eaten by a moose.”
“Well, if you do get eaten by a moose, I’ll take comfort in the fact that you’ll go down in history as the only human being to be eaten by an herbivore.”
“Do we really have to go, Dad?” She peers out the small window. “We haven’t even left the gate yet. We could still call the whole thing off.”
He’s digging in his carry-on, but stops long enough to match her eye roll. “You’ll live, kid.” He pulls out the most recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, shoves her arm off the armrest to plant his elbow there, and starts reading.
She lets him read for approximately two minutes before she flicks a corner of the magazine with her index finger. “In Alaska, I bet your mail won’t be on time. You won’t be able to read your magazine every week.”
He doesn’t bother looking at her as he says, “I spent five years reading magazines that were never less than two months out of date. You get used to it.”
She’s not going to win this argument. He’s even more stubborn than she is, and he really likes the ‘because I said so’ argument, so she knows she should stop before he pulls that one out.
She can’t, however, keep from having the last word. “You get used to it,” she mutters.
It’s weak, and instead of the intended effect of annoying him, it just makes him grin. Her dad is pushing fifty, but when he grins, all wide and boyish, it makes him look twenty years younger, probably what he must have looked like the last time he was in Alaska, she realizes.
He reaches over and gives her knee a squeeze. “You are your father’s daughter,” he says. “But I still love you.”
She grins back; she can’t help it. “I love you, too, Dad.” The plane jerks as it starts to back away from the gate, and she belatedly remembers that she’s supposed to be mad at him for making her fly 5000 miles away from home. “But I’m planning on hating Alaska. Just so you know.”
He pats her knee again and returns to his magazine. “Oh, yeah. Definitely your father’s daughter.”