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“Slow down, Jolyne. I’ve already seen enough cops to last me a lifetime.” Hermes said from the front seat, gripping her seatbelt a little too tightly.
Jolyne looked at the speedometer, which was pushing eighty-five, and then let off the accelerator. “Sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
The GPS on Jolyne’s phone came back to life, instructing her that the next exit was in a mile, so she moved into the other lane. Port Charlotte, where her father was studying something or the other, was clear on the other side of Florida, but Jolyne knew that if she had left it up to her father to come to her, he wouldn’t have. Work would always be too pressing, excuse upon excuse would keep piling up until Jolyne gradually just stopped asking. She wasn’t going to do that anymore. There was no use grasping for someone who wasn’t going to take your hand. Jolyne was going to make one last overture, and if he didn’t take it? That was it. Her father would be as dead to her as she had apparently been dead to him.
That said, she was not looking forward to what would probably be a strained and awkward lunch. When Jolyne had called him, Jotaro had seemed to be taken by surprise, and had wanted to know what was the matter. That was their relationship. They never called each other unless there was something wrong. Jolyne had been tongue tied. What was she supposed to say? “Sorry, Dad, I’ve come down with an acute case of the lesbians?” She was not looking forward to this conversation, but she desperately wanted to have it. If there was one goddamn thing that he was ever going to do for her, it might as well be coming to her goddamn wedding. But he didn’t have a good track record of attending important events, and the whole gay thing kinda threw an additional wrench into the plans, which was why the knot of anxiety in her stomach hadn’t unclenched since she had started this trip.
“You know, it would almost be easier if my dad just hated gay people. Then I could just…not talk to him for the rest of my life and not feel bad about it,” Jolyne said, awkwardly unloading her burden onto her partner. The way that some of the people she had come out to had acted—saying they were supportive, but not actually being supportive—almost made her long for the spittle-flecked Bible thumpers telling her she was heading straight to Hell. Those she could ignore outright, laugh and give the middle finger. People who pretended to be cool with it but really weren’t were the worst. Jolyne didn’t even know her father’s stance on gay marriage. She didn’t really know his stance on anything besides aquatic mammals. It was quite possible that he didn’t have opinions on anything besides marine biology.
The restaurant Jolyne had chosen was Olive Garden, because if she was going to have to leave in the middle of this date, she was taking the breadsticks with her. She couldn’t remember her dad ever complaining about the restaurant and they had gone there before, so it seemed like a safe choice. Hermes, whose sister had run a real Italian restaurant, scoffed slightly, but she knew that she was just here to support Jolyne. It was in some kind of shopping mall and it took some consultation with the mall map to discover that they had parked as far away as humanly possible from the restaurant and had to head to the opposite side.
They were running a bit late, even with Jolyne’s speeding, and Jotaro was waiting for them in front of the restaurant, smoking a cigarette. He was dressed in his usual baffling way for someone who spent most of his time in nearly tropical climes. A full, long coat and a long sleeved shirt and pants and that omnipresent hat. He took one last drag and then put out his cigarette when he saw them.
“Hey, Dad. Sorry we’re running late, traffic sucked. This is Hermes.”
Jotaro was peered at Hermes from underneath the brim of his hat.
“It’s uh, a pleasure to meet you, sir,” Hermes said, sticking her hand out to shake.
Jotaro gave her a curt nod and shook. “Let’s go in. It’s starting to get crowded.”
“Sir?” Jolyne whispered to Hermes as they passed through the doors of the building and into the blessedly cool air conditioning a little behind Jotaro.
“I panicked,” Hermes said.
“Reservation for Kujo,” Jotaro said to the hostess at the front desk. She barely looked out of high school and enormously flustered at Jotaro’s low, deep voice washing over her. Jolyne may not swing that way—and he was her dad, ew—but she knew that Jotaro was considered an enormously attractive man, and the originator of her own good looks. Whenever the friends that Jolyne had taken home in high school had overlapped with times her father happened to be home, all of them practically swooned over him. There was nothing worse than trying to get closer to your lesbian crush than having her gush over how hot your dad is.
The hostess led them to a table for four and Jotaro took one side of the table and Jolyne and Hermes the other. A waitress arrived quickly with breadsticks and to take their drink orders, and the suddenly they were left in awkward silence, even more pronounced because the rest of the restaurant was so crowded and loud.
Jotaro had been staring at Hermes, and she was starting to feel uncomfortable if the way her hand went under the table to seek Jolyne’s was any indication.
“Would you come to my lab after this so I can run a few tests on you?” Jotaro asked abruptly.
The two girls were horrified into silence before Jolyne recovered her wits. “Dad! She’s not the plankton one!” she hissed.
Jotaro frowned. “She’s not? Why did you bring her then? I wanted to meet the plankton one.”
“I’ll bring Foo Fighters next time, okay? I wanted it to just be us this time.”
“All right,” her father said, and that was the end of that. The awkward silence stretched on while Jolyne tried to marshal her thoughts. How should she break it to her father? “This weather, huh? I heard on the forecast that there’s a one hundred per cent chance of YOUR DAUGHTER BEING A LESBIAN!” “I read that homosexuality is found in dolphins. Did you know that it is also found in daughters? Yours, specifically. Dad, I’m a lesbian.” “Dad, I’ve been diagnosed with stage four leukemia. Haha, just kidding! I’m just gay. Please come to my wedding.”
Hermes ended up being the one to break the silence. “So Mr.—uh, Dr. Kujo—can you tell me more about your work? What are you doing here in Port Charlotte?”
“I’m collaborating with a geologist to write a paper about the Charlotte Harbor and Punta Gorda.”
“That sound interesting!” Hermes said, trying to muster up some enthusiasm.
Jotaro just stared at her silently. Jolyne plucked the cocktail menu off of the table and examined it. One of everything, please, Miss Waitress.
As if summoned by Jolyne’s desperation, their server arrived to take their orders. She only ended up ordering a margarita, but the night was still young.
“You said you had something to tell me?” Jotaro said, directing his question to his daughter. “Something that couldn’t be said over the phone. Are you in trouble again?”
“No, Dad, nothing like that.”
“Good,” Jotaro said, his face relaxing slightly.
“It’s, uh, a more personal matter.”
Her father waited in silence for her to continue. Jolyne waited until the waitress arrived with her drink and took a long gulp. Thus fortified, she started her story.
“Hermes isn’t exactly my, uh, roommate. I mean, she is, but…”
Jotaro’s face remained impassive.
“She’s, uh, more than that. She’s, uh, kinda my girlfriend— I mean, not my girlfriend! Not like the kind that’s like, a friend and a girl kind of a girlfriend—okay, you know what, screw it. I’m a lesbian!”
“I know,” her father said.
“You what?” Jolyne asked in disbelief, slumping down in her chair. “You know? Did Mom tell you?”
“Yes. When you were six.”
“Wait, what? Really?”
“Yes. You came home from school with a crush on this girl. I don’t remember her name. Amy? Annie? And you never really grew out of it. I’m not surprised.”
Jolyne leaned back until she hit the seat. “So you knew. This whole time.”
“Yes. I can’t believe you made me take off work for this. I thought you were in trouble again. Good grief.”
“Well sor-rry if learning your only child is getting married interrupts your precious work!” Jolyne said, throwing her hands up in the air.
Jotaro’s face shifted slightly. “You didn’t say anything about marriage.”
“Well, I’m saying it now! We’re getting married! Next February! Not like it matters to you, since you probably won’t BE THERE—” Hermes’s hand tugging frantically on her sleeve recalled Jolyne away from her passion. She realized she had been shouting and people were starting to stare.
“What’s the date?”
“The ninth.”
“I’ll mark it on my calendar.”
“No, you don’t get to just mark it. I have to know now. Are you going to walk me down the aisle, are you just attending as a guest, or are you even coming at all?”
“I don’t know what I’ll be doing in February, Jolyne. Something might come up. I’ll try to make it.”
“Yeah, that’s what you always say, shortly before you don’t make it!”
“You don’t want your mother’s new husband to walk you down the aisle? You seem to like him.”
Steve was a nice guy, and they got along fine, but he was Jolyne’s stepfather in name only. Jolyne had already moved out by the time they got married, so he was just a nice relative she saw occasionally at Thanksgivings and Christmases that just happened to be married to her mother. He wasn’t any kind of father figure to Jolyne. He would probably be touched by an offer to walk Jolyne down the aisle, but that wasn’t what Jolyne wanted. She wanted to give Jotaro one last chance to prove himself. If he just showed up this one time and walked thirty fucking feet arm-in-arm with her, Jolyne felt like it would erase all of those years of not being there. But it didn’t look like her father was willing to even do that. Jolyne felt like crying, even though it had been years since she had cried about her father abandoning her. It had become so routine that there was no use.
“I’m just glad you’re not marrying that man with the weird hat.”
“Who? Anasui? God no. He’s still in jail, thank God. You know what he’s in there for? Killing his girlfriend. Like hell I’d date someone who literally murdered their last girlfriend, even if I wasn’t a lesbian. And you’re in no position to call other people’s hats weird, Dad.”
“There’s nothing weird about my hat,” Jotaro mumbled, holding onto the brim of his hat protectively.
“Well, I’m glad we’ve got all that sorted out,” Hermes said, trying to inject some false cheer into the conversation. “You took it well, Dr. Kujo.”
“Why would I not take it well?”
Hermes shrugged. “Some people don’t.”
“Dad, you don’t know the first thing about what it’s like being gay,” Jolyne said.
“Yes I do.”
“What do you mean, yes—”
“I mean, I’m gay too. You probably got it from me.”
The waitress arrived with their food, the pleasantries she spouted going right over Jolyne’s head. She was pretty sure her mouth was hanging wide open.
“You—you’re gay? You’re gay? Like, gay gay?Is that why you and Mom got divorced?”
“One of the reasons,” Jotaro said in between bites of his eggplant parmigiana.
“Does she know?”
Jotaro shrugged. “Probably.”
“Are you, like…seeing someone?”
“No.”
“Oh. That’s…lovely. You’re gay. I’m gay. Hermes is gay. We’re having a big fat gay wedding you may or may not be coming to.” Lacking any other words, Jolyne started shoving bites of her chicken scampi into her mouth. She glanced over at her fiancée, exchanging a look that she wasn’t sure was laughing or horrified or disappointed or what. Hermes’s look in return was reassuring, and she squeezed Jolyne’s free hand, now at the top of the table.
The rest of the meal was blessedly silent. Not the awkward silence of three people who had no idea how to talk to each other, but the silence of three people forking chain restaurant Italian food into their mouths. When they were finished and Jolyne was poring over the dessert menu, Jotaro asked another question. “Where is the wedding being held?”
“The same church you and Mom got married in,” Jolyne said.
“I suppose they’ve changed pastors, then,” Jotaro commented. “He was hardly willing to marry us because of your mother’s pregnancy.”
“Yeah, I have no idea where the guy who married you went, but it’s a very LBGT friendly church now.”
“That’s good.”
In the end, Jolyne decided against dessert, and they paid the tab without haggling over the check. Jolyne sort of liked that about her dad. Way too many people tried to fight about who paid the check, but Jotaro just paid his portion and let Jolyne and Hermes pay for theirs. He wasn’t a hassle in many ways.
They wound their way through the throngs of people waiting for tables to open up and got blasted by the Florida heat and humidity as soon as they were outside. They stood awkwardly on the sidewalk, away from the people waiting to get it. Jotaro lit up another cigarette.
“Do either of you smoke?” he asked.
“No,” Jolyne said. The pack of cigarettes went back into his jacket pocket.
“We should probably be going. Have a long drive back home,” Jolyne said.
“Yeah.” Jotaro advanced towards Jolyne awkwardly just as she was walking away, and they ended up dancing briefly towards and away from each other before they decided to stop and then hug each other.
“I’ll be there,” Jotaro murmured into Jolyne’s hair, and for a moment, Jolyne allowed herself to hope.