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Dana.
He squints a moment, sizing her up. “And what’s going on in your life, young lady?” he asks her.
Dana swallows hard. “Oh,” she says, her mouth twitching with hesitation. “Nothing much really.”
“You’re going to school, right?”
She nods. “Chicago North.”
“You know I hear great things about ladies’ track and field there,” he says. “If you’ve got half your daddy’s speed?—”
“Oh, no.” Dana shakes her head. “I don’t do much in... athletics.”
He smiles. “Well, that’s all right. Some of us have to be the brains around here. Will you be joining your mother in the science department?”
“Uh... no.” Again, Dana swallows. “No, I’m... not much for STEM, either.”
“Then what do you do?” he asks her.
The table goes quiet.
Dana fidgets in her chair, clearly uncomfortable with the amount of eyes suddenly focused on her. “Nothing remarkable, I guess,” she finally says.
She smiled at me, her arms full, the candy sack almost too big for her hands.
“That’s not true,” I hear myself say.
Dana looks at me, her big eyes rounder than before.
Everyone else looks at me, too.
“I mean...” I clear my throat. “You write. Right?”
“Do you?” Grant asks her with interest. “I didn’t know that.”
“She does!” Rose says, leaping on it. “Short stories. Isn’t that right, honey?”
“Well...” Dana pauses. “I used to.”
“You wrote that story, though,” I say. “Won a bunch of awards.”
“It was just the one award, actually,” she says, her voice getting low.
Alex furrows his brow. “What story?”
“The one with the kids on the boat,” I tell him. His frown deepens as he tries to recall it. “They get stranded out to sea. Big storm. No?”
Still, he doesn’t remember. A few hums of acknowledgment pass around the table, but whether they really remember it, I can’t tell.
Dana ignores them, still focused on me. “You read that?” she asks.
I look at my grandfather. “It was great. They had it on display in the school library for months.”
“And on our fridge at home,” John says, touching Dana’s shoulder beside him. “The kid’s right. It was a good story.”
“She’s really talented,” I say, looking at Dana again.
“That was two years ago,” she says.
