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No more thinking about Wilson.
At breakfast he’d played it cool. No one at the table could’ve guessed we’d spent the night together. If he could do it, so could I.
We were adults. We’d done nothing wrong. I just really didn’t want my grandmother or his friends knowing I’d had a one-night stand with a sexy stranger who’d turned out to be a friend of my grandmother.
Only me.
Why did nothing ever go my way?
I couldn’t even have wild sex without doing it wrong.
My phone on the dresser rang.
Knowing who it was, I pulled in a breath and braced.
“Hey, Dad, how’s…” Shit, where was he again?
“Port-au-Prince.”
Right. Haiti.
“Are you with your grandmother?”
“We had breakfast. I’m back at the hotel.”
“Good. Good,” he hummed. “How was the flight?”
“Uneventful. How’s your week been?”
“Lymphatic filariasis is still on the rise. Higher than normal TB cases, a ciguatera outbreak, and fifteen cases of TD.”
Ah, good old traveler’s diarrhea.
What did I say to that? Good thing you’re there to help all those sick people while your only child is back in the good ol’ US of A all by herself wishing her father cared about her half as much as he cared about traveling the world helping those less fortunate?
I couldn’t say that because it made me sound like a selfish bitch.
But damn if it wasn’t true.
Perhaps if he’d started his crusade to help the world after he’d finished raising me I wouldn’t have been so bitter. Or maybe if he’d spent a single summer doing father-daughter things with me instead of sending me to my grandparents’ house after my mother had died I wouldn’t resent his quest. But since neither of those things had happened and I’d grown up with an absentee father who was a really great financial provider but sucked at being anything beyond that I hated his campaign to save everyone but me.
When the silence stretched beyond what was acceptable for me to comment on this week’s medical triumphs he launched into the familiar disapproval.
“Have you given any more thought to going back to school?”
He meant medical school. Something I had no interest in and had repeatedly told him but he’d refused to listen. This included when he forced me to apply to NYU with the hopes I’d get a bachelors in biochemistry then get accepted into the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. There had been a moment, though it was short lived, when I’d wanted to be a physician like my father. Not because I wanted to be a doctor but because I thought then maybe if we had something he deemed important in common my dad would notice me.
As I said, that was short lived and here we were, me almost forty and he still wouldn’t let it go.
“Dad, I haven’t thought about going back to school since I graduated college sixteen years ago.”
“You have a degree in hospitality.” His tone was incredulous and it only served to piss me off. “At least consider going back and getting your PhD.”
Right, so then I could add the letters DR in front of my name even if I wasn’t a medical doctor.
“I have a degree from Cornell, Father. Not some pop-up cert program that printed my diploma on an inkjet after they stole my money and closed up shop.”
And it was my money.
