I had been looking forward to watching my dad slink off to his room in disgrace after the botched demonstration, shunned by the turkey-stuffing community. But his colleagues and admirers seemed to lose interest in the balding turkey almost immediately, and infuriatingly enough, everyone still flocked to the front of the room when the presentation ended. My dad stuck around to shake every hand and answer every single question, and I stayed in my spot on the floor, marveling at how patient and kind he was to people who weren’t related to him. Even Jeremy, who had looked so horrified as he watched that Nair-filled turkey fall apart, came up to shake his hand and clap him on the shoulder.
My dad beckoned me over after everyone was finally gone, and I silently helped him clean up the prep table, which was littered with stray feathers and smears of hide paste and clay. Dad made a big show of dropping all the chemicals into the trash. When everything was packed, I moved to pick up the box holding the finished turkey armature, but Dad snatched it away from me.
“You’ll take that one,” he said, nodding to the box containing the mangled turkey. “You don’t get to touch anything valuable from now on.”
I didn’t argue. What did I care which turkeys I got to touch? I had only cared about them in the first place because doing taxidermy meant being with Dad, and now that was the absolute last thing I wanted. It would be perfectly fine with me if he lived in the studio, and I lived in the house, and we didn’t communicate again until I left for college.
I grabbed the box and trailed behind my dad all the way to the elevator. The convention center was noisy and crowded, but the silence between us felt oppressive, heavy with unspoken words. I wondered if I’d be able to breathe better once we got some of them off our chests and into the air.
The elevator dinged open on fifteen, and my heart sped up as I carried the turkey box down the hall. My dad had never been remotely violent, but a small part of me wondered if he would go berserk and start throwing things the moment we got inside the room. I almost wished he would so I could throw things back.
He didn’t. But when the door slammed behind us and he turned on me, all the rage that had been lurking under his eerily calm façade was right there on the surface.
“In the entirety of my career,” he started, his voice low and dangerous, “I have never seen anything so wildly unprofessional as what you did today.”
I crossed my arms, looked him right in the eye, and shrugged. “Oops. Sorry.”
“I know you’re being sarcastic, Callie, but you should be sorry. Why would you do something so unbelievably stupid after all the conversations we’ve had about professionalism? Does anything I say make it through to you?”
“You really don’t know why I did this?” I snapped. “I bet you can figure it out. You’re a smart guy. Go ahead, take a guess.”
“Seems to me it’s because you’re too caught up in your own selfish teenage angst to listen to anything I say. I swear to god, if you weren’t my daughter, I’d fire you in a second for—”
“I talked to Mom,” I interrupted, and he actually stopped talking. “I know she wants more time with me, and I know you told her I didn’t want to go. Did you seriously think I wouldn’t find out?”
“It doesn’t matter if—”
“Where do you get off thinking you can do that? I’m sixteen, not four. I decide where I spend my time, and I’d rather it not be with the parent who destroyed my family!”
Everything went dead silent for five seconds, then five more. It was deafening. When my dad spoke again, his voice was quiet. “Your mother is the one who left, not me.”
“It was your fault! You drove her away!”
“She chose that man over our marriage. She’s a grown woman with free will. I don’t know what you expect me to do about it.”
“I expect you to care!” I shouted.
“Callie, I obviously care. I—”
“You go around telling people she’s on a trip like it didn’t even happen. I heard you do it with Jeremy.”
“It’s nobody’s business if—”
“Listen, I’m not exactly Paul’s biggest fan, either. But at least he cares about what she wants. Why do you think she chose him over you?”
“In case you didn’t notice,” my dad said, “she chose him over you, too.”
That felt like a punch to the stomach. I wrapped my arms tight around my waist to hold myself together.
“The court mandated that I give your mother four weeks with you over the summer, and that’s what I’m willing to give her,” he continued. “She doesn’t deserve one second longer. She’s an incredibly irresponsible parent, and it’s my job to provide you with a stable life.”
“You think my life is stable?” I shouted. “I’m alone all the time unless I’m in the studio with you! You never eat with me, and none of my friends will set foot in our house because they’re too creeped out by all the heads mounted on the walls. You constantly forget to pick me up, and you won’t practice driving with me, so I can’t get my license. You’ve skipped Christmas at Grandma’s three years in a row because there was some dead animal that couldn’t wait one more day to be stuffed. When’s the last time you remembered my birthday? Do you even know when it is?”
A tiny flame of panic lit in my dad’s eyes. “It’s in January. January … eighteenth.”
“It’s the nineteenth. Do you know what you were doing on January nineteenth? You were skinning that cheetah that died at the Bronx Zoo. And do you know what I was doing? Canceling our dinner reservation and eating pizza by myself in front of 16 and Pregnant reruns. That was some super responsible parenting.”
“I’m sorry, but you know what an important project—”
“Do you know what the worst part was? I wasn’t even surprised, because you never remember, and you never remembered Mom’s birthday, either. When I was thirteen, I started getting her two presents every year because I knew she wouldn’t get anything from you. Do you know how many nights I sat there trying to convince her that the fun guy she married still existed, that I still saw him in the studio, and that after this project or that project was done, you’d finally remember there were important things in the real world, too? I stood up for you! But all the projects ended, and there was always something else to skin, and nothing ever got better. And yeah, I wasn’t enough to make her stay all by myself, and now she’s in freaking Tucson, and you’re trying to keep me away from her because she’s irresponsible? Are you seriously surprised that I want to spend time with the parent who cares I exist?”
“She’s the one who left you,” my dad said. “I’m still here.”
“You haven’t really been here since I was in seventh grade! I mean, yeah, you stock the freezer and put a roof over my head, but you don’t actually notice me unless I’m holding a scalpel. So I held the stupid scalpel, and I fleshed out your stupid carcasses, because I wanted you to remember that you had a daughter. But you know what? I don’t care anymore.” My nose was suddenly running, and when I wiped it on the back of my hand, I was horrified to find that I was crying. I was furious at myself for showing so much weakness in front of him.
“Callie—” My dad reached for my shoulder, but he was too far away to actually touch me. It was a totally empty gesture, like always.
“No. I’m done. You said you’d fire me in a second, but you obviously don’t have the balls to do it, so I’ll make it easy for you, okay? I quit.”
“Hang on,” my dad said. “Let’s—”
“I don’t want anything to do with you or your taxidermy. I’m asking Mom if I can live with her full-time from now on. If you want to take us to court, fine. Do whatever you want. But the judge is going to be on my side if I tell her you neglect me.”
I was all the way to the door before I heard him say, “Callie, wait …” He sounded upset, like I had finally gotten through to him, but it was too late. It was years too late.
The door slammed behind me, and I fumbled in my pocket for the key card to my room. The door didn’t open on my first three tries, and I started to panic; I felt like Harley Stuyvesant’s musk ox was sitting on my chest, and if I didn’t get inside this second, I was going to lose it right here in the hallway. I had a visceral need to be in my bed, where I could curl up in a tiny ball and pull the covers over my head and cry myself out. A scratchy fleur-de-lis duvet had never seemed more appealing.
And then the door opened from the inside, and there was Vanessa, barefoot and rumpled and dressed in a Weird Sisters T-shirt. Behind her, perched on my bed, was Phoebe.
For a second, all I felt was exasperation—seriously, couldn’t everyone leave me alone to cry for one second? But then I registered the identical expressions on their faces—half embarrassed and half sympathetic—and what was left of my heart dropped directly into my stomach.
I had just spilled my deepest, most embarrassing secrets, and my new friends had heard every single word.