There was a myth going around that dads couldn't cook. I could verify the blatant wrongness of this terrible stereotype. Dad was a genius with meat loaf, cheeseburgers, and ribs. Meat was a big theme with dads and dinner, and mine was no exception. But that was OK because I wasn't about to go vegetarian anytime soon—I was more T. rex than brontosaurus.
I raced into the kitchen, my socks sliding across the linoleum. Tonight Dad had made all my favorites. Spaghetti with meat sauce, Caesar salad, and garlic knots crowded the table. I grabbed a roll and pulled it apart. Somehow warm bread made everything even better.
"Load up your plate. I thought we could eat outside."
A great thing about Dad and dinner was that he didn't make me sit at the table. He was cool that way. He was wearing a sauce-splattered T-shirt that read "I Dig Mammoths!" His jeans were worn, and so were his tennis shoes. He liked to call himself a "creature of comfort." My parents had been divorced since I was seven. Now I was thirteen and well adapted to Dad's cuisine.
As I grabbed my plate, he asked, "How's the gypsy doing?" He thought Mom had a wandering spirit.
"Good," I answered. "She's found an old doll."
"Cool." Dad's mellow voice filled the kitchen. Supportive comments, even about Mom, came naturally to him.
I mentally noted that gypsies were the color of swirling paisley.
After getting my food, I followed Dad out to the backyard. It was early April and perfect sweatshirt weather. He flipped the back-porch light on, and we made our way to the tent. Some people might think it strange that we had a tent set up in our backyard. But why not? Our neighbor had a rickety old shed that leaned to the side at a forty-five-degree angle and had a giant padlock on the door, protecting its precious contents. I could kick the thing down with one foot. A tent was much nicer than a near-death shed, plus we could hang out in it. No one wanted to hang out in a shed.
Our tent wasn't your typical nylon camping-in-the-woods tent. It was made of sturdy canvas—the kind of tent used at excavation sites. Dad got it from his university back when he was in grad school. It had seen better days and had some holes gnawed in the sides, but it was still cool. It looked like it could have been lifted right off the sands of Egypt.
I've always wanted to go to the desert and unearth a mummy or a golden tomb of a newly discovered girl queen. I would get a big grant from a university and stake my claim right next to the great statue of the cat-bodied Egyptian god the Sphinx and kiss it on its broken nose while I dug beneath its paws.
Dad and I sat in camp chairs and ate our dinner at a card table. The tent was filled with Dad's old college stuff like camping supplies, crates of books, shovels, and tools. Those were his glory days, he always said. He was a paleontologist, which meant he studied fossils—not just dried-up bones and imprints in stone but the animal's actual bodies captured and preserved in the earth and ice. He was really into bones, especially the bones of one particular favorite animal of his—the woolly mammoth. I always thought of the mammoth as a giant hairy elephant with super-long curled tusks. Mammoths were like prehistoric snowplows making their way across the icy tundra of the Arctic. The majority of mammoth bones have been discovered in Siberia, which is probably one of the loneliest places in the world. The last place I ever wanted to go on an excavation was in the frozen world of the Arctic.
The Arctic was the kind of place that looked pretty in pictures. The snow peaks towered over the landscape like freshly whipped cream, and the ice forges glittered in the reflecting sun against a pure blue sky. I was sure it was fun to play for a while in the snow, building snowmen and making snow angels and igloos. But it was a bad sign when the indigenous mammals wore thick layers of blubber. Who would want to spend time in a place where the temperature was walk-in-freezer cold?
Luckily, mammoth bones had also been discovered in North America. A huge cache of bones had been found in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and some were recently found in Colorado, which, from a tourist standpoint, was cushy compared with Siberia. Dad was trying to get funding to do fieldwork on Saint Paul Island in Alaska. He spent many sleepless nights writing up his proposal and doing research. I could handle a trip to Alaska—even in winter it wouldn't be that bad.
"Did you hear about the grant?" I asked through a mouthful of spaghetti. I had seen an official-looking letter in the pile of mail by the door and had wanted to rip it open and read it, but instead I had put it on top of the pile and waited.
Dad stared at his plate and twisted his fork around and around, building up a massive ball of spaghetti strands. I swallowed. This was not a good sign. For some reason, Mom had all the luck in our family; grants flowed her way, and she went on expedition after expedition. But not Dad. Science wasn't fair.
"Not this time," he finally said. "The economy's tight."
"That's just another excuse. The economy is always bad."
"What can I say? The grants are fewer and the competition gets fiercer every year." He tore a piece of bread in half. "We have to adapt."
I groaned. Why couldn't he fight back, get angry? "But you worked so hard."
"I'll apply again next year. There's always another chance."
"You'll get one soon," I said, but it felt like a lie. What was I supposed to say? Pep talks were tough.
After dinner Dad made me wait in the tent while he brought out a surprise. Even though he was a whiz with turning ground meat into a delicacy, he was not as good in the baking department. I peeked out of the canvas flap and saw the sparkler on top of a huge brown mound. I held the tent open while he carried in a cake.
"Wow! It's beautiful." The sparkler glowed, and a warmth spread over me. Dad always came through. I leaned my head on his shoulder, then gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.
"I know you miss your mom, so I wanted to make a surprise," he said. "Wait till you see what's inside."
"Inside?"
Once for Thanksgiving, a teacher at my school baked a dime in a pumpkin pie and whoever found it got good luck. I got it—and swallowed the dime whole. It was never seen again. I really hoped there wasn't any loose change baked inside my surprise cake.
"You'll see," he said, a mischievous grin spread across his face. "Now make a wish and blow out the sparkler."
I closed my eyes, but it only took me a second to make my wish… I wanted to go on an expedition—a real one, far, far away. I focused really hard on my wish, willing it to happen. I visualized hot sands and great stone pyramids. I imagined myself floating down the Nile in a slow boat, the way Cleopatra drifted along on not a boat but a sedan carried on the sturdy backs of men. I wished for an adventure where I could dig up something important, something really rare that none of the scientific experts saw coming. I opened my eyes, pulled the sparkler out of the cake, and waved it across the darkening tent as looming shadows stalked the canvas, until at last it sputtered out in my hand.
Dad cut the cake and then proudly pointed to the inside.
The cake was made up of a half-dozen layers, each in a different shade of brown, from light beige to putty, then tan, on to a mocha layer, then plain chocolate, and finally to a dark devil's food chocolate. "I wanted it to look like the layers of rock," he said. "And, trust me, it wasn't easy. I have a newfound respect for Betty Crocker."
I laughed. "It's so cool!" I dipped a finger into the icing and licked it off. "Very chocolaty." This was the kind of cake one might expect from a science-nerd dad—both delicious and educational. "It's the best cake ever."
"You might want to wait until you take a bite to decide that." He cut off a huge slice. The tower of chocolate toppled over onto my plate. It looked a little shiny and wet. I dug my fork in and took a big bite.
"It's a little raw in the middle. Oh, is it one of those molten cakes?" I asked.
Dad tilted his head like he was considering the possibility. "Yes!" he answered a little too eagerly. "It's molten, like a volcano." He wiggled his eyebrows at me. He was totally making that up.
I swallowed a mouthful of the undercooked batter. "It's really good." And it actually was.
After I had finished eating and had helped do the dishes, I headed to my room and changed into my pajamas. As I was climbing into bed, I saw my reflection in the now-black computer screen. I'm very different from my parents, at least in appearance. Mom's hair was glossy brown, and Dad's was dark blond, like an old golden retriever's. Due to some freak of nature or some warped gene, my hair was… pure white.
Not blond, not honey, but snowdrift white.
It was cute when I was a baby. Everyone thought my hair would darken as I got older, but no. My hair was born old—the color of powder, the color of milk. Now everyone thought it was weird, definitely stare-worthy. The other kids said I was part albino or part mutant spawn.
Once I overheard one of my parents' friends say that it was no wonder my hair was white—Mom and Dad loved the past so much they had made an old baby.
Dad said that one day I would be a famous scientist like Jane Goodall and everyone would recognize me on sight, because my white hair would be my trademark and make me look both glamorous and wise at the same time. Which, he said, was a really hard thing to do. He said it was just like the way movie actress Katharine Hepburn was really tall and always wore pants back in the days when most actresses were petite and always wore dresses, but she could pull it off because she owned the thing that made her different. She didn't slouch.
So I handled it. I grew my hair out really long and wove it in two long braids. I cut my hair into blunt, serious bangs. But I also wore hats a lot—especially in winter, when it wasn't strange to wear a hat, because stares could be tiring.
I snuggled down under the covers and turned off the light. My best friend, Zoey, and I had stuck star stickers to the ceiling in an ill-fated attempt at creating a galaxy, but even though they didn't look like a real sky, they made the room feel less lonely, which was strange because the real stars were light-years away, and Mom was only on another continent. She was probably swaying in her ropy hammock at this very moment, staring up at the stars, and hers weren't made of plastic.