Steel Petals

The first time I saw her in that skirt, I was standing at the kitchen sink with my hands in cold water, scrubbing a pot that didn't need scrubbing. My wife had left for her shift at the hospital an hour ago. The house was mine until seven. That was the deal we'd made when I moved in, that I'd handle the mornings, get Claire to school, keep things quiet. It wasn't a bad deal. I'd taken worse.

The pot was clean. I kept scrubbing anyway. The radio was on low, some morning show where the hosts laughed at things that weren't funny. I didn't turn it off. The noise filled the space where thoughts would've gone.

Then the stairs creaked. Not the heavy creak of someone rushing. The slow, deliberate creak of someone taking their time.

I didn't turn around. I knew it was Claire by the rhythm of it, the way she paused on the third step from the bottom like she always did, like she was deciding something. The refrigerator hummed. The faucet dripped. I put the pot in the drying rack and reached for another.

"Morning," she said.

Her voice was closer than I expected. I turned.

She was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, one hip against the frame, her arms crossed under her chest. The skirt was plaid, red and black, and it stopped about four inches below where her legs started. Her legs were bare. She wore a white t-shirt knotted at the waist, and her hair was down, wet from the shower, dripping onto her collarbone.

"Morning," I said.

She didn't move. I dried my hands on the towel, slow, because there was nothing else to do with them.

"Mom leave already?"

"Hour ago."

She nodded. Pushed off the doorframe and walked to the refrigerator. Her feet were bare on the linoleum. I watched the refrigerator door open, the light inside, her hand reaching past the orange juice for the almond milk. She poured a glass without asking. Drank it standing there, her back to me.

"You're gonna be late," I said.

"I'm not going."

I folded the towel and set it on the counter. "What do you mean you're not going?"

She turned around. The glass was half empty. She set it down on the counter, not in the sink, not on a coaster, just on the bare counter where it would leave a ring. Her mother hated that.

"I mean I'm not going. I don't feel good."

"You look fine."

She smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the kind of smile that knew something I didn't, and I felt it in my stomach, that drop you get when you miss a step in the dark.

"I feel fine," she said. "I just don't want to go."

I should've called her mother. That's what a normal person would've done. But my wife was on hour nine of a twelve-hour shift, and she'd told me, before she left, that she needed me to handle things, that she couldn't do everything, that I was supposed to be the one who made this easier.

So I said, "Get dressed. I'll drive you."

"I am dressed."

"You know what I mean."

She looked down at herself. Then she looked at me, and her eyes were her mother's eyes, that same dark brown, that same way of holding still while everything moved behind them.

"This is what I wear," she said. "This is what everyone wears."

"Not to school."

"To school. Every day. You just don't notice."

She was right. I didn't notice. I dropped her off in the mornings and picked her up in the afternoons, and in between I did whatever it was I did, the small jobs, the errands, the hours that disappeared. I didn't look at what she wore. I didn't look at her.

"I notice," I said.

"No you don't."

She picked up her glass and drank the rest of the milk. Then she set it down again, same spot, same ring. She walked past me, close enough that I could smell her shampoo, something floral and cheap, and I stood there with my hands at my sides while she went into the living room and turned on the TV.

I followed her.

She was on the couch, curled up, the remote in her hand. The skirt rode up her thighs. I looked at the TV instead. Some talk show. A woman crying about her husband.

"Claire."

"What."

"You need to go to school."

"I'm not going."

"Why."

She didn't answer. She flipped channels. The screen changed, changed again, changed again. I stood there like an idiot, like a man who'd forgotten how to sit down.

"Because I don't want to see him," she said finally.

"See who?"

She didn't answer. Her thumb kept moving on the remote. A cartoon. A commercial. A news anchor talking about a fire.

"Claire. Who don't you want to see?"

She looked at me then. Just her eyes, her head still facing the TV.

"Why do you care?"

"I'm your stepfather."

"That's not a real thing."

I felt it, the way you feel a slap before it lands. Not the sting, but the air moving.

"It's real enough," I said.

She sat up. The skirt stayed where it was. She didn't pull it down. She looked at me like she was waiting for something, like I was supposed to say a line I didn't know.

"He's a senior," she said. "His name is Derek. He asked me to homecoming and I said yes and then he told everyone we did things we didn't do and now everyone thinks I'm a slut so no, I don't want to go to school today. Is that a good enough reason for you?"

The TV kept talking. The anchor moved on to weather. I stood there and listened to her breathe.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"Okay. You don't have to go."

She looked at me like I'd grown a second head. I didn't blame her. I didn't know what I was doing either. I just knew that standing there, in my bare feet, in my wife's house, looking at this girl who wasn't mine, I had a choice to make. And I made it.

"I'll tell your mom you were sick," I said. "But you owe me."

She didn't say thank you. She turned back to the TV and pulled her knees up to her chest, and the skirt disappeared between her thighs, and I walked back to the kitchen and picked up her glass and washed it and set it in the drying rack next to the pot.

Then I called the school and lied.