Althea and Oliver by Cristina Moracho

You know. For eating.” She demonstrates by taking a bite.
    Garth follows her example and makes a noise of delighted surprise. “Delicious.”
    â€œIt better be. I think I gave myself carpal tunnel squeezing all those Key limes.”
    â€œWhere did you even find Key limes?”
    â€œI know a guy.”
    They eat. The gazebo falls quiet, except for their forks chiming against their plates, but elsewhere the neighborhood is full of summer’s rich sounds: mourning doves and the humming of insects, the rubbery echo of a basketball bouncing in someone’s driveway down the street. When the last bits of graham cracker crust have been pressed against their thumbs and licked away, Althea moves the plates to the floor and lies down with her head on her father’s thigh, her leg dangling over the low wall of the gazebo, heel kicking against the wood.
    â€œWhat happened to the visiting artist?” Althea asks.
    â€œShe was just visiting, remember?”
    â€œThere’ll be another one next year.”
    â€œThat there will.” Garth sounds confident about his prospects.
    â€œYou’re rich, right?” she says.
    â€œPardon?”
    â€œI mean, we have money.”
    â€œTechnically, I have the money, and you have the benefit of my continued good will. And we’re not rich. We’re comfortable.”
    A patch of clouds parts and sunlight streams through the slatted roof of the gazebo. Althea shades her eyes with her wrist. “How come you never take me anywhere?”
    â€œLike to get ice cream?”
    â€œLike someplace not in Wilmington. We always have the summers off together, but we never go away. Well,
you
go away, but you never take me with you. You just leave me here and tell Nicky to keep an eye on me.”
    â€œDid you see a commercial for Disney World and now you’re feeling deprived because you’ve never been?” Garth shifts uncomfortably under her weight.
    She sits up and gives him an accusatory look. “You’re a history professor. Haven’t you ever had the urge to show me Pompeii? Make me climb the steps of some Aztec temple so you could translate a bunch of pictographs and explain the details of their human sacrifices?”
    Garth glances longingly at his paperback. “Althea, as appealing as all this father-daughter globe-trotting sounds, you never showed any interest in doing anything over the summer besides going to the beach with Oliver or camping out with him in the backyard.”
    â€œWe could have taken him with us somewhere.”
    â€œHe’s not like a stuffed animal you could have packed into your suitcase. Nicky couldn’t afford a big trip like that, and she never would have let us pay his way. She would have seen it as charity. You remember what happened when I gave him that telescope for Christmas? Can you imagine if we tried to take him to Europe?”
    Glumly, Althea does remember. After his freakout over the inevitable end of the universe, Oliver had become fascinated by the night sky and started camping in the backyard with his star chart and listening to Garth’s stories about the constellations—Cassiopeia, hanging upside down in her throne, heroic Orion, and of course their favorite, the twins, Castor and Pollux, the brightest stars of Gemini. He’d even joined the Cape Fear Astronomical Society, going to meetings at the Unitarian Universalist Church one Sunday a month to listen to guest speakers talk about the Hubble Telescope and the Magellan probe, and traveling to dark sky sites outside the city where the view of the stars was less obscured by light pollution. That Christmas morning, Althea and Oliver had both been awed by the telescope—even her brand-new skateboard had been momentarily forgotten when Oliver tore open the wrapping paper to reveal a present that must have cost Garth hundreds of dollars. Nicky had held up bravely in the moment, thanking Garth graciously and