Dear Zoe

In the first two weeks staying with her dad, Tess realizes he spends most of his day doing “the kind of nothing that can fill up your whole day” (82). He doesn’t really work but spends time with his family, or fixes something in his mother’s house, or goes to the gym. He drives Tess to school every morning and picks her and Em up at Em’s school. Tess can tell Em is starting to like her dad. Tess’s grades are improving at her dad’s, even though David was always the one to ask her about her homework. At night, Tess checks in with her mom on the phone, and her mom apologizes about Justin, but Tess says that’s not the reason she left. Sometimes her dad receives phone calls, or people come to the door, but her dad turns them away. Tess says when she was little, her dad always had a girlfriend, but no girlfriend comes by in the first few weeks.

Tess notes her dad keeps the wedding picture of him and her mom on his dresser. In it, they both look extremely young, not so different from Tess’s friends. She doesn’t understand why he has it and says, “The only thing I can think of is it’s a picture of one of the only really important days of his life and he needs to be reminded that he once did something that was worth doing, even if it didn’t work out so great” (87).