and a spring concert in a week that required bringing a dish to share. And he was going to have to figure out what dish because he’d never been much of a cook. And the last time he’d brought something to a school event, he’d stopped at a grocery store and bought a prepared fruit tray. And Mia had told him with the diplomatic honesty of a child who loves you that it was embarrassing. He’d make something this time. He’d figure it out. He pulled out of the parking lot and turned toward home.
The dish he brought to the spring concert was a lasagna. It hadn’t gone smoothly. He’d called his sister in Phoenix on a Tuesday night and asked her to walk him through it over the phone. And she’d done it with the particular patience of someone who had explained things to her older brother many times before and had made a private peace with the fact that he required them explained thoroughly. He’d written down every step on a yellow legal pad. He’d bought the wrong kind of pasta the first time and had to go back to the store. The final product had come out of the oven slightly darker on one corner than it should have been, and he’d stood in the kitchen at 9:30 at night, looking at it with the critical assessment of a man who diagnosed problems for a living, and had decided it was fine. Mia had looked at it the next morning and said, “You made that?” “I did from scratch, mostly from scratch. The sauce was from a jar. Your aunt said the jar was acceptable.” Mia had considered the lasagna for another moment. Then, “It looks good, Dad.” Coming from an eight-year-old who’d previously described a store-bought fruit tray as embarrassing, he’d taken that as high praise.
The spring concert was in the school gymnasium, folding chairs arranged in rows, paper decorations hanging from the basketball hoops, the air smelling like construction paper and the industrial cleaning product the school used on the floors. Gavin sat in the third row and watched Mia stand on the risers with her class and sing four songs only three of which he recognized and he took a video on his phone that was slightly crooked because he couldn’t figure out where to look between the screen and his actual daughter standing 30 ft away. Afterward, in the gymnasium chaos of parents and children and folding tables full of potluck dishes, Mia found him and took his hand and pulled him toward the food table with the focused purpose of a child who had evaluated the available options and made her selections. “Your lasagna is almost gone,” she said, with the particular satisfaction of someone reporting good news about something they’d had a hand in, even if that hand had been purely moral support. “Is it?” “Mrs. Patterson had two pieces.” He looked at her. She was wearing the dress she’d worn to her mother’s birthday dinner 2 years before Clare got sick. They’d found it in the back of the closet last month, and it still fit barely, and she’d insisted on it. He didn’t know if she remembered where it was from, or if she’d just liked the color. He hadn’t asked. “Good concert,” he said. She shrugged with the nonchalance of someone who’d worked hard on something and was performing indifference about the result. “I forgot the words to the second song for a second.” “I didn’t notice.” “I covered it.” “I know. You were the only one who looked like you knew what you were doing.” She gave him the look that meant she knew he was being a dad about it, but she didn’t entirely mind. Then she spotted her best friend across the gymnasium and dropped his hand and was gone. The dress disappearing into the crowd of other children with the speed that characterized her exits from all conversations she considered sufficiently concluded.
Gavin stood by the food table with a plate he’d stopped eating from and thought about how the week had felt. The documentation he’d written in the evenings after she went to bed, the inspection protocol he’d designed for the remaining three CS7 aircraft. The two calls he’d taken from the outside legal team, and the one from a federal investigator named Rashida Coats, who was straightforward and smart and had asked better questions than most of the people he’d dealt with in the past 2 weeks. He thought about how it had felt to do that work at his kitchen table after 9:00 p.m. with the house quiet and a cold coffee at his elbow and then to close the laptop and go up the stairs and check on Mia and find her asleep with her arm over the edge of the mattress the way she always slept. It had felt like both things at once, the work and the life. Not balanced. He’d never believed in balance, which implied a static state that actual living didn’t really permit, but present. Both present. He finished his plate and went to find his daughter.
The federal investigation began formally on a Monday, 8 days after the board meeting. Rashida Coats arrived with a team of four and a mandate that covered wire fraud, securities fraud, falsification of FAA documentation, and a preliminary inquiry into whether the evidence supported an attempted manslaughter charge, which when Gavin heard it, produced a specific feeling he couldn’t quite name, something between relief that the legal system was using the right words and the discomfort of having words like manslaughter attached to something he’d lived adjacent to. He cooperated fully. He’d already organized everything, the documentation, the digital forensics, the inspection reports, his original materials from 3 years ago that he’d kept in a fireproof box under his bed through two apartments and one house move. He handed it all over on a Monday morning in three archival boxes and an encrypted hard drive. And Rashida Coats had looked at the organization of it and said, “You prepared this yourself?” “Yes.” “How long did it take you?” “3 years,” he said. “And then about 2 weeks at the end.” She’d looked at him for a moment and then she’d said, “Thank you.” Which was the first time anyone official had said that to him, and it landed differently than he expected.