“Oh God, Manny, she’s you. We should start calling her Mini-Manny. She certainly knows how to get you pissed off.”

I open my eyes. “I don’t need one more enemy, Linda. Don’t pick at me. I’m already surrounded.”

I can tell Linda is fighting back a smile. “Jesus, you’re touchy today.”

I run a hand through my hair, shaking my head. “The girl hates me. I don’t know what I was thinking bringing them along for this.”

Linda gives me a sympathetic look. “The girl, as you kindly refer to her, is your daughter. That’s what you were thinking. Don’t work so hard. Sometimes that’s all the answer there is. And she doesn’t hate you. She’s angry. There’s a difference. How are the little ones doing? Did you have a nice holiday at Winderly House with them?”

“How the fuck would I know? The boys don’t talk. And Krystal, she smiles all the time for no reason, but when she sees me she stops smiling. You can decide for yourself what that means.”

“Jesus, OK. I didn’t ask to pry. I asked because it looks like the second verse is coming your way. Parenting is not your forte, Manny. You better learn quickly. You can’t hide from them. You can’t ignore them and you certainly shouldn’t fight with them. Why the hell did you leave them in the front of the plane?”

Criticism on parenting from Linda. Really? “Because I need a break from them. And I don’t need your advice.”

“Of course you don’t. You do very well all on your own being an asshole.”

Linda closes her tray table with an angry snap.

I open my eyes to see Krystal closing in with her playful half-skipping walk. She smiles at everyone she passes, but she stops smiling when she nears me.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

Krystal climbs over me and settles in the seat beside me. She locks her belt in place. “Kaley is really angry. I don’t want to sit with her. You shouldn’t argue with her. It makes her angrier. Mom and I ignore her when she’s in a mood. It seems to work.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

I watch her pull from her backpack a homework packet, pencil and calculator, drop the tray table down and immediately begin working on it.

I study her for a while. “Why are you not angry? You’ve got as much reason to be angry as your sister does. You just go with the flow.”

Krystal shrugs. “I’m like Mom. Kaley is like you.”

Interesting comment. How does she know that? Chrissie, no doubt.

“You don’t hate me, do you?” I ask.

Krystal looks startled by the questions. “Why should I hate you, Dad? I didn’t hate you before. Why should I hate you now? You are my dad, aren’t you?”

The way she says Dad stirs an odd impulse in me to cry. It is in the easy tones of a loving and emotionally generous child. It is heartfelt and unexpected. It’s the first time she’s called me that. My gaze roams her dark hair, her bright blue eyes, her too small nose and full lips. Part Chrissie. Part me.

These five kids, each so different, are all part Chrissie and part me. It is overwhelming to see it. I can see it so clearly now. Why couldn’t I see it before? What kind of man can be around his own children year after year and not see that they are his?

Choked up with unfamiliar emotion I never expected to have, I continue to watch Krystal work on her homework. “Me being your dad, it seems to be the case. You’re not sorry we’re related, are you?”

She shakes her head, chews on the tip of her mechanical pencil and then goes to work on a problem. I watch her silently for the first hour of the flight, this bright, confident and self-sufficient girl.

She is halfway done with the second page of problems. “What are you working on?” I ask.

“My math packet.”

“I know it’s math. What kind of math?”

“Calculus.”

I look at the pages, study them. Christ, it is calculus. “They give you calculus in fifth grade now?”

“No, I go to Kumon.”

“What’s Kumon?”

“Sort of a math club. Mom makes me go. She says the US educational system is so poor I need to go to math club to learn anything. It’s mostly geeks and foreign kids, but I really like math and I’m good at it.”

“You must be good at it to be learning calculus in the fifth grade.”

Krystal’s bright blue eyes fix on me. “Kaley’s the one who is wicked smart. She got nearly a perfect score on her SATs. It would have been a perfect 2400 but she said they took off fifty points for her essay being politically incorrect. Still, 2350 is going to be a tough score to beat. I’m not nearly as strong in the verbal as Kaley is.”

How intense Krystal sounds over all this makes me want to laugh, but this is serious to her so I don’t.

“What are the SATs?” I ask.

She stares at me, surprised. “You don’t know anything, do you? The college admission exams. Don’t they have SATs in the UK? In the US if you don’t get a good score you end up in community college.”

“Is that bad?”

“The worst. Kaley got into USC.”

“Is that good?”

“The best. They only take like a handful out of like a gazillion applicants into their film program. It’s the best. She hasn’t told Mom yet so don’t tell her.”

“Why not?”

Krystal shrugs. “She doesn’t have enough money for school. She needs to accept admission by next week or she loses her slot. But I guess it costs even to accept and she’s too pissed off to ask you guys.”

“That’s foolish.”

“Kaley is stubborn.”

Stubborn. Understatement of the century. I stare down at Krystal’s math problem. “You got the answer to the second problem wrong. Just the last step. The rest is perfect. Am I supposed to show you, or just tell you and let you fix it yourself?”

Krystal stares down at her paper. “No, I didn’t get it wrong. You don’t know the answer. Daddy use to say my packets looked like Greek to him. You just wanted to change the subject. You don’t want to talk to me about Kaley.”

Well, that’s true enough. I don’t want to talk to Krystal about Kaley. I want to talk to Krystal about Krystal.

I watch her and admit to myself I’m a little bugged by the Daddy comment. She means Jesse. I am now Dad, but Jesse will always be Daddy. It is how Krystal organizes things in her mind, in a manner that so resembles Chrissie’s internal working. Whatever life tosses at her, if she can organize it then she is comfortable in it.

It shouldn’t bother me—I don’t have a right to expect anything different with these kids—but it does.

“No, you got the answer wrong. I was always good at math. It just made sense to me. The answer is—” I take the pencil to write out the correct answer.

She studies the paper. She erases with a fury. “You’re right. They must have a better education system in the UK. At what grade did you start learning implicit differentiation problems?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. I never went to school.”

Her eyes go wide. “If you didn’t go to school then what did you do? Where did you learn? How did you make friends? Who did you play with?”

I tense. The questions are shot at me like bullets from a machine gun. Why the fuck do kids ask so many questions? I don’t know what the correct amount of sharing with a nine-year-old should be. And fuck, this isn’t just any nine-year-old. She’s my daughter. I feel myself choking up again.

Those wide blue eyes are fixed on me, waiting expectantly.

“I had private tutors at home,” I say in an inflectionless way. “I wasn’t permitted friends and I didn’t play. I worked.”

“Always?”

She says that as if it’s inconceivable to her. Maybe it is. Maybe my life is hugely inconceivable to everyone. It definitely is to me at times.

I nod. “Always.”

“I don’t think I’ll like Grandma Lillian.”

“She’s not so bad,” I find myself saying, amazed by the carefully articulate responses I am learning to force through my lips for my children.

Krystal tucks her math packet back into her bag. She studies me for a while. “I can teach you what you need to learn.”