Father's Day

Connie is leafing through a catalog at Whit's End, torn between a tie and a pair of multi-dimensional neon socks for her father's Father's Day present. She has already bought the socks, and she is busy trying to talk Whit into advancing her the money for the tie when a familiar voice cuts in behind her: "The perfect Father's Day gift would be a hug from my little girl." Bill Kendall has turned up in Odyssey without a word of warning, in town for one night on his way to New York, where Connie's grandmother is not doing well. He wants Connie to fly out with him, and when her mom stops by the shop, the divorced Kendalls are so pleasant with each other - a dinner invitation and all - that Connie decides something must be stirring. Whit warns her not to read anything into it. She doesn't listen. By the time her parents arrive for dinner, she has turned the upstairs room at Whit's End into Papa Luigi's, the Italian restaurant the family loved when she was little, complete with music, breadsticks, grape-juice "vino," and Connie herself in a fake mustache playing Papa Luigi. June's diagnosis is swift: "Her little red choo-choo has finally chugged around the bend."

Her parents gently tell her that getting back together is impossible, and Bill decides this is the moment to explain just how impossible. He has remarried. Her name is April - not Lindsay, the woman he left June for; he left Lindsay for Carol, and Carol for April. Connie is stunned, then furious. He got married without even telling her, and she is not going to New York or anywhere else with him. She storms out, and June observes that one thing about Bill has not changed: he still knows how to hurt the people closest to him.

That night June sits with Connie in her room, oddly calm. She got over her anger at Bill's antics long ago, she says, though "when you've loved someone, the hurt never really goes away." What you can do is keep doing what you're supposed to do and realize that life goes on. That leaves Connie chewing on whether the trip to New York is one of the things she is supposed to do.

In the morning she finds her dad and April at breakfast in the hotel restaurant. She delivers the tie, asks Bill why he is only attracted to women named after months ("I just marry the women who are named after months," he corrects), and apologizes for the way she spoke the night before. April graciously slips away so father and daughter can talk, and Connie tells him she loves him, but the rose-colored glasses are off for good; from now on she has to see things the way they really are. She will go to New York to see her grandmother - on her own flight, meeting him there - and maybe, she suggests, the three of them could see a show together. Bill assumes she means Grandma. She means April.