I blink against the sun, the shock, and my parents on my front porch. My mother’s arms are open, my father stands behind her.
“Mom, Dad. Hi.” I step back, grabbing my shirt off a chair and pulling it over my head. I’d been ready to go for a run when they knocked.
“Sorry about dropping in on you,” my dad says, looking around the small living room.
“I don’t mind. You’re always welcome.” I watch my mom take in her surroundings. Her lips pinch disapprovingly, obviously unimpressed with where I’m living.
I don’t blame her. It’s not a home. It’s a place to stay.
“This is nice,” she forces, and I laugh, giving her a ‘come on’ look. She makes an exasperated face and chuckles. “Ok, fine. But it’s not that it’s not nice. It’s just… sort of…”
“Boring?” I supply.
“Undecorated,” she says diplomatically.
“Decorating hasn’t been high on my priority list.”
The three of us stand looking at each other, then avert our gazes to something boring and undecorated around the room. Maybe they’re realizing this is the first time they’ve been to visit me since I moved up here. Maybe they feel bad about that. I think I would, if I were a parent.
“So…” I clear my throat. “Not to be rude, but why are you here?”
“We’re taking a road trip up into Colorado, then over to Lake Tahoe. Probably through to the coast, and we’ll drive down to San Diego.” He adjusts his ball cap. “Trying not to get bored in retirement, honestly.” His eyes go to my mom. She gives him a frosty look. “She’s getting sick of me.”
“I’m getting sick of you rearranging my house,” she says.
“Our house,” my dad amends.
“Hmph,” she growls.
“Can I get you something to drink?” I ask, before this can devolve into what looks like a well-traveled argument for them.
“Little early for drinking,” my dad jokes, and my mom smacks his arm. “Doug, don’t make jokes like that around Gabriel.”
“It’s ok, Mom,” I assure her, walking into the kitchen and retrieving three glasses from a cabinet. I fill them with iced tea. “It doesn’t bother me.”
“Are you, uh…” She accepts the tea from me, holding tightly to it. “Are you, um…” She coughs, uneasy.
“I’m not drinking, if that’s what you’re trying to ask. I haven’t had a drink since the night of the DUI.”
She blinks at me, taken aback at my easy use of the word. She never refers to it by what it really was, choosing instead to call it my ‘trouble’ or ‘problem.’
She recovers, and asks, “Do you keep track of the days? Like other…people?”
“Other alcoholics?” I raise my eyebrows. “No, I don’t. I don’t want to know the exact number. It’s irrelevant to me.” I look my parents in the eyes, first my mother and then my father. Maybe it’s the way Avery encouraged me while she was here, or the fact she faced her own issues with her father, but I feel stronger under my parents’ gaze than I have in a very long time. “I don’tstruggle with wanting a drink, either, in case that’s your next question. I go to AA, and some people there say every single day they fight the urge to have a drink. But I don’t. Ever, at all. I damn near ruined my life. I injured somebody. Me, a person who swore to protect people.” A lot of what happened still feels surreal, even though I lived every nightmarish moment of it.
My mom’s pursed lips tremble. My dad nods slowly. He hardly said a word to me after everything happened. In some ways, his disappointment in me runs deeper than my mother’s. She wears hers on the outside, like a badge on her shirtsleeve, alongside her grief over Nash. With my dad, it’s more something in the air around him, a slow leak.
He sips his tea. “There’s a way to get you back out there. Back on a crew.” He sets down his glass and leans forward, elbows propped on knees. “They’re assembling a hotshot crew made up of ex-cons. You’ll be right on the fire line, face to face with fire on the ground.” Excitement trickles into his voice. He misses the thrill, the feeling. I understand that. But I don’t want it for myself.
“I don’t want to be a firefighter, Dad.” These are words I should have said a long, long time ago. If I’d been honest with them, and myself, maybe I could’ve avoided all of it.
The muscles near his jaw flex, and he crosses his arms. “What are you going to do instead? Hide up here in the mountains? Slowly run out of the money Avery set aside for you?” He blows out a heavy breath. “You’re good at fighting fires, Gabriel. You have a natural talent for it, and you’re wasting it.”
The unspoken portion of his sentence twists like a knife in my heart.You’re throwing away what Nash wanted more than anything.
For so long, I tried to give my parents what they’ve been missing since Nash died. A son like the one they lost. I can’t do it anymore. I shouldn’t have done it in the first place.
I push back from the table. “I want to show you something.”
