Mom: Just ran into Anika at the farmers' market. She’s very excited to see you again.
I groan and drop my head back against the locker.
"What now?" Luka asks, smirking.
"My mom's officially out of control."
He smirks and then heads to the showers.
Later that night, I'm stretched out on my couch, half-watching a rerun of some cooking show, a bowl full of chicken alfredo sitting on my chest, when my phone rings.
This time, it's my dad.
I answer immediately. "Hey, old man."
"Hey yourself, hotshot." His voice is gruff but warm, and I can hear the TV in the background—probably a game. "Your mother told me to call and remind you to cut your hair before the wedding."
"She called me this morning to guilt-trip me about being presentable for a girl. She probably bribed Corey’s fiancée into changing the seating arrangement to put me next to a woman I haven’t seen since before I hit puberty.”
He laughs—deep and familiar. "Yeah, well. You know how she is. She just worries that you’re not going to settle down. She wants the best for you, bud."
"I know."
There's a pause, comfortable and easy.
"How're you feeling?" I ask.
"Fine. The therapist is a pain in my ass, but I'm fine."
"Good. That's what we pay her for."
"You don't pay her for anything. We've got insurance."
"Dad—"
"Scottie." His voice firms up, just a little. "We're fine. I mean it. Stop worrying about us and focus on your season. Use the money to go on one of those outrageously expensive vacations to the Maldives that your teammates are taking. Or buy that muscle car we’ve always talked about buying and fixing up. Don’t spend that hard-earned money on me."
I want to argue. I want to tell him that I can't stop worrying, that every time I think about him stuck in that chair, something in my chest clenches so hard I can't breathe.
But I don't.
He doesn't want to hear it. And because I know he's proud… too proud to admit that things are hard, even when they are.
So I just say, "Yeah. Okay." Because I already have intentions of padding the next check I send to my mother.
"Good. Now go get some sleep. You've got a game coming up."
"Yes, sir."
He hangs up, and I'm left staring at the ceiling, the blue glow of the TV flickering across the room.
I think about my mom's texts. About the wedding I'm dreading and the hockey season that I'm not. I think about my father being too proud and remember the sting of Anika breaking up with me in the halls of our middle school, thinking that my life was over. But it wasn’t. It was just starting, and to think that I hadn’t even thought of her since middle school until this morning, when my mother brought her up.
It’s funny what you used to care about and what matters to you fifteen years later.
I think about how, now, at twenty-seven, I still feel too young to settle down, though, for the last five years I've had a steady stream of wedding invitations coming in from all my friends back in Whitefish. Most of my buddies are grown and married, starting families of their own or are currently getting divorced. It’s crazy how fast life moves.
It’s not like I don’t miss family life—growing up in a loud house of five of us kids. And my mother is right… Having someone to come home to after a rough practice, a home game loss, a long week on the road sounds nice. Having someone to share a life with instead of eating a bowl of pasta on the couch alone on a Wednesday evening watching TV, icing my ankle, wouldn’t be the worst thing.
