“Your own Thanksgiving plans or we’re having a pop quiz, please,” I interrupt.
The kids all groan, but they quit peppering June with questions and start talking about things in town instead.
The parade coming up the day after Thanksgiving, which half of them will apparently be missing. Our football team is still in the playoffs, so everyone’s heading to that game before our weeklong Thanksgiving break. The tour of lights that’s normally out at Tony’s place will be hosted at an alternate ranch this year instead, and anyone still in town isdefinitelygoing to that.
When the bell rings, nobody has anything to gather because no one’s gotten anything out. I’m behind on grading, which will cut into my time with Maisey this week, but she has to sleep sometime.
And she’s helping friends on the PTA with side projects for all the holiday festivities coming up in Hell’s Bells.
I’ll get the grading done.
June’s the last person to leave my classroom, which is unusual.
She pauses at my desk, and for a second, I think she’s going to lose the nerve to say whatever it is she wants to say.
But she doesn’t. “I can handle that my dad’s dating again. Abigail wasn’t wrong. He can’t take care of himself. He never could.”
Warning bells are going off in my head.
I don’t like it, but I know these warning bells.
They’re hitting a spot inside me that I don’t like to remember and I don’t like to let other people see.Flint, take care of your father. I don’t feel good this week, and you know he can’t take care of himself.
“You gonna be okay with him for a week?” I ask her.
She rolls her eyes. “He’s my dad.”
“That’s the most nonanswer answer ever.”
Her brows knit together, and she scrunches her nose, then quickly schools her face into a blank expression.
Still picking at one of her fingernails, though.
“You’re not obligated to like your parents, June.”
“That’s a weird thing for you to say.”
I lean back and shrug at her. “I ran away from home when I was your age because my father was a prick, my mom struggled with depression, and I finally realized a sixteen-year-old shouldn’t be responsible for managing a household with people who didn’t even want him there.”
She blinks twice at me.
I keep talking like I don’t want to throw up.
Still isn’t something that’s easy to say out loud, but if I oweanykid the truth, it’s this one.
“You’re allowed to feel how you feel about things that are out of your control,” I tell her. “And picking your parents is always out of your control.”
“How do you know? How do you know there isn’t, like, this soul nursery in heaven or wherever, and you get to pick the parents you want?”
“If there is, you must’ve known something great’s coming. Wouldn’t have picked them otherwise, right?”
She stares at me like I’m an alien.
“Look, I get theWoe is meroutine to get sympathy from your friends. I know you haven’t seen your dad in months. I know you’re probably excited in a lot of ways. But you know if you don’t want to go, your mom will throw down and take half the state with her to give you what you want, right?”
“How do you know that?”
Maisey’s voice rings somewhere down the hallway, cheerful as she tells a kid to take a cookie. I slide a glance at June as her lips flatline and then tip up in a reluctant smile.
