“I miss him,” she says, and it’s a bullet to my chest.
“I do too,” I admit. My voice is low and my throat is tight. I don’t let myself go here often. But if she’s going to bring him up, there’s not much I can say.
“I think about him every day,” she says. “Little things remind me of him. When I see people wearing Bills jerseys.”
“He did like football.” I almost smile. “Even though Dad said it was a waste of time.”
“Your father thinks anything not related to work is a waste of time. Like cars.”
That burns. It’s one thing to mention Nik. It’s another to mention Nik and cars.
“He shouldn’t have died,” I say before I realize I’m even saying it.
“It was terrible and reckless,” she says but I shake my head.
I set my chop sticks down because my appetite is suddenly gone. Not surprising.
“It wasn’t an accident. I really wish people would stop saying that.”
“Whatever happened, it’s in the past,” she says. “We cannot dwell on it.”
It makes me angry. Because for me, it’s not in the past. When a kid dies, a kid who never sought to hurt anyone, a kid with so much heart and ambition and life in his veins, the truth can’t just be buried with the body.
“Nik was supposed to bepakhan,” I say, and my mother looks at me. Her face is soft but her eyes are stern.
“What Nik was supposed to be then doesn’t change what you are supposed to be now,” she tells me.
Fuck. I could really do without the fortune cookie speak.
“What I’m supposed to be?” I echo.
“You are more of a born leader than you think, Ransome. I knew that from day one. You just have to follow the path in front of you and find that in yourself.”
“I’m following the path,” I say. “I am doing everything I am supposed to do. I am following all of the rules. So much so that I am bound to a woman I don’t love.”
“You are also bound to a woman youdolove,” she says. “Even after the baby is born.”
“I don’t have the option of divorce,” I say.
“Maybe so.” She sets down her chopsticks. “But you don’t get to decide who your heart wants either.”
38
AMARA
There are two things I love in the morning: coffee and… well. You know.
And right now, I am getting neither. Not quickly anyways. I understand that French presses are fancy and therefore fancy people have them, but I’ll never understand why anyone actually wants one. And since the regular coffee machine seems to be on the fritz (because what isn’t broken in my life?) I am at the mercy of a “coffee maker” that takes no less than thirty minutes to make me one damn cup of coffee.
I am in the middle of googling how to use a French press when I hear the keypad on the door making noises. A moment later, it rings green and opens.
Ransome walks inside. He’s dressed like he always is, all black and like he’s got some swanky place to be. But I assume, since it’s 8 A.M. on a Saturday, that he’s got no place to be.
“Good morning, Miss Parker,” he says as he rounds the counter.
That’s when I realize he has coffee in his hand from my favorite shop. He hands it to be and I just stare.
“Good morning,” I echo, and it almost comes out as a question. “This feels… backwards.”
