“There are city leagues I can join in Nashville. I’ll still get to play a little.”
“I hate that you’re moving so far away. What am I supposed to do once you’re gone?” My voice cracked.
She tucked her head against my shoulder. “There’s still the chance I’ll be really crummy and everyone in Nashville will hate me.”
I smothered a laugh. “You forget I’ve already heard you. You’ll be amazing, Sel.”
“You’ll visit, and I’ll come home all the time. It’ll be like I’m not even gone.”
But she would be. So much was changing. I already missed her and she hadn’t even left yet. Tomorrow she’d be back at Whitney’s, but this night was still ours.
“I just realized what you would have done,” I said.
“What?”
“If you’d been the first to know about Brandon instead of me. You know that scene inA Christmas Storywhere Ralphie blames his friend for teaching him the wordfudge, and then Ralph’s mom is on the phone with his friend’s mom, and you hear this screaming through the handset, ‘What? What!What!’” I tried to whisper the shrill screaming. We both suppressed a grin. “We’d have all heard you screaming and we’d have had to have the whole thing out, right then. That’s what you’d have done.”
“Probably,” Selena admitted, and I could hear the smile she still wore. “So you forgive me?”
“Yeah.”
“And Dad?”
My lingering smile faded. “I don’t know. Do you?”
“I want to. I don’t want to feel this way about him, you know?”
I shoved her. Not hard enough to push her off the bed or anything, but enough so she’d feel it. “Iknow. How do you think I’ve been feeling all this time?”
“Ow! Well, I hate it.”
“Me too.”
“And I can’t even begin to think abouthim.”
Brandon.
“Except…” she went on “…I hope he changes his mind. I still want Dad to get to meet his son. Is that wrong?”
I could feel Selena’s eyes on me, waiting for my answer. I knew how she felt, that undeniable longing for Dad and Brandon to see each other, even if it was only one time.
CHAPTER 47
Dad’s back was to me when I entered the kitchen early the next morning. It was the first time since finding Brandon that I’d willingly sought out my dad. Silently, I pulled the box of Bisquick from the pantry and a mixing bowl from the cabinet next to the sink, then grabbed eggs and milk from the fridge. I sat down at the kitchen island and started mixing the pancake batter while Dad lit two burners on the stove and dropped a pat of butter on the griddle he pulled out. A minute later I was ladling batter, silver dollar–size for me and Selena and larger ones for Dad. Mom only drank coffee in the mornings.
As I watched for the little bubbles to appear and tell me it was time to flip, I remembered a much younger me, still in footie pajamas, lifted in Dad’s arms as he showed me the exact right time to flip pancakes. He’d always been my coach, on the field or in the kitchen and everywhere else.
“State is in less than a week,” I said, turning the first pancake while Dad began frying up bacon beside me.
“Yep.”
“I think we have a real shot. Sadie’s pitching is almost better than Selena’s at this point.”
“She’s been working hard,” Dad said. “Hard work always pays off.”
Maybe that was a dig and maybe it wasn’t. But it felt like one, since I obviously hadn’t been working as hard as I could have been these past weeks. I paused in the act of flipping the last pancake. “I have worked hard at this for years even though we both know I’ll never be as good as Selena, but you know what? She never cared half as much. Maybe your son would have been the perfect blend of talent and determination, but with me and Selena, we only each got one.” I whirled away from the stove, taking my plate of pancakes to the island with me. In the silence that followed, all I heard was the sizzling bacon and the occasional pop from the coffeepot. Dad stayed quiet until a pile of bacon joined the pancakes in front of me and he sat on the stool beside me.
“When I was eleven, I lived with the Scudder family. Mom, dad, two kids a little younger then me. They were nice people, not overly affectionate, but they never hurt me.”
