“Then I simply don’t understand what warranted you sayingPlease don’t change your mind about me when you meet them.”
Two nights ago, in the middle of watchingJerry Maguireon Liam’s twin bed, he told me, voice careful, “I’m going to Savannah this weekend. It’s the first anniversary of my dad’s death.”
I’d leaned onto an elbow, swept a hand through his soft curls. “Okay,” I said, studying the sudden vacancy of his brown eyes.
“If you aren’t working… I mean, I would understand if you don’t want to, since it’ll be depressing and awkward.”
“Do you want me to come?”
He pulled me over his chest, so my ear was by his heart. It was thrumming. “Yeah, Paige,” he said. “I really do.”
I wasn’t sure feeling touched was even an appropriate internal response, but I had been. And I knew if Liam was hurting, I wanted to help make it—not less. But smoother, maybe. I wanted him to know he’d have someone in the hurt to sit with.
“Then of course,” I said, “I’ll be there.”
Now, we’re fifteen minutes from his childhood home, and ever since we climbed back in the car after topping up on gas and grabbing a few snacks, Liam’s been antsy. Anxious.
“I don’t know how to explain,” he says, the words torn, “how uncomfortable it is. When I visit my family.”
I set my elbow on the console, lean in his direction. “Do you want to try?”
He breathes quietly for a few seconds. “Yeah. But I don’t want to villainize them to you before you meet them.”
I catch his eyes. “I can keep it separate. Your feelings, my first impressions.”
He chews on his lip, but eventually, Liam sighs long, then expels his words in a verbal exorcism. “I’ll hold the baby wrong and never get a second chance. Buy a birthday present that’s a choking hazard. Mention something baseball related that makes my brothers-in-law roll their eyes. Talk about Dad and send my mother to her room in tears for the rest of the afternoon. It’s like I’m walking on eggshells all the time. Like I’m—I don’t know—like they need me tobesomething I haven’t figured out how to be yet.”
After a beat I ask, “Does it feel like they want you to be more like your dad?”
His fingers tense on the steering wheel. “Yes. And I think it breaks their heart that I’m not.”
Beneath his words, I hear the rest of it:It breaks my heart that I’m not like him most of all.
There’s no way Liam has zero of his father’s traits, but he’s only twenty-one. Surely his family isn’t looking for him to become the man they lost?
“He was always there,” Liam goes on. “Anytime one of us had something tricky come up, he’d be there to help navigate it. Meanwhile, I’m not even moving home after graduation. I’ll be absent, possibly more so than I already am. I missed Kayla’s engagement because I was playing in Texas, and Heather’s pissed I didn’t meet her baby until he was three months old. And my mom”—his laugh is dry—“she’s there, but she isn’tthere.”
He shakes his head, turning onto a quiet street lined with magnolias. The houses are uniform, lined up like soldiers on tight lots.The car turns onto a cracked driveway, toward a redbrick house with a pot of dying white flowers on the front porch.
“Nothing that happens over the next two days is going to make me want you less,” I promise him. “We’re here in memory of your dad. Everything else is periphery.”
Liam shifts into park and turns to me. There’s true fear in his eyes. Whatever he was on the brink of saying gets swallowed, and Liam nods, smiling gently before climbing out of the car.
Inside the house, Kayla and Heather stand from the couch, long, blond hair hanging down their backs in beautiful waves. Heather’s son is on her hip, a six-month-old named Benjamin. When Heather sees me trailing after Liam, she freezes.
“Who’s this?” Kayla asks brightly, hugging her brother first, eyeing me over his shoulder.
“This is my…” He turns to me, as if considering. “My girlfriend, Paige.”
“I didn’t know you had a girlfriend,” Heather says, watching me with suspicion. “Or that you were bringing her home.”
Liam stiffens. “I told Mom.”
Heather rolls her eyes and mutters low, “Mom is an unreliable narrator.”
“She didn’t tell you Paige was coming?” Liam asks.
“She did not,” Heather says, “and we planned for you to sleep on the couch. Dad’s old office is a mess right now with Benjamin’s baby stuff.” She says this all in a highly accusatory tone. It would be obvious that Liam is starting out in the Heather Bishop doghouse even if he hadn’t primed me for it.
