Breathing before a run, breathing before a fight, breathing before you have to go back in a room and pretend you weren't just crying in the bathroom.
I don't know what I resent more, some days.
That she left me, or that every useful thing I know about surviving her leaving—she taught me.
Pops is going to be worried if I don't call him back.
He called twenty minutes ago, but he won't call again.
Pops doesn't chase. He calls once.
You call back or you don't, and if you don't, he remembers it and waits. He doesn't mention it when you finally show up, but you know he clocked it.
I pick the phone up off the passenger seat.
Face it up.
My thumb hesitates over Mom for a split second before I scroll past her to Pops.
I breathe and press call.
It rings half a ring before he answers.
"Baby girl."
His voice is coffee-rough and soft at the edges, the way it gets in the mornings, and for one second I’m eight years old and sitting on the kitchen counter while he makes me pancakes shaped like horses, and the whole house smells like bacon and I don’t know anything about what's coming.
"Hey, Pops."
"You drive safe?"
"Yes, sir. I'm not far out."
"Second place, huh?"
"First."
A pause, then a low laugh, the kind he does when he's proud and doesn't want to say it so loud that the universe hears and takes it back.
"Damn right, baby girl."
"Yeah. Damn right."
"Jaeger run clean?"
"Like a dream."
"He’s a good boy."
We sit there, him in Sharp and me at a Valero outside Brady, breathing at each other.
Neither of us are saying the other thing. The thing we've been not saying for months.
"Come home," he says.
"I'm coming."
"Marlena's got breakfast. Biscuits and gravy. Bacon for the boys. Presley drove up last night from College Station. Cal is walking. He's been walking for three weeks, but she's still going to make you watch him walk like it's the first time, so brace yourself."
