If my avoiding the question threw Rod off, he doesn’t show it. He just grins up at the sign, and with a wave of his arm, ushers me inside, holding the door for me.
‘Don’t worry,’ he says as we slip through. ‘Ma and Dad aren’t in today. They’ll probably have my ass for it when they find out I came when they weren’t here, but it’s just Bia.’
I feel partly grateful and partly guilty at that bit.
Amato’s is bustling on the inside. Sicily Night is a lively occasion, bursting with crooning music, cheery waiters milling about, tray stands folding and unfolding, and the smell of sauces and meat in the air. Bia, in anI’m-the-bosspower pantsuit, seats us excitedly, and makes sure neither of us leaves hungry in the slightest, serving us the restaurant’s Sicilian specials, including that incredible pasta we’d had at the farewell cookout. And Rod, bless his heart, points to a hallway towards the back of the restaurant in the first five minutes of our sitting down at the table: the bathroom, within potential running distance. If he wasn’t already making this harder and harder for me, I’m struggling now. He’s doing every single thing right, down to my battle plans.
I scan the walls as we eat, photos ranging from black and white to high-res full colour. Generations of family around tables, and then, family at lacrosse games. Older lacrosse games, a man who looks an awful lot like Rod, and then Rodney Wilson himself, along with … is that Genny and Bianca?
‘All three of you played lacrosse?’ I ask him, my attention still piqued by one photo where the siblings take a knee beside one another, sticks planted in the ground. Rod is a tiny elementary schoolkid, but it’s clearly him. Genny and Bia look so alike it takes their different-coloured hair for me to tell them apart.
‘All three of us,’ he confirms. ‘Bia and Genny didn’t really like it.’
‘They didn’t?’
‘Nope. Neither did I, at first. Look.’ He points to a black-framed photo off to the side. It’s still Rod, still no beard, but he’s in football pads and a jersey this time, mid-catch. ‘I think I told you, but it was ball first. Then Coach suggested I give laxa fair shake. Since Dad played as a kid, all three of us felt that initial pressure, the need to abide by the game, which ruined it when he tried getting us into it young. After that fair shake, in high school, I fell for it, hard. Can’t say my sisters did, though.’ He moves to another photo next to his football clipping. ‘Bia went D1 in wrestling.’
‘Holy shit.’ I whistle low. No wonder she’s got the commanding aura down. She has a Regional Championship trophy cradled in her arms in the photo, hair totally braided back. As cool as it all is, it sinks in that this is Rod’s family, all the little things about them. A piece of his heart. ‘She must run her kitchen like a military regiment.’
Rod lets out a laugh that tells me I’m exactly right. ‘I was in there once, like, a year ago. I moved a single pan out of place. I thought she was literally going to kick my ass all the way out the restaurant. She gets her fierceness from Ma, same way Genny gets her compassion. And I guess …’ He shrugs. It’s guarded, as if he’s trying his best to be indifferent. ‘The rest of it comes from Dad. The competition. The need to win.’
‘So your dad …’
‘Didn’t love it when my two-sport athlete high-school career ended in becoming a single parent. He lives vicariously through his kids,’ Rod jokes, although I sense a note of brush-off in his voice. Sore topic. Noted. ‘What about yours?’
Speaking of sore topics. I smile tightly. I remember letting the bit about my dad slip when Declan came by camp. ‘Dad left when I was in elementary school.’
‘Oh.’ Rod looks like he’s got his foot hovering over a land mine labelled Daddy Issues. ‘I’m sorry, Jor. About your mom, then.’
‘Mom …’ I blow a hair from my face. It feels so weird. I’venever talked to anyone like this, as isolated as that might make me sound. I did it to myself. Even with May, it’s like twisting a knife to talk about how I grew up. With Rebecca, it was definitely guarded. But Rod looks at me warmly, with the vibe that even if I chickened out and moved on, he’d take it in his stride, wouldn’t judge me for it. I guess that makes it easier to give him some context. ‘She’s a really hard worker. Maybe too hard a worker.’
He nods. ‘Yeah.’ Something in his eyes, something that feels heard, sparks up. ‘I get that. It’s not easy. Not for her, and definitely not for you, I imagine.’
‘It was … turbulent.’ I manage a weak smile as I recollect things I haven’t shared in years. The dirty boots more often on our feet than by the door. The stack of wrinkled bills on the kitchen table. ‘He left the ranch when it was basically on the verge of failing.’
‘Just you and your mom?’
‘Just us.’ It’s a weird kind of story. I toe the line whenever I so much as think about it. People seem to see it as a pity grab when you talk about things like being unable to make ends meet and eating struggle foods growing up. But Rod is just attentive. There’s zero judgement in his eyes. I continue after a beat of hesitation. ‘Meant most of what I remember was spending time with the horses, doing odd errands here and there. I guess it sounds cooler when I talk about rodeo and bucking broncos, which is great, it was a chance for me to cut loose every so often, but the reason I learned to ride was to do the work. Then I found lax, and it was like my locked-in mentality shifted from ranch to sport.’
‘One thing to another.’ He smiles tightly. The exhaustion ofa single parent, the same exhaustion I saw in my mother, that I still see today, hangs heavy in his eyes. So too does the exhaustion of a child thrust into responsibility from a young age.He lives vicariously through his kids.‘You grow up that way, you know no breaks is a surefire way to burn out. You do it anyway, though, right. Because you don’t know anything else.’
‘Exactly.’ I swallow hard. My next words are bitter on their way out. I’ve been afraid to utter them for years. I thought that it would mean I was blaming my mother for everything that I was burdened with when I was growing up, and I knew that was unfair. She hadn’t asked for my father to cheat, and she certainly hadn’t asked for him to leave us in debt. ‘I had to get it done for her. You know?’
I think for a moment that I’ve said too much. I’ve been scared to admit these things for ages. It shouldn’t be that easy. I absolutely can’t let it be that easy.
Rod, eyebrows furrowed intently, seems to have hung on my every word, though. He takes a beat, and then he locks his big brown eyes directly on mine and says, ‘I know.’
And that is all it takes. Forget the tiptoeing. With those two words, I fall. Hard.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
We Talk About It
Rod
It’s darker than dark out by the time I pull up to the front of Rebecca’s place. Jordan has been unusually quiet the entire way. Oddly, without her weird questions about canoeing and car sickness and the state bird of Massachusetts or something, it felt incomplete. Wrong. I don’t love the silence, but I’m also not going to force her to talk if she doesn’t want to. We unloaded a lot of heavy stuff at dinner. I don’t blame her. I didn’t feel much like talking, either.
Part of me was still hung up on the way her father left. Thinking about the two of them slogging to keep an entire ranch alive after that bastard decided to show his true colours. A mother and herchild.
