“Nah, don’t do that,” he said. “Come to dinner.”
Gabby hesitated. She kind of wanted to go home, honestly: she was tired and peopled-out, and Ryan’s dad’s swings between charm and testiness made her uneasy. She got the distinct impression that the guy didn’t like her, which was unsettling. Parents always liked her.
Still, it was Ryan, and he was asking; Gabby nodded in spite of herself. “Okay,” she said. “Sure.”
RYAN
They ate at a pizza place in a strip mall, fake Tiffany lamps with fruit bowl patterns hanging over all the tables and an ancient Ms. Pac-Man beeping away in the corner. Ryan and Gabby both ordered Cokes, lemon wedges hooked on the sides of the big red plastic cups. Ryan’s dad ordered a beer. “So did Ryan tell you hockey chops run in the family?” he asked Gabby as they slid huge, floppy slices of sausage-and-pepperoni onto their plates.
Gabby nodded. “He did,” she said brightly, in the cheery, artificial voice she used with people she either didn’t know or didn’t like. “Remind me what team you played for?”
“Adirondack Thunder,” Ryan’s dad said, grinning like he always did when his old team came up. “Not exactly the Rangers, I gotta tell you, but we did all right.”
Gabby smiled. She was putting on a good show, but Ryancould tell she was uncomfortable by the way she was shredding her straw paper while she listened, how she was only picking at her food. He couldn’t tell if it was just her usual run-of-the-mill weirdness about being in an unfamiliar place with an unfamiliar person or if it was something else, something more specific to this particular situation. Sometimes when Ryan hung out at Gabby’s house he could forget that he wasn’t one of them, the Harts with their1,001 Crowd-Pleasing Party AppetizersandFriends of the Colson Public Librarytote bags. Now, though, as Ryan watched Gabby watch his dad dig for a piece of pepperoni in his molar with a toothpick, the differences between their families were thrown into sharp relief. He felt enormously protective all of a sudden, though truthfully he wasn’t sure of whom.
He would have tried to smooth it out somehow, made a dumb joke or asked Gabby if she wanted to go play Skee-Ball at the back of the restaurant, but just as he was about to his dad turned to Ryan, his focus like a laser beam across the ragged checkered oilcloth. “So what was going on with you out there, kid?” he asked, leaning back on the hind legs of the rickety wooden chair. “Kind of bit it today, huh?”
Ryan felt Gabby stiffen, like his dad had reached across the table and smacked him; he shrugged, kept his voice light so she’d know the ribbing was no big deal. It just meant his dad was interested, in his hockey game and in him by extension. He actually kind of liked it sometimes. “Yeah, it was a bummer,” Ryan said. “Thanks for coming, though.”
“If you want me to come back, buddy, you’re gonna have to start giving me something to see.” Ryan’s dad shook his head, smirking a little. “You guys looked like a bunch of sad sacks out there, the lot of you. Getting taken down by a bunch of soft-handed, coddled private school kids?”
Ryan resisted the urge to remind his dad that two years ago he’d been one of those soft-handed, coddled private school kids himself. He didn’t mind his dad’s needling—after all, the guy just wanted him to get better—but there was something about him doing it in front of Gabby that made it seem less harmless than Ryan knew it actually was. “They outskated us, I guess,” he said with a sheepish smile.
His dad wasn’t willing to let it go quite so easily, though. “What was that mess there at the end of the second period?” he asked. “You looked like a bunch of damn ballerinas.”
Ryan’s smile dropped a bit. “Well, Coach Harkin said—”
“Coach Harkin doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing,” his dad interrupted. “That guy’s a joke. Your grandma could coach a better hockey team than him.”
“Coach Harkin spends a lot more time watching me play hockey than you do, Dad.”
That was the wrong thing to say; his dad’s face darkened, and Ryan knew he’d probably gone too far. “Well, that sounds peachy for you and Coach Harkin,” he said. “Maybe Coach Harkin wants to pay for all your damn gear from now on, too. Hell, maybe Coach Harkin wants to be your damn father.”
Ryan grimaced, eyes cutting over to Gabby. Shit, this was embarrassing. He needed to dial it back. “Dad,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm and even. “Come on, that’s not what—”
“I’ll tell you, kid, I think I’m about done sitting here listening to this shit from you,” Ryan’s dad said, still scowling.
Ryan realized too late that this was about to go from bad to worse; he was tired, he hadn’t thought fast enough to salvage it. “Look, Dad, I’m sorry,” he started. “You’re right.”
“No, forget it,” his dad said, shoving his chair back, the legs screeching against the sticky wooden floor. “Really. I’ll see you around, kid.”
Then he got up and left.
GABBY
Gabby stared at the entrance to the restaurant for a moment, then looked back at Ryan. “Did your dad just dine and dash?” she asked. It was so far outside her understanding of things that parents did that she sort of couldn’t comprehend it. If his dad had turned into a T. rex, ripped the roof of the pizza place clean off, andeatenit, she would not have been more surprised.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I think he did.”
“Is he coming back?”
Ryan rubbed a hand over his face. “Probably not,” hesaid after a moment. “He does stuff like that sometimes, if we piss him off bad enough. He left my mom and me in Princeton once. We wound up taking New Jersey Transit home.”
“He didwhat?” Gabby said, but Ryan looked so stricken that she immediately moved on. “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath and trying to sound casual, trying to sound for his sake like this was no big deal. “Want to just call your mom, then? She’s probably not that far; she could come back and get us.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, wriggling around to dig in his pocket, then swearing. “Phone’s in my hockey bag,” he said. “In my mom’s car.”
“Use mine,” Gabby said, pulling it out of her backpack. The battery was low—she’d worn it down fiddling around on Instagram at the game—but it had enough juice for a phone call.
