“I’m not doing it,” Gabby said, shaking her head stubbornly. “I’m not.”
“We can’t force you,” her mom said, scooping Gabby’s tangled, matted hair up off her shoulders; this time, Gabby didn’t flinch away. “It’s not like when you were little, where we could just pick you up and carry you somewhere you didn’t want to go. You’re a grown-up now; you’re going to college. And you have to be responsible for your own self.”
“I don’twantto,” Gabby said, and started crying all over again. She felt like she could cry forever. She felt like she might never, ever stop. “I’m soscared.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” her dad said, and his voice was so quiet. “We know you are.”
RYAN
Ryan met his dad at a diner up in New Paltz, all peeling tabletops and Naugahyde seat cushions clumsily bandaged with duct tape. Ryan ordered a burger and a heaping side of onion rings, choosing not to say anything about the fact that the guy had been half an hour late. He’d showed up, hadn’t he? That was something. “How you doing?” his dad asked, sliding into the booth and ordering a cup of coffee from the waitress. “Your summer good?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, thoughgoodwasn’t really the adjective he would have chosen to describe it. “Pretty good.”
“Good,” his dad echoed. “Look, I’m sorry again about the graduation thing.”
“Oh, no.” Ryan shook his head. Even though it was just at the beginning of the summer it felt like it had happened to somebody else entirely. He kind of didn’t care anymore. His dad hadn’t shown up when he said he was going to, but his dad hardly ever showed up when he said he was going to. Somewhere along the line, Ryan had realized that no matter what he did—or didn’t do—that was probably never going to change. “It’s cool.”
Ryan took a deep breath. “I have something to talk to you about, and I wanted to do it in person,” he said, looking at his dad across the booth. He was wearing a faded Sunoco T-shirt Ryan remembered from when he was little; there wasa day’s worth of graying beard on his chin. “I’m not going to go to Minnesota.”
“Ha!” Ryan’s dad barked a laugh loud enough that the waitress looked over, then slapped the tabletop so hard it rattled the forks. “Jesus Christ, I thought you were going to tell me you were gay.” He shook his head then, like he was only now absorbing what Ryan actuallyhadsaid to him. “Why the fuck not?”
So Ryan explained as best he could: the headaches, the forgetting. How inexplicably pissed he felt all the time. When he was finished, Ryan’s dad frowned at him over his patty melt.
“Is this coming from your mother?” he asked.
Ryan looked at him blankly. “No,” he said, “it’s coming from me.”
“Because I’m just saying, this sounds like the kind of thing that’s coming from your mother. You’re cranky around the house, so she says you can’t play hockey?”
“It’s not like that,” Ryan explained. “It’s just—”
“You know how many times I got cracked in the head, when I was playing?” Ryan’s dad continued. “You know how many of my teeth got knocked out? A shattered hand when I was twenty, a broken wrist. And you’re quitting because you’ve got a headache?”
Ryan felt himself blushing now. “It’s kind of more than a headache—”
“I knew you were soft, kid, but Jesus. Your mom really did a job on you.”
“This isn’t about Mom!” Ryan said, more loudly than he meant to. “It’s about me. I know that’s hard for you to recognize, maybe, but for once in my entire life, this is about me.”
His dad’s eyes narrowed across the table. “What’s that supposed to mean, exactly?”
“It means—” Ryan broke off, let a breath out. This was humiliating. “It means I’ve done a lot of stuff in my life to, like, try and make you proud of me, or whatever. And—”
“What’s wrong with wanting to make your family proud of you?” his dad interrupted.
“No, that’s not what I’m—” Ryan blew out a breath. He wasn’t a good arguer; his dad knew how to twist things, to make them seem different in the telling than they’d actually been. Abruptly, he wished Gabby was here. For all her anxiety and panic, he’d never met anybody less afraid of a fight.
Thinking about Gabby gave him a strange burst of confidence; Ryan lifted his chin. “I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get your attention,” he said, voice surprisingly steady. “And playing hockey was a big part of that. And I’m not saying I don’t love hockey, because I do. Ido. But playing at school and hoping it’s going to get you to show up more is just—” He shook his head. “It’s never going to work. I’m never going to be important to you, not really. I mean, you literally didn’tcall me on my birthday last year. I can’t do it anymore. I don’t even want to. And I’m definitely not going to bash my own brain in trying.” He made himself look across the table. “You haven’t actually been such a good dad, Dad.”
“And you’ve been an ungrateful little sponge, mostly,” his dad said, with an ease that took Ryan’s breath away. “Neither one of us got what we wanted, I guess.”
“Okay,” Ryan managed after a moment. “Well. I came here to tell you I wasn’t going to play hockey anymore for a while, and now I told you I’m not going to play hockey anymore for a while, so.” He tossed his napkin on the table, slid out of the booth. “Being my dad and all, I guess you can buy me this lunch.”
He headed across the diner and out into the parking lot, felt the sun on the back of his neck. He kept waiting for the pain and the anger to hit him, like the time between the moment you stub your toe and the moment you actually feel it, but as Ryan unlocked the door it occurred to him that he felt better than he’d felt all summer. He actually felt kind of...light.
And there was only one person in the whole entire world he wanted to tell about it.
He got in the car and stuck the key in the ignition. He rolled down the windows, headed home.
