Page 16 of What Maple Heard

I asked her out because I wanted to sleep with her. I will be honest about that. That was the complete reason, one hundred percent, no other motivation.

And then we went on that first date and it turned into something I had not budgeted for.

She had put everything on the table in the first hour. No warmup, no careful impression management, just — here it is. The father who drank and hit. The debts. The night her sorry excuse of a father tried to sell her virginity to a debt collector. The night she ran with River on her hip and sixty-two dollars and no plan except away. She told me about her years as a pole dancer in Vegas and how that was the one thing that was the biggest blessing in her life. It gave her back her confidence and helped her to slowly shape the life she wanted. By the time she told me about the move to Chestnut Ridge and building the studio from nothing, I was already half way in love with her. I just didn’t know it then.

She told me all of it the way you tell someone directions. Matter-of-fact. No self-pity. No performance of strength. Just: this is what happened, this is what I did, here we are.

I had never once in my life met anyone like her.

The horror of what she’d been through would have broken most people. It hadn’t broken Maple. She went through fire, and came out gold. When she talked about River acting up, about the fear of losing him to the wrong crowd, I wanted to reach across the table and take her hand. I wanted to say: I’m here. I’ll help. You’re not doing this alone.

I hadn’t said any of that. Instead I had noted it quietly, tucked it away, and at the same time felt the familiar whisper in the back of my head without even knowing it was there: she’d never be accepted. In my mother’s world. In my father’s expectations. In the Sonnenberg name and everything that came with it.

I had gone to my parent’s house from that date smiling in a way I couldn’t control. Mom had seen me the moment I walked in and asked what I was so happy about. I had waved her off. But I was lighter than I’d felt in years, just from three hours of sitting across from Maple Brooks.

Then my father had come in and they’d started talking about the quarterly projections and the next charity gala and who was being seated where, and I slid back into my life like water finding its level. And at the back of my mind, the whisper: she would never fit here.

What kind of man doesn’t question that?

What kind of man feels what I felt and then files it under not practical and keeps going?

You know the kind.

When Maple invited me, I mean, when she accepted my clumsy request to attend River’s first game, I was extremely nervous. Genuinely, actually nervous in a way I hadn’t been since I was a kid. Which was absurd because I was thirty-nine years old and had run eight-figure negotiations without breaking a sweat, and I was nervous about a fourteen-year-old’s opinion of me.

But I needed River to like me. I understood now why that had mattered so much. It wasn’t just about Maple. It was because River was real to me. The kid I’d heard about on our first date, the kid for whom Maple had upended her entire life — I had wanted to know him. I had wanted him to know me.

After the game, River had given me the teenage attitude. Arms crossed, phone out, the full defensive package. I talked soccer at him methodically, question after question, because it was the only door I could see and I was going to knock on it until something happened.

And something happened at the pizza place.

River slid into the booth across from me, phone already out, not looking at me.

I said: “Back four or back three?”

Nothing.

“Against a high press,” I said. “Back four or back three?”

The phone lowered. Just slightly. “Back three. Obviously.”

“Why obviously?”

And that was it. Twenty minutes later the phone was face-down on the table and River was using the saltshaker to demonstrate a defensive line collapse while I moved the pepper grinder to show the press.

He scored a point. He grinned.

I thought: I know this kid.

I had never had a sibling. I had wanted one my entire childhood. I had wanted a brother specifically, someone to do stupid things with and argue with and stand next to. I had not found that until I sat across from a fourteen-year-old in a pizza place talking about corner kicks.

And Maple’s face. I looked up from the conversation at some point and saw her face across the table, and she had been watching us with an expression I had never seen on her before. Not happy exactly. More like: relieved. Like a weight she’d been carrying alone had been shared, just slightly, just enough.

I let that down.

I let all of it down with one drunken, cowardly conversation.

Because here was the truth I had been sitting with for two weeks: every word I had said that night was what I was already thinking my mother would say if I got serious about Maple. My mother’s voice, my father’s expectations, the Sonnenberg family rulebook that I had been absorbing since childhood, coming out of my mouth because Kyle had asked me what I was already subconsciously scared of admitting to myself, and the whiskey made the distance between what my parents would say and what I said disappear entirely.