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“Yeah, yeah,” I say, giving him a little push to get him out of my face. He punches my arm, then walks off with Amelia still in one arm. I spot Andi, who is waiting inside the tunnel. She rushes up, hugs him, and laughs when Amelia starts trying to bite her earrings.
I’m watching them as I walk and don’t even notice the woman blocking my path. I stop up short, then look down at her. It takes my brain a second to recognize what I’m looking at.
“Mom?” I ask, stunned.
“Hey,” she says softly. The last time I saw her was almost three years ago when she told me she was going to give things with my dad another shot. That was right before Mia broke things off with me. The lines in her face are a little deeper and the gray in her hair is coming in a little thicker, but she hardly looks changed.
She breaks eye contact, staring down at her feet as tears well up. One falls from the tip of her nose as she wipes at her face. “I’m so sorry, Nolan. I know this doesn’t fix what I did, but I broke things off with your father. Again.” She adds that last word in a way that tells me she’s full of shame.
There’s a part of me that wants to demand answers. I want to know what the hell she was thinking when she took dad back. I want to ask how she could just walk away from me like that and cut off contact.
All my questions feel meaningless, though.
She’s here now. The apology for everything is in the way she’s standing slightly hunched. It’s in the bags under her eyes. It’s in the fact that she’s here. I can’t bring myself to care about much else, and I can’t bring myself to punish her by acting cold when it looks like she’s already punished herself enough.
I pull her into a tight hug. “You okay?” I ask.
She sniffles against my chest, laughing a little. “What did I do to deserve a son like you?”
“I’m always going to be here for you. You’re my fucking mom. You earned that much.”
She squeezes me a little tighter. “Language,” she teases.
“Does he know you’re here?” I ask.
“He knows you guys won. He was watching the series.”
I pull back from the hug, eyebrows furrowing. “What?”
She nods. “He still keeps up with you. I’m not saying this because it’s an excuse for what I did, but your dad still cares about you. He just… He’s proud and stubborn. He has an entire room in his house, though. It’s painted in Vandal colors and he’s got a few of your jerseys framed on the wall.”
An unexpected spike of emotion hits me. I don’t think any part of me wants to try to mend things with my dad. The way he treated mom and abandoned us is probably a chasm too big to ever cross. But I’d also assumed he never thought about me all this time.
I clear my throat, nodding. “Alright,” I say. “Thanks for telling me that.”
She smiles up at me, touching my face with her hand. “So… Are you going to tell me about this girl I’m hearing about?”
I narrow my eyes. “Who have you been talking to?”
“Jake. How do you think I got back here? He says you and Mia are getting pretty serious. Is that true?”
I shrug. “Things have been getting interesting. Still waiting to see where it goes, though.”
“Well, get out of here, then. I just wanted you to know I’m sorry. I avoided your calls and texts because I was ashamed of what I was doing. But the way things ended with your dad always felt like a scar, to me. I think I believed I could close that wound by giving it another try–like enough time had passed to forgive him.”
“Did it work?” I ask.
“Not in the way I was hoping it would, no. But I’ve been realizing being happy isn’t something you have to wait around or hope for. I used to look back on the good days with your dad and think those were the last times I was really, truly happy. Before everything went bad, I mean.”
I nod. “We had good times, though. After him.”
She smiles. “We did. And I need to learn not to regret what happened or wish I could change it. I can be proud of those scars because they shaped me into a stronger person. Just like yours,” she gestures to my lip. “You wanted to make hockey work so bad you didn’t even wait for the stitches to heal to go back on the ice.” She smiles a little at the memory. “And then you took a helmet to the face and broke them open all over again.”
I grin. “Hurt like a bitch.”
My mom cups my face and gives it a little pat, smirking. It’s the same look she used to give me when she’d catch me doing something wrong as a kid–something bad, but not so bad that she couldn’t cover for me. That was our dynamic. Mom wanted what was best, but she also knew we were in it together, and sometimes, having your family’s back is more important than what’s right or wrong. “I’m moving back into a place in Green Hills,” she says. “If you eventually decide you want to come visit, just let me know. I can text you the address.”
“I will visit.”
