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“When’s the last time you tried talking to him about her?” Summer asks.
I huff, my brow bouncing up trying to think of how long it’s been. “Years,” I can only answer with a shake of my head.
Summer lets out a soft, sympathetic hmm. “Maybe it’s time to try again. Maybe, after all this time, if he knows you still want to talk about her, want to remember her with him … maybe now he’ll want to, too.”
Doubt sits heavy low in my stomach. But … maybe.
“It must have been hard for him, too,” Summer continues. “Sometimes in hard situations it’s … well, hard to know what to do. It can seem like there are no right answers.”
This girl is just too smart, kind, insightful. Over the years I’ve felt so much resentment about how I feel my father doesn’t honor Mom’s memory the right way … maybe for him, no way seemed like the right way. And after a while, he just settled into ignoring the feeling of loss that lingered so heavily, so palpably in our house and in our lives.
I mean, shit, can I say that I’m the best at expressing my feelings? I sure as hell can’t.
I haven’t even been able to bring myself to tell the girl standing next to me right now that I’m head over fucking heels for her, for real. That I don’t want us to end when the semester’s over. That I want us to drop all pretenses of this being fake. That I want that word erased from both of our vocabularies.
“You’re going to see him this weekend when you have that away game, right?” Summer asks.
“Yeah,” I nod. We’re traveling down to Boston to play Boston College this Saturday—the team I just transferred from.
“Maybe you can talk to him then about all this.”
My chest expands as I take in a long, thoughtful breath. On a slow exhale, I say, “Maybe that’s not a bad idea.”
39
HUDSON
“Marcus, though, you know he’s weak behind the net. When it looks like he’s going to circle around and try to get a wraparound goal in through the other side, you know he’s really setting up a backward pass to someone behind him …”
My dad goes on and on breaking down the game against Boston that we just won. We skated off the ice with a 3-1 final score, something to be proud of against a team like Boston.
We were firing on all cylinders tonight, especially defensively. Rhys and Lane have worked out whatever kinks they had for the first couple weeks to become a brutal shut-down duo.
On offense, Tuck’s speed and puck handling skills, Carter’s unpredictability, and Sebastian’s strategic mind are an onslaught on any opponent’s net.
I can feel in my bones that this team is going to go far this year. The only question is if we make it to the Frozen Four.
But truthfully? I’m not really thinking about hockey right now. I’m tuning out my dad’s lecture, and not for the usual reasons.
Instead of celebrating at the hotel bar with the rest of the guys, I suggested to my dad that we go out to a diner to have dinner. He was a little taken aback, as it’s not exactly characteristic of me to make such a suggestion. But he agreed.
Of course, from the moment we got seated, he’s been talking nothing but hockey nonstop. But that’s not the topic I wanted to have some one-on-one time with him to discuss.
“Remember when we went to the beach when I was ten?” I interject right in the middle of my dad saying something about how he can’t get a read on Carter’s style. “When Mom made you take those surfing lessons with us?”
A smile tugs at my lips from the memory. Dad being so confident that he wouldn’t even need lessons even though he never as much as held a surfboard in his life, because, in his words, hockey had made his balance elite, and balance a pair of skates should translate to balance on the waves.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t.
Dad couldn’t keep the board under his feet for more than three seconds, while my mom was a natural.
That ended up being the last vacation we ever took as a family.
Some sadness twists in my chest at the thought, but it’s a dull twinge, the happiness of the memory rising above it.
I can almost feel the balmy warmth of the sun against the back of my neck from that day, learning to keep my balance sitting on the board while the waves gently swelled under me.
My dad’s jaw hangs open as my reminiscence stopped him mid-sentence. I look in his eyes, and I could swear I see something there. Some glimmer. His mouth closes, and maybe I’m imagining this, too, but I think I spot just the slightest twitch at the side of his mouth.
