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“Oh. Yeah, they’re all pretty big. And people around here really like their privacy.”
I turned my flashlight to the left side of the road, and Russell took the right. “Andy!”
“Andy!” Russell called. We both stopped, listening. I was straining my ears for the sound of a small terrier barreling toward us, but when nothing came, we started moving again.
“He does this a lot,” Russell said, after we’d been walking in silence for a while.
“Runs away?”
“Yeah. My dad rescued him a few months ago, and Andy’s been trying to escape ever since. He’s brought trainers in, specialists, dog behavioralists—nobody can seem to get him to stop. Tidbit never goes anywhere, so my dad wasn’t prepared for this.”
I nodded—it was almost impossible to imagine Tidbit running away. Or running, period.
“And usually he doesn’t do this more than once a day. But I guess he saw his chance.”
“Has he ever come back on his own? When he’s run away before?”
“No. We’ve always found him. And he always seems really happy to see us, and thrilled to be back home again. It’s almost like he wants his freedom, but then gets turned around and can’t find his way back.”
“It seems like he’s got a pretty good setup at your dad’s. You wouldn’t think he’d want to run away from all that.”
“I guess if someone wants to leave, you can’t convince them otherwise. Even if they’re running away from something pretty great. Anyway, after three escape attempts, my dad changed the dog’s name.”
“To Andy?” Russell nodded. “I don’t get it.”
“Well, his full name is Andy Dog-fresne.”
It took me a moment, but then it clicked into place. “From The Shawshank Redemption?” I asked, and he nodded again. “My dad would love that. It’s his favorite movie.”
“My dad’s, too.”
“Really?”
“I think it’s every dad’s favorite movie.”
“I know, I just…”
“He is just a dad,” Russell said quietly after a few moments, like he’d understood what I’d been thinking. “I mean, despite…” He made a vague gesture, like it could encompass all of it—the modern art, the Grammys, the helicopter, the mansion. He sighed. “I know it can be a lot.”
“Is that why?” I stopped walking and turned to him, lowering my flashlight so it made a small circle of light on the pavement. Russell stopped too.
“Why—what?”
“Why you lied to me.” I could hear the hurt running through my voice like a crack. “Why you didn’t tell me about him, or who you really were, or any of it.”
Russell let out a shaky breath and looked down at the ground. “I think at first I just wanted… to not have to go into all of it. To not have to be Wylie Sanders’s son, just for a little bit. When people find out, they look at you different, even if they don’t mean to. And then when I thought you might—like me—” He glanced up for a second, meeting my eye before looking away again. “I was worried that if you found out, it might change things.”
“It wouldn’t have.”
“But it did.”
“Yeah, because you’d been lying to me about it! If you’d just told me from the beginning—”
“You think it would have been the same?” Russell raised his eyebrows at me. “Really?”
I opened my mouth to reply yes, absolutely, but then stopped. If I’d known the cute boy at the bus station was the son of a rock star, it would have changed things. I would have been dazzled by it. And it would have made everything a little more about his dad, and a little less about him. “Well—I certainly wouldn’t have talked about your dad so much, if I’d known.”
“I actually liked hearing you talk about the music. What you really thought. Most people don’t tell me things like that. At least not to my face.”
