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“Sure, we can do that after dinner,” I say.
“You’ll have to unload all the china from it.”
“No problem,” Cade says.
“Thanks, boys. We’ll just be waiting on dinner.”
She goes back into the house and Cade gives me an amused grin.
“Thanks for helping with the cabinet,” I say.
“No worries.”
He’s still smiling like he’s in on a joke I’m not.
“What’s so funny?” I ask him.
“It’s funny that you usually live the life of a pro athlete and now you’re catering to two hilarious old ladies and their every need.”
I finish my beer and shake my head. “Yeah, real funny, asshole. I never imagined myself helping Aunt Jo get her underwear on every morning.”
“Aren’t they going to need help for more than a month?”
I shrug. “I’ll stay as long as I can, and I’ll hire in-home-care nurses when I have to go back for the preseason.”
“Well, since you’re here anyway, maybe you should try to talk to Allie sometime.”
“About what?”
He gives me a confused look. “About…everything. Obviously you’re not over it. Maybe she’s not, either.”
“I see things differently now,” I concede. “I understand why she did what she did.”
“Well, yeah. She never would have abandoned those kids and let them enter the foster care system. That’s just not who she is. I admire her for giving up her own dreams to take care of them.”
“Me too.”
It’s true. Now that I’m not a selfish, immature kid anymore, I see how much Allie sacrificed for her nephew and nieces. She’s the best kind of person. It blows my mind that men in Greentree Falls aren’t lining up for a chance with her.
“She’s really single?” I ask.
“I haven’t seen her with anyone since Larry.”
“He probably scarred her for life.”
Cade laughs. “He always was a douche.”
I get up to take the burgers off the grill and Cade says, “You should talk to her, bro. You guys used to be best friends.”
“I saw her the other day at Fox Foods, but it was awkward. Neither one of us know what to say after all this time.”
“Figure it out,” Cade says like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “Say, ‘You’re still on my mind’ or ‘I miss you’ or ‘Great job raising three kids all by yourself.’”
I feel his last suggestion like a punch in the gut. I’ve never gotten over the guilt of staying in school at Penn State and letting Allie walk away from our relationship. A big part of me wanted to quit and come home, knowing she’d get over her anger and get back with me eventually.
But the dream of making it to the NHL was strong. My mom begged me not to quit school, tearing at my heartstrings every time we talked about it and she cried.
Allie’s the love of my life. I didn’t just figure that out when I came back to Greentree Falls and saw her—I’ve always known.
“Yeah, maybe,” I say, dismissing Cade’s idea.
I need to apologize to Allie for the way I treated her when she broke up with me. I was so distraught I lashed out at her when she was under a lot of pressure, and still mourning the loss of her parents.
But it doesn’t seem right to say anything more than that. To suggest that things could or should have been different. I didn’t fight hard enough to keep her, and that’s on me.
So I do what I always do. I paste on a fake smile to convince those around me that it’s all good. That I’m all good. Just easygoing, always content Erik Zimmerman.
No one but me gets to see the permanent ache in my heart.EightAllieAs I pull my car into the garage, I breathe a sigh of relief.
Longest. Day. Ever.
When I got to work this morning, I found out the weekly shopper delivered to every mailbox in the county had a misprint in the Fox Foods ad. It was supposed to advertise all meat ten percent off, but it said one hundred percent off.
I spent the whole morning dealing with pissed off customers when I wouldn’t give them the meat for free. Our regional manager came in on her day off to help, but it was still a madhouse.
Then Hazel called from school saying she’d forgotten her sack lunch for her field trip. I couldn’t leave the store, but one of the grocery stockers came to my rescue and offered to deliver lunch for her.
Not only did I not get a lunch break, I barely even had ten seconds to get a drink from the water fountains by the bathrooms at work. People abandoned their carts full of meat products at the checkout lanes when they found out we weren’t giving them one hundred percent off. Then we had to quickly restock it.
Signs all over the meat department about the error in the ad didn’t help—most customers either didn’t read them or wanted to argue that we had to honor the price in the ad.
