“Then I suppose you’ll have to fix it.”
Lara kept her mouth shut because…well, wasn’t it safer to let it stay broken?
“I won’t tell you what to do, Lara. I won’t tell you what to feel. Because no matter what you choose, I love you. You’ve been the brightest spot in my whole life. And nothing that happens, even when I die, can change that.”
Lara swallowed at the lump in her throat. “I don’t want to think about that.”
Grandma made a considering noise. “Well, maybe you should. Maybe it’s time to face that change is coming. Do you want it to knock you out? Or do you want to choose the good things while they’re within reach?”
At first, Ty had walked along the beach trying to find a good center. A good stable place. He didn’t like being angry. It made him feel like his father, so he’d decided to walk until he was calm.
He hadn’t stopped at the cottage. He’d just kept going. Then, eventually, he’d had to walk back. All his things, including his car, were at the cottage. He’d maybe worked off some of his mad, but mostly he still didn’t like the churning in his gut. Still, he could hardly walk all night.
As he approached the cottage from the beach side, he’d noticed a figure out there in the moonlight.
A man seeming to stand on a rock in the middle of ocean. Ty stood there, staring at the thing that couldn’t be—wasn’t—possible, and felt a new swell of anger he couldn’t fully understand.
“Fuck you,” he told the ghost emphatically, then purposefully turned his back on whateverthatwas.
He couldn’t go back to the cottage, even with all his stuff there. Not tonight. He needed some time and some space to figure out…where a guy went from here. Besides, the living room light had been on, which meant someone was up. Lara or Mary Lou or both.
Yeah, he wasn’t going in there.
So, he’d gotten in his car and driven. At first, he hadn’t had a destination in mind. He’d briefly considered going to his dad’s trailer, but that would be just to start a fight, and why bother?
Now that he’d quit baseball, Dad had left him alone. They didn’t mean anything to each other so why go bother a dormant hornet’s nest? Why not let sleeping shitty drunk dads lie?
Eventually, he ended up at Keane’s. Keane had clearly done some work on the old cabin since Ty had last been out here. It gave him some hope that his friend wasn’t so bad off if he was making an effort to fix up the house.
When Keane opened the door, he didn’t seem surprised. Or particularlysober. Still, Ty walked in at Keane’s invitation.
“Hey, uh, you mind if I crash here a few days?” he asked, feeling awkward in his nice clothes and sandy dress shoes with nothing but his keys and wallet.
“Extra room’s all yours whenever you want it, you know that.”
Yeah, Ty did, but the line of empty beer bottles on the kitchen counter didn’t exactly fill him with welcomed ease. But that wasn’t Keane’s fault. Ty could hardly come into another man’s house and demand he stop drinking.
But Keane was a good enough friend to realize what he was looking at. Keane made a move for the bottles, began to gather them. “Look, you don’t need to worry about that while you’re here,” he said, putting them in a bag for recycling. “I’ll take a break.”
Which made Ty feel a mix of relief and guilt. “You don’t have to do that on my account. It’s your house. Though I wouldn’t mind borrowing some clothes to sleep in if you’ve got anything lying around.”
But Keane didn’t take the change of topic. He stared at Ty, and there was a weird similarity to the hurt on his face that had been on Lara’s.
Ty didn’t thinkhewas the one putting it there, but it didn’t exactly feel good to get that same reaction from two different friends in the same night.
Friends. She just wanted to be fucking friends. Aftersleeping together. What the hell was he supposed to do with that?
“So I should just be a dick and keep drinking even though I know it makes you think about your asshole of a dad?” Keane demanded.
“No, you’re not being a dick.” Ty raked a hand through his hair. He didn’t want another fight. He just wanted somepeace. “You?—”
“I’ll lay off a few days, because I amnota dick and don’t want my friend to be uncomfortable.Andto prove to you it’s not a problem…” He put the bag of bottles off to the side. “I can go as long as I’d like without drinking. It’s not that big of a deal.”
Ty didn’t have anything to say to that, because he wasn’t convinced. He was a little too well-versed in the lies addicts told themselves. But Keane wasn’t ready to hear that. Maybe…maybe someday he would be.
“So,” Keane said, eyeing him suspiciously. “I don’t think I can even guess why you’d need to stay here instead of with the Townsends.”
Ty tried to laugh, but it was just a bitter sound. Everything inside of him felt bitter and brittle.
