There's a whole matching set of plates in the cabinet now, because a hockey player who once owned exactly one of them went a little feral with a registry scanner the week I moved in. And there's a note on the refrigerator door in his blocky handwriting, gone soft at the corners with age, the one that says: in case you ever just need a place that's quiet. I never took it down. It reminds me that, now, Caleb is my quiet place.
I bought a one-way ticket here. That's the part I'm proudest of in my entire life. Not Caleb, not my father, not the job, not the speeches. Me. The woman who never once did a reckless thing on purpose sat down at her color-coded spreadsheet, looked at the column marked REASONS NOT TO, which was long, which was still correct, and bought a one-way ticket to North Carolina anyway, because the other column still held only one thing and the one thing still won.
Him.
He cried at the airport, although he'll deny it. I have it documented, though. I am, after all, very good at documentation.
I took a job my second month here, running compliance for the athletic department at a small college across town. It’s different working for a boss other than my father, but it’s a good program and a busy one, full of kids who need somebody keeping their eligibility clean and their files honest. It turns out the work I did from the shadows of my father's building for three years is work other places will hire you to do and thank you for to your face. I am still adjusting to the part where they thank me.
“You're doing the thing,” he calls from the kitchen.
“What thing, Adams?”
“The middle-distance thing. The feelings-spreadsheet thing.” He sets a bowl down in front of me, and yes, there are two, and I have decided to stop being embarrassed about that, the same way I've stopped being embarrassed about most of what I am. “Talk or eat.”
“You’re too good to me. One day I’m going to cook you the one thing I know how to.”
“No rush, baby. I’m happy to cook. Now stop stalling and tell me what you were over there thinking about.”
“I was thinking that I'm happy,” I say, because we still have a rule about the truth. “And that I finally know how to hold it, settle in it, even wallow in it.”
He goes still for a second, then leans down and kisses the top of my head. “That’s good, baby. It took you long enough.”
“I gave the preseason eligibility briefing at work last week. Forty athletes in a locker room, and I stood at the front and delivered the whole rulebook to their faces. I made eye contact with three of them on purpose and survived it.”
“Look at you.” He says it like I lifted a trophy. “My badass girl.”
For three years, I gave that same talk for my father from a chair along the boards that nobody ever turned to look at. Last week I gave it from the front of the room and let every one of them see who was doing the talking.
“I'm not a badass.”
“What? Do I need to remind you that you took a microphone in front of two thousand people and saved my ass from a folding table?”
“That was one time.”
“It was the best time. I think about it daily.”
We talk now, my father and I. Not perfectly. He's a hard man who spent a long time getting it wrong, and he’s not going to learn a new language in under a year. But he learned my coffee order. He flew out for my birthday and sat through a dinner that was hard for him because Caleb can sometimes be overly affectionate in public now that we can be.
He calls every Sunday, which is nice. But he still can't say I love you, because that word got buried so deep in him decades ago, I don't know if he'll ever dig it back out.
Last month, he ended a call with “ Be good to yourself, kiddo,” which, from my father, is basically I love you. Afterwards, I sat in a grocery store parking lot and cried about it for ten minutes, and Caleb didn't ask why. He just drove us home and made the soup I like, with sourdough toast on the side.
In three days, Caleb's whole family lands at the airport, but I'm so nervous, I don’t exactly know what to do with those feelings. I've talked to Christian on the phone a hundred times by now. He calls almost as often as my father does, which is to say Caleb's family adopted me somewhere around month two or three without anybody taking a vote. But I’ve never been in a room with all of them at once, and a room with all of them feels…like a big fucking deal.
“You don't have to do the whole airport,” Caleb told me last night, careful, leaving me the room he always leaves me. “I can grab them, bring them back slowly. You meet them here, where you’re comfortable. Nobody's going to think anything of it.”
“I'm coming to the airport,” I said.
“Jasmine.”
“I made a card.” I showed him. I'd written each of their names and one thing about each of them, pulled from eight months of phone calls, so I'd have something to anchor to if my brain went blank at the gate.
Bean: ten, wants to be a marine biologist this month, hates being called the baby.
Courtney: fourteen, honor roll, secretly the softest.
Christian: nineteen, notices everything, like his brother, carries the whole house on his back and pretends it weighs nothing.
