I want to push. I want to ask how long it’s been since someone touched him in a way that wasn’t a toddler climbing on his lap or a teammate tapping his pads. But his jaw tightens, signaling that he’s holding back the rest of the sentence. If I push now, he’ll shut down the conversation, and I won’t get another opening for weeks.
“Enough about me,” he says, and the wall goes back up. “What about you? You said you quit the studio.”
I trace the rim of my mug with my finger. “Yeah. They told me they’d hire me back in a heartbeat whenever I was ready, but… I don’t know. I’ve been teaching ballet to kids for seven years, and I love the students—I do. Especially the little ones. Watching a six-year-old nail her first relevé is still, like, the best feeling.” I pause. “But the parents are a nightmare, Arch. You wouldn’t believe the emails I get. ‘Why isn’t Madison in the front row?’ ‘I don’t think this recital costume is flattering for Emma’s body type.’ She’s eight, Karen. She’seight.”
He’s watching me while I talk—not interrupting, not nodding along—just watching. His eyes are on my face and then, for a second, on my mouth, and I lose my train of thought completely.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing. Keep going.”
“I, uh—” I take a sip of coffee to regroup. “It’s not just the parents. I think it’s ballet itself. I love it. I’ll always love it. But I spent four years getting a degree in dance, and I imagined—” I stop because what I imagined sounds naïve when said out loud. A career on stage. Maybe my own studio. Creating dances instead of teaching the same recital numbers year after year.
“You imagined more,” he says.
“Yeah.” I look at him. “I guess I did.”
He holds my gaze for a moment too long. “You’ll figure it out, Syd. You always do.”
“That’s generous. My current life evidence suggests otherwise.”
“Your current life evidence is that you packed a suitcase and flew across the country to help someone because that’s who you are. That’s not lost. That’s, uh—” He runs his hand through his hair. “That’s pretty brave, actually.”
My throat tightens. I take a sip of coffee to avoid responding, because if I open my mouth right now, I’m going to say something embarrassing about how he’s the only person who’s ever made me feel like my mess is acceptable instead of a problem to be solved.
“I’m glad you’re here, Syd.” He looks at me across the island, his gray eyes steady, tired, and honest. “There’s no one else I could’ve called. No one who would’ve just dropped everything and come.”
“You make it sound dramatic. I didn’t have that much to drop.”
“That’s not true.”
I shrug. “You needed help. I showed up. That’s our thing.”
“It is.” He pauses. “Still, I don’t take it lightly.”
He’s right about that. We’ve always been there for each other. During my sophomore year of college, I called him at two in the morning from my dorm at UNC. My voice was shaking so badly that he couldn’t understand me at first, and when he finally made out the words—my dad, stroke, hospital—he didn’t ask a single question. He simply said, “I’ll be there.”
He was at Boston University, a thousand miles from Minneapolis. I flew home that morning and came straight to the hospital, where my mom was in the waiting room, lookingsmaller than I’d ever seen her. I held her hand, watched the monitors, drank terrible vending machine coffee, and didn’t sleep.
Archer walked into the hospital lobby fourteen hours after my call. He had a duffel bag slung over one shoulder and a plastic bag from a gas station in the other. He was wearing a hoodie that he’d probably thrown on in the dark before heading to the airport.
He didn’t say anything. He just walked up to me, and as I stood up, he wrapped his arms around me, and I fell apart. I cried ugly, shaking sobs that I had been holding in all day because I was trying to be strong for my mom. He held me in the middle of the hospital lobby while strangers walked past, and he didn’t let go until I stopped shaking.
Then he handed me the gas station bag. Inside was a package of red licorice—the specific brand from the gas station near our high school that we used to stop at after Friday night games. I don’t know how he found it in whatever airport he’d flown through, but he did.
My dad was fine. He recovered fully, went home after three days, and still mows his own lawn to this day, despite my mother’s protests. Archer stayed for two of those days, sleeping in a chair in the waiting room, before he flew back to Boston for a biology exam he most likely failed.
We show up for each other; it’s what we do.
I wrap my hands around my mug and look at him—this enormous man in a faded t-shirt with bedhead and stubble on his jaw, thanking me for showing up. I want to say I’d show up for you every time. I’d show up if you called me from the moon.
Instead, I say, “Well, someone’s gotta feed those kids. Your fridge is very sad, Arch.”
He almost smiles. “Fair.”
“Seriously. You’re the starting goalie for the New York Knights. If you’re off your game because you aren’t eating enough, the entire tri-state area is going to have my head.”
“That’s a lot of pressure on you.”
