Page 68 of Main Event

“You did not. You ordered for me like a tyrant and then stood there looking smug.”

“I’m not smug.”

“You are mountain smug. It’s a very specific variant.”

I take a bite of mine. “Mountain smug sounds respectable.”

“It’s not.”

We eat in silence for a few minutes, watching a couple of kids chase each other near the parking lot while their mother tries to pay for three cones and keep the smallest one from licking the service window. A boat moves across the lake in the distance, leaving a soft white line behind it.

Andi has peach ice cream on the corner of her mouth. I reach over and wipe it away with my thumb. She keeps her gaze trained on me longer than ususal.

“What?” I ask.

“You look different here.”

I sit back. “Different how?”

“Younger,” she says. Then thinks better of it. “Not young. Just… less braced.”

I look toward the water. That’s probably true. “I didn’t realize how much I remembered until we got here.”

“Good memories?”

“Mostly.”

She waits.

I turn the spoon in my hand. “My dad and I used to come up here when things were loud at home.”

“Loud how?”

“Not bad. Just loud. Business, bills, family stuff. Expectations. He never said that was why we came, but I figured it out later. We’d fish half the day, and he’d talk more up here than he ever did at home.”

“What did he talk about?”

“Nothing important, which means it was probably the important stuff. How to tell if a storm was coming by the way the wind shifted. How to clean a fish. Why you don’t buy peaches by size.” I glance at her. “Hanley was involved in that lesson.”

“I assumed.”

“He told me once that a man ought to have one place where nobody needed him to be impressive.”

Her expression changes. Just slightly. “He said that?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you listen?”

“At twelve? No. At twelve, I thought impressive was the whole point.”

“And now?”

I look out at the lake, at the light moving on water clear enough to show the stones near the shore. “Now I think he was trying to give me a place to put everything down before I knew I was carrying anything.”

Andi’s hand moves across the table and covers mine. I turn my palm up. She holds on. The fan turns overhead, stirring hot air into something almost gentle. For a while, neither of us says anything. The silence doesn’t feel empty. It feels kept. When we finish the ice cream, I throw the cups away and take her back to the truck.

She looks at the road ahead. “Are we going to your place where nobody needs you to be impressive?”