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“It was a long time ago. It’s honestly fine.”
“You don’t have to make it smaller just because time passed.”
My throat tightens. I quickly look out of the window, blinking hard at the lights smearing across the glass. Damn it.
“I’m not making it smaller.”
Cal says nothing.
One tear slips free before I can stop it. I wipe it away immediately, annoyed with my own face.
“Honestly, I’m fine,” I say, and my voice nearly behaves. “I mean, I can’t go back and save him.”
His fingers tighten around mine.
“But I can go into medicine. Maybe I save somebody else’s dad.”
His thumb moves once over my knuckles, sending more shockwaves through me.
“That’s a hell of a reason to do it.”
“It’s not the only reason.”
“No.” His voice is soft. “But it’s a pretty fucking good one.”
I swallow.
“He was insane about cables,” I say. “It’s hard to believe. Everything else in our lives was pure chaos. Entropy. But the cables had to be coiled his way. Over-under. Thumb and finger, alternating every loop.” I do it in the air with my hand. “There’s a right way, apparently.”
“There is a right way,” Cal insists.
I groan. “Don’t.”
“No, there is—”
“Oh my God. You’re the same!”
Cal shrugs. “I respect my equipment. Sounds like he did too.”
There was a guy called Ray. Roadie, sweet man, huge hands. And one night Ray wrapped a cable around his elbow like a garden hose, and Dad watched him do it from twenty feet away and said absolutely nothing, and then an hour later, I found him behind the van re-coiling every single one. In the dark. Working through them.
I tell Cal this, and he laughs, and it’s such a good sound that I keep going.
“So I asked him why he didn’t just say something. And he said—”
I stop. Because right now is one of those magical moments when you’ve lost someone where you can hear their voice clearly. Five years, and I’ve lost what he smelled like, and I’m not actually certain how tall he was, but the voice is right there now.
“He said, ‘Bumblebea, you can teach a man to coil a cable, or you can be his friend for thirty years. Pick one.’”
Cal doesn’t say anything.
“And then he made me help him,” I say. “For about forty minutes, in a motel parking lot in the middle of nowhere. I was eleven and furious because I wanted to sleep, but it ended up being one of the most fun nights of my life.”
The streetlights keep coming, gold and gone, gold and gone.
“He could do that. He could make a parking lot at midnight feel like the best place to be. I’ve never worked out how he did it.” I turn my ring around my finger.
“He would’ve found the whole thing hilarious,” I say. “Me becoming a doctor. He could barely sit through a ten-minute appointment without trying to leave.”
