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“Dane?” Felix stroked my cheek. “Baby, are you frozen? Need me to let you think for a bit?”
“You want me to meet your family?”
Felix ducked his head, then nodded.
“I just thought it would be…like a together-ish thing to do. A…boyfriend thing?” He made a face. “Sorry, that was so dorky.”
I nodded in agreement and kissed him.
“Yes, it’s dorky, or yes, you wanna come?”
“Both.”
His eyes sparkled and he grinned.
“Yay. Okay, I’ll tell my mom.”
I forced myself to relax. Felix climbed off my lap clumsily and went back to his own seat.
“Dane.”
“Huh?”
Felix was looking at me like maybe he’d been saying my name for a while.
“We don’t have to.”
“Have to what?”
“You’re freaking out. About meeting my mom, my family. I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to.”
“No, it’s fine. I want to.”
He nodded, but he didn’t seem convinced. He looked at me for a while longer and I felt like he was fighting with himself. Then he said, “Why don’t you ever talk about your dad?”
Predictably, he’d hit on exactly the thing I least wanted to talk about.
“We don’t talk much. I don’t go back to Virginia.” Felix waited, and after a little while I sighed and added, “He doesn’t know.”
“Know what?”
“Anything. I never told him. About any of it. The drugs, losing my scholarship, my recovery. I…He doesn’t know.”
Felix gaped.
“But how? What did you talk about?”
“We don’t. Didn’t. Not often.”
It was usually just, Hi, How are you, Yes sir, and How’s the boat? Occasionally when I’d still been playing ball, he’d ask how a game went. But I doubted he even had any idea what position I played. We’d barely spoken when I lived in his house, orbiting one another like silent moons, so we certainly hadn’t had anything to talk about once I left.
“But—but…” Felix went on. “Didn’t you have to make amends to people?”
“Yeah, but I never hurt my father when I was using. Hardly even talked to him. Didn’t have amends to make.”
Felix narrowed his eyes at me like he didn’t understand. Then, in a voice so gentle I could tell he was trying hard to temper whatever he was thinking, he said, “Don’t you think it hurt him to not know his son?”
I sucked in a breath that caught in my throat. It was such a sweet, incredibly Felix thought. But I was fairly certain it didn’t apply here.
“I—I’m sorry, I—”
“Never thought of it that way,” I said, which was also the truth.
“Why didn’t you ever tell him?”
“We really never had a relationship after my mother died. I know that’s hard to understand since you tell your mom everything.”
I elbowed him gently and he rolled his eyes, but then nodded.
“After my mom died, my dad couldn’t do anything. He walked and ate and went to work. But he was this blank, empty…shell. If I didn’t clean the house, it didn’t get cleaned. Didn’t go to the store; there were only frozen dinners and stuff he’d get at the gas station. Once, I broke the sink in the bathroom. Leaned too hard and it came out of the wall. My dad just stared at it like he couldn’t figure out what to do. It just stayed broken. I was fourteen. I couldn’t hire anyone. And he just…didn’t do anything.”
“He was the parent,” Felix said, as if that meant something. “He was supposed to protect you, supposed to take care of you, not the other way around.”
I shrugged.
“He couldn’t.”
We sat with that for a while.
“But…but if you’d told him when you had stopped using, wouldn’t he have been proud of you? For doing something so difficult? You’ve worked so hard.”
I squeezed his shoulder in thanks. He wanted so much for my father to be proud of me—and him wanting it for me was almost enough.
* * *
—
We took the train to Felix’s mother’s house in New Brunswick on Thursday afternoon. Felix kept darting glances at me like he wondered if I would be stricken with some kind of parental allergy symptoms at any moment.
“Oh, shit, I almost forgot,” Felix said, thankfully interrupting his monitoring of my mental state. “I went by the museum yesterday to see Sue.” Felix had told me about the woman who’d talked him down after our fight. “I can report that she’s one hundred percent a real person. I promised her I’d give her an update.” He winked at me.
“Yeah? What’d you say?”
“Nice things about you.”
He smiled and bumped my shoulder with his. I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not.
“Anyway, she has this niece she’s really close to and her niece can’t find a job. Any chance there’s anything at the bar for her?”
“I’ll ask Johi. I promoted her.”
“Aw, that’s awesome—I love Johi.”
“Yeah, it’s part of an idea I had.”
The idea was only half-formed, and I wasn’t sure it was a good one. I hadn’t intended to mention it yet. But Felix was looking at me with that expression that meant he wanted to listen to me. It undid me.
