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She looked at me with compassion. “Why?”
Was she serious?
“Well, he’s my baby brother, and he’s always looked up to me. I think he got into hockey because when he was a little kid, that’s when I was playing. He came to all my games. And Jacob wanted me to go pro, badly. He put so much into it. Darcy grew up in that. He grew up playing hockey. And when I shit the bed, Jacob pinned all his hopes on Darcy. Dad wanted a hockey player son, and he got two. It’s pretty fucking incredible, really, that two guys in the same family got that good, and we’re not even blood related. But I don’t go to Darcy’s games. I don’t think I can watch. Too depressing or something.”
Jolie was gazing at me thoughtfully.
And I realized… I’d barely talked to anyone about all this stuff before. Definitely not to a woman.
“Do you ever watch hockey anymore?” she asked me.
“Not if I can help it.”
“Okay, real talk,” she said softly. “Can I give you shit about something?”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “If you must.”
“You just said that you ‘shit the bed.’ I can’t believe you’d say that. You think you failed somehow at hockey because you got in a car accident and couldn’t play anymore?”
“I guess that’s how it felt at the time.”
She considered that. “Is that how your family made you feel?” she asked gently.
“Sometimes. But to be fair, I don’t know if I was thinking straight back then anyway.”
She gazed at me, like I was some puzzle to solve, and maybe she was finally starting to put it all together. “You think, since you lost your ability to play hockey, your family doesn’t love you.”
That one didn’t sound like a question.
“Maybe they don’t.”
“That really sucks that you feel that way,” she said softly. “But I don’t think it’s true.”
ChapterThirty-One
Shane
Conversation turned to lighter things for a while, as Jolie put the soup together and we let it simmer. Music. Movies. Our favorite foods and restaurants we liked in town.
But later, as we sat down to eat lunch, I asked her about her family, and her life. “I don’t really know anything about your dad. Or your life down in San Diego.”
I thought she looked uncomfortable. Like she didn’t want to talk about it. But she said, “He lives there. He grew up in California. I have dual citizenship because he’s American.”
“I heard that.”
“When Mom was moving in with Jacob, I spoke to my dad over the phone, and he mentioned that I could come see him. Stay with him, even. I don’t even know why, exactly. He never said things like that. But maybe he was just competing with Mom. He didn’t like being the bad guy. And here she was moving in with this great guy. Maybe, for once, he was trying to prove what a good dad he was. But… he really wasn’t.”
I wondered what that meant, exactly.
“You see him down there much?” I knew she wasn’t living with him. Margot had mentioned, at some point, that she had roommates.
“No.” She seemed to think about it. “It’s sad, actually. That one little wisp of interest from him, and I just dropped everything to run down there. I thought I’d go live with my dad in California, finish college, live this cool beachside life… I had such fantasies of what my life could be. But as it turned out, well, he didn’t have the same fantasies.” Her eyes met mine briefly, and she shrugged. “I stayed with him for a couple of weeks, until it became glaringly obvious that I wasn’t really welcome. Then I found roommates and moved out of there.” She paused like she was remembering it, not fondly. “The silly thing is, Mom tried to warn me about him. I didn’t want to believe her. I guess no matter how absent he is, every girl just wants to know her dad, you know?”
“That’s fair.”
“I still try to see him, sometimes. I’ll call him at the holidays but he’s never really interested in getting together. I invite him for dinner, and even when he says he’ll show up, he doesn’t always. And if he does, he’s tuned out. The man has left me sitting in restaurants by myself so many times.” She added softly, “You’d really think I’d learn.”
I studied her, my chest tightening as I listened to her descriptions of her father, a man who clearly didn’t deserve the lovely daughter he had.
