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“Why?” Thomas asks.
Dad scowls at him.
Thomas raises his hands defensively. “It’s a valid question.”
Mom replies, “My entire life was in Miami, a job I loved, all my friends, my family… I didn’t want to leave it all for a pretty boy I had just met.”
I turn to Dad. “What did you do?”
He sighs, slightly shameful. “I bought the restaurant she was working at and told the manager to fire her so she’d have one less reason to stay.”
“Oof,” I say. That seems extreme even for me—and I’d considered kidnapping Blake so that should say a lot.
“Yeah, Dad, ouch. Not cool,” Thomas adds.
I turn to Mom. “How did you find out?”
“The manager was one of my friends. He told me he had no choice but to let me go, but that he’d be damned if he didn’t let me know why.”
I stare at Dad. “How’d you come back from that?”
“I pleaded, and groveled, offered to give her old job back, heck, I offered to gift her the restaurant, but nothing worked. So I applied for a job at the taco-pizza joint she went to work for next. I didn’t buy that one, in case you were wondering, I’d learned my lesson.”
“Wait, wait,” Thomas says. “You mean to say you worked as a server at a Taco Bell?”
Dad shrugs. “It wasn’t a Taco Bell per se and all server positions were filled so I took a job as a kitchen helper.”
The idea of my father washing dishes and mopping floors is so alien I’m having trouble picturing it.
“For how long?” I ask.
“An entire year. Took me two months just to get her to say hello to me again.”
“Mom,” Thomas says. “Remind me never to get on your wrong side.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Mom says.
“The moral of the story is,” Dad continues. “If you’ve found the right woman, you gotta go all in. Throw a Hail Mary, do whatever it takes, but get her to take you back. If she loves you, she will. And if she doesn’t, well, then she wasn’t the right woman to begin with and you can move on.”
Thomas rubs his hands together excitedly. “So, how are we going to grand gesture Blake?”
I don’t know yet. But Dad is right, I can’t just give up.
“Why don’t we have brunch before we make extravagant plans?” Mom asks, motioning for us to move into the dining room.
I stand up and follow her, for the first time in days feeling something similar to hope rising in my chest.
52
BLAKE
Saturday afternoon, two weeks post-breakup, I’m in my apartment slumped on the couch with my laptop in front of me, letting Facebook mock me with a “What’s on your mind?” post prompt.
What’s on my mind?
Regret.
Despair.
