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“I just… some things happened, and I need to talk to him, even if he can’t talk back. He always knew the right thing to say, all the time, you know?”
“And you have something you have to figure out?” she said.
“A lot of somethings,” Griz said. “My head’s been spinning around, and I feel like I can’t stop screwing up or… I don’t know. He was always so much more in control than me. My dad. He always knew exactly what to do. I never know.”
“You know what my sister tells me? Not my younger sister, the older one. The oldest one.”
“How many sisters do you have?” Griz said.
“Three. And three brothers.”
“That’s a big family,” he said. “You’re lucky.”
“I know, right?” Nikki said. “Anyway, here’s what she always says. My sister. She’s got kids now, and so she says that now, she realizes our parents, they had no idea what the hell they were doing. They were just trying to get by, every day, trying their best and fucking it all up half the time.”
“I don’t know,” Griz said. “My dad always seemed to know the right thing to do. The right thing to say.”
“Maybe it just seems like that, you know, from your perspective?” Nikki said. “I bet he was just as worried that he was messing things up. That he didn’t know what to do and was making it all up as he went.”
“It’s hard to imagine,” Griz said.
“I remember… not too long ago, really… I had to decide if I was going to try to become a nurse or not. Maybe I should do hair instead… I like to do hair, you know? And I didn’t know anything about nursing. There was a lot of classes to take just to do the pre-requisites, because I was never that big of a student. So maybe I was better off just staying in my lane, you know?”
“What made you decide?” Griz said.
“I talked to my dad,” Nikki said. “I said, I don’t know what I should do. There’s no clear answer. He said, there’s never any clear answer. Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual. You just have to make your best guess sometimes.”
“Your dad sounds like a smart man,” Griz said.
“My dad?” Nikki said. “Ha! My dad has a big beer belly and farts a lot.”
Griz had to laugh at that. It surprised him, the laughter, since he’d been so down lately, but it felt good, like a cool breeze on an oppressively hot day.
“He blames it on the dog, too,” she said. “Everybody hears him rip one, and still he says, ‘Baxter!’ That’s the dog’s name, Baxter.”
“My dad used to take Wyatt and I out to his fishing cabin a lot when we were kids. I think it was so that he could clear his head to try to make better decisions.”
“Do you still have it?”
“The cabin?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes. I took Becca to it.”
“That’s your girl? Becca?”
“Yeah.”
Nikki frowned, looking upward as she thought that over for a second.
“Oh, wait,” she finally said. “Are we talking Kate’s sister Becca? The boujee one?”
“Boujee?”
“You know. Boujee. Got to drive that Mercedes, not a Toyota. Got to have expensive sushi, not McDonald’s.”
Griz smiled. “That’s her.”
