“Ha!” Ryan’s dad barked a laugh loud enough that the waitress looked over, then slapped the tabletop so hard it rattled the forks. “Jesus Christ, I thought you were going to tell me you were gay.” He shook his head then, like he was only now absorbing what Ryan actually had said to him. “Why the fuck not?”
So Ryan explained as best he could: the headaches, the forgetting. How inexplicably pissed he felt all the time. When he was finished, Ryan’s dad frowned at him over his patty melt.
“Is this coming from your mother?” he asked.
Ryan looked at him blankly. “No,” he said, “it’s coming from me.”
“Because I’m just saying, this sounds like the kind of thing that’s coming from your mother. You’re cranky around the house, so she says you can’t play hockey?”
“It’s not like that,” Ryan explained. “It’s just—”
“You know how many times I got cracked in the head, when I was playing?” Ryan’s dad continued. “You know how many of my teeth got knocked out? A shattered hand when I was twenty, a broken wrist. And you’re quitting because you’ve got a headache?”
Ryan felt himself blushing now. “It’s kind of more than a headache—”
“I knew you were soft, kid, but Jesus. Your mom really did a job on you.”
“This isn’t about Mom!” Ryan said, more loudly than he meant to. “It’s about me. I know that’s hard for you to recognize, maybe, but for once in my entire life, this is about me.”
His dad’s eyes narrowed across the table. “What’s that supposed to mean, exactly?”
“It means—” Ryan broke off, let a breath out. This was humiliating. “It means I’ve done a lot of stuff in my life to, like, try and make you proud of me, or whatever. And—”
“What’s wrong with wanting to make your family proud of you?” his dad interrupted.
“No, that’s not what I’m—” Ryan blew out a breath. He wasn’t a good arguer; his dad knew how to twist things, to make them seem different in the telling than they’d actually been. Abruptly, he wished Gabby was here. For all her anxiety and panic, he’d never met anybody less afraid of a fight.
Thinking about Gabby gave him a strange burst of confidence; Ryan lifted his chin. “I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get your attention,” he said, voice surprisingly steady. “And playing hockey was a big part of that. And I’m not saying I don’t love hockey, because I do. I do. But playing at school and hoping it’s going to get you to show up more is just—” He shook his head. “It’s never going to work. I’m never going to be important to you, not really. I mean, you literally didn’t call me on my birthday last year. I can’t do it anymore. I don’t even want to. And I’m definitely not going to bash my own brain in trying.” He made himself look across the table. “You haven’t actually been such a good dad, Dad.”
“And you’ve been an ungrateful little sponge, mostly,” his dad said, with an ease that took Ryan’s breath away. “Neither one of us got what we wanted, I guess.”
“Okay,” Ryan managed after a moment. “Well. I came here to tell you I wasn’t going to play hockey anymore for a while, and now I told you I’m not going to play hockey anymore for a while, so.” He tossed his napkin on the table, slid out of the booth. “Being my dad and all, I guess you can buy me this lunch.”
He headed across the diner and out into the parking lot, felt the sun on the back of his neck. He kept waiting for the pain and the anger to hit him, like the time between the moment you stub your toe and the moment you actually feel it, but as Ryan unlocked the door it occurred to him that he felt better than he’d felt all summer. He actually felt kind of . . . light.
And there was only one person in the whole entire world he wanted to tell about it.
He got in the car and stuck the key in the ignition. He rolled down the windows, headed home.
GABBY
Gabby sat on the sofa in the living room, wrapped in a blanket with the AC blasting, scrolling idly through her Instagram feed. She still hadn’t taken a single picture since the beginning of the summer, but her hair was washed today, which she was considering an improvement: baby steps, after all. She was examining a shot of a cornfield that seemed to glow in pink late-afternoon sunlight, trying to figure out what filter it had on it, when the doorbell rang.
Gabby sighed and waited for somebody else to get it before it rang again and she remembered she was the only one home. But she vaguely remembered her mom saying something about waiting on a delivery for a client, so—keeping her blanket around her like a cape—she got up and flung the door open.