Chapter 7 - Saturday
The diner was called Ruthie's Kitchen and it smelled like coffee and old wood and something frying in the back.
My father was already there when Wade dropped me off — a booth by the window, both hands wrapped around a mug, watching the lot.
He saw me come in and sat up straighter.
I slid into the seat across from him. A waitress came by. I ordered coffee. She left.
"Thank you for coming," he said.
"I said I would."
He nodded. He looked like he hadn't slept well. There were things around his eyes that hadn't been there in the driveway.
"I've been trying to figure out where to start," he said.
"Start with why you left," I said. "Not the version where you were young and scared. The real reason."
He looked into his mug. "Your mother and I were in trouble before you were ever born," he said. "We were twenty-two. She got pregnant. We both thought that would fix it." He paused. "It didn't fix anything."
"So you left."
"Not right off. I stayed three years. I was there."
"You were in the house," I said. "That's not the same thing."
He looked up. "I know it isn't."
"What happened when I was three?"
"She asked me to go." He said it carefully. "I want to be straight with you about that. She asked me to leave. I wasn't thrown out."
I hadn't known that. Something shifted in my chest — not against my mother, but a recalibration. A new piece clicking into the shape.
"Why did she ask you to go?"
"Because I was making things worse by staying," he said. "I was unhappy and I wasn't hiding it, and she told me a kid can feel that. She said you were already picking it up."
I thought about the letter. The parent-teacher conference. Unusually tuned in to other people.
"So she protected me from you," I said.
He winced. "That's one way to put it."
"Is it the wrong way?"
A pause. "No."
The coffee came. I wrapped my hands around the mug.
"Why didn't you come back?" I said. "Later. Once things settled down."
"I told myself I was waiting for the right time," he said. "Then I told myself she'd moved on and I'd just wreck things. Then I told myself you were better off without me." He looked at the table. "I got very good at telling myself things."
"And the real reason?"
He was quiet a long time. "I was ashamed," he said. "Every year that went by made it worse. By the time you were ten the gap was so wide I couldn't see the other side of it. I didn't know how to start."
"So you paid Coach Doyle instead."
"So I paid Coach Doyle instead."
I drank my coffee. He drank his.
Outside, a truck pulled into the lot and a family climbed out — a mom, a dad, two little kids. The dad swung one of them up onto his shoulders without being asked.
My father watched them too.
"I'm not going to sit here and tell you I'm sorry and expect that to fix it," he said. "I know it doesn't work that way."
"No," I said.
"But I am sorry. I want you to hear me say it. Not because it changes anything. Just because it's true and you deserve to have it said to your face, plain."
I looked at him. He was fifty-one years old and he looked tired in a way sleep doesn't touch. He looked like a man who'd been carrying something a long way and had finally set it down in a diner booth and didn't know what to do with his hands.
"I read all the letters," I said.
He went still.
"Last night. The last three." I set my mug down. "She wrote about you every year. Not always much. But you were always in there somewhere."
He didn't say anything.
"The last one — the year I turned sixteen — she wrote that she hoped you'd found something worth staying for." I kept my voice level. "She wasn't being cruel. She meant it."
He put his hand over his mouth and looked out the window.
"She's a remarkable woman," he said. His voice had changed.
"Yeah," I said. "She is."
We sat there a moment.
"Is Wade good to her?" he said. Then he caught himself. "Sorry. You said—"
"It's okay." I looked at him. "Yeah. He is."
He nodded. He didn't push it further.
"What do you want from me?" I said. "Not what you think I need. What do you actually want?"
He thought about it. Really thought — I watched him fight off the easy answer.
"I want to know you," he said. "Who you actually are. Not the kid Coach Doyle described. You." He met my eyes. "I know I don't have the right to that. I'm asking anyway."
I looked out the window. Wade's truck was parked across the road at a gas station. He'd said he'd find somewhere to wait. He hadn't gone far.
I thought about fourteen letters. About a woman who kept her anger and handed me something else. About a man who built a box with his hands because somebody needed a place to put the things they couldn't say out loud.
I thought about what it costs to stay. And what it costs to go.
"I'm applying to three schools," I said. "One's a reach. One's realistic. One's a backup I actually like."
My father looked at me.
"I'm thinking environmental science," I said. "Or engineering. Haven't decided."
Something in his face opened up. "Tell me about the reach school," he said.
So I did.
We stayed in that booth two hours. He asked questions and I answered them, and sometimes I asked questions back and he answered those too, careful, not ducking the hard ones.
It wasn't forgiveness. It wasn't a relationship put back together. It was two people in a diner, starting from the actual beginning.
When I came out, Wade was pulled up at the curb. He'd gotten a coffee somewhere — it was in the cupholder, a second one waiting in the other slot.
I got in. He didn't ask how it went. He handed me the coffee and pulled out of the lot.
We drove about five minutes before I said anything.
"He's going to come back," I said. "I think. If I let him."
Wade kept his eyes on the road. "What do you want to do?"
I looked out the window at the town going by. "I don't know yet," I said. "But I think I want to find out."
May you like
Wade nodded. That was enough for him.
It was starting to be enough for me too.
