Chapter 18
CAL
Tonight's dinner is Dad's pasta, which means three pots and forty minutes of the kitchen smelling like an actual restaurant while he hums something low and off-key over the stove and refuses to be helped with any of it.
He's been making it since before I could reach the counter. Still makes it on nights when the house needs to feel like more than two people rattling around inside too much space.
I set the table the way I've been doing my whole life, first from a parent's hip and then on my own when I got tall enough to reach. We eat over small talk, the evening settling around us familiar and worn in all the right places.
"You know, you don't have to stay here."
Dad twirls pasta around his fork with focus that tells me something's coming. I glance up.
"What?"
"Here." He gestures with his fork at the room, the house, the general concept of us. "With me. You're almost thirty years old, Cal. Don't you get tired of living with your old man?"
There it is, the question he's been sitting on. I turn it over, try to find the honest answer. Dad needs an honest answer, and the honest answer is that every day, I choose this kitchen that always smells like home, and his humming, which is the steadiest sound I know.
"Not even a little."
I go back to my food. Dad makes a face, the one that means he expected the answer, likes it, and is also going to argue with it anyway. Classic Dad.
I, on the other hand, mean every single word. There's no reality in which I leave him alone, not as long as he insists on remaining alone.
"That's not a ringing endorsement of your social life," he observes.
"My social life is fine."
"Your social life is the firehouse and Ramsey's porch and the pub and driving out at two in the morning."
I put my fork down. "How do you know about that?"
Dad picks up his water glass, the picture of innocence. "You took the car out. I heard it leave."
"You were asleep. And the car makes literally no sound."
"I was resting my eyes."
"At two in the morning?"
"This is not about me, Cal." He sets the glass down and levels me with a look. "Where'd you go?"
"Drive."
Which is true, technically. A very specific drive to a very specific location for very specific reasons I'm not about to detail to my father over pasta on a random night.
"I'm serious. You should be thinking about your own place. Your own life. A family."
The hope in his voice guts me. I know he wants grandchildren. He's said it often enough over the years, usually in good fun, but tonight there's something more serious underneath. Something that sounds a lot like worry.
So I give him a white lie. "I'm working on it."
"Are you?"
I have never been able to lie to my dad. He was a present father even when Mom was alive, knows me better than anyone, and that makes lying to him harder than it should be. I can feel him reading me right now, weighing every little expression.
"Slowly, but surely," I manage over a mouthful of pasta.
"Cal." Dad sets his fork down, gives me a look that says he's been waiting out my deflections for twenty-nine years and he can wait twenty-nine more.
"You go out of town when you want company. You come home and you're here and that's fine, that's your choice, but you're not building toward anything. You're just... running the clock."
"I'm not running the clock. I'm taking my time."
"There's a difference between the two and I'm starting to wonder if you know what it is."
I finish my pasta and consider whether I can get away with clearing the table and redirecting him toward the chess set. One look at his face tells me I can't.
"I don't want to date someone here," I say finally. "It's a small town, things get complicated."
"Things get complicated everywhere."
"Less so when you've got sixty miles of distance and nobody knows your name."
Dad picks up his fork again, but doesn't eat. He's working through the next three moves of this conversation before I've finished the last one. I hate that look. I also learned everything I know from it.
"You can't spend your whole life keeping people at a manageable distance."
"I'm not, Dad. Really."
"You are." He says it without judgment, and somehow that's harder to deal with than if he'd been annoyed. "All this time and you've never brought anyone home. Not once. Not a dinner, not a passing mention. Nothing."
He's right. He's completely right, and I don't have a defense that isn't the truth, and the truth isn't something I'm willing to say. So I shove my plate away and reach for the easiest lie I know.
"Just haven't met the one, I guess."
Dad finally eats a forkful of pasta. "Okay. So what's the plan?"
"The plan is that at some point I'll meet someone I get along with and I'll build a good life with her. I'm not in a rush."
"Someone you get along with." Dad repeats it like I've said something in another language he's translating slowly. "That's your criteria? Getting along?"
"It's a solid foundation."
"Cal, every person in this town gets along with their mechanic. You don't marry your mechanic."
"Not with that attitude you don't."
Dad gives me the look he used to give me when I talked back as a kid. I let him, because the alternative is telling him the truth, and I'm not ready for that. Not tonight, maybe not ever.
"I want a good life," I tell him, keeping my voice even. "I want to settle down, have kids, do all of it. I'm not opposed to any of that. I just don't really care about the falling in love part. I want to find someone I like, someone I respect, and build something with her that actually holds."
A deep frown forms between his eyes.
"You don't want to fall in love?"
I know, in that moment, that I've disappointed him more than I ever have. I'm going about this the wrong way, but I need him not to worry. That matters more than being understood.
"I think you can have a good, solid marriage with someone you like without it having to be a grand love story."
"No girl will settle for like, son."
"I know that. I'm not saying I wouldn't love her. I'd love her. I just..."
I stop to take a long gulp of water because I need a second to figure out how to say this without hurting him.
"I don't want to fall in love the way you mean it," I say gently, watching his face. He just stares at his plate like he's lost his appetite entirely. I need to fix this.
"I think what you and Mom had isn't something most people get. It was the whole thing and I'm not saying there was anything wrong with it. But I also watched you lose that. I saw what came after."
I hold his gaze, hoping he understands.
"I don't want to go through the same thing."
Dad's whole body changes, slouches, like I've taken the air out of him. All I want is to hug him the way I did eleven years ago when I watched him lose the love of his life and didn't know how to make it stop hurting.
"Buddy..."
"I know it might sound..."
"No." Dad shakes his head, and there's no argument in it. "I hear you, I do. I'm not going to tell you you're wrong, because you're not. Not entirely. Love like that comes with a debt. I knew it when I was in it, and I'd choose it again a hundred times over, but I knew."
He taps the table once, looking for the right words.
"What I'll say is this. The thing you're describing, the good life, the solid foundation, the woman you respect and choose on purpose. You're not going to build it with someone you only like. Because when it gets hard, and it does get hard, like won't be enough to hold you there."
He picks up his fork, resigned. "But I understand what you're afraid of. I'm not going to pretend I don't."
I nod, not able to meet his eyes.
"Your mother would've had opinions," he says after a while. "Very loud ones. She'd have told you all of this was nonsense and then cried on the porch."
I laugh. "She sure was a crier."
"Happy tears and sad tears. The woman was a full weather system."
We've gotten better at talking about her. It took a few years, but we got there. The grief still sits here, though, the third person at the table, always has a seat.
Dad reaches over and refills my water glass without asking, which is such a specific, automatic thing. Eleven years of missing half of himself, and he still remembers to be here for me.
We move on, the way we always do. Dad tells me about the piece of walnut he's been working on, a commission for a couple in the next town over, something about getting the joinery right on a corner that's been giving him trouble. I listen, ask the right questions.
I think about the drive last night and the fogged-up windows and a single song I put on repeat after it was over. And I had kissed her. Again and again and still it hadn't been enough.
I stare at the table, my vision flooding with flash after flash of her on top of me, eyes bright even in the dim light. My brain keeps focusing on her mouth, over and over, glistening and bruised. Because of me.
"You're far away."
He pulls me back so abruptly I have to blink a few times to focus.
"I'm here."
"Where did you go just now?"
I press my thumb into the edge of the table and stare at the grain of the wood. I don't know why, but the thoughts are growing too thick for me to carry alone.
"I kissed Lily."
Yeah, he didn't expect that. He lowers his glass to the table very slowly.
"Moreland," I add, in case there's any confusion. As if there could be. As if there's any other Lily in this town, in this house, in the entire radius of my life.
"I know which Lily."
"Right."
Then Dad laughs. I sit there as he presses both hands on the table and laughs until it spills out around the edges. I wait it out, but it doesn't take long for it to start grating on my nerves.
"You can be such an asshole, Dad. You know that?"
He holds up a hand, as if to tell me he's sorry, while still laughing.
"You done yet?"
He just keeps going, deeply unrepentant. "I am just so happy, son. What happened?"
"I don't want to discuss it."
"You brought it up."
"And I regret that, thank you."