Chapter 6
WYATT CHASE
“Daddy’s here” Lyla screams from the kitchen, even though she can’t be bothered to come greet me. I don’t take it personally. I’m sure that her grandma has her doing something fun like painting watercolors or building legos or decorating cookies.
I make my way to the kitchen, where I see Lyla sitting at the table with an ungodly amount of stickers stuck to the table. I give her a kiss on the head. “Hi, baby.”
Lyla pokes her tongue out of her mouth. It’s her look of deep focus. “Grandma got me a sticker book.”
I turn toward my mom and grin. “How times have changed.”
Valerie Chase wasn’t a strict disciplinarian by any means, but I can’t imagine a world where she’d have looked at me with that much love if I’d have put dozens of stickers on the kitchen table.
But there she is, making moony eyes at Lyla like she can do no wrong.
Unfortunately, Lyla has the same effect on me which means that my pint-sized princess basically gets everything that she wants.
My mom doesn’t take the bait. “We have an afternoon snack if you want some. Ants on a log.” Which means peanut butter on celery sticks with raisins on the top. One of my favorites.
I rub my belly. “Hit me.” I look back toward Lyla. “How was your first day of school? Meet any nice kids?”
She nods decisively. “Gwen is cool. We sat together at lunch. She wears glasses and let me look through them, but it made my head hurt. And Marcus let me use his green crayon when mine broke,” she says, trying her best to adhere a star sticker in a very precise location that makes absolutely no sense to me.
“I’m glad you had a good time, baby.” And really, I am. All I want is for Lyla to have a great life. I’d say a perfect life, but I know that’s impossible. Doesn’t mean I won’t do my damndest to try and make it happen though.
“How was the pick-up?” I ask my mom when she hands me a small plate.
“Exactly the same as when you went to school there twenty years ago,” she chides. My parents have lived in the same house for my entire life. It’s a well-maintained, three-bedroom Cape Cod that’s situated on a cul-de-sac.
My mom was a middle school English teacher until she retired a few years ago, and my dad is an accountant at a big firm in Boston. They’re boring and stable in the best possible way. They never missed a hockey game, and they always instilled in me a sense of confidence.
‘Consistency’ should probably be my middle name. As the only child of stable, well-adjusted adults, I can’t imagine having had a better upbringing.
I want to give Lyla the same experience, but it’s going to be an uphill battle. I’ve already failed in the two-parent household. We don’t live in a home even half as nice as this one. God knows what else I’ll fail at before it’s over.
I blink the thoughts away and munch down on a celery stick.
Unfortunately, my mind drifts back to earlier today in the training center’s parking lot. Asher Reynolds is not in a good place, and I’m not exactly sure when raising that issue to other staff is my responsibility.
Sure, hockey players can be hotheads or make stupid decisions, but everyone takes recovery seriously.
Treating it like an afterthought is the surest way to ruin a good career before it’s even really begun.
These guys have trained their entire life for a chance to play in bigger arenas, get more ice time, maybe be the one-in-a-million that goes pro one day.
If there’s a chance that they can get back to one-hundred-percent, they’re going to be at my door when I unlock it every morning to make it happen.
Which means that Asher is a brand new situation for me to deal with in my physical therapy career with athletes. It’s like he doesn’t want to get better. And I don’t really know what to do with that.
He was definitely having a panic attack earlier today.
We didn’t get into the whys, but I would bet my next paycheck that it was about the car accident that he was in over the summer.
I’m not certified to give mental health support, and I’ve already tried referring him twice to professionals who can help him work through the trauma.
Add in the fact that given the clip he was walking at when I spotted him, there’s no way he’s not going to at least have significant, if not debilitating, pain tomorrow. I’ve thought about him more than a few times over the last few hours–and what it will mean for our next session.
Maybe you can call it a flaw, but I don’t like giving up on people. Especially when they’re the ones standing in the way of their own recovery.
“And how was your first day of school?” my mom asks, pulling me away from thinking about Asher.
I grin. “Unfortunately, there was no coloring or sharing of crayons.”
She heads to the fridge and starts taking things out to make dinner. I’m sure that she’ll insist we stay. “I hope you made some friends at least.”
I don’t miss the way she says the word friends. “I have co-workers, and they’re all fine so far.”
“Any night that you’d like to spend time with them outside of work, we’re happy to watch Lyla. Or if you meet someone on the Kindling or something.”
I laugh. “First, it’s called Tinder, and second, I hope to never talk about dating apps with my mom again.” We go through this every few months. She thinks that I need to ‘get out there.’ Whatever that means.
My mom turns her attention to Lyla. “Honey, why don’t you run to the bathroom and get cleaned up. You can help me with dinner.”
Lyla pokes her little tongue out of her mouth again and focuses like she’s about to score the game-winning goal. Her eyes stay trained on a sticker of the sun that she’s insistent on putting in the ocean. “What are we having?”
“Spaghetti and meatballs,” my mom says.
The magic words. “Like Lady and the Tramp!” In seconds, she’s slapped that sun sticker where it definitely doesn’t shine and is on her way to the bathroom.
Which means… Yep. My mom turns toward me again. “How is the new apartment?”
“We’re settling in.” It’s the same answer that I gave her the first, second, and third time she asked me.
“We’d love to come over for dinner soon.” It’s a nice thought, but she says it in a way that makes me think she believes that I’m feeding Lyla boxed mac-and-cheese every night.
“Mom, if there’s something that you want to say, you can just come out and say it.
” I glance toward the hallway. “Lyla will be back any minute.” And whatever it is, I don’t want her to hear it.
Partly because I want to insulate her from the world and partly because I’m sure she’ll agree with my mom.
I watch as she leans her hip against the counter, studying me. “You really didn’t need to move out. We have plenty of room here for the two of you. And having a built-in babysitter would mean that you have more time to go out and make friends or cultivate a life.”
I walk over to the sink to wash my plate. “I have a life.”
“You have Lyla and work. And yes, that is a life, but people need other adults to talk with. Spend time with. Blow off steam with.”
My face goes red, and I’m glad that she can’t see it. Once I’ve cleaned the plate, I put it in the dishwasher. Finally, I turn to face her. “Mom…”
She grabs a cutting board off the counter and places an onion on top of it. “What about Sarah?”
“I went on two dates with Sarah over a year ago.” It wasn’t exactly a love connection.
We matched on an app, but apparently the life of a mid-twenty-something in Boston is dramatically different from a single dad who lives in the suburbs, regardless of the fact that we were almost the same age.
Add in that for six months out of the year my weekends aren’t my own, and it was never going to go anywhere.
She chops the onion deftly. “What about Damian? It sounded like you two had chemistry.”
I groan. “I should have never mentioned him to you.” Damian was an assistant coach at my last school. He made a move on me after an away game my first season, but he was in the closet and I was the new guy on the staff. My first professional job, in fact. It would have been a recipe for disaster.
“I want to know what’s going on in your life,” she says simply. And I know that she means it. For all of her gentle insistence and prodding, I’ve always felt safe talking to her.
God, am I a momma’s boy? I’m realizing that I tell her way too much. Still, it means that I feel the need to remind her… “We went on a date, where we ran into one of the coaches and his wife. Then, Damian literally snuck out of the back of the restaurant so that no one got the wrong idea about us.”
I don’t hold it against him. The closet is a complicated place. But, I knew that wasn’t the life that I wanted to model for Lyla. I don’t want her to grow up believing that secrecy and shame are normal.
She winces. “I guess I’d forgotten that part. Ryan and Clyde make it look so easy.”
Tack on another checkmark in the lucky column, but my uncle Ryan, my mom’s brother, is gay.
Growing up around gay men in healthy relationships was completely normalized to me.
He married Clyde, and I’ve never known my life without the two of them.
Just like my parents, Ryan and Clyde are aggressively boring in the best possible way.
They have season tickets to the Renegades, and they were absolutely thrilled when I got a job with the team.
“Are Uncle Ryan and Uncle Clyde coming over tonight?” Lyla asks as she rounds the corner into the kitchen.
I pick her up in my arms and spin her around. “I thought maybe you fell in the toilet, kiddo, but I didn’t hear a yell.” It’s one of our running jokes, and I’ve never left the toilet seat up since.
She gives me a long-suffering sigh that’s unfairly charming coming from a five-year-old. “I needed to check my room and make sure everything was still there.”
“Your room is just the way that you left it, sweetie,” my mom answers quickly. She’s moved onto cutting carrots now, but I can tell that she’s concerned with Lyla’s words like I am.
It’s a tricky thing, explaining to Lyla why it makes sense for us to live on our own. And at this moment, again, I’m agonizing over the decision. “Once games start, you’ll get to spend some weekends here. It’s like having two houses. How many kids do you know that get two places to live?”
She furrows her little brows, and I resist smoothing my fingers across them.
I was never as concerned about anything–except maybe hockey–as she is with just about everything.
“Jacob lives with his mom sometimes and his dad sometimes. He says he likes his mom’s house better cuz she has better snacks. ”
“Snacks are very important,” I agree.
“Grandma has better snacks but I still like being with you,” she says, wrapping her arms around my neck.
My throat is full and I’m blinking away tears, but I try not to let Lyla see. “I like being with you, too.”
I love my life. Really, I do. With my parents. With Lyla. With the Renegades. Sure, sometimes it gets lonely, but the idea of introducing someone into my carefully crafted world is terrifying.
We’ve all worked so hard to build what we have. My life is nothing like I’d thought it would be, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Maybe when we’re more settled into our new place, and I’ve made it through my first season at Radford. Plus, Lyla’s just started school. There's a lot of newness happening, all at once.
And maybe, the nagging voice chastises from somewhere deep inside of my mind, for as much as I pretend that I’m good at rolling with the punches, I’m pretty damn scared to put myself out there again.