Chapter 15 Tanner #2
Dinner was easier than I expected. Frank asked questions about my work without oversimplifying or pretending to understand more than he did.
He and Mom moved around each other with the kind of ease that came from spending real time together—passing dishes without asking, anticipating what the other needed.
When he put his hand on her shoulder, she leaned into the touch.
“Your father sounds like he was an incredible man,” Frank said when the conversation turned to Patrick. “The way Angela describes him, before the illness— It’s clear how much he loved you both.”
“He was.” I pushed food around my plate. “The disease took so much of who he was. But before that, he was the best dad I could have asked for.”
After dinner, Frank helped with the dishes while I sat at the counter nursing the last of my wine. He and Mom worked together with the same easy rhythm, and I found myself watching them the way I’d once watched my parents—looking for cracks, for signs this wouldn’t last. I didn’t find any.
Frank left around eight, pressing a kiss to Mom’s cheek at the door, shaking my hand again with that same warm grip.
“It was good to meet you, Tanner. I hope we’ll see more of each other.”
“Me too,” I said, and I meant it.
Mom and I settled into the living room with the box of photos.
She’d set it on the coffee table between us, the cardboard soft with age. A stack of albums and loose prints filled it to the brim, each one dated and annotated in Dad’s handwriting. I picked one at random—2002, the year before I was born.
There he was—young, strong, grinning at the camera in his uniform with the kind of confidence that came from believing your body would never betray you.
Another photo showed him mid-game, caught in motion, arms outstretched for a pass.
In the next, his teammates mobbed him after what must have been a touchdown, and he emerged from the pile grinning.
Mom made a soft sound beside me. I reached for her hand without looking, and she squeezed back.
“He was so beautiful,” she said. “I forget sometimes. What he looked like before.”
“I remember him like this.” I traced the edge of the photograph. “Teaching me to throw a spiral in the backyard. Driving me to school with the windows down, singing along to the radio.”
“He was a terrible singer.” Mom laughed, the sound catching in her throat.
“The worst. But he didn’t care.” I set the photo down, picked up another—Dad and me at my high school graduation, his arm around my shoulders, both of us grinning. “I’m glad I had those years with him. Before everything changed.”
“He loved you so much, Tanner. Even when he couldn’t remember your name, some part of him knew you were his.”
The tears came without warning. I let them fall, didn’t try to stop them, just sat there holding my mother’s hand while we looked at my father’s ghost frozen in time.
When we set the last photo down, neither of us moved to pick up another. The silence felt sacred somehow—like we’d completed a ritual neither of us had known we needed.
Mom had shared something hard with me today. Something real. And she’d trusted me with it. I thought about everything she’d said about Frank, about guilt and grief and finding something good in the middle of loss. Maybe it was time I trusted her back.
“There’s something I should tell you too,” I said.
Mom turned to look at me. Her face was still wet, but her eyes were steady.
“I’ve been seeing someone. A guy.” I kept my gaze on the blank television screen. “His name is Seth. He’s my roommate, but it’s…more than that now.”
“Oh, honey.” Her hand tightened on mine. “How long?”
“A few months. Since October, really, though it took us a while to figure out what we were doing.”
“Is he good to you?”
“Yeah.” My voice cracked. “He’s good to me. He makes me feel like I’m worth taking care of.”
“Then I’m happy for you.” She shifted closer, wrapped her arm around my shoulders the way she had when I was small. “Tell me about him.”
So I did. I told her about the roommate arrangement that had turned into something more.
About the hot chocolate and the ice packs and the nights we’d spent tangled together on the couch.
About how scared I was to love someone who played the sport that had destroyed my father, and how I couldn’t seem to stop loving him anyway.
“He plays football?” Mom’s voice was careful, but not judgmental.
“He’s finishing his senior season. Then he’s done—grad school for athletic training.
He wants to help players, not be one.” I rubbed my face with my free hand.
“But it’s hard. Every game, I watch him get hit, and all I can think about is Dad.
All I can see is what might happen ten years from now, twenty years.
And I know it’s not fair to him, but I can’t make the fear go away. ”
Mom was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was rough with something I couldn’t name.
“Your father never regretted playing. Even at the end, even when he couldn’t remember most things, he remembered the games.
The teammates. The feeling of doing something he loved.
” She turned to face me fully. “I spent years being angry at football for what it took from us. But being angry didn’t change anything. It just made me bitter.”
“How did you stop?”
“I didn’t, not completely. But I learned to hold the anger alongside everything else.
The love, the grief, the fear.” Her hand found my cheek, turned my face toward hers.
“You’re allowed to love someone and be scared at the same time.
The fear doesn’t make the love less real.
It just means you understand what you’re risking. ”
“What if I can’t stop being afraid?”
“Then you love him anyway. You choose the fear that comes with connection over the safety of being alone.” She smiled, sad and knowing.
“That’s what I did with Frank. That’s what your father did with me, knowing what football might cost us someday.
Love is always a risk. The question is whether it’s worth taking. ”
I thought about Seth—alone at his parents’ house right now, surrounded by people who didn’t support him, pretending to be someone he wasn’t.
I thought about the distance between us this past week, the way we’d been circling each other instead of reaching out.
I thought about how much I wanted to close that gap, and how terrified I was to try.
“Things have been hard lately,” I admitted. “Between us. He’s dealing with family stuff, and I’ve been spiraling about his season, and we keep hurting each other without meaning to.”
“That’s what relationships are, baby. Hurting each other and choosing to stay anyway, always working to do better. Figuring it out together instead of running away.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“It’s the furthest thing from simple.” She pulled me into a hug, and I let myself be held the way I’d needed to be held for months. “But the hard things are usually worth doing.”
Later, after Mom had gone to bed, I sat on the back porch with my phone in my hand.
The night was cold, the wooden boards rough under my palms. Crickets sang in the darkness beyond the floodlight’s reach, and the oak tree at the property line creaked in the wind.
Above me, the sky was clear enough to see stars—more than I could see from campus, the light pollution dimmed by distance from the city.
Dad used to sit out here with me. We’d identify constellations—or try to, anyway. He’d make up names for the ones he couldn’t remember, and I’d pretend to believe him. Orion’s Belt became “Patrick’s Three Beers.” The Big Dipper was “The Soup Ladle of Champions.”
I smiled at the memory. It hurt, but not as sharply as I’d expected.
My phone glowed in my hand. I typed a message, deleted it. Typed again.
Thinking about you. Hope you’re okay.
I stared at the words for a long time. Then I hit send.
The response came faster than I expected, a bubble appearing almost immediately.
Surviving. Miss you.
Two words that shouldn’t have meant so much. I typed back before I could overthink it.
Miss you too. We’ll talk when you’re back?
Yeah. We will.
I sat there for a while longer, phone pressed against my chest, watching the stars my father had named for me. The fear was still there—probably always would be. But underneath it, something else had taken root. Something that felt like hope.
Mom was right. Love was a risk. But some risks were worth taking.