Chapter 21
Asher
My phone buzzes on the way from Millbrook up to my parents’ house, and I leave it in the cupholder.
It's a rule I keep better than most. A promise Deck made each of us swear to.
Hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. Whatever it is can wait.
I don't see the text until I'm pulling into my parents' driveway, killing the engine, reaching for the bakery box on the passenger seat. The screen lights up when I move it.
Nate: Your dad invited me to dinner. That's not weird right?
Nate: Should I bring something?
Nate: Leaving now.
I'm still reading it, trying to make sense of it, when a second set of headlights swings into the driveway behind me. Nate's truck. He climbs out of it, grinning, holding a grocery-store pie still in its plastic clamshell, and I get out slow, the suspicion already crawling up the back of my neck.
"You didn't answer," he says. "I went with Nora’s suggestion and bought pie."
"My dad invited you to dinner?"
"That's what I texted you." He squints. "You didn't see it?"
"I was driving."
"Hmm.” He nods, understanding, bound to the same oath too. He hefts the pie in his hands. "Owen's with Nora. I didn't know if family dinner meant everyone or not so I left them home. Felt safer."
"It's not—" I stop. I don't actually know what this is. My father doesn’t invite my best friend to Sunday dinner for no reason, and the fact that I'm only finding out in the driveway lands in my gut like a trap I haven't figured out the shape of yet. "Yeah. It's fine. Come on."
Nate falls into step beside me up the walk, and I feel the old reflex kick in, the one that smooths my face out before a door opens. I've been doing it my whole life. I just notice it a lot more lately, since I started spending time in a house where I don't have to.
The Calloway house smells like lemon polish, Mom’s roast, and the cedar of the front closet. The second I'm through the door, I'm seven and thirty-one at the same time. That thing that going home does to you.
"There he is." My mother has me by the face before I've got the box down, thumbs at my jaw like she's checking I'm still the right son. "You're too thin."
"I'm an athlete, Mom. I’m definitely not thin.”
"Too thin." She spots Nate behind me and her whole face opens. "And you brought Nathaniel."
"Dad brought Nathaniel," I say, rolling my eyes.
"I brought pie," Nate offers, and surrenders the clamshell to her like a man handing over a passport.
"He brought a store pie," Felicity announces from the stairs, dry, arms crossed. "And Mash brought a bakery box. Why do I get grief when I bring something store-bought?"
“Because, sweetie,” Mom says, forbearingly, “it’s the best way to catch yourself a man. Through his stomach.”
"Yeah, Flick. Don’t you want to be a proper lady?" I tell her, snickering.
She gives me the finger behind Mom’s back. "Like you’re the beacon of gentility." She comes down and looks at me a beat too long, reading something on my face I'd rather she didn't. Then she lets it go and steals the bakery box and the pie out of Mom’s hands to go peek at what's inside.
Mom sighs. “How am I supposed to dote on any grandchildren if neither of you settles down with anyone? Nate,” she says, looking at him imploringly. “You know people. Can’t you rope anyone into dating these two?”
“I don’t think getting a date is the problem, Mrs. C. They don’t want to be tied down.” He says it lightly.
Mom nods, dejected. “Yes, yes. You’re right, of course. Well, you’re dating that lovely girl. You work on putting out more beautiful babies in the world, and I can dote on them.”
I immediately laugh. I love it when the tables turn.
Nate goes red—absolutely crimson—which I don’t get to see very often.
Mom shoos us away, the roast needing another forty minutes. She’s roping Felicity into the kitchen for help when Dad appears in the study doorway with two fingers of something amber already in his hand.
"Asher. Nate. Come have a drink while the women cook." He says it like a man who hasn't updated the phrase since 1985 and doesn't see why he should. Mom rolls her eyes at the stove. Felicity pretends to stab her chest with the knife she’s chopping lettuce with.
It's not a request. It never is. I follow him into the study, bracing for whatever plan he’s concocted that involves my friend, Nate following behind me.
The study swallows us the way it always does—mahogany panels, towering walls of books. Law books my father sat me down with once he decided I was old enough to use my “gift.” Poetry and plays my mother made me read out loud because she liked the sound of them in the room.
I’ve read every single one. My father has too—something I’ve always admired about him.
Framed diplomas line the wall beside the fireplace. The desk sits front and center. I’ve never liked sitting in front of it.
Dad reaches for the whiskey bottle and pours. Hands Nate a glass, hands me one, and doesn't sit, which tells me everything about how the next twenty minutes are going to go.
"Nate," he says, settling against the edge of the desk. "How's the trading going? You're doing well, from what I hear."
"Can't complain." Nate takes a careful sip, and I watch him clock the temperature of the room a second behind me. He's good at reading people too, in his own way. Not Calloway-trained, but good. "Good year so far."
"See?" My father waves the glass in his hand.
"That's exactly the thing I keep trying to say to this one.
" He nods at me, warm and easy, like we're all three on the same side of something.
"Nate's got the same life you've got, Asher.
Same schedule. Same travel. Same people asking for pictures in restaurants.
And he's built something underneath it all.
Something that's still there when the knee goes. "
And there it is.
Heck, I should have read it in the freaking driveway.
He didn't invite my best friend to dinner.
He invited Exhibit A.
"Dad."
"I'm just saying it's possible." He holds a hand up, thinking this is all reasonable.
"I'm not even married to the idea of it being the firm anymore, if that's the sticking point.
Marcus is retiring, a seat will be opening, and I'd love nothing more than for you to start moving your way up.
You know that. But if law's not it—fine.
Trade. Invest. Do what Nate's doing or something like it.
" He looks at Nate. "Tell him. He'll hear it from you before he hears it from me. "
The room goes quiet in a particular way. Nate looks at me, and I can see him deciding whether to play along to keep the peace or step back out of it, and to his credit, he sets the glass down on the desk and doesn't pick a side.
"Mr. Calloway, I don't know that I'm the guy to—"
"You're exactly the guy. You're proof." My father says it kindly.
That's the thing about him I can never get a grip on.
There's no meanness in it anywhere. He genuinely believes he's standing in this room handing his son a gift, and he's lined up a witness to help me see the wrapping.
"I'm not asking you to quit anything, Asher.
I've never once asked you to quit. I'm just asking you to think about what comes after, while you've still got time to set it up right instead of scrambling for it at thirty-six with nothing. "
"I've got time."
"That's what time feels like right until you don't have it." He says it gently, and he's not wrong. Even I can hear the reasoning. "You've had a great run. I mean that. But that’s all it is. I want you to have something with your name on it when the cheering stops."
I set the glass I haven’t touched down on the desk.
"It's never been enough for you." It comes out lower than I mean it to.
Quieter. "Baseball’s never been enough. Not once.
I'm one of the best in the country at a thing I love, and every single time I walk through that door you've got a better life picked out, sitting one room over from the one I'm actually living. "
"That's not it, Asher.”
"Then what is it?”
"I’m trying to protect you from a version of your future you can't see yet.
" His voice doesn't rise either. We're two quiet men in a study with a third quiet man between us, wishing he were anywhere else.
"One day the phone stops ringing. The cameras find someone younger. And I don’t want my son sitting in an empty house at forty wondering why he didn't build anything when he had every advantage to. "
And here's the part I can't say.
I am building something.
The word sits at the back of my throat. Her name.
I could say it. End this whole conversation in one sentence.
I want to put my glass down harder than I did and tell him I’m building the most serious thing I've ever touched in my life.
That it has a kitchen and a boy who runs trucks up my arm and a girl who does long division at the table and a woman who looks at me like I matter for nothing.
For less than nothing. For turning off a microwave beep.
He of all people would understand that. Family is the one thing he would get. He built a family and called it a legacy—and he was right to.
I want the same thing. I'm trying to build the same thing he did. I’m just doing it somewhere he can’t see.
But it isn't mine to say. It's hers. So I stand in a study I've felt small in my whole life and let my father believe I'm building nothing, with my best friend standing right there, holding the one piece of information that would change the entire room.
"I appreciate the intervention, Dad," I say instead. "Really."
I don't, in this second, appreciate anything, and all three of us hear it.
I head for the door.
"Asher."
"I need some air before dinner." I keep moving. "It's fine, Dad. We're fine. I just need a minute."