Chapter 12 Knox
Chapter twelve
Knox
It’s Sunday evening as I barely make it two steps through the front door of my childhood home before I’m wrapped in the smell of roast beef, garlic, and my mom’s signature scent—some kind of expensive candle that smells like vanilla had a baby with a meadow.
“There’s my boy!” she calls from the kitchen.
I hear the scrape of a chair and my dad’s voice, calm and steady as always. “Big win Friday, son.”
“Thanks,” I say, setting my keys in the little bowl she insists I use.
“Are you hungry?” she asks like she doesn’t already know the answer.
I lean into the doorway. “Is that a real question?”
She’s wearing her Cedar Falls sweatshirt—same one she wore to every game I played in high school—and her cheeks are a little pink from standing over the oven. Her eyes are bright, though. Proud. She’s practically buzzing.
“You should’ve seen me screaming when Diaz caught that ball,” she says, tossing a salad like it wronged her. “I almost dropped my popcorn.”
Dad lifts his coffee mug. “She cried.”
“I did not cry,” she shoots back, then glances at me with a sheepish smile. “Okay, maybe a little. It was just—it was a moment, Knox. You and that team. You’ve got something special this year.”
I shrug, but I feel it. That weird, warm swell in my chest. I’m still riding the high from that win. That pass. The way the boys lit up after. Hell, the way I lit up after.
“You looked proud on the field,” Dad says.
I nod. “I was.”
We sit down to eat. Everything feels easy, until my mom breaks the silence.
“So,” Mom says casually, spooning gravy onto my plate like she’s not planning a sneak attack. “What are you doing Tuesday night?”
I narrow my eyes. “Why?”
“No reason,” she singsongs. Which, from my mother, means I should have every reason to be suspicious.
Dad clears his throat. “Here it comes.”
“Okay,” she admits, stabbing a green bean with a little too much enthusiasm. “I may have told someone you’d go out with her niece.”
“Oh, come on.”
“She’s lovely!” Mom insists. “Teaches third grade. Volunteers at the animal shelter. She has a beagle named Muffin, for heaven’s sake.”
I drop my fork. “Her dog is named after a baked good?”
Mom ignores me and keeps going. “You’re one to talk, you named your dog after Elvis’ wife. She just moved here, doesn’t know many people, and I thought—well, Knox is such a nice guy. Maybe he’d show her around.”
“You thought I’d take a stranger and her muffin dog on a tour of Cedar Falls?”
Mom rests her chin in her hand, completely unbothered. “You’re not getting any younger, sweetie.”
“Mom.”
“You’re almost twenty-nine.”
“Dad?”
Dad raises his hands. “Don’t look at me. I told her to leave it alone.”
“And yet here we are,” I mutter.
“She’s not asking for a marriage proposal, Knox,” Mom says gently. “It’s one drink. One little Tuesday night. Just…try.”
I look at her. Really look at her. She’s trying so hard to fill in a blank I haven’t asked anyone to fill. Her heart’s in the right place. It always is.
But what I can’t tell her—what I haven’t told anyone—is that there’s already someone to fill that space again in my head. Someone who lives on the other side of my kitchen wall. Someone I haven’t stopped thinking about since the second she came back into town.
I rake a hand through my hair and sigh. “I’ll think about it.”
Mom brightens like I just said yes. “That’s all I ask.”
“And if I say no?”
She smiles sweetly. “Then I’ll just reschedule it for Thursday.”
Dad chuckles into his coffee.
I lean back in my chair and shake my head. “God help me.”