18. Chapter Eighteen
Aspen
The seatbelt sign chimes somewhere over my head, and I surface out of the first real sleep I’ve had in four days into the slow, horrifying understanding that the warm thing my cheek is pressed against is Stanley Ermington’s shoulder.
I don’t move. Not for a second. I feel the heat of him through the cotton and the steady in-and-out of his breathing. Finally, I lift my head, close my eyes, and stretch. When I open my eyes, he rolls his shoulder once and leans back again.
Stanley doesn’t say anything, and he hasn’t really since my mini crisis in the airport, and I’m grateful for the comfortable silence.
I look out the window across his large body and try to ignore how he smells.
I pat my hair, find it’s a disaster, pull out my phone, and look at my own reflection. Panic of what we’re about to do rises in my chest.
“What’s the plan from the gate, Linwood?” he asks, keeping his eyes forward.
“My dad’s picking us up.”
He pauses.
“He always picks me up,” I add.
He looks through the window and jokes, “Is it too late to turn this plane around?”
I grin at that right as the flight attendants announce that we need to fasten our seatbelts and stay seated for landing. The plane lands almost ten minutes later. I turn my phone on the second the wheels touch and see that my dad has already texted me.
“He’s already waiting,” I say to Stanley.
I breathe in and try to push the nerves out. It doesn’t work.
“You good?” Stanley asks.
I nod, and then I shake my head, sighing. “Not really.”
He looks at me for a long moment, and then he says, “Don’t worry, Linwood. Just look at me if you need saving, okay?”
I blink, surprised that he’s being genuine.
“Okay,” I say. “Yeah. Thank you.”
“We’ll get through it.”
I don’t have anything to put on top of that, so I don’t try. My father’s voice is going around in my head — I’m so proud of you — the thing he said on the phone and has never said to me before.
The seatbelt light turns off, and the whole plane stands up at once. We wait for our turn. Stanley pulls my carry-on down from the overhead and hands me the pie to free up his hands, so now I’m holding a man’s pie, and he’s got everything else. I fall into step behind him up the aisle.
For someone as ridiculous as he is, he takes up a startling amount of room.
He’s broad through the back, a full head over the people around him, and his hair is the perfect length that curls up off his neck.
I watch the way other passengers glance at him.
I catch it twice, three times, and decide it must be his height.
It can’t be anything else. They haven’t heard a word out of his mouth.
All they have to go on is his looks, and the outside of him is not the problem.
We come off the jet bridge, and he takes the pie back.
“I can carry something,” I say as he steals the pie from me. I suddenly feel empty-handed.
“Not a chance, princess.”
“Please don’t call me that in front of my family.”
“Noted.” He hikes the garment bag higher on his shoulder without breaking stride.
“I’ll keep princess in the vault. Emergencies only.
” And that is the whole negotiation. He walks fast, and I’m left jogging to keep up.
Then I remember that we’re about to walk into Thanksgiving at my father’s house and kick myself for not preparing Stanley for this days ago.
“Stanley.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t ask my dad anything about hockey. Answer what he asks you. Don’t volunteer.”
He nods once. “Got it.”
“And there’ll be some of his guys there today.”
“Yeah.”
“Hodge is bringing Beth. Mac. McCallister. Maybe just — don’t bring up hockey at all.”
“Linwood.”
“Don’t make a face.”
“This is my face.” He keeps moving. “Is this an actual rule? Because I’m going to be on the ice against half these men inside a year. It’s going to come up.”
It hadn’t, until that exact second, occurred to me that I am walking my fake boyfriend into a room full of professional rivals, and my face goes hot all the way to my ears.
“That’s more of a reason not to talk about it,” I manage.
He stops. The garment bag swings against his hip and settles. “Hey. It’s going to be okay.”
“No, it’s not. I can’t believe I’m bringing an outsider to my dad’s Thanksgiving.”
“I’m not an outsider, Linwood.” And there’s the grin, slow and sure. “Your dad coached me all summer. I’ve already met half the room.” He tips his head, studies me a moment too long, and the grin thins out into something quieter. “What’s actually going on?”
I swallow.
The grin comes back halfway, the way the tide comes back. “Is this just your dad? Or do you have a secret crush on one of his guys, because I’m going to need a name. For the cover story. And, separately, for my own records.”
“Stanley.”
“Linwood,” he says, delighted with himself.
“It’s not that.” I get it out on barely any breath. I cross my arms.
He looks down at me. “You’re usually so — composed. Poised. I don’t know how to act around you when you’re like this.”
“And you’re usually weird and cracking jokes,” I say, “so I don’t know how to act around you when you’re not so insufferable.”
A grin spreads slowly across his whole face, like I’ve handed him a thing he’s going to keep. “Okay.”
We start walking again.
Okay?
Okay!
We come out through the sliding doors into the cold as I call my dad. He says almost there, and then his truck noses up to the curb three minutes later. He sees us through the windshield, and his whole face opens up. A lump comes up in my throat so fast it surprises me.
And just like that — like a switch thrown somewhere behind his eyes — the Stanley Ermington I know comes back on at full wattage.
“Coach!” he hollers, like a man who’s spotted land after a year lost at sea.
My father’s grin gets wider through the glass.
Stanley pulls the front door open for me, and I lift a hand at my dad with my heart going a hundred miles an hour.
Stanley loads our bags into the back, then drops into the back seat, reaches over, and grabs my father by both shoulders like he means to shake him out of his skin.
“How are ya, Coach? You look rested. Retirement suits you.”
“I’m not retired, Stan.”
“You will be, once you see how I’m playing this year.”
My father throws his head back and barks a real laugh, the kind that only a few real ones get out of him. I sit very still in my seat and stare out the windshield, because I know how it is between him and Robert Ermington. But I did not know my father was this way with Stanley as well.
He pulls into traffic and goes quiet for half a mile.
“Flight okay?” my dad asks.
I nod.
“Yes, sir,” Stanley says. “Smooth one. Aspen got some sleep.”
“Good. She doesn’t sleep enough.”
Stanley agrees. “She works too hard.”
My father glances at me. “That she does.”
I press out a small smile and look at my hands. It feels so hot in here.
“Bigger crowd than usual this year,” my father says. “Mac, McCallister, Hodge and Beth, Ricardo and the family, the Lindbergs, Pete and Marie. Your folks. And my brother.”
I stop breathing.
My uncle Pat has not come to a Linwood Thanksgiving in eight years. He doesn’t, as a general rule, leave the state of Maine. Which means that something happened, and I don’t know about it.
“Sounds like a great day, sir,” says Stanley, who doesn’t know the difference.
“Should be. Aspen — your mother’s been in that kitchen since five. She’s going to want the both of you out of it the second you’re through the door. Don’t fight her on it.”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Stan. Your folks are already at the house. My brother flew in last night. And I had Carolyn put a shirt out for you in the guest bath. In case you want to change before people start showing up.”
Stanley’s head turns, just slightly. “You did?”
“Navy Oxford. Tie. Hanging on the door.”
And Stanley pauses before he says, “Thank you, sir.”
I look out the window and think, my father does not do that for anyone.
We turn into the drive, through the gate, and the house is lit up gold in the morning light. There are two cars I don’t recognize parked along the side and room left for a dozen more. By dinner, the lawn is going to look like the players’ lot at his arena.
He parks, kills the engine, and doesn’t get out.
“Sweetheart,” he says.
“Yeah, Dad?” I look over at him.
“Your mother’s a little nervous today.”
So am I, Dad, I think. So am I. “About what?”
“She’s just wound up. But she’ll be happy to see you. Make sure you make time to talk with her privately later.”
I swallow the unease that shoots through my stomach. “Okay.”
He climbs out, pulls my bag from the back, and hands it to Stanley. Then he sets his hand on Stanley’s shoulder and leaves it there.
“Welcome home, son.”
Stanley nods.
And I stand on the driveway I grew up on and watch my father lift his hand off my fake boyfriend’s shoulder and think about how he has never once called anyone son.
I swallow it, the whole jagged thing, and I walk to my own front door with my pulse going in my ears.
The smell reaches the porch before the door does.
Brisket. Turkey. Cornbread. The brown-butter thing my mother does to the green beans that she will take to her grave before she explains.
Coffee. And under it all, the candle she only ever burns on this one day, the one in the silver Tiffany jar that’s lived on the mantel since I was seven years old.
My mother is at the door before it’s fully open, in a soft brown sweater I’ve never seen, hair done, wearing the pearls my father gave her for their twenty-fifth.
“Sweetheart.” She kisses my cheek quickly. Then her voice lifts. “Stanley.”
“Mrs. Linwood.”
“Get over here, you.” And he does, and she wraps both arms around him and holds on too long. When she lets go, she keeps her hands on his shoulders and tips her head back to look up at him. “You look like your father.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Don’t you ma’am me. It’s Carolyn.”
“Carolyn.”