Chapter 30
AREK
Icalled my mother at nine in the morning. Mac was picking up his son from SeaTac at four, and if that man could face his hardest relationship head-on, I could face mine.
She picked up on the third ring. “Arek! What a surprise. Is everything all right?”
The question that wasn’t a question. What she was really asking was: “Why are you calling? You never call,” which meant the subtle ledger she kept of my failures as a son had a new entry. I’d learned to read the subtext before I’d learned to read books.
“Everything’s great, Mom. How are you and Dad?”
“Oh, you know your father. He’s out on the golf course. I swear he’d sleep there if they let him.” A light laugh, perfectly pitched. “And the boys? How are my grandsons?”
“They’re wonderful. Summer break just started.”
“And you? Are you still happy with your choice to move to a small town?”
She’d never understood that choice, but then again, she’d never gotten over her disappointment that I’d chosen family medicine over something more prestigious, like becoming a surgeon either. “Actually, that’s why I’m calling. I have news. I’m seeing someone.”
A pause. Brief, calculated. “Oh? That’s wonderful. Tell me about him.”
She’d always been fine with me being gay.
Performatively fine. The kind of fine that never rejected outright, never protested, but also never walked with me in a Pride parade, never displayed a single rainbow flag, and never had her political choices be influenced by queer rights in any way.
It was the kind of fine that looked like acceptance from a distance and felt like sandpaper up close.
“His name is Mac. He lives here in Forestville. He’s a veteran, former 82nd Airborne. He’s kind, honest, and the boys love him. And he’s a dad too. He has a sixteen-year-old son.”
“A veteran. How interesting.” The word interesting did a lot of heavy lifting. “And what does he do?”
“He’s a builder, a carpenter. He’s currently renovating an old campground, rebuilding cabins.”
“A builder.” A pause that lasted one beat too long. “Well, that’s very…practical.”
There it was, the veiled barb, delivered with a smile I could hear through the phone. The implication that I—a physician, an educated professional—was with someone who worked with his hands, as if hands that built things were worth less than hands that wrote prescriptions.
Three months ago, it would’ve landed. I would’ve felt the sting, would’ve filed it away, performed a defense of Mac that was really a defense of myself, and spent three days composing the conversation I wished I’d had.
The old pattern. The dance I’d learned in her kitchen from before I could read—perform, absorb, pretend it didn’t hurt.
“He is practical. He’s also the best man I’ve ever known. I’m really happy, Mom.”
The simplicity of my answer left a silence on the line that my mother wasn’t prepared for. She recovered quickly. “Well, I’m happy for you, sweetheart. You deserve someone special. Maybe we can meet him when we visit.”
“That would be great.”
We talked for another three minutes. She asked about the clinic.
I gave her the surface version. She told me about a neighbor’s daughter who’d gotten into a prestigious surgical program, the comparison implicit and unnecessary.
I let it pass through me like wind through a screen—present, felt, not retained.
When I hung up, I stood in the kitchen and took stock. My hands weren’t shaking. My jaw wasn’t tight. The conversation had been exactly what it always was, and for the first time, it hadn’t cost me anything I couldn’t afford.
My mother was my mother. She wasn’t going to change. But I had changed. Her barbs needed a surface to stick to, and I’d stopped providing one. Score one for me.
My phone buzzed.
Leaving for the airport at 1. Flight lands at 3:52.
How are you doing?
Fine.
Mac…
Terrified.
That’s more like it. You’re going to be great.
What if he takes one look at the mountain and wants to go home?
Then you’ll deal with that together. But he won’t. He chose to come, Mac. He chose you.
A long pause. Then:
Yeah. Okay.
I love you.
Love you too.
I put the phone on the counter and went to find my boys.
They were in their respective natural habitats—Kace on the couch with his phone, Jules in the armchair with a book.
The feeling of a summer morning with nowhere to be was still a sensation I was adjusting to.
No schedule. No deadline. Just a Sunday stretching out in front of us: open, formless, and terrifying in its freedom. An idea formed.
“River,” I said.
Kace looked up. “What?”
“Let’s go to the river. It’s hot. We should swim.”
“Who are you and what have you done with my father?”
“Hilarious. Get your suits on.”
“Dad never takes us to the river,” Kace said to Jules, as if I weren’t standing right there.
“Dad is taking you to the river right now,” I said. “Move.”
Kace moved with explosive energy, ecstatic at receiving an unexpected gift. Jules closed his book, studied me for a moment, and nodded. A small approving nod.
I packed a bag. Towels, sunscreen, water bottles, and snacks. All the snacks. And a book. For me, not for Jules. He’d bring his own, but I would bring one as well. Getting Kace to put sunscreen on before we left was a battle, but a worthy one. It would be a lost cause once we were outside.
The Skykomish was a ten-minute walk from the house, down a path through the trees that half the town used on summer weekends.
The water was running high after the rain the previous week.
It was clear, fast in the center, and gentler at the edges where the rocks created pools.
Kace was in the water before I’d set down the bag, a cannonball that sent spray fifteen feet in every direction and startled a heron into indignant flight.
“Kace!” I yelled, instinctively.
“What? It’s water, Dad. It’s what you do with water.”
Right.
Jules waded in from the bank, careful and methodical, testing the temperature with his toes before committing to each step. When he was waist-deep, he stood still for a moment, adjusting, and then sank to his shoulders with a quiet exhale of satisfaction.
I sat on the rocks with the towels laid out, sunscreen applied, and snacks organized as I watched my boys in the water. The lifeguard. The supervisor. The man on the bank.
Kace surfaced from another dive and shook water from his hair like a dog. “Dad! Come in!”
“I’m good here.”
“You’re supposed to be in the water, Dad, not supervising.”
The bluntness of it—so Kace, so unfiltered, so accidentally profound—cut through every layer of performance I had left. You’re supposed to be in the water.
I took off my shirt and walked to the bank.
The water hit my feet, and it was shockingly cold, the kind of cold that reorganized your priorities and made your brain shut up for a second.
I waded in to my knees, my thighs, my waist, gasping at each increment.
Kace was laughing, and even Jules was smiling, and I stood in the Skykomish River on a Sunday in June, felt the cold water rush around me, and didn’t think about a single thing.
Kace splashed me, and I splashed him back, and before I knew it, we had an all-out water war going on.
Jules watched from a safe distance with the expression of a nature documentarian observing a species in its habitat.
When Kace tried to splash Jules, Jules submerged entirely and surfaced behind him with a genuinely impressive stealth.
We stayed for two hours. I swam. I floated on my back, watched the clouds move, felt the current tug at my body, and let it.
Kace performed increasingly elaborate jumps from a rock that I assessed once for safety and then stopped monitoring.
Jules found a shallow pool and lay in it, carefully reading a book.
I sat on a submerged rock in waist-deep water and let the river hold me.
No phone. No list. No tasks. Just cold water and warm sun and my boys’ voices echoing off the trees.
At one point, Kace swam over and floated next to me, his face turned up to the sky. “Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“This is nice. We should do this more.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We should.”
“Is Mr. Heald’s son coming today?”
“His name is Boden. And yes, his plane lands at four.”
“Are we going to meet him?”
“Soon. Let Mac have some time with him first.”
Kace nodded, accepting this with unusual patience. “Jules and I were talking. We think it’ll be cool having another kid around. Like, an older kid. Someone who can drive us places.”
“He just turned sixteen, Kace. He doesn’t have a license yet.”
“He will eventually. We’re playing the long game.”
I laughed. The sound came easy, unforced, bouncing off the water, and Kace grinned at me with the uncomplicated delight of a kid who’d made his father laugh and knew it was worth something.
“You can call him Mac, you know,” I said to both of them. “Instead of Mr. Heald.”
“Cool,” was Kace’s only response.
We dried off and walked home. Kace carried the bag without being asked, running ahead like he still had energy to burn. Jules walked beside me, his shoulder occasionally bumping mine. The town was quiet in the afternoon heat, the streets mostly empty.
Back home, I checked my phone. I had a few messages from Mac.
On the road.
Cabin looks good. Bookshelf was the right call.
Then, twenty minutes later:
At the airport. His flight is on time.
I could feel his controlled anxiety through the phone.
You’ve got this. Call me tonight if you want.
Yeah. I will.
The afternoon settled around us. Kace disappeared into his room with his phone.
Jules read on the porch, freshly showered, his hair still damp.
I made dinner—nothing elaborate, just grilled cheese and tomato soup, a meal that took fifteen minutes and didn’t require performance.
Kace told Jules about Tyler’s latest plan, and Jules listened with patient skepticism.
I sat at my table with my boys and felt like that was enough.
After dinner, the boys retreated, and I found a spot on the love seat on the porch.
The evening light was golden, and the air was warm and gentle around me.
I opened my book and started reading, but it was hard to keep my focus on the book.
My thoughts kept drifting off to Mac, who was meeting his son for the first time in five years.
But I forced myself to hold that thought gently, the way I was learning to deal with things like this—without gripping, without managing, without trying to carry it for him.
Mac’s joy was Mac’s. Mac’s fear was Mac’s.
I could love him and support him and be here when he called, and I didn’t have to carry it.
I sat on my painted porch in the last of the light, letting the evening be what it was, and I waited.