Hummingbird #2
It was surprising how naturally that habit seemed to form.
It was my dad that started it. When Zane and I first went to college, he would drive the two hours to our dorm, and then we would try to find a restaurant that wasn’t crowded with drunken college kids.
I appreciated it. I saw the effort my dad was making.
He was making a choice, like Zane, to love me. Not an obligation. Choice.
As nice as that was, I hesitated every time he came. Zane noticed it, of course, and I’m sure my dad noticed too. It just felt… off, in a way. Like he did not belong there. He was a part of this life. Not that one. This one. Here, in this town, where these memories live.
So, naturally, Zane suggested that we make the trip instead of him. He told me it was because he would be able to see his parents more often. That was both true, and nice. But I think it was really because he saw my hesitation and made the choice to take it away. As Zane does. As he always does.
“What are you kids doing out here?”
Zane and I both turned to look toward the sliding door.
My Dad stood there, framed by the glass like a portrait of a man who had never known the meaning of the word small.
In the city, in his glass-and-steel offices, he was a titan.
A man whose voice could command a boardroom into silence and whose presence was felt before he even entered a room.
He was all sharp edges and expensive wool.
But here, in the soft, fading light of the porch, the silhouette was different.
He was wearing an old sweater that hung a little too loose on his shoulders, his hair still damp and unstyled from the shower.
He looked at us with a curious sort of tenderness that still felt new and constantly recalibrating, like a high-power lens trying to focus on something moving constantly, like a hummingbird.
He was powerful, yes, but in this house, the power did not belong to him. I don’t think it belonged to anyone.
He was trying to parent a girl he just met. I was trying to keep my arms pinned against my sides instead of pushing him away. Neither was stronger than the other.
“Hey Tom,” Zane greeted him, loosely like they were old friends.
They weren’t, not really. They were polite and welcoming to each other. But there was bad blood there and it was silly to pretend otherwise. Zane would never forgive him for the role he played in the bad things. My dad was painfully aware that Zane was the only reason I survived the bad things.
My dad cleared his throat, his hand lingering on the handle of the sliding door. “Zane. You’re back early. Hope your folks are okay. I was just about to pull the steaks off.”
“Traffic was light,” Zane said, stepping toward the door with that easy confidence that always made the room feel smaller. “I don’t mind a medium-rare that’s sat for a minute.”
“Right. Good.” My dad stepped back, ushering us into the kitchen. The air inside was warm and heavy with the scent of butter and rosemary. “Seren, I got those potatoes you like. From the market on Fourth.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said. My voice sounded steady to my own ears, something that felt more normal than not these days. “You didn’t have to go all out.”
“It’s no big deal,” he replied quickly, a bit too quickly. He turned to the counter, busying his hands with a set of tongs. “Zane, can I get you something? A beer? Sparkling water?”
“Water is fine, Tom. Thanks.” Zane leaned against the island like he felt at home here, and I’m sure in a sense, that he did more than me. Like I said, he was here a lot after the bad things happened.
I watched my dad hand Zane a glass, his fingers brushing against Zane’s in a way that felt like a passing of a torch.
There was a look in my dad’s eyes, like a tired recognition.
Like I said, he knew Zane had been the one to hold me together while he was busy pretending I was self-sufficient.
He knew Zane was the architect of my current safety, and it must have stung to realize he only had limited access to the blueprints.
“How’s the drive been treating that car of yours?” my dad asked, his back to us as he plated the food. It was a safe question. A man question.
“Still good as new,” Zane said. He didn’t elaborate. He just stood there, painfully present. “Seren says you’ve been doing some work on your office?”
My dad paused, tongs mid-air. He looked at me, then back at Zane. “Just some shelves. Thought I would organize the… well, the things that have been sitting in boxes.”
He meant the things that belong to the ghost that lives here. The ghost that lives inside of him, inside of me and inside these walls. The ghost that never makes itself known but always haunts us anyway. My mother.
“That’s good, Dad,” I said, stepping in to bridge the gap before the silence became a moment. “It’ll be nice to have it finished.”
“Yeah,” my dad muttered, finally turning around with two plates. He looked at me, then at Zane, offering a tight, hopeful smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “It’s a start, anyway.”
“So, how’s Austin?” he asked me once we had taken our seats at the table. “Is he doing good?”
The same remorseful gratitude that my dad held for Zane, he also held for Austin.
The difference was that Austin didn’t hold the same undercurrent grudge as Zane did.
When Austin first showed up at my doorstep, when our lives had just been flooded and blown over, dad found it hard to trust Austin.
He did not trust any men around me at that point, but I was sure the tattoos, leather jacket and permanent marijuana odor didn’t help.
He was always on guard, waiting for Austin to make a mistake.
He kept pushing him away, hoping he would give up and leave me alone in my father’s caged version of false safety.
But Austin never gave up, and he never made a mistake.
Eventually, Austin and my dad had bonded like teammates on the bench together.
“He’s good,” I told my dad, pushing a piece of potato around my plate. “I think he’s in Florida right now.”
“Oh? Is he still with that girl?” he asked me, genuinely curious and not just making conversation. “That one that he spent all those years talking about?”
“Blair,” I reminded him. “Yeah, they are still together. I can’t see him ever letting her go, honestly. She makes him light instead of mean and grumpy like he usually is.”
I thought about the change in Austin when he first met Blair, just after we had graduated high school, not long after the bad things had finally begun to settle down into the past instead of the present.
The way that it felt like a light had suddenly turned on in his world that previously was only dark and gray.
I was proud of him for the work he did after meeting her.
Proud of him in the way he was probably proud of me.
One night, the two of us had stayed up until the early morning hours watching Grey’s Anatomy at his house.
He had been in a horrible mood, barely talking, the scowl on his face was different from the grin he usually wore around me.
I had given up trying to speak any kind of hope into him, and we had been sitting side by side in silence for hours.
Then, Austin paused the show, he looked at me, and said did you ever think we would be here? Us? In therapy every week? Getting better? Wanting to get better? Trying?
And for a moment, he stunned me. He was right. When I was a teenager, when I was going through the storms and the hard nights and the grief and all of the bad things, sitting beside Austin Portwood in silence, sober, fresh from therapy… was a future I never saw coming.
Dad nodded slowly, a small, thoughtful smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Good for him. He deserves that. It is a rare thing, finding someone who can make you feel like that. Once in a lifetime, I would say. Hold it when you get it.”
I looked down at my plate, the steam from the potatoes curling into the air. My mind drifted back to that night with Austin; the flickering blue light of the TV, the heavy silence, and that sudden question: Did you ever think we would be here?
“He’s coming back this week,” I added, pulling myself back to the present. “He wants to take us all out to that pier place. The one with the overpriced oysters.”
Zane chuckled, the sound low and warm. “Austin and his oysters. I’m surprised he hasn’t opened his own raw bar by now.”
“He probably would if Blair let him,” I joked, the tension at the table lifted. It felt normal. It felt easy.
My dad laughed, a real sound that made him look younger, less like the man in the wool suit and more like the father I was still getting to know. “Well, tell him he is welcome here anytime. He doesn’t need to wait for a weekend.”
I watched him take a bite of his steak; his movements relaxed for the first time all evening. He was happy. He was content in this small moment.
“How’s school?” he asked us, looking between me and Zane.
“Finals are coming,” Zane answered for us. “But I think we’re both ready for it. Seren’s been hitting the library harder than I have lately. We are almost at the finish line for the semester.”
I nodded, though my thoughts drifted, again.
To my dad, school was a metric of success, a series of grades and credits.
But to me, it was just proof that I was trying.
Every lecture I attended, and every paper I submitted felt like a stone laid in the foundation of a life I actually wanted to live.
It wasn’t about the degree; it was the proof that I was no longer a trap made specifically to catch myself in.
“Proud of you guys,” my dad nodded as he said the words, looking at Zane first but then zoning back into me. “You’re really making it. Soon enough you’ll be graduating. One more year. I can’t wait to see you on that stage, Seren. It will be the proudest day of my life.”