37. Chapter Thirty-Seven
Stanley
I have flown a hundred times in my life and never once been scared on a plane, and I am scared on this one. I’m at the window seat, and the decision to get on a plane was made the moment I was staring at her window from my truck.
Bart Linwood got into his daughter’s head, which means he’s the one who can fix this, but a man like him can’t be convinced over a phone call or a text. I have to show up and talk to him in person.
So that’s what I’m doing. I’m going to Connecticut. Tonight. To sit in that man’s house and admit the lie and ask him, properly, for a thing I never once asked for the right way.
I’m fucking terrified.
I ran it past the Hawthorne boys before I made the flight because I don’t do something this unhinged without my brothers weighing in.
Benson said it wasn’t a bad idea — and from Benson, who measures every choice like it costs him money, not a bad idea is basically a golden ticket.
Percy looked up from his stall and said, “You’re batshit crazy,” which is more words than Percy has said to me consecutively all season.
Blue said, “That’s — yeah. That’s pretty intense, man.
” Rowan, who has not given me the pie recipe yet, said, “You’re insane. ”
And then every single one of them agreed it was the reasonable way to make it right.
That’s the thing. Four guys who think I’ve lost my mind unanimously agree that going to the man in person and taking the hit to his face is the honorable move.
Benson walked me to the door and said the only thing that mattered.
“If you’re gonna blow it up, blow it up to the right guy first.” The brotherhood I turned Halifax down for, signing off on the play that might cost me everything.
I carried it out the door with me. I’m carrying it now, at thirty thousand feet, the one warm thing in a cold seat.
When I land at my connecting flight, I decide it’s time to tell my parents.
I call my dad, and he picks up on the second ring, warm, riding high, already mid-sentence.
“Cup! Perfect timing, your mother and I were just—”
“Dad,” I say, because if I don’t stop him now, he’ll keep going. “I need to tell you something, and I need you to let me get all the way through it before you say anything, because if you stop me, I’m not sure I’ll start again.”
He pauses, and the brightness goes out of his voice. “Alright. Your mother’s here, you’re on speaker. Go ahead, son.”
And I tell them.
All of it. The party. The kitchen. Gavin closing in on her, and her grabbing the nearest body, which happened to be me.
The deal we struck. The rules we wrote down.
The fact that none of it was ever real — that the thing they’ve been so proud of, the Thanksgiving they flew over for, started as a lie two people told to survive one party and it got blown out of proportion.
I don’t dress it up. I don’t reach for any jokes, not once, even though I can feel it sitting right there the entire time. A joke would take the edge off, the deflection that would land it softer on me. I don’t pick it up. I let it be exactly as bad as it is.
And then I tell them the other part, because it’s true, and they’ve earned the true part. That somewhere in the middle of the lie, it turned into the realest thing in my life. That I’m not telling them to be forgiven. I’m telling them because I’m done with the lie that’s hurting her now.
When I stop, there’s a silence on the line. The silence runs long and heavy. I sit in a chair facing the window, watching a plane drive by, and I make myself stay inside the silence. I don’t fill it. I don’t try to make this better. I refuse to make a joke to lighten the mood.
“So when you called me,” my dad says finally, and his voice isn’t angry, “in that hotel, and I asked if I’d overstepped.” A long breath. “That whole time, you were—”
“Yeah.”
“I was so proud of you, Cup. I’ve been telling people. I’ve been telling everybody. About my son and his girl.”
“I know, Dad.” My voice gives out. “I know. That’s why I had to be the one to tell you.”
And he doesn’t say anything. It’s the hardest silence I have ever made myself stay inside of.
“Robert,” my mom says, gently, “give us a minute, would you?” A shift, a door, and then it’s just her on the line, and I brace, because if my father’s disappointment could level a building, my mother’s has always known how to find the one wall left standing and take that too.
“How long has it been real?” she says. Not was any of it real. How long.
“I don’t know exactly. A while. Thanksgiving, maybe before it.”
“Mm.” And I know that Mm. I’ve been hearing it my whole life.
It’s the sound she makes when something confirms a thing she already knew.
“I told your father, after Thanksgiving. I said, whatever that is between those two, it’s the real thing, and he laughed at me.
Of course it’s real, Margaret, they’re dating.
” A dry, sad little sound. “I didn’t know I was right for the wrong reason. ”
“Mom, I lied. I let—”
“You did. And you and I are going to talk about that, at length, when you’re not in whatever state you’re in tonight.
” Steel under the gentle. The way it’s always run.
“But it doesn’t matter how it started. I know what I watched at that table.
I watched her look at you when she thought nobody was looking, and a lie cannot do that.
A lie can put two people at a table. It cannot do that.
So whatever you built it on, the thing standing on top of it is real. And it still counts.”
I have to put my hand over my eyes.
“You said something to me a few days ago,” I manage. “About wanting a thing that was mine. You didn’t know how right you were.”
“I know now,” she says. “And it still counts. That’s the entire point I’m making, Stanley, so be sharp enough to hear it.”
“I have to tell Coach Linwood,” I say. “Myself. To his face — not let it travel, not let him hear it off a rumor or from Dad. I owe him that much.”
My mother’s quiet for a moment. “Where are you,” she says then, because something in the background has reached her — the gate noise, the boarding call starting up. “Stanley. What is that? Where are you right now?”
“The airport. I’ve got a connecting flight, Mom. I’m going to Connecticut. Tonight.”
“You’re going to Bart.”
I nod. “To his face. He has to hear it from me.”
I hear her take it in. For a second, I think she’s going to tell me to wait, sleep on it, do something else. She doesn’t.
“Then be sharp,” she says. The highest thing she’s got. “And he is not going to make this easy. Don’t miss your flight, son. I hope everything works out.”
“Me too.”
“I love you. Call us later.”
“I will. Bye.”
“Bye.”
It’s dark by the time the cab drops me at the Linwood house, Sunday evening, porch light on and the windows gold.
I stand in the driveway longer than I should.
What am I doing? I think up the walk. I reach the front door and knock anyway.
Carolyn opens the door.
And the first thing she does — before hello, before anything — is look past me.
Around me. Down the steps and out at the dark street, for Aspen, because there is no other reason on this earth for Stanley Ermington to be standing on her porch on a Sunday night.
And when she doesn’t find her daughter out there in the dark, something crosses her face — a small flicker of wrong, of why is he alone, why is he here without her.
“Stanley.” Warm, but careful now. “Sweetheart. Is everything—”
“I’m sorry to come by with no warning, Mrs. Linwood. I know it’s a Sunday and it’s getting late.” My voice is steadier than I am. “Is Coach home? I need to talk to him.”
She holds the door and reads my face for a second the way her daughter reads faces — and I remember, distantly, someone telling me Carolyn’s the one Aspen gets it from, more her sister Lisa than herself, the watching, the seeing-too-much.
Whatever she finds on me, she doesn’t ask. She steps back and lets me in.
“He’s through in the back,” she says. “Go on. I’ll bring you something to drink.”
Coach is in his chair with a drink and a game on with the sound down, and he looks up when I come in. He doesn’t stand. He doesn’t smile. He reads me the way he’s read ten thousand kids walking in carrying something. Takes him about a second.
“Did you get her pregnant?”
It hits me somewhere I can’t let him see, because of all the questions in the world, that’s the one — that one — and he has no idea what he’s asking.
No idea it’s the exact wound. No idea his daughter spent seven days three years ago waiting to answer a worse version of it through a door.
I keep all of it off my face. I keep it in the vault where it’s lived since she handed it to me in the dark, because it’s hers, and it stays hers, even here, even in the one room on earth where saying it might help me.
“No, sir.”
“Are you here to ask for her hand?” His tone is flat. A man in a foul mood who has decided he is not in the market for whatever I brought.
“No, sir. Not that.”
“Then sit down and tell me what you’re doing all the way over here.”
“I’ll be straight with you up front, Coach, I’ve got a red-eye back tonight.
Practice in the morning, a class I can’t miss.
I flew in to do this, and I’m flying right back out, so I’m not going to waste your night or dress anything up.
” I take the chair across from him, since he’s tipped his head at it.
“But I need to tell you the truth, and I needed to do it in person.”
Carolyn comes in with a glass, sets it by me, and doesn’t leave. She perches on the arm of her husband’s chair. Whatever this is, she’s decided she’s in it. Good. She should be.
So I tell him.