5
Ryan
The Furnace Grill was loud enough to make pretending everything was normal easy.
The lunch rush had packed every table near the windows, servers moved between booths balancing overloaded trays, and the open kitchen sent out the smell of burgers, fried onions, and whatever bullshit Briggs had ordered in quantities meant for a small family.
He sat across from me with three baskets spread around his plate, one knee bouncing beneath the table while his phone vibrated facedown beside his drink for the fourth time in less than ten minutes. Nobody mentioned it, which told me everybody had noticed.
Easton stole another fry from Cade’s basket and earned a slap across the back of his hand.
“If you touch my food again, I’m breaking a finger.”
“You say that like I need all ten.”
“You need at least nine to hold a stick correctly.”
Briggs pointed a mozzarella stick toward them. “This is why neither of you will survive marriage. You have no respect for shared resources.”
“You threatened me with legal action five minutes ago for touching your ranch,” Rider said.
“That was theft.”
“You ordered six.”
“I plan ahead.”
I reached across the table and took one of Briggs’s mozzarella sticks. His eyes narrowed as I bit into it.
“See, Ryan understands exactly what he’s doing. He steals with confidence.”
“That’s because I respect you enough not to lie.”
“You’re all parasites.”
The waitress dropped another basket at the end of the table, and Briggs immediately pulled it closer before anyone else could touch it.
The bullshit came easily with us, which was why Cade had suggested lunch in the first place.
Briggs had appeared on ESPN the night before in one of those preseason college hockey segments where analysts sat behind a desk and spent twenty minutes predicting which players scouts would be watching before the season even started.
His name had been near the top of the list. They replayed saves from last year, talked about his size, reaction time, lateral movement, and the kind of NHL ceiling people had been whispering about since his sophomore season.
The group chat had exploded before the segment ended. Briggs responded with a picture of his television and the caption THEY USED MY GOOD SIDE, followed by eleven messages arguing that goalies technically had no bad side because masks improved everyone.
His grandparents had apparently recorded the segment twice. His grandmother called him immediately afterward crying hard enough that Briggs spent most of the conversation assuring her nobody was dying.
Everything about last night should’ve been good.
Then his parents saw it.
His phone vibrated again, and Briggs stabbed the mozzarella stick into his ranch hard enough to crack the breading.
Cade leaned back in the booth and watched him. “You planning to answer that?”
“I’m planning to let it annoy everyone until they give up.”
The phone buzzed against the wooden table again.
Easton glanced down at it. “They’re persistent.”
“People discover perseverance when television tells them they should give a shit.”
Nobody laughed, and Briggs noticed. His mouth tightened before he picked up the phone and looked at the screen.
“My mother.”
He set it back down without answering.
Rider lowered his burger while Cade’s expression changed. “She saw the segment?”
“Apparently everybody with basic cable did.”
“What’d she say?”
Briggs let out a humorless laugh and unlocked the phone. “Which message? We’ve got options now.” He scrolled through the screen. “My favorite so far is, ‘Your father and I watched you last night. We’re so proud of the man you’ve become.’”
His jaw flexed as Easton leaned farther back in the booth.
“Then Dad sends me the clip this morning like maybe I missed the part where my own face took up half the television.” Briggs laughed again, quieter this time. “His text says, ‘That’s our boy.’”
The words sat wrong in the middle of the table.
Briggs locked his phone and looked at all the food he’d ordered without touching any of it. “I was never their guy when I needed them.”
The comedy disappeared from his face, leaving behind the version of Briggs most people never saw.
Everybody knew the loud goalie who climbed onto furniture sober, argued with strangers for entertainment, and turned almost any uncomfortable conversation into something stupid enough that nobody had to sit inside it for long.
We knew what lived underneath too.
Cade reached for his drink but didn’t lift it. “You don’t owe them anything.”
“I know that.”
“You don’t sound like you know.”
Briggs rubbed one hand over his jaw. “I know intellectually. Is that helpful?”
“Not even a little.”
“Then I’m fucked.”
Rider shifted beside me. “You’re pissed.”
“I’m fucking furious.”
His answer came fast enough that several people at the next table looked over. Briggs lowered his voice without lowering the anger.
“I wanted that shit when I was ten. Twelve. Fourteen. I wanted my dad at games where there were forty people in the stands and half of them were parents who came because somebody had to drive their kid home. I wanted my mother to remember my birthday without Grandma calling her three days before to make sure she had the date right.”
His phone vibrated again, but this time he didn’t touch it.
“My grandfather taught me how to drive. My grandmother sat in freezing rinks before anybody knew my name. They paid for camps they couldn’t fucking afford because I told them I wanted hockey.
When I moved in with them at fifteen, Grandpa converted half the basement so I’d have somewhere to keep my gear because Grandma said the smell was killing her plants. ”
A small smile tried to appear and failed.
“They did every shitty, ordinary thing I spent my childhood begging my parents to care enough to do.”
Cade nodded slowly. “And now ESPN changed their minds?”
Briggs looked at the phone. “Now ESPN says I might go pro, and suddenly my parents want pictures. Dad wants to come to games. Mom wants to know whether I’ll be home for Christmas.”
His laugh came out rougher this time.
“I wanted them my whole fucking life.”
The table went quiet around him.
I understood that anger, even if mine came from a different kind of loss.
“My mother wanted me,” I said.
Briggs looked across the table while I leaned back in the booth and rested my forearms against the table.
“She wanted me every day she had me. My father wanted her, and loving me was part of loving her. Whatever his addiction did to him before the overdose killed him, I never grew up wondering whether my mother wanted me in her house.”
Briggs’s gaze held mine.
“Juanita loved me when we had food and when we didn’t.
I knew it when the lights were on, and I knew it when she was lighting candles because the electric company shut them off again.
Every night, she dragged my ass to that little kitchen table and made me read in two languages because she thought my brain deserved every door she could help me open. ”
My throat tightened around the memory, though the pain had lived inside me long enough that I knew how to speak through it.
“My dad died when I was seven. Then my mother was murdered when I was eleven, and there wasn’t anybody left who could take me. That’s how I ended up in foster care.”
Briggs looked down while his fingers tightened around his glass.
“I lost the person who wanted me,” I continued.
“You had two people alive who kept choosing not to show up. That shit is different, man. Your parents neglected you and disappeared on you in ways I don’t know how anybody expects you to forgive because some ESPN analyst finally told them you’re worth watching. ”
For a few seconds, the only sound at our table came from plates and conversation around us.
Briggs swallowed before looking at me. “My grandparents came.”
“They came every chance they had.”
“Every game they could.”
“I know.”
“They chose me.”
“They did.”
His mouth twisted as he dragged his thumb over the condensation on his glass.
“I still spent years waiting for them to decide I was too much too. Grandma used to tell me I wasn’t temporary, and it took me until almost graduation to stop thinking temporary was exactly what everybody eventually became. ”
I watched him for another second. “That’s the part of your story I envy.”
His eyebrows pulled together. “You envy my childhood?”
“Fuck no. I envy fifteen.”
The confusion left his face.
“You got to fifteen, and somebody finally said, ‘Come home. You’re staying.’ I didn’t get that until I was old enough to build it myself.”
My eyes moved around the table. Cade looked at me first. Easton’s expression had softened, and Rider had stopped pretending to look at his phone. Briggs followed my gaze while Cade leaned one arm against the table.
“You’ve got it now,” Cade said.
I looked at my best friend, who had almost died under my hands four months earlier and now sat across from me alive enough to threaten Easton over fries.
“Yeah. I do.”
Briggs released a slow breath. “Blood doesn’t guarantee shit.”
“It doesn’t.”
“People who stay do.”
I touched my glass against his. “That part I’ll drink to.”
Easton clinked his glass next, followed by Rider and Cade until Briggs had five drinks knocking against his from every direction.
He looked around the table and shook his head. “You’re all becoming emotionally disgusting.”
Easton reached for the ketchup. “Good. I was worried we were going to start hugging.”
“I have at least seventeen additional childhood wounds available if anybody wants to continue.”
Rider sighed. “Please eat something before you begin wound number two.”
Briggs picked up his burger. “I cope through protein.”
The laughter came easier after that.
His phone vibrated one more time, but Briggs turned it off, shoved it into his pocket, and took a bite like the decision had cost him something.
Cade watched him chew. “You good?”
“I’m not good yet.”
The honesty made Cade nod. “That’s fair.”
“I will be.”
“That’s better.”
Briggs pointed at Cade with the burger. “Don’t therapist me.”