Chapter Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
I decide to do one last erg test. As always, Rohan catches it all on video: The intensity and triumph on my face as my legs pump out the final meters. The display screen moving slowly into view. Kids cheering in the background. Adrian yanking me into a tight hug.
It’s a personal best. The first one I’ve gotten in nearly a year.
I’m still watching the video on repeat—I bet I’m personally responsible for a third of the twenty thousand views it’s gotten so far—when I click my bike lock closed outside my mom’s house.
Usually on Mondays I go to the weight room right after practice, but today I’m going to do a long stretching routine first. It’s what my body needs.
As I reach the door, salsa music blasts so loudly that it’s competing with the kids screaming encouragement in my earbuds.
I’m still grinning when I pull open the door.
Then freeze.
Inside, Mom is sashaying back and forth, hips moving to the music.
But she isn’t alone. There’s a man towering above her, and she has a palm pressed to his sternum.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I realize the video is still playing because I can hear myself let out a scream as I cross the finish.
The man twirls Mom in a cyclone of scarves. She’s so lost in the moment that she doesn’t even see me standing with the door half open, mouth gaping.
He whispers something into her ear. She laughs, then tips her chin toward him.
They kiss.
I lose my grip on the knob. The screen door slams shut.
Mom whips around. The man’s eyes snap to my face and I register the familiar salt-and-pepper hair.
This isn’t just any man. This is Rob. Her business partner.
Mom’s hand remains on Rob’s chest, but pink sweeps up her cheeks.
I remove my earbuds and swivel my shoulder bag so I can bury my phone inside it.
“Katherine, darling.” Mom is clearly trying to sound casual. “You remember Rob?”
I nod and try to muster a smile. “Yes, hi. How are you doing?”
He stuffs his hands in his pockets. “Fine, yeah.” He glances at my mom. “Would you like me to get out of your hair?”
She squeezes his forearm. “I think that might be best.”
Rob stoops, just slightly, like he’s aiming a kiss toward my mom’s cheek. But then his eyes ping toward my face and he straightens.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says. “We’ll go over the month-end accounting.”
Mom nods tightly. “Of course. Tomorrow. Accounting.”
“Good to see you again, Kath,” he says, as he passes me on his way to the door.
I force another smile. “You too, Rob.”
When his footsteps fade down the porch, I spin. Mom has her hands up, bangles and shawls cascading from her arms like a hippy surrendering to a SWAT team. She murmurs my name, perhaps bracing for a speech. I’m not angry, though. I’m just disappointed.
I heave a sigh. “Your business partner.”
“It’s not what you are thinking.”
I eye her as she sinks onto the couch. The same one that she’ll lay on for days the next time her heart gets broken.
This trip has been so different from all the others.
Mom has been level and stable—not flying high on some new romance, but also not crashing after an old one, either.
And the studio, too. Every morning, I’ve watched her cruise out the front door with a smile, and every evening she kicks her feet onto the ottoman with that exhausted, but full, feeling of a day well spent.
After years of flitting from job to job and man to man, she’s finally found purpose.
“Mom, you’re doing well. You’re doing so well. Are you sure you want to throw that away?”
Her lips flatten. “How am I ‘throwing it away’?”
“Because if you get involved with this guy, you’ll eventually break up. And if you break up with your business partner, you’ll either have to buy him out or dissolve the business or, at the very least, find someone to take his place, which will put that business under threat.”
“What do you mean ‘you’ll eventually break up’?”
I frown. “Mom. Come on. Your track record is clear on this.”
“No, it isn’t. I haven’t dated Rob before. So, we have no track record at all.”
“You know what I mean.”
“And you know what I do. Rob is nothing like anyone else I’ve been with before. He is caring and kind and supportive. He lifts me up, he doesn’t push me down.”
I can see she really believes that. But I’ve heard it all before.
Or, maybe not that list of traits exactly, but all of the guys have had good qualities.
Most of them have been handsome, several exciting and adventurous, some passionate, others generous.
“Sure, but…Rob isn’t the first guy in the world who is nice. ”
She throws her hands up and then lets them drop as she stands. “Kath, this is the reason I didn’t tell you about him. Exactly this.”
“Wait,” I say. “How long has this been going on?”
She blinks and I can practically see the recalculation happening behind her eyelids. “Some time.”
“Was he the one on the phone a while ago?”
Her mouth purses. “I wasn’t ready to tell you then. I’m not even ready to tell you now.”
My throat lets out a strangled sigh. “Because you already knew you were doing something wrong.”
“No,” she says. “Because I knew how you would react.”
I shake my head. Maybe there’s no point in pushing back on this. If she’s been seeing Rob for over a month, then she’s already too deep in it. I’m about to give up when Mom says, “There’s nothing wrong with falling in love, you know.”
“There is if you keep getting hurt,” I say. “Have you forgotten how many breakups you’ve gone through? Because I haven’t. I haven’t forgotten a single one.”
Especially not the first one.
I’ve lost them both. I hear the words as if she’s speaking them aloud.
I feel her arms circle me as the slamming door is still echoing and I’m trying to hold my slight shoulders steady enough to support her.
I still feel myself fighting back tears, biting at the inside of my cheek so hard I draw blood, because I know I’ll only make it worse for her if I show just how much Dad leaving is hurting me, too.
I can feel her coarse hair in my fingers as I whisper that everything will be okay, even though I know it won’t because she lost almost everything she has ever loved.
Because now I’m all she has and I’m too small and too young to take care of her.
“Just because I’ve failed in the past doesn’t mean I should give up on it for the rest of my life. You of all people should understand that. And, with the last few weeks, I thought maybe you were finally getting there. I suppose not, though.”
“What does that mean?”
“You and Adrian,” she says. “You’re finally with someone. Falling in love. Experiencing the highs and lows that come from real, genuine affection and not that box-checking nonsense you did with the last guy. I was hoping that falling in love with Adrian would have changed your perspective a bit.”
My next breath stalls. “What? That’s not what’s happening.”
“No?”
“No. Nobody is ‘falling in love.’ We have an expiration date. Like you said, I’m being present.”
She blinks at me like there’s something caught in her mascara. “Being present doesn’t mean that you don’t have feelings for him.”
“Right, sure, but it does mean that I won’t end up heartbroken. I won’t be hurting while I’m racing at Pan Ams because I knew from the beginning that it would end. I’ve protected myself.”
Mom looks back at me with an expression that can only be described as pity.
“You are such an intelligent person, Kath, but the world—life—they are not black and white. Not everything fits in a box with a neat label. It’s messy.
It’s grayscale. It’s emotion. That’s true whether you want to see it or not. ”
In the last few months I’ve gotten pretty good at understanding Adrian when he talks to me in cryptic code, but apparently these translation skills don’t extend to my mom. “Sorry, what?”
“It doesn’t matter what label you put on it or what you decided in advance,” she says quietly. “It will still hurt when it ends.”
A thick feeling rises up my throat. The world suddenly seems like it’s moving too fast, and Pan Ams is streaming toward me like a launch with a broken motor.
I swallow again, trying to push that feeling back down.
We’ve gotten derailed here. This conversation wasn’t supposed to be about me and it certainly wasn’t supposed to be about Adrian.
I cross my arms, square my shoulders, quell the tremble in my fingers.
“Does this mean you’re going to keep seeing Rob?” I ask.
She watches me for a long moment, lips pressed into a thin line. “Yes, I’m going to keep seeing Rob.”
“Fine,” I say, scooping up my bag. “But I don’t want to pick up the pieces when it all falls apart.”
Before she can respond, I fly upstairs to my room.
. . .
Mom’s words are still haunting me the next time I see Adrian.
The truth is I did think that the expiration date would make leaving him easier.
As much as I hate it, I realize now that leaving Adrian is going to hurt.
I’m going to miss the way he smiles encouragingly when I’m afraid to try something new, and the tingle of his high fives after I do it anyway.
I’m going to miss the way he touches me, like he’s full of reverence, and the way my chin fits into the divot in his sternum.
I’m going to miss the way he tastes like citrus and how he always presses a kiss to my forehead when he thinks I’m already asleep.
“You okay, Parker?” Adrian asks.
I blink up at him from the squat rack. Apparently, I’ve spent the last two minutes of rest staring at the middle distance between the barbell and the rubber flooring.
I swallow, but it’s like I’m trying to push down a mouthful of agave syrup.
“Uh, yeah,” I say, ducking under the bar and letting the cool metal settle across my shoulders.
Thankfully we’re alone in here—the kids aren’t strength training today because they leave for Youth Nationals a few days after I land in Toronto.
Rohan absolutely would have caught that awkward moment on camera. “I’m fine.”
He snorts. “Extremely convincing.”
“Just worrying about Pan Ams,” I say as I rise onto my tiptoes to lift the bar off the rack. It’s not that I don’t want to tell him how I’m feeling. But talking this through with him would be confusing and possibly hurtful. It also might give him the wrong idea and I don’t want to mislead him.
I drop into my first squat, trying to focus on my sets. The weight room has always been my sanctuary—a silent corner where the world makes sense. A place where every day, every moment, is organized methodically. Reps organized in sets. Sets organized in circuits. Predictable. Orderly.
Under Adrian’s careful watch, this weight room now smells of Lysol and rubber instead of sweat and rust. Rather than towers of mismatched bar plates shoved into corners, dumbbells and plates are organized by size in neat rows.
I still love this place. But the best part of being here is Adrian, his presence, his enthusiastic confidence when I’m repping pull-ups, the way he yells in triumph when I let the barbell crash to the floor after a clean-jerk, the fire in his eyes when he urges me to finish just one more rep on the bench row and how my chest immediately clenches in response.
The weight room back in the training center is objectively better—cleaner, higher tech, more orderly. I need that place. I love that place. But it won’t have him.
My glutes burn lightly as I finish the set. I rack the weight, trying to avoid Adrian’s eye contact in the mirrors.
He slides to a seat on the bench across from me. “You want to talk about it?”
I duck to pick up my water bottle, take a swig, and lean against the rack. “You were right before, you know. About my mom and Rob.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I refused to let myself see it because she was finally, finally happy with her life and career. As well as I know her and as many times as I’ve seen her make the same mistakes over and over, I didn’t think she would be careless enough to risk that for, what, a few months of happiness with a guy, only to have it all come crashing down when they break up. ”
Adrian tilts his head. “Are they having problems?”
I swat at the air. “Not that I know of. But they will. Inevitably.”
“Well,” he says, “you don’t know that until you know that.”
“No. With her, I know. She’s been in about a dozen serious relationships since my dad. And those are only the ones I know about. This thing is doomed from the start.”
Adrian rises slowly from his seat and moves toward the rack of dumbbells so that his face is angled away from me. “Rob is a new person, though. Why can’t this time be different?”
“Probably not, though.”
“But it could be,” he presses.
“I mean, sure, in theory it could be. But I don’t see the point of taking the risk.”
“I think that if you’ve taught me one thing this summer, it’s that there is a point in taking risks,” Adrian says quietly. “In taking chances. In not quitting before it’s over.”
He traces a finger across one of the plates and a creeping, tingling sensation runs up my neck, a heightened awareness that something has shifted. “We’re not talking about my mom anymore, are we?”
Adrian turns to me, smooths a hand across his hairline. “Kath.”
My heart rate accelerates. “First name? Must be serious.”
His fingers curl around a dumbbell like he’s holding on. “I want to say something and I don’t want you to say anything back, okay? Just hear me out and, maybe, take some time to think.”
“Okay?”
“I know we said—you said and I agreed—that you want us to have a clear end date. And I know you have goals, really important goals. I don’t want to get in the way of those.
But I also want to say that…I think we could make this work.
Berkeley isn’t that far from the training center.
I can fly down to you once a month and I’ll see you when you’re here after races.
We can video call and text. It’s not ideal, I know, but…
but I think it’s worth trying. I think we shouldn’t quit before it’s actually over. ”
There’s a low ringing in my ears. “You…”
“Please don’t react right away, okay? Take a few days.”
I nod, stomach twisting. A handful of days is all we have.
“You’ll think about it?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say slowly. “I’ll think about it.”