Chapter Twenty-Seven
I trudge down to the kitchen the next morning, nursing a small hangover despite only having a few sips of Scotch. I follow the smell of coffee over to the pot in the corner, where my dad is already pouring me a cup.
“Heard you on the stairs,” he says by way of greeting.
“How’d you know it was me?”
He smiles at me as he pours sugar into my mug. “You’re the only one that doesn’t walk like they’re angry at the ground.”
I laugh, knowing exactly what he means. My brothers have all the grace of a bull in a china shop.
“How’d you sleep?” he asks, handing me my cup.
“Like the dead,” I confirm before blowing on my coffee and following him over to the breakfast table, where the newspaper crossword and his coffee await him.
“When are you heading to the airport?” he asks, folding up the paper.
I sink into my chair—two to his left, all of us having unofficially assigned ourselves spots at the table for as long as I can remember. “In an hour, but, about that—” I take a deep breath.
“Oh, thank god,” he mutters. “I thought I was going to have to ask.”
I pause, forgetting the other half of my sentence.
Instead of dropping the bomb I was about to, I start at the beginning.
I tell him about Dax—the first time, the now time.
I tell him the truth about my Offbeat internship and how I gave up my voice in the hopes of getting a foot in the door at Rolling Stone, and how I finally have that offer now, how I turned it down via email this morning, and about the email I sent to John with a few last-minute edits to the Final piece, addressing the gossipy YouTube comment section directly.
I tell him about the fight Dax and I had, the dumb pact my brothers and I made on the roof, the conversation I had with Gray last night.
I can’t remember the last time I talked so much with my dad.
It feels good. It doesn’t feel like the dozens of times he’d sit me down at this table and attempt to extract truths out of us, my brothers and I coordinating lies to keep ourselves out of trouble.
Now it feels like the only way out of what’s troubling me is to talk about it with the only people who could possibly understand why I am the way I am, the only other people who lived through it.
All of us have scars on our hearts from when Mom left.
“So anyway,” I say, attempting to wrap up my deluge of feelings, “I bought a standby ticket to Cleveland, in case he doesn’t show.”
My dad smiles softly at me, nodding. “Good for you.”
“You’re not mad if I miss Thanksgiving? I know you’ve been planning for weeks—”
My dad waves this away. “I’m proud of you.”
A strangled, wet laugh escapes me. My life is in shambles. I can’t see anything worth being proud of. “Why?”
“Because you already had a flight back to Cleveland—in five days. You could wait, but instead, you’re going for it. You’re not waiting until it’s too late to fight.” Regret flashes across his face, and my chest pangs painfully.
“You don’t think I’m being foolish?”
“Sloane, of all my children, you are the least foolish. In fact, I think you should be a bit more foolish.”
For all our shenanigans as kids, I was along for the chaos but was rarely the source.
I was the one who came up with the plan on how to get us out of trouble, not into it.
“It’s a risk, though, turning down that job for…
” I gesture vaguely. I don’t have high hopes AP is going to make an offer.
There’s only one thing keeping me in Cleveland.
My dad hums thoughtfully from behind his mug, taking a sip before speaking. “Does it feel like a risk?”
“No,” I say, the answer sighing out of me.
It doesn’t make sense how sure I am about Dax when we have literally nothing figured out, but I’m sure about him, his presence in my future an indisputable fact.
He’s woven into my life the same way my friends are.
No matter how often I get to see them, whether we go days or weeks without talking, I know they’re going to be in my life forever. Dax feels like that.
I blink back to the present, and my dad is filling in the squares on his crossword, letting me disappear into my own head.
“How did you do it?” I blurt. I’ve spent so many years focused on not becoming my mom when I should have been focused on becoming my dad. “Five kids and a career?”
He puts his pen down. “Well, I had to feed you gremlins somehow,” he says dryly.
“But… thanks to your mom. We didn’t get it all right, obviously, but we leaned on each other.
She put her dreams on the back burner to raise you kids while I chased mine so we could be financially stable.
But you can’t—It can’t be one thing all the time.
It’s got to be give-and-take. That’s where we got it wrong.
I was pushing so hard to get into a position to provide for us all that I burned her out, shut her out.
If I’d taken my foot off the gas, let her dreams have room to breathe rather than her suffocating them to support me, you kids, things may have turned out differently.
“I was up for a promotion,” he says suddenly.
“When she left. I’d been promising for years to slow down, once we were comfortable financially, once you kids were all in school, so she could do more than just be a caretaker.
And we were comfortable, and you were all in school, but I was still pushing.
If I’d taken that promotion—and I wanted to—I would be at home even less.
And that was the breaking point. She didn’t believe things were ever going to change, and I hadn’t given her any reason to believe they would.
She left, and I didn’t take that promotion, because I couldn’t.
I had to be home with you guys. And I wish I’d just…
done that anyway, not made her force my hand.
” He traces the wood grain on the table.
“Even if it means I didn’t get to provide for you all as much as I would have liked, I’m glad I didn’t miss everything.
In the end,” he muses. “I won’t miss not working more, but I would have never forgiven myself for not getting to know you kids. ”
“Even though we made you go gray?” I tease.
He runs a hand over his close-cropped hair.
“I think it suits me,” he says with a wry grin.
His gaze drops to my left hand wrapped around the warm coffee mug, and I realize he’s staring at the scar on my ring finger.
“Your mom and I… Neither of us had good relationships with our parents, so we rushed into getting married and making the family we never had. And I don’t think we ever really got to be just kids because we were trying to be for our children what we never had, and I never wanted that for you all—especially you. ”
“Because I’m the favorite?” I ask slyly.
He purses his lips. “Favorite daughter, for sure.”
I roll my eyes. He’s made that joke a million times, and somehow it still gets a laugh out of me.
“‘Especially you’ because… you were such an introverted kid, very private, very practical. I think you somehow stole your brothers’ shares from their DNA because they’re so—” He pinches the bridge of his nose as if decades of shenanigans are flashing before his eyes.
“As much as I didn’t want them to be a bad influence on you, with them, you let yourself just be a kid.
And Charlie, and the band, they got that silliness out of you, too, but in public, you always seemed to keep it hidden, a secret side of you that you reserved only for those you felt safe to be yourself with.
Which,” he concedes with a nod, “you come by that honestly.” He gestures to himself.
“And it wasn’t until you started writing for your friends’ band that I saw you share it publicly.
It came alive in your writing. You came alive. ”
I roll my mug between my hands, my brows furrowing. “So, you think I shouldn’t have turned down the job?”
He takes a slow sip of his coffee, choosing his words. “I think you’re twenty-four and could be a bit easier on yourself for not having everything figured out. I think you should do whichever allows you to be the most you.”
It’s such dad advice. And yet, it makes perfect sense, taking the tangled mess of my situation and boiling it down to one simple factor.
I’ve spent so long trying to find my voice again, and at the end of the day, it wasn’t Robb or Rolling Stone or Alternative Press that helped me find my way back to myself: It was Dax. He’s always been my safe space to land.
“The question is,” my dad continues casually, attention back on his crossword, “when you get everything you want, are you standing alone or is there a certain someone you want next to you?”
I understand Dax’s point for the first time.
Maybe it’s okay if I don’t have a plan right now, or if my only plan is him, us, figuring it out together, because at the end of the day, I don’t want any of it more than I want him.
I love him. I love who I am with him. It’s not just the person you want by your side when you get everything you want.
It’s the person who’s still there when all your plans fall apart, showing back up to the starting line, ready to begin again.
My phone vibrates in my pocket, and for the second time in as many days, I silence the “Airport!” alarm. Only this time, I’m not leaving Dax but leaving with him.
I hope.