“You don’t do any kind of love? At all?”

“I don’t do romantic love,” I specified. “The dumb kind.”

She paused a second, and I could tell she was deciding whether to take that topic on. “Great, then, I guess,” she said at last, letting it go. “One less thing to hold you back.”

This was the most substance we’d worked into a conversation in years.

“I do love my job, though,” I said, to get us back on track. This might have been a good moment to tell her that I had just received an award for valor. But I didn’t.

“We’ve got firemen up here, you know,” she said, as if that made any sense.

“Firefighters,” I corrected.

“And we’ve got plenty of fires,” she said, sounding almost proud. “Tons of them. This whole part of the country’s a smoldering tinderbox just waiting to go up in flames.”

What was her point?

“There are fire stations on just about every corner,” she went on. “Maybe you could do some kind of exchange.”

“That’s not how it works, Diana. I’d have to give up my job.”

“Just for a year.”

“I’m not a foreign exchange student,” I said. “They don’t hold your place.”

She let that one pass. Then, with new determination, she said, “When have I ever asked you for anything?”

I sighed.

“Never,” she answered for me. “I have never asked you for anything.”

True enough. She had once asked me to forgive her, in a letter—one I hadn’t even replied to. But that wasn’t something we talked about.

“Just this once,” she said. “I promise I will never, ever ask you for help again.”

It was too much. My head was spinning. I just needed to shut this day down. I thought about tonight, and the guys, and the way they chanted my name at the banquet. Then I thought about what it would feel like to leave them, and I said something so true it was mean.

“I’d really like to help you, Diana,” I said. “But I just can’t leave my family.”

 

* * *

 

NOT TEN MINUTES after I hung up, as I finished rinsing off my plaque in the sink, my phone rang again. I thought it would be my mom, trying again, and I planned to ignore her … but it was my dad.

I never ignored my dad.

“Your mother just called me and told me you said no,” he said when I answered.

What were they—in cahoots? “You knew?”

“When she couldn’t get you last week, she called me.”

“Why would she do that? You two are divorced.”

“This matter concerns the whole family.”

“Not really.”

“How could you say no to her?” he demanded. “She needs you.”

“Can we talk about this later?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter when we talk about it,” my dad said, rolling out his most authoritative voice. “You’re going.”

“I already said no.”

“Change your mind.”

“I’m not going to change my mind,” I said, like he was completely nuts.

“She’s your mother, and she needs you, and you’re going.”

“You’re telling me to leave my job, my apartment, my life—everything?”

“You’re young. You’ll make it work.”

“Ted,” I said. “I don’t want to make it work.”

“That’s not relevant.”

“I barely know her. She’s practically a stranger.”

“Bullshit. That woman made you. She gave you life.”

“She left me. And she left you, too, buddy, by the way!”

“Are you still mad about that?”

“Yes. No. Both.”

“You can’t stay mad forever.”

“Wanna bet?”

“You’ve got to move on.”

“You moved on with a new wife. I can’t get a new mother.”

“True. But your old one is knocking on your door.”

In a way, I’d felt abandoned again when my dad started dating Carol. And I won’t say that Carol was awful, because she wasn’t technically a bad person, though she was a little prissy for my taste.

The point was, my dad and I had been lonely together for years, like it was our thing. Like we were in a special club of two: People Abandoned by Diana Hanwell. But then he found Carol, an administrator at his school—a divorcée, in her pastel culottes and espadrilles—and then, of all things, he decided to marry her. That was that. He couldn’t be in our loneliness club if he wasn’t lonely anymore.

He left.

Or maybe I kicked him out.

But some part of me flat-out refused to leave that club. It was the principle of the thing. In some funny way, I was still standing up for my teenage self.

Because if I didn’t, who would?

Now, here was my dad going over to my mom’s side. “Why are you advocating for her?” I demanded. “She left you! You loved her, and you were good to her, and she cheated on you.”

He knew all this, of course.

“These things happen, Cassie,” he said. “Life is messy. When you’re older you’ll understand.”

The fact that he wasn’t mad made me madder. “I hope not.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” he said.

What was he doing? Was he trying to model behavior for me? Was this some kind of teachable moment about growth and change? It seemed so patronizing. I might not know everything about forgiveness, but I sure as hell knew you didn’t get there by pretending earth-shattering betrayals had been no big deal.

Your wife cheating on you is a big deal. Your mom abandoning you is a big deal.

I wasn’t going to insult my teenage self and all she’d been through by just shrugging and saying, Nobody’s perfect.

“I think you’ve forgotten how bad it was,” I said. We’d eaten SpaghettiOs for a solid year.

“I probably have,” my dad said.

“Well, I haven’t.”

“Don’t you know that expression, ‘The best revenge is forgetting’?”

“Seems to me like the best revenge would be revenge.”

“Tell me you’re not plotting revenge on your mother.”

What would that even look like? It was far too late for revenge. “Of course not,” I said, though, in a practical sense, by keeping my distance for so long, that’s what I’d been doing for years. “I’m just refusing to give her a pass.”

“Sweetheart,” my dad said tenderly. “Let it go.”

“She’s the one who called me!”

“It’s been a decade.”

“A decade I’ve spent building a nice little life for myself—in Texas.”

“She needs you.”

“I won’t dismantle my entire life and move across the country for a woman I’m not even close to.”

“I think she’d like to be closer.”

“Too bad. She can’t just demand closeness. She gave up the right to be close to me when she left.”