Page 85 of The Hometown Legend

“Yeah. That’s not fair.”

“It’s not.”

“I had such good parents,” he said when they got into his truck.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” she said. “Your parents really were wonderful. Are wonderful.”

“I was off doing my own thing. Chasing glory. And... I dunno. Sometimes I regret that. But I was away.”

“I think people make regrets out of anything they can when they lose somebody.”

He stared at her. “What gives you that idea?”

“I don’t know. All I feel is a wall of regret over things I didn’t do. I feel like Fia regrets Landry. Something she did do. I just think that whether you do the thing or you don’t, whether you were here or you weren’t, you find ways to second-guess your life. Especially when you find yourself unhappy with where you’re at.”

“That’s almost profound,” he said.

“Maybe it’s being in the front seat of a car with you. Reminds me of when I used to give my unsolicited opinion all the time.”

“Yeah, you did do that.”

He pulled out of the driveway and headed down the dirt road that would take them to the main highway.

“It was the only place I ever did that. Other than with your sister. I guess in some ways you two are the only people I’ve ever really said everything to.”

“Why me?” It suddenly seemed essential to know that. Why she had found it easy to talk to him. Why him? Because she had never idolized him. Not like everybody else. She had never treated him like he was more than human. So what was it about him that made her want to talk to him? Because maybe that thing was still in him. Because none of the hero stuff was. None of the legend stuff was. Maybe there was something he could grab onto.

“I just liked you,” she said, looking out the window.

“Because I was great at football?”

“I don’t care about football.”

“Oh. Was it the track, then?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

He looked at her, and at the same time she turned to face him. “It might’ve been your blue eyes. I don’t know if anyone has ever told you this before, but they’re very...” She cleared her throat. “Well, they’re very blue. That was in the poem, Gideon, you really shouldn’t be surprised.”

That felt like a sucker punch, and for the life of him, he couldn’t say why. A lot of women commented on the color of his eyes. Or they used to. Now it wasserial-killer vibes, Daddy. But at the end of the day, being found handsome initially wasn’t foreign to him. Rory thinking his eyes were very blue—well, that was something else.

He supposed his eyes werestillblue. So maybe that was it. He did still have that.

They drove on in silence for a while.

“Where are your mom and dad now?” Gideon asked her.

“Didn’t Lydia ever mention it?”

“No.”

“They had a hideous divorce. My dad was having an affair. And he left under a cloud of smoke. My mom hung on for another three years, and then she left, too. She went to Hawaii. She’s living her best life over there, enjoying the sunshine in the ocean. I went to visit her once. It’s beautiful. I get why she’s there. She lives in this little community with a bunch of other retired people and they do art and go swimming in the ocean every day, and I didn’t ask questions about the different rotation of people that I saw leaving her house early in the morning in the same clothes they came in the night before.”

“Sounds like she’s having the time of her life.”

“And why not? As much as his leaving affected me, as much as it made me feel like I couldn’t trust anything, I know that it was worse for her. He was her husband. The father of her kids. She gave so much to him, and to this place. She wasn’t a Sullivan by blood. She had moved here from California, and she missed the ocean. The warm ocean, not the Oregon coast. I think she felt like she devoted her life and gave up so much, and then he just ended up leaving. Treating it all so cheaply. She doesn’t like coming back. I can’t blame her.”

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