Page 67 of The Doctor's Surprise Family

“Idon’tknow,” said Sam. “What if what?”

“What if I come back and I screw it all up? If I screw Oli up. If I’m not a good father.”

“What if you leaving screws Oli up?”

I hadn’t thought of that. My stomach clenched up. For a moment, I thought I might actually puke.

“Relax,” said Sam. “Youwillscrew him up. That’s what parents do. They screw up their kids.”

“And that’s supposed to be comforting?” I punched his arm. Sam punched me back, in the meat of my thigh.

“Joelle didn’t say comfort you. She said kick your ass. But you look too pathetic for me to do that.”

“Oh, thanks a lot.”

He smirked. “You’re welcome.”

“So, do you have any advice for me, or was that it? Relax?”

Sam leaned back on the slide, and then he stood up. He frowned down at me, his deep-thought frown. “The problem with you,” he said, after a while, “your problem is, you suck at relationships. It’s easy to miss that because you’re easy to like, but the second you hit a snag,poof. You’re out.”

“What? No, I’m not.”

“Uh, yeah. You are. Remember that time, our first year in college, we had that huge fight when I blew off our study group? You didn’t talk to me for a whole month, and when I came crawling back to you, you remember what you said?”

I tried to remember, but I couldn’t at all. Our fight had been years ago, and it was over. We’d moved on, or I had. I’d put it behind me.

“You said you thought I was mad at you. I was like, duh. Of course I was mad at you, but that means we don’t talk? We’re still friends, aren’t we? We work it out.”

“We did, didn’t we?”

Sam did a facepalm. “Yeah, becauseIcame and got you to talk. You’d have just gone on and written us off.”

“So you’re saying I should go back and talk more to Claire?”

“Maybe not now.” Sam sat down again. “You really are hopeless. You know that, right?”

“Yeah.”

We sat for a while, watching the road. A blue car whizzed by, then a couple of black ones. A wild turkey pecked its slow way down the shoulder.

“You’re going to screw up,” Sam said at last. “In any relationship, that’s just a given. You’ll do and say the wrong thing a million times over, but what you don’t seem to get is, that’s not the end.”

I scuffed at the dirt. “It has been for me.”

Sam looked so sad I wondered what I’d said this time. He started to say something, then shook his head.

“What?”

He sighed. “I forget sometimes how you grew up. All those damn foster homes. How many, again?”

“I lost count,” I said. “More than both hands. They used to get scared of me, the parents, y’know. Because I was big and all, and they had other kids. I’d get mad one time and I was too much. They said I was angry. Hard to control.”

“You’re allowed to get angry. You know that, right?”

I tried to picture myself getting angry at Claire. Yelling at her. Telling her no. I couldn’t see it, somehow. It felt wrong and mean.

“Me and Joelle fight. We have to sometimes. If we didn’t fight, we’d never get to what’s bugging us, and then we’d never figure it out. I mean, we have rules, no screaming, no name-calling. But we disagree. We do that a lot.”

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