Page 82 of Take Me Home

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

“I’msorry.”

She shook her head. “Don’t. You didn’t owe me. He made his choices.” Then, “It’s hard to talk about? The stuff with your dad?” Her voice was achingly tender, sweet.

“It’s not that I didn’t trust you with it.”

“You were afraid it would feel too serious.”

“Iwas,” he began, quiet around an ache in his throat. “But not just because you might pull away. The opposite, actually. I knew if you saw this…” She turned, spatula hovering, and he gestured feebly around them at his home.“I was the one who would want to hide out until I had it handled. I’m just now realizing I’m not actually very good at this part.”

She tilted her head, sympathy and confusion both in her eyes. “What part?”

“Talking about it before it’s okay. My parents don’t— My dad doesn’t like to be managed, and my mom doesn’t like to dwell onanything negative, so we just silently handle the situation and then…move on.”

“Like the other day when your dad got up to go to the living room,” Hazel said. “Suddenly you and your mom were there, helping him, like you guys had this sixth sense.”

“Yeah, I guess we do.” He sat for a moment with that—that she’d seen something even his own sisters barely noticed, that she’d been paying such close attention. “I’m not used to talking about it much at all, but especially when I don’t know what’s going to happen. Or I didn’t, before this morning.” Then, out of habit: “Everything’s all right now.”

That his father had been cleared today should have made it easier to tell her all of this, but everyone’s frustration when Ash had pushed to call the doctor, then the fight in the exam room, the fact that his father still hadn’t looked at him since and the rest had barely spoken to him, even his mother, made his chest ache.

“I overreacted this time. June told you, right? But it’s frustrating. Sometimes, they want me to step up and help. Then they don’t. They’re the parents, I’m the kid.”

“Like they didn’t expect you to manage it with them when you were just a kid.”

“I’m not complaining.”

“I know. But you were seventeen with all that on your shoulders? I wish I’d known. Those nights you drove us around, I thought you were annoyed I was tagging along. When you fell asleep in class and missed practices, I thought you just didn’t care. You must have been so stressed out.” She turned the burner off and faced him, a deep furrow in her brow. “God, you were helping take care of your dad, your sisters, your mom, even Justin and…” She didn’t sayme, but he saw the realization on her face.

He clutched the back of his neck.

“Ash.”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. All of it, everything—” She gave a frustrated huff. When she spoke again, her voice was so soft it needled straight into his heart. “Who was taking care of you?”

“Come on,” he said with an attempt at a quick, reassuring smile. “I was fi—” But his throat finally succeeded in sealing itself off. Pressure built behind his sinuses and then his eyes, and blinking it back brought it instead to the surface. Tears—fucking tears—gathered.

She took a half step, opened her arms, but stopped. “Can I?”

He shrugged because to say that, yes, he wanted her to cross the short distance and hug him felt embarrassingly weak, but this was all she needed to push into his space, to wrap her arms tightly around him until the ache in his throat released and the sting behind his eyes passed. After a while, he murmured, “Our food will get cold.”

She squeezed tighter, breathing him in. “One more minute.”

—

“This is really fucking good.”

Hazel tossed her napkin at him.

“I’m serious. I’m adding this to the café menu when we get back. ‘Hazel’s Best Sandwich.’ It’ll be a bestseller.”

“You’ll have to pry the turkey and Swiss from Frank’s cold, dead hands first.”

“Dark.” Ash smiled around another big bite. “What made you think to put pears in a sandwich?”

“Actually,” she said, something sparking in her eyes, “that wasn’t me. After the divorce, my dad didn’t know how to cook much of anything. He used to order pizza or buy these awfulpremade meals. We lived on those and PopTarts and cereal forever. After a while, I got so annoyed that I basically yelled at him for not feeding me a real meal and sitting at the table to eat it together. He had no idea how to do the things my mom used to do. I’m talking basic cooking, cleaning, laundry. He didn’t unpack the boxes from our old house formonths.”

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