Page 73 of Lovely War
Ben laughs and lifts the thin gold chain of my necklace. He runs it back and forth between his fingers, thinking. “You must miss him.”
“So much,” I say. “When I had to learn the states and their capitals in grammar school, he volunteered to teach me. This was a lifetime first. He never helped me with my homework. He came up with all these word associationsusing the mascots of each state school. And on top of memorizing the states, capitals, and mascots, he made me memorize which ones were good at basketball.”
“Did it work?”
“Short-term? I did okay on the test. Long-term? I can tell you the University of Maine is the Black Bears, but I don’t have a freaking clue what the capital is.”
He smiles, a sweet, contemplative one, like he’s imagining me as a kid. “So it was all basketball, all the time.”
“Yes. For sure. He came to Career Day in fifth grade and brought everyone autographed cards from some of his former players who made it to the NBA. He missed my cousins’ weddings because of his coaching obligations.” I swallow. “Not just my cousins’ weddings. I don’t know why I said it like that. He missed a lot of my milestones too—holiday concerts and winter formal photos and honor roll breakfasts.”
Ben tilts his head. “I’m sure that wasn’t always easy for you.”
I frown. “It was fine. I understood. I loved basketball too. In high school I started making videos for his team, so we spent a lot of time together.”
“That’s great,” Ben says. “But it’s okay if it wasn’t always fine.”
I shrug. “When I was a toddler, he brought me to a summer league game at the outdoor courts and left me there. Totally forgot I was with him, got swept up in a conversation with a friend of his, and they decided to go to another game. One of the refs had to lift me up and yell to him as he was pulling out of the parking lot, ‘You forgot something!’ ”
I don’t know why I’m telling him this. I don’t evenremember it happening. I’ve just heard the story a million times, a funny anecdote about his one-track mind.
Ben doesn’t laugh. “You’re allowed to remember everything,” he says. “Even the parts that weren’t good. You can miss him and love him and still wish certain things were different. It’s not a betrayal to remember him as imperfect.”
I huff out a laugh. “Yeah. I wish he were a little less dead, for example.”
He covers his face with his hands, his shoulders shaking.
“Sometimes I wonder what our relationship would’ve been like if I hadn’t been interested in basketball,” I venture, rolling the corner of the sheet between my fingers. “Would he have made an effort to connect with me if I were obsessed with synchronized swimming or playing the oboe? I’m afraid he died disappointed in me. I gave up on the dream we both had for my future. I was working at an appliance company. He never knew I came back to Ardwyn.”
“Annie,” Ben says. “He wasn’t disappointed in you.”
“Please don’t say anything nice,” I plead. “I don’t want to cry right now.”
“He couldn’t have been disappointed in you,” he insists, pulling me close. He whispers in my ear: “You’re an excellent free throw shooter.”
I kick him lightly in the shin, even though it was the perfect thing to say. Turning from my side to my stomach, I nudge him down so he’s lying on his back and tuck myself into his chest.
I know him pretty well by now. Well enough to read his face in the dark. But I don’t know everything. There are some things I’ve wondered but hesitated to ask. “Tell me about your dad,” I say.
His face doesn’t change at all. He expected the question, maybe even wanted me to ask. I rake a reassuring hand through his hair.
He stares at the ceiling for a long time. I’ll wait all night for him to be ready, if that’s what he needs. In the near-quiet of the hotel, muffled voices float in from a nearby room over the footsteps and jostling sounds of somebody dragging a heavy suitcase down the hall. Finally, in a resigned voice, he says, “Not all parents have redeeming qualities.”
It all spills out of him so calmly while he rubs the nape of my neck. The worst bedtime story anyone’s ever told me.
“My parents started dating when my mom was a senior in high school,” he begins. “My dad was a couple years older. They were together for about a year, and then she got pregnant. He stuck around until I was six months old and then…” He shakes his head. “He said he was going to stay with his brother in Raleigh for a bit, to see if it was a better fit. My mom thought he meant for all of us. She didn’t realize he’d left us until a few months later.
“Eventually he did come back. It was like that for years, him bouncing in and out of our lives. Usually when he wore out his welcome somewhere else or got lonely. We were like a friend’s couch he crashed on whenever he felt like it. We moved a lot because my mom had trouble paying the rent, the bills. It was hard for her to turn him away, especially when he had a job.”
The shame of my old assumptions about him, that he was a spoiled brat who was used to having everything go his way, corrodes a hole in my lungs. “I’m sure it was hard for her,” I say. “And it must’ve been confusing for you.”
A minuscule nod. His hand drops a few inches, and hekneads gentle circles around my shoulder blades with his knuckles. “I dreaded him coming around, because I spent the whole time waiting for him to leave again. Every day was like the last day of a vacation. When you can’t enjoy yourself, because you know it’s almost over? Each time he’d fixate on some father-son bonding activity that he’d talk about and talk about but never actually do with me. The zoo was a big one. Phillies games. One time it was building the Lego pirate ship. I swear, he saw a commercial for that thing with a dad and a kid, and he liked the idea of being that kind of parent. But he could never bring himself to sit down and put together all one thousand pieces with me. I learned early not to expect him to keep his promises.”
I wrap my ankle around his. “What was it like when he was gone?”
“Rough on my mom. She sees the best in people, so it blindsided her every time. She tried so hard to act like everything was fine. I think she hoped I’d be less upset if she hid that she was upset, but it made it worse.” He swallows audibly. “I was confused about why he was there one day and gone the next, and I had no framework for processing it. I thought since she wouldn’t talk to me about it, it must’ve been something awful. And it must’ve had something to do with me.”
When I was ten, Dad’s team had a rough season. They lost so many games he almost got fired. I knew my parents were stressed, but nobody explained why. Tension filled the house like pollution. I convinced myself they were getting a divorce.
