You Have a Match(81)

“To impress some other girl, it turns out,” my mom cuts in.

“I hadn’t met you yet!” my dad protests.

Pietra’s eyes are gleaming. “You and that other girl would have been a disaster, but the moment I saw Tom I knew he was Maggie’s. So I brought him over to the coffee shop—”

“She told me there was a student discount.”

“There wasn’t,” says my mom, leaning toward me and Savvy conspiratorially.

“And when I got there, she just—poof!—disappeared. Left me in that café all alone with Maggie, who took one look at my John Grisham paperback and started talking my ear off about how secretly reading her parents’ ‘murder books’ as a kid is what first got her interested in law.”

“Lucky you.”

My dad’s smile softens. “Lucky me.”

“And lucky us, because Maggie paid back the favor. I mean, it was a little less romantic and definitely not intentional—”

“Uh, Dale, it was completely intentional,” my mom cuts in. “I’d been talking to Pietra about you for weeks.”

“Wait, what? Then why did you wait until we were in the middle of a training run on the hottest day of the year to drag me into Bean Well for free water?” He leans over to me and Savvy for context, adding, “Maggie and I were in the same running club.”

“Because you seemed like the kind of guy who would, I don’t know, overthink the whole thing completely and come off way too strong.”

“Instead he came off as kind of smelly,” says Pietra, looking over Savvy to tease him with a smile.

“Anyway,” says my dad. “That’s how we met.”

There’s this lull where nobody says anything, until Savvy asks, “So you two kind of … picked each other’s husbands?”

“No,” says my dad, without missing a beat. “They picked each other.”

My mom and Pietra both get so immediately teary-eyed that there is no mistaking it for nostalgia, or that specific brand of weepy you get when you’re thinking about your best friend. It’s quiet and ancient. It’s years of regret and grief, and an entire lifetime buried under it—a lifetime where my mom and Pietra were two entirely different people, on some entirely different plane. A lifetime where they teased each other and dreamed each other’s dreams and willed each other’s happiness into existence.

And no matter how messy it turned out, it’s still there, I realize. That happiness. It’s in every part of my world—the old things, like walking hand-in-hand with my parents to get ice cream as a kid. The new things, like making massive Oreo towers with my little brothers. Even the newest, sitting across from me right now, blinking back with eyes like mirrors, the two of us coming to the same understanding.

Their friendship may have ended years ago, but it’s lived on in us all this time.

My mom reaches her hand across the table at the same time as Pietra, and they squeeze, and there is something so powerful in the pulse that it feels like some kind of spell is broken. It’s a thank you every bit as much as it’s an I’m sorry, the weight of it without the words. We hold our breath in the aftermath, like they were all bound to something for so long that they don’t know how to move themselves without it holding them back.

And then my mom looks at me and Savvy and says, “Seems like they did, too.”





thirty-three




Only after we’re all fed, watered, and deposited in our respective hotel rooms does it occur to me how strange it is, being with my parents on my own like this. I’ve gotten so used to my brothers’ footsteps darting up and down the hall, the clanging of things that probably shouldn’t be clanging, the unsteady soundtrack of our steady lives. In the absence of it—in the just me, Mom, and Dad of it—I feel inexplicably littler and older at the same time.

We end up sitting in the same configuration we did the last time I was here, them on the couch, me on the chair. I sensed A Talk long before we drifted into position for it, but this one already feels different. We’re looser. Lighter. A lot fewer secrets and, for the adults at least, a lot more wine.

There isn’t exactly a silence to break, only a contemplative quiet, but my mom is the one who interrupts it.

“I know the last few days have been rough on all of us. And there’s a lot to process and decide on, regarding how we’re going to move forward. But before we get to that, we wanted to talk to you about—”

I shake my head. “You don’t have to.”

“No,” says my dad, “we really do. What you were saying, about feeling like the…” He winces.

“The replacement kid,” I supply, wincing right back. “And I—”

“It couldn’t be further from how we felt, how we feel.”

“I know—”

“What we went through was—unimaginable. Even now. But when you were born—”

“I know,” I say, firmer.

Even if I didn’t know it in my bones, I can see it in their faces. I don’t need an explanation, because it isn’t an explanation, really. It’s a lifetime. It’s sixteen years of never having to wonder who to call or how long it will take for them to pick up. It’s looking at them and knowing I’m every bit as much theirs as they are mine.