You Have a Match(83)

“She did?” I wasn’t aware that I was on her radar for anything other than gum smuggling and sneaking out before sunrise.

My dad adds, “She also mentioned you’d made a lot of friends here.”

“I have.”

It’s not an attempt to stay. All things considered—the lying, the broken wrist, the still very confusing aftermath we all have to navigate—I’m lucky to be having a conversation this calm at all. I’m not going to try to take advantage of it by angling to go back.

“And that’s been great, too. I don’t think I’ve made a lot of friends outside of Leo and Connie for … a while, really,” I say. My throat tightens, thinking of them both, but that is its own volcano of issues that I am not touching with a ten-foot pole tonight. “It made me feel—I don’t know. Excited for what comes after high school. I don’t think I’ve really even thought about it much, but it was nice, to meet new people. See new things. And I think … I want more time to do that. Not just when senior year is over.”

They consider this, my dad more actively than my mom, whose gaze is on the table between us. “So you want to just—full stop, on the tutoring?” he asks.

I press my lips together. “I mean, yeah?” I glance at them. “Is that a … trick question?”

“I’m not saying we’re going to stop caring about your grades.” My dad’s voice is wry. “We do need you to graduate.”

My ears burn. “Yeah, well. That I can do.”

“And you know,” he adds, taking care to take some of the defensiveness out of it, “you could have talked to us about this before.”

And there it is. That deeper root I thought I was pulling on, finally brought up to the surface. It isn’t one I would have touched a few weeks ago, but I’m a long way from the Abby I was then.

“It just seemed like it mattered to you guys a lot,” I say carefully. “And honestly … things were so nuts after Poppy died, I didn’t want to make it any worse. I didn’t want to be a problem.”

“Honey, you’ve never been a problem—”

I don’t mean to cut my mom off with the look I give her, but it stops her in her tracks.

“I feel like I have,” I say, trying to soften it. “I mean, you guys have to drive me all over for tutoring. And before that I was getting in the way of you working full-time, and before that I was getting in the way of school…”

“Abby, those were our problems. Not yours. You understand?”

My mom doesn’t say anything for a few moments, and I can’t tell if it’s because she’s not sure how to say it or if she should say it at all. But it’s almost like we’re shaking something loose, something we’ve all been walking around with for a long time, and it doesn’t make sense to leave the weight of any of it on us now.

“We knew it would be hard, having you during law school, but that was our decision,” says my mom. “And a huge part of why we were able to do that was knowing that your grandpa wanted to help. I don’t know if you ever realized how much that meant to him, having you—he’d been so quiet after we lost my mom, but after you were born everything changed. He couldn’t wait to take you places and teach you things. It was like watching him come back to life.”

I nod, only because my throat feels too thick to say much else.

My mom smiles sadly. “And I know you and Poppy were always close because of that. And we were there whenever we could be, but it seemed like we … missed out on some stuff. It felt like sometimes we weren’t giving you your best shot.”

“Like maybe we’d been selfish, having you when we did. Instead of waiting until we could have given you more,” says my dad.

The idea of this is so ridiculous to me that I’m not even sure how to react. I’m so used to being the one they’ve had to soothe or reassure—now that the script has flipped it turns out I’m total crap at it.

“I’ve never wanted more,” I say. “I mean, sheesh. I got ten years of you all to myself.”

My mom smiles. “Well, things got calmer after the first few years of work, and we were around more,” she says. “And the feeling went away. The fear that we were letting you down.”

I bunch my fingers into my shorts, wishing I could find the words to tell them that they didn’t. That to me it’s always felt the other way around.

“Then, when your brothers were born … obviously things got hectic,” my mom continues. “And it was like the pattern repeated. You were older, and more independent, and we still had your Poppy to keep an eye on you.”

I nod, and they pause. I wonder why, until I feel a tear burn down my cheek, falling onto my bare knee. My mom’s already crossed the distance to me before I fully realize what’s happening, wrapping me up in her arms and letting me snot into her shoulder.

Usually I’m not sad when people bring up Poppy, because I’m already thinking about him most of the time. He’s in the weight of his old camera strapped to my shoulder, in the periphery of every photo I take, squinting at the same views and humming his approval. He’s the person I talk to in my head, when I need an imaginary person to help me think things through.

I was lucky to have him to myself as a kid, and luckier still to go on the adventures we took after my brothers were born. But those adventures are over, and I’ve been too busy to really think about how scary it is that I’ll have to choose the next adventures on my own.