Begin Again(91)

I mindlessly pick up one of the quarters, trying to make his words make sense. I’ve listened to the show for years, but I’ve had good reason—I wanted to keep up with Mom’s legacy. Last I checked, my dad was avoiding that like the plague.

“You listen to the show?” I ask cautiously. And then, with decidedly less caution: “Because of Mom?”

My dad shakes his head. A little boy squeals on the slide as a little girl plumes down right behind him, the two of them crashing together at the base of it in a fit of giggles.

“I checked in on it from time to time because of your mom,” says my dad. “But I recognized your voice a few weeks ago. I’ve been tuning in ever since.”

The revelation doesn’t know where to land. For so long the studio has been a hideaway, this quiet place where nobody can see me except for Milo and Shay. It feels like discovering there’s been a secret window the entire time.

“You have?”

Only then do I realize that my dad’s call was no coincidence. He already knows exactly what happened. His call this morning wasn’t an offer—it was a full-on rescue.

“Course. You’re made for the air.” My dad busies himself with a piece of his bagel, watching me process all this out of the corner of his eye. “Plus, I had to do something to get my ‘Bed of Roses’ fix, since you never sent me your clips.”

I blink down at my own bagel. “I, uh . . . I’ve been busy.” My throat is thick. “I didn’t realize you were listening.”

“I always want to know what’s going on in your world.”

I look over at him so quickly that I can see him bracing himself, his hands paused on the table, his shoulders set against the breeze. This is the part where I’m supposed to say something like, You’ve got a funny way of showing it. Something combative, something to cause even a fraction of the hurt I’ve felt for years.

My dad clearly is ready to take it, but suddenly, I don’t have it in me. I don’t want to hurt anymore. I just want to understand.

So I level with him. “I appreciate you trying. I really do. I’m just . . .” I can’t look at him when I say it, so instead I stare off at the shadows of the kids barreling through the tunnels, palms and knees knocking against the plastic in the distance. “There were times when I thought you were going to be more involved, and you weren’t. I don’t want to get my hopes up so you can just . . .”

Start over with someone else, I want to say. But I already feel raw enough taking it this far. I can’t say anything else without knowing what he’ll say, how he’ll react.

“The time I was gone—it was longer than I thought it would be,” my dad says.

I can tell it’s the beginning of an apology, but it can’t start like that. If we’re blowing this open right now, we’re blowing it wide open. “Longer than I thought it would be” isn’t going to cut it.

“You were gone for years.”

I’m surprisingly calm. Part of it, I think, is that I’ve been imagining some version of this conversation for a long time. Versions where I cried, versions where I yelled. Versions that eventually boiled down to the core of the issue: what I needed to say, what I needed him to hear. After that it was just a matter of working up the nerve to do it.

The other part of it is Milo’s voice in my head. If I had the chance to talk to my dad again . . .

I want to have that chance. Not just for this conversation, but all the ones that can come after. The kind that will only really mean anything if we try to fix this first.

“It felt like you were running away.” I sit up straighter, the bagel forgotten, the sounds of the kids fading away. “From Mom. From Little Fells. From me.”

My dad’s eyes close for a moment. “I never wanted to be away from you, Andie.”

As I watch him start to gather his thoughts, I realize I imagined this all wrong. It’s not what I need my dad to hear. It’s about what I need him to say. So I don’t protest, don’t point to moments in the past we both already know. I just keep watching him and wait.

“You’re right. I was trying to avoid Little Fells.” He glances past the playground to the row of trees beyond it, to the road that leads to the main part of town and branches off into side streets full of everyone we know. “It was sort of like . . . Groundhog’s Day. I kept trying to move on—for both our sakes. But every person here, they knew your mom. They loved her. And every conversation I had . . . it started with this grief. This pity. Everyone was hurting, every single time her name came up.” He shakes his head, like the words aren’t quite matching what he’s trying to say. “And your mom wouldn’t have wanted that. She would have wanted people to smile when they thought of her. But they didn’t understand that, and sometimes I’d just be so angry that—that they felt like they could understand, that they knew what we’d lost, when—when it felt like they didn’t know her at all.”

I hate that I know exactly what he means. It’s the same private kind of grief Grandma Maeve and I have always shared. There is a part of Amy Rose that belonged to Little Fells, and a whole of her that only belonged to us.

“And everywhere I went it was like—being at the funeral. All over again.” He adjusts the baseball cap on his head, lowering it over his eyes and then setting it back again. “The grief already felt like a mountain. It just got heavier and heavier the longer I stayed here. Like we were carrying it for everybody else, too.”