Thick & Thin (Thin Love, #3)(50)

Dad looked at me, his smile easy, real. “And I wanted you, my beautiful strong boy who reminded me of my twin. Who was his own man, who was so happy, so full of all that boundless potential. And here you are...I look at you and see what Luka would have been like. I see my blood and it makes me so proud.” Kona reached over to me, grabbing my neck. “Don’t think for a second that you are alone. Don’t you ever think that you weren’t wanted. You were. You are. You always will be.”

I couldn't make my throat work, or keep the burn from my eyes when he stopped speaking. The only thing I managed to do was blink, nodding at him for fear that speaking would make my voice crack. Dad seemed to understand and he patted my face, resting back against the sofa.

“I’m not telling you to quit. I’m telling you to figure out what’s important. I’m telling you it’s time to man up and do what you need to do, to be happy and healthy.”

It just wasn’t that easy. It never had been and I didn’t quite get why he couldn’t see that. “It’s just not…”

“You have to fight, Ransom.” He interrupted quick, like he’d become a little desperate for me to understand him. “You have to fight for the life you want.”

“Is that what you’re doing?” I nodded toward the hallway that lead to Mom’s studio. “All this shit you’re keeping from everyone…is that you fighting for the life you want?”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing.” He scrubbed his face, exhaling, looking exhausted. “But sometimes focusing on what’s important, on what’s right, means you end up being alone in the fight you have. Sometimes you have to be a man and go to battle for yourself.”

My father left me on that sofa, watching my little brother out on the patio as he bounced a rubber ball against the side of the house. Dad joined him, then picked up the ball to lead Koa toward the deck. They stood there, watching the water, my Dad with his hand on Koa’s shoulder and my little brother yammering on like he sometimes did. I couldn’t make out my father’s expression but I did notice the small dip of his head, and how he stood taller and straighter than he had in weeks, as though he’d come to some decision that had lifted a weight off his shoulders.

Sacrifice was our family burden. I’d seen so much of that in the decade that my parents built our family. I’d seen it a lot as a kid being reared by a teenage mother and her two best friends. I’d seen it in the jobs Aly didn’t take, in the plans and goals she pushed aside to be with me.

Everyone had sacrificed. Everyone, I realized, but me. The sudden realization that my life didn’t begin and end in with football, with Miami, hit me like a sucker punch to the gut. My life had started long ago in New Orleans. And even before that, in Hawaii where so many people who gave me my chin and my thick, stubborn head. It’d had started in a city filled with music and sorrow, and all of those places and the people who lived in them, made up who I was. Places filled with sacrifice. People who gave everything for the ones they loved. My family was made up of fighters and selfless survivors. It was time I fell in line and became one too. I’d be fine, I knew that. My family, all of them, would never leave me without a soft place to fall.





It begins like a rill

Slowly Sliding Then a trickle used to keep from chaffing.

Tumbling

Tide

A sprite dancing over rocky terrain Blissful Break

Over the boulder, into the chasm, into the mouth Vacated Vastness Until

I cannot contain it, it can’t be kept, and I’m swept in the undercurrent Drowning.





Twelve





There were two framed pictures that rested on top of the fireplace mantel at the center of my condo. The frames were made of beach wood and looked a little worn with cracked edges and splintered corners but the glass was thick and clean. I’d never cared about things matching or looking pristine. Besides, it was the pictures in those frames that mattered to me. My mother was in both.

The first picture showed her smiling, happy, her face rounded by pregnancy, those crystal blue eyes filled as only blind love can make you. Blind love for my father who had reserved his affection for the Cajun white girl he’d married at eighteen. I liked to think that the other emotion filling my mother’s face in that picture was joy, kontantman she felt as I stretched her small body, growing inside her while she sat for that picture.

The other picture was of manman on her wedding day. My parents didn’t have any money for a proper dress or much in the way of a wedding at all, but they’d managed to marry at St. Louis Cathedral when they found an Irish priest who cared more about the influence of love than the sentiment of racism that lay as an undercurrent in the city. She’d worn her hair in a soft up-do around her full face and my grann, my father’s mother, had pinned daisies in her soft curls like a crown. That picture was the only evidence that my father had ever smiled or that I had come from a woman more beautiful than a fairytale, braver than the fiercest dragon slayer. At least, that’s what grann had always told me.

Ethan stared at both pictures, as he usually did during his infrequent visits to my Elysian Fields condo. He didn’t typically like staying with me here. He complained that the traffic was too heavy, that the parking wasn’t safe enough for his Mercedes and there was more room in his Jax Brewery condo. His home was newer, safer, to be sure. But it lacked the homey, welcoming feel I’d managed to invoke in this place.