Tweet Cute(89)

I nod. “You guys know each other.”

“Yeah, well. That, and … we dated, briefly.”

My eyes widen to the approximate diameter of those useless dollar coins the MTA card machines are always spitting out. “Oh.”

My dad raises his hands up in defense of himself. “A long, long time ago. Like, long.”

I try to picture my dad and Pepper’s mom in this “long, long” time ago, but my imagination refuses to de-age them. My dad is just my dad, the way he is right now, and Pepper’s mom is—well, terrifying. But also such an unknown quantity to me, it’s hard to imagine anything about her at all.

“How long is long?”

He has to think for a moment. We both raise our hands to scratch the backs of our necks, and I hide a smile at my shoes and stop myself just in time.

“It was—well, it was just before I met your mother.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Did you dump Pepper’s mom for our mom?”

My dad stares at the coffee table.

“It didn’t—happen—exactly like that.”

Which is to say, from the rueful look he is not doing a very good job of suppressing, that’s exactly how it happened.

“Dad.”

“She was just here for the summer before heading back to Nashville. It was never meant to be anything serious. Not that—okay, that’s enough, that’s all you’re getting from me on it,” says my dad, pointing a finger at me. “No smirking.”

It’s so rare I ever get to hear about my parents’ pre–Jack and Ethan days that I can’t help myself. “You scoundrel.”

My dad shakes his head. “I fell in love with your mom within a minute of meeting her. Nothing in the world was gonna stop it.”

Then all at once he gets misty-eyed the way he does sometimes when he talks about Mom. This time, I don’t feel the usual rush of secondhand embarrassment. This, maybe, is the real anchor, the one that’s always been there—knowing I have parents who love each other so much it was never a matter of if, but always a matter of when.

“But you pissed off—Ronnie, was it?”

My dad presses his lips into an exasperated line. “Yeah. I got a few angry phone calls. She, uh—she was working at the deli that summer. Trying to learn the ropes because she wanted to open her own place. That’s how we met. We hadn’t quite called it off when she went back to school in Nashville, so things were a little … tangled in that regard.”

My dad’s eyes aren’t fully with me when he says it, so I know there must be more to the story than that—but whatever it is, he doesn’t offer it up.

“So rather than working it out, you just waited until your kids were old enough to duke it out on Twitter instead?” I ask.

“Hardly,” says my dad. “That’s why I didn’t want you on it at all. That whole Grandma’s Special stunt at Big League Burger had Ronnie written all over it, and if I’d had my way, we would have just ignored it altogether.”

I feel a pang of remorse. “Well.”

My dad nudges his shoulder into mine. “But then it got half the city buying our sandwiches. I’m not going to lie—we were in a tight spot a few months ago. All this Twitter insanity … it’s made a huge difference to our bottom line.”

For a moment I almost pretend this is a surprise to me, but we both know I’m way too invested in the deli and its goings-on not to know we were in the red. I nod quietly, and my dad cuts his gaze to his lap, obviously not expecting it. I can feel the slight puncture to his pride so immediately that it feels like my own.

“So all this was thanks to your spurned college ex, huh?” I ask, to take some weight off of the silence.

“No. All this was thanks to my very clever son, who is nothing if not loyal to this family. And would probably make an excellent social media manager one day, if he wanted to be.”

I open my mouth, but it’s suddenly drier than it was after trying to eat the stale rye loaves my mom used to make our lunch sandwiches from when we were kids. But I can’t chicken out now. It’s my opening. I know it’s not now or never, but it’s now or some other less appropriate moment when I don’t have my dad’s full attention.

“I know this whole Weazel thing kind of blew up in my face, but—I think that’s what I want to do. Develop apps, I mean.”

My dad considers this. “I really didn’t have any idea you were even into that,” he says, leaning forward and propping his elbows on his knees.

I pick at a loose seam on my jeans. Years and years of work—of teaching myself to code, of stumbling through online tutori als, of watching the weird things I’ve envisioned come to life on screens—and now that the moment has come to justify all of it, to explain how much it means to me, I’m at a complete and utter loss for how to do it.

“I’m—it’s something I think … I could be good at,” I say.

The words aren’t right, maybe, but the understanding must be. My dad breathes out a sigh that is just as much in resignation as it is pride.

“I believe you, if those screenshots your vice principal sent me are any indication.” There’s a subtle edge in his voice to let me know I’m nowhere near off the hook for that, but it doesn’t do anything to dampen my relief. “I just wish you’d told us.”