Fake Skating(108)

I could barely breathe as I watched.

But in the second period, when Kyle tripped Benji and got sent to the penalty box for two minutes, St. John’s took advantage of the power play and managed to score not only once, but twice.

“No!” I yelled when the second one went in, dragging my hands through my hair and kind of wanting to vomit.

“Cool it,” my grandpa said, signaling to the server that he needed another beer. “Plenty of time.”

The buzzer sounded, and I wasn’t sure I was going to survive another period of this.

My phone vibrated in my pocket—and, God, it was my dad.

Talk about terrible timing.

And somehow my grandpa knew who it was, because when I glanced at him, he said, “Just answer—you need to talk to him, and you’re just going to pace through intermission anyway.”

“True,” I said, feeling somehow more capable of talking to my dad with Grandpa Mick’s support.

“Hey, Dad,” I said, standing and walking over to the hallway by the restrooms. The pub was packed and noisy, so I was looking for somewhere marginally quieter.

“Hey, honey. Where are you? It’s so noisy,” he said.

“Why did you leave?” I asked, because hearing his voice hurtsomething inside me. And it make me feel bold. Bolder than before. I deserved answers. “I mean, how could you leave without talking to me first?”

“Oh,” he said, sounding surprised that I’d jumped right into it. I’m a little surprised myself. “Well, it just seemed like we weren’t going to have a fruitful conversation with—”

“?‘Fruitful conversation’?” I repeated, immediately frustrated. “Did you really think that asking me to pick a parent would result in a fruitful conversation?”

“I wasn’t asking you to do that,” he snapped, sounding defensive. “I was simply trying to get closer—”

“But I overheard what Grandpa Mick said to you,” I said, steeling myself for his reaction. “And he wasn’t wrong. Why couldn’t you have wanted to get closer to me without asking me to destroy Mom?”

“Now, come on, that’s not what I was doing,” he said.

“It was, though,” I said, wondering if he really even cared. “You know Mom, and you know how close Mom and I are, so you can’t just pretend it didn’t occur to you that this would be upsetting.”

It was scary, being this honest with him, but I didn’t want to stop.

“I know we let you down by moving back, and I’m so sorry for that,” I said. “But I’m kind of happy here, I think, being in a place that feels permanent for once. I don’t want that to hurt you, and I don’t want it to make you distance yourself, because I love you.”

I took a deep breath, feeling slightly braver than normal.

“Daniella,” he said, his voice quiet, and then he sighed. Said, “I’m sorry too.”

“You are?”

“I am,” he said, sounding… more introspective than usual. “I did feel like I was losing you when you guys moved back there, and I’m not proud of my knee-jerk reaction. Your grandpa said some things the other night that really hit home.”

“Oh,” I said, my chest feeling tight as my dad completely surprised me.

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes over the years when it comes to you, but it was always because I love you—you know that, right?”

“Of course,” I said, absolutely confused by the fact that he was admitting to being wrong.

I guess Grandpa really had struck a chord with him.

“Wow, what is that?” he asked when a random guy walking to the bathroom yelled something as he walked by.

I explained we were watching the tournament game, and he said, “Yeah, were you as shocked as I was to discover Sarah’s kid turned into an athlete?”

Sarah’s kid. I could tell my dad was trying, so I wasn’t going to focus on the fact that he couldn’t seem to remember the name of the kid who was all I could talk about for the first, like, twelve years of my life. “For sure,” I agreed.

“I had him pegged all wrong. I thought he was kind of a creepy little dork before that, honestly.”

“You did?”

“Well, between the way he always followed you around and all the postcards written in another language, who could blame me?”

The postcards. “It wasn’t another language, Dad; it was a code we made up.”

“Same difference,” he said. “All I know is that the guy kept sending them when he was waytoo old for that, so it seemed like a red flag. What well-adjusted boy in high schoolis still sending coded messages once a week to a girl he knew in grade school?”

“He stopped sending them when I was in middle school, to be fair,” I said, remembering exactly when he stopped writing, because it was right when everything in my life was at its worst.

“No,” he said. “I distinctly remember telling your mother that it was weird that the kid was going into high school and still doing it.”

“I don’t think that’s right, but—”

“No, it is, Daniella—I started tossing them,” he said. “That’s why you don’t remember them, because I chucked them with the junk mail.”