Page 24 of Yard Sale

My dad gave me a glower and smacked my ankle with the pen he was holding.

“Ow.” It didn’t hurt, and he gave me a look as I rubbed it.

“You’d think you were raised in a barn with a bunch of goats who put their feet up on their parents’ furniture.”

“I would so go live with goats if that was an option.” I ran my fingers up and down the seam of my shirt. I was wearing a mesh top with a lace pattern, and it felt nice on my skin. “Anyway, as long as that’s fine with you⁠—”

“Aravind,” he said, then softened. “Beta, you have to stop worrying about me.”

It was annoying as hell that he understood the whole reason I was feeling panicked about not going to the beach house for the entire summer was because I worried about him.

Not that he was going to be able to make it for the whole summer either. He had maybe three weeks of free time before he was going to be called back for his obligations to the league.

There was the draft, there were several organization meetings, then dealing with onboarding whatever rookies and trades who were coming onto the team. Then, after his short break, there was training camp and preseason, and once again, my dad would be lost to the time suck that was the NHL.

It was an echo of my entire childhood, but I was no longer a nervous kid hiding in my mom’s closet, worried about how angry my dad would be if he saw me in her long, bohemian-style skirts as I slipped my tiny feet into her huge heels. But even that fear never stopped me, and sometimes I wondered how my dad would have felt if he’d known about me sooner.

I had idolized my mom in a way that was probably unhealthy, but she had been so, so beautiful. She was tall—which she used to tell me her parents thought it would make it difficult to marry her off. She was chubby, and I used to bury myself in her curves whenever I was scared. She wore things that seemed like they were made for her and just her, and I wanted to be like that.

I wanted to be comfortable in my own skin the way she had been. I wanted to look in the mirror every day and smile at myself. And I was confident. She had given me that. My hair was as long as hers had been right before she died, though mine didn’t have her curls. But we shared the same shape of eyes, and my skin was closer to her shade than my dad’s. I had his chin, though, and his jawline. I was a good mix of them both, but I saw her a lot in my own reflection, which made looking at myself hard some days, and I was starting to wonder if it was ever going to get easier.

My grief therapist told me that there was no one way to grieve—that there wasn’t some kind of timeline I was meant to be following. But sometimes it felt like carrying around a heavy weight, and occasionally, I felt a small prickle of fear, like one of these days that weight was going to break me.

“Listen, beta,” my dad said, leaning over toward me, “if you don’t want to be around everyone, or you need some space, I can help. I can buy you a ticket, and you can go visit Rajesh and Shaan. I know they’ve been trying to get you to Dublin for a while⁠—”

I held up my hand. I loved my cousins. A lot. After my mom died, they flew here to be with me and my dad until the screaming, aching part of the pain had passed. And they had been up my ass about coming to Dublin, where they were both working, so we could drink like the Irish and forget about how horrible the world was starting to become.

But I wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t think getting blackout shit-faced with my cousins was going to help me figure out who I was. Or what I wanted to do with my life now that my era of chasing that fuck-face Leon was over.

“I think a few weeks by the beach sounds like what I need. Seriously, Dad. I promise I don’t need special treatment.”

He stared at me for a long moment. “I know that job was hard. And I know your thing with Leon⁠—”

“Don’t say his name. He’ll appear like some kind of magical cockroach,” I said.

His lips twitched. “I have warned you about men like him.” I sucked in a breath to say something sarcastic, but he cut me off. “I’m just glad you got out before you got hurt worse. And I know you took on sports reporting to make me happy.”

“I didn’t do it just for that,” I said, feeling kind of pathetic because yeah. I mostly did. Being next to Leon’s office was the bonus that quickly turned into a curse. But I was still the small child trying to make my dad proud.

He was better at showing it now than he had been before, which helped.

“I think you made some good friends out of it, didn’t you?”

That was a stretch. Like a warm vat of saltwater taffy stretch. Some of the hockey guys were really nice to me. Some wanted to keep in touch.

Some followed me on my socials, and Vanya was always commenting on all my OOTD posts and gave me hearts when I tried out a new metallic eyeshadow or bought a pretty top. But it was hard to tell if he was being performative and trying to look good for the public or if he actually gave a shit.

I was probably too jaded to believe anything but option A.

“Well, I’d better get going.” I pushed up from the chair, but my dad held up a hand.

“Everything you wrote in the article, it was true, right? About Nadeau?”

My brows furrowed in confusion. The article had a fairly ambiguous ending since Tiago’s final statement to me on the record was fairly ambiguous. I wasn’t even sure why my dad was asking. “Uh, yeah? I have journalistic integrity, even if my boss is a complete waste of space. And it wasn’t like anything Nadeau said was out of character.”

He sighed and didn’t look convinced. “Alright.”

“Did someone say something?” I pressed. I hadn’t looked at the article since it had gone live. I emailed it off to the editing desk, sent Daryl a message letting him know that I was looking forward to forgetting every second I ever worked with him, and then left my badge with reception and didn’t look back as I drove off from the campus.