CHAPTER 53
CARTER
I took him to his favorite strip-mall Thai place. It had a Buddhist shrine in the front with bowls of fresh fruit and flowers and faded photos of specialty dishes that curled at the edges. We couldn’t pronounce the name of it, and most of the menu was in Thai, but we had things we ordered every time. I wanted something . . . anything to be the way it was before he knew I wasn’t his father.
Over the past twenty-four hours, Phin had started waking up. He ate a little. Went to the bathroom. He spoke in a full sentence while looking at the Thai menu, which was a relief, except that I had to answer his question.
“Where are we going?”
“After dinner?”
“When you sell the house.”
“I was thinking Northern California. There’s a lot of tech up there.”
“Is Grandma coming with us?”
“She’s getting her own place here.”
“Can I stay with her?”
The waiter came to take our order before I could react as strongly as I felt.
“I’ll have the chicken basil and a Thai iced tea, and he’ll have a pad Thai with—”
“I want the crying tiger.” Phin folded up his menu.
“That’s very spicy,” the waiter said.
“Make it mild,” I interjected.
“I’ll take it spicy.” Phin picked up my menu and gave both to the waiter. “And a Thai iced tea too.”
The waiter bowed and left.
“There’s caffeine in that tea. You’ll be up all night.”
“I’ve been sleeping for two days, Da—”
He cut himself off before finishing the word. I folded my hands on the table and tapped my thumbs together. He pressed his chopsticks in the paper napkin until they made crescent-shaped dents.
“I don’t know what to call you.”
“What do you want to call me?” It wasn’t like me to give him that kind of power in the relationship. I made the rules. I was the parent. But without the armor of my lies, I didn’t know how to maintain my authority.
“Jerk.” He said it matter-of-factly, without reprimand or venom, but I was filled with a blood-saturated rage and snapped his chopsticks away.
“Do not dare,” I growled.
He wouldn’t look at me. Without chopsticks, he used his fingernails to emboss crescents in the napkin.
“Fine.” He pushed the napkin toward me, and I picked it up. Even as I was about to make a scene in a Thai restaurant, I loathed how I was behaving. My anger was disgusting to me but undeniable.
A waitress passed by with a tray of lemongrass and basil, and I was reminded of Emily. Her life in a fortress. Her beautiful smile. Her vulnerability with a red X on her chest. Everything came to me in a flood, and I saw myself and my anger through her eyes. How would she react to my behavior?
“I’m sorry.” I took his forearm across the table. I wanted it to be a stabilizing force between us. I wanted to transmit my love for him with a squeeze to the arm. “This is hard.”
“I don’t want to go,” he said. “Please don’t make me go.”
“Everyone’s going to be talking about it.”
“I don’t care.”
“You will.”
“Maybe. But if we run away, I’m going to make all new friends, and what am I going to tell them? At least everyone here knows me and I only have to explain, like, half of it. Or none, maybe. And I’ll be the center of attention for a little while, but it’s going to go away. No one gets attention for that long. When Glen Crouch and Frida Langston got divorced, everyone felt sorry for Indigo for, like, a week. Ten days, tops. Then it was like, whatever. No one cared.”
I’d decided a long time ago that Phin wouldn’t run the show. Major decisions about his life would go to the adults in the room. Yet he’d brought something to my attention. As I started to let the idea of staying enter my mind, I saw where my resistance was coming from.
“You always said not to worry what other people think.” He was stuffing more words into ten minutes than he had in the last two days. “And here you are worrying what other people think.”
“It’s not about what other people think.” Untrue. When did I become such a liar? I was the one who didn’t want to make explanations for what I’d done. If we stayed, things were going to change, and his school, his friends, the people in my life, would all want to know why I’d made this boy’s life a lie. “It’s about . . .”
. . . protecting you.
It wasn’t. Protection was my default. My core motivation. Without it, why did I do anything?
What is it about, Carter Kincaid?
What are you running from?
Phin continued as if he didn’t need to hear the rest of the sentence because he knew damn well what it was about. It had been about protecting him, up until it wasn’t. Now it was about protecting me.
“And what about that girl you like?” Phin continued like a used-car salesman trying to close on a clunker. “Emily? She seemed really nice. You’re just going to leave her behind?”
“Stay out of my love life, kid.”
“You seemed really happy. I never saw you hold hands with anyone.”
“Hey now . . .”
“I’m just saying. Look. Here’s the thing. I’m really mad at you. Like, really mad. But I want you to be happy anyway.”
“So you want to stay for my own good?”
“Well, partly. I guess? I don’t know.” He looked lost. He was thirteen. What else was I going to dump on him?
Our food came. I handed him back his chopsticks and napkin.
“I’m a jerk,” I mumbled.
“Yeah.”
“You may never forgive me.” I waited for word of his forgiveness but didn’t get any. He shrugged and poked at the chili-crusted beef, letting me continue. “I only ever wanted to take care of you. I know that’s not an excuse. But whatever you decide to call me, Uncle or Dad or Carter . . . I want you to know something really important.”
“I know you love me.” Phin kept his eyes glued to the plate and put a piece of meat between his teeth and chewed.
“Yes, but no. I want you to know that I loved being your father. It was everything I hoped. Raising you into the young man you are? It’s the best thing I’ve done. And if it ends before I want it to, I’m okay with that. You calling me ‘Dad’ made me proud every day. I didn’t give up a thing that was worth more than being your father. And Phin. Just so you know. You can call me Uncle Jerk to my face or behind my back. I’ll always think of you as my son.”
He was bowed over his food, so I couldn’t see his face. A tear dropped to his plate, and I thought I was going to have to carry him out on another crying jag.
“Phin?”
He grabbed his glass of Thai iced tea and downed half of it. His face was red and slick with tears and sweat.
“Kid,” I said, “they call it crying tiger for a reason.”
He coughed and took another piece of meat. “I got this.”
He chewed and swallowed. I’d had crying tiger from this restaurant, and it was authentic in ways one had to suffer through to appreciate. “You might start hallucinating.”
“Maybe it’ll trigger puberty.” He choked on his words, and I laughed. The waiter, as if seeing the white kid deal with a fire in his face, brought a bowl of iced cucumbers and cabbage.
I ripped off a cooling cabbage leaf and handed it to him. He stuffed it in his mouth and sucked, chewed, swallowed, and went for more crying tiger.
“I have an idea,” he said before he ate the next flamethrower.
“We switch plates? I went through puberty already.”
“Better. You go to Vegas.” He ripped off a cabbage leaf and put it on his plate. “While you’re not here, I’ll explain to all my friends what happened. This way, you don’t have to, like, be embarrassed, and they’ll tell their parents whatever they want.” He used chopsticks to put a few pieces of meat into the cabbage leaf.
“I don’t think so.”
He rolled the meat up in the leaf. Clever. I was as proud of the way his brain worked as if he were my own. “By the time you get back,” he said, “it’ll all be over.”
He ate the rolled-up crying tiger, and I watched him chew.
Go to Vegas. See Emily. Share a bed. Start something with her. Something real. Something happy. Something completely distracting that could leave Phin exposed without me.
“I have reasons I don’t travel. One: I’m not leaving you.”
“You could take me.”
“I can’t watch you when I’m working. Next time.”
“Really?” His face lit up from excitement or chili. Possibly both.
“Really. And two, I hate hotels. And airplanes. And long drives.”
He took a big bite of his rolled-up meat and chewed. He handled it all right. Just a little wetness in the corner of his eyes.
“You gotta live a little, Dad.”
He sucked down a third of his iced tea without mentioning that he’d called me Dad.