days, and then like always, he got a job offer to work as a cook on some fishing boat, and he was gone. That was the deal I figured out later. He never worked a regular job. Instead, he took all these dangerous jobs. He worked as a logger, on crab boats, and on off-shore drilling rigs mostly. A lot of them were seasonal, so he would work one job, make a lot of money, then breeze into town with gifts and stuff until the next job called. He was a real adrenaline junkie. Anyway, that time I was angry at Ryan. I told him it was his fault that he left, that if he was nicer to him, he would stay longer. Before you knew it, we were rolling around on the ground fighting.”
“What happened next?” he gently prodded me when I stopped, remembering that day.
“Our mom happened,” I said with a chuckle. She stepped right in the middle of us and pulled us apart. She picked us up with the back of our shirts and deposited us on opposite ends of the couch, then she sat down in front of us on the coffee table and glared at both us for a minute. Then she said. Talk. I launched into telling her my side, but she just shook her head at me and said, No, not to me, to your brother. When we have a problem in this family, we don’t use our fists, we use our words. Now you two talk. We glared at each other for a minute, but eventually, we did. I told him if he weren’t so mean, Dad might stay, and he told me he was mad because no matter what he did, he always left.
She let us go on like that for a few minutes, both of us getting it all out. Then she switched seats, so she was between us. She pulled us both close and hugged us tight. Then she told us something I’ll always remember. She told us that we weren’t responsible for how other people behaved, that our dad made his own choices, and me being happy to see him or Ryan being angry had nothing to do with whether he stayed or not or with how long it was before he came back. She said there was no right or wrong way to feel about things, and we were both entitled to our own feelings no matter what they were.”
“Your mother is a very smart woman.”
“Yeah, she’s great,” I agreed.
“Do you still see him now?” he asked.
“No, he stopped coming around after my mom and Conrad married.”
“Well, that’s kind of crappy.”
“Nah, that wasn’t the crappy part. The crappy part happened a few years later when Conrad wanted to adopt us. All three of us loved him, and he’d been the best dad you can imagine. He coached Jordan and Ryan’s Little League team, was my Boy Scout troop’s den leader, and he would’ve done anything for Rand in particular. He’d been so young when they got together. He doesn’t remember a time when Conrad wasn’t in our life. So we were all excited about the idea. We hadn’t seen our dad in about three years, so we just assumed it would be fine. But no, instead, he refused. Didn’t get mad, didn’t show up, just sent back a response with his lawyer that said he would continue to pay his child support and was refusing to sign.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t say. He just refused, but he didn’t show back up.”
“That is so weird.”
“I have no idea why he did that, but when we started the business, we named it after Conrad, not our waste of a father.”
Chapter 21
Roman
What on earth was that ridiculous sound? I shook my sleep-addled brain and tried to place it. It was the theme song from some musical, I think. Trey shifted in the bed next to me and grumbled something that sounded like go away as he pulled the pillow over his head to shut out the sound. I followed the music to the table on his side of the bed, where his phone was lit up, and Ash’s picture was on the screen.
I nudged him trying to wake him, knowing he wouldn’t want to miss a call from Ash this late. “Babe, it’s your phone. Ash is calling.” He just mumbled something and dug deeper into the bed. I chuckled, leaning over him and grabbed the phone. I wouldn’t have answered this late