Chapter 247 Can I Watch You Play

Chapter 247 Can I Watch You Play

ARES'S POV

My mother was already there when I pulled up, at the second table from the window. She'd gotten there early enough that her drink had gone cold.

I sat in my car a minute with the engine off and did the thing I said I'd do — car where I said it'd be, six tables, a door.

Ethan was four hundred yards down the road, sitting in a parking lot with the radio on, told not to come in for any reason at all.

I got out and went in.

She was on her feet the second the bell over the door went.

She didn't cry. I'd spent twenty years picturing this with her in tears, and it had never once occurred to me that she might not be.

"Hi, Son."

"Hi."

She waited a beat for the other word. I didn't give it to her yet. She took that without a flicker and sat down.

We were terrible at it for four minutes.

She asked about the team. I said it was good. She asked whether I was still at center and I said mostly. Then there was a gap long enough to hear the machine behind the counter.

"You used to practice in the hall," she said.

"You complained about it."

"I complained because you broke the lamp."

"You told him it was already broken."

She laughed — a small one, over fast. I hadn't heard that sound since I was a boy. It hasn't changed at all.

"Are you with somebody?"

"Yes."

"The one you wrote about."

I looked up at her. "You read that."

"I've read all of them. And besides he came to see me once, remember?”

I nodded mutely because I gave her some of it. Not all of it.

His name, where he plays, what he's signed. That he starts later in the year than I do, and the two of us are about to find out what four hours does to people.

I told her he can't cook and thinks he can. She covered her mouth with two fingers. That's the first time I've said anything about Ethan to family without the room going quiet after.

"He sounds like he suits you."

"He does."

Then it stopped being that, because she moved her cup two inches to the left, and I knew.

"I thought staying away was the thing that protected you," she said.

“From what."

"Your father. The lawyers. All of it. I thought if I wasn't there you wouldn't have to pick."

I had three of these — I'd had them since I was about eleven — so I said them. "You stopped calling."

"I know."

"You missed every birthday from nine on."

“I know that too."

"I wrote to you twice at that address and got nothing back."

"I know," she said. "I have both of them."

That wasn't what I'd been expecting. I sat there with nothing to do with my hands.

She put one hand on each side of that cup and looked at them both.

"I should have been."

No excuse came after it. That's what I hadn't prepared for.

I'd had twenty years of quiet to build the excuse she was supposed to give me — a whole case for it — and she said six words and left me holding all of it.

So I put my wrist on the table, because it was that or say something.

She saw it straight away.

"That's Grace's."

"It is."

“I always knew you'd end up with something of hers," she said, and she was smiling when she said it — the wrong smile, thin, closed at the corners.

"It doesn't run."

She stopped.

"It's been stopped since before she died," I said. "It's been stopped the whole time I've had it. It was stopped when she put it in my hand."

"I didn't know that."

"You wouldn't have."

She turned her cup a quarter turn and didn't drink out of it.

"There's a great deal I didn't know."

"That's the whole of it," I said. "That is the entire thing, and you've just said it better than I've managed in twenty years."

She took that. She didn't put a hand out. She didn't say my name in the voice she used to.

After a while it came down off that and turned back into a conversation.

She told me the town she's in now. A job that involves scheduling other people. A neighbor with a dog that gets out. She was careful with every bit of it, handling that whole twenty minutes like somebody was watching her hands.

Then she said, "Are you really happy?"

“Yes." It came out with nothing in front of it, and I heard it land on her.

"I can see it," she said. "You look like somebody. You never used to look like anybody."

"That's him."

"I assumed."

She had her coat over her arm before either of us stood up. It had been over her arm for ten minutes.

"Can I ask you for something."

“You can ask."

“Can I come and watch you play some times?”

Twenty years I'd had a version of that question in my head, and in every version of it I said no.

The light in that place was bad and the table was too small and my grandmother's watch was sitting on it, not going.

"Yes," I said.

Her mouth opened around a second thing, then she shut it down.

"Then I'll pick which one," she said. "There's a good one at the end of the month. And tell somebody they have the away bench on the wrong side of that building. I sat behind a pillar for an hour."

I didn't move for a second.

"You've been in that building."

She had her bag on her shoulder and she was already half out of the chair. She stopped there, caught between the table and standing, looking at the window instead of at me.

"I've been to a few."

"How many is a few."

"Ares," she said, "I'll tell you which game."

She leaned over and kissed the side of my head, fast, before I'd worked out what to ask her next. Then she went out, past the window, and didn't look in at me.

I sat at that table on my own for about six minutes.

~~

Ethan had the engine going before I was across the lot.

"Well?" "She wants to come to a game."

“And?"

"I said yes."

He hit the wheel with the flat of his hand once and said something about his mother that I didn't catch, because I was watching the road.

He pulled out, got us onto the main street, and asked me what else, because he always asks what else.

"That's it," I said.

I sat in that car for four hours and let him talk. I kept the rest of it.