Chapter 249 I Didn't Lose Him

Chapter 249 I Didn't Lose Him
ARES'S POV

My father's name came up on the screen with my bag still on the kitchen floor where I'd dropped it. I let it ring three times before I decided we were doing this.

"They'd like you on the stage at the last one," he said. Before hello, before anything. My father has opened a phone call with hello maybe twice in my life.

The picture put itself together before he got to the end of the sentence. The candidate, and next to him the son. Openly gay, plays professional hockey, photographs well, forgives his father in public at the correct moment.

"Because you want me there, or because they want me there."

A pause on the line. I let him have the whole of it.

"Both," my father said.

That answer took the fight out of me faster than any argument he's ever made.

"I'm not going on a stage."

"All right."

"If I stand up there, every question the next morning is about you and me instead of the work you've put four years into. And I'd be up there performing a man who has always had a father."

"All right," he said again.

I waited on the guilt. Twenty-two years of him says it turns up right about here, dressed as something reasonable. It never came.

"Will you watch the results with me," my father said. "After they close. At the house, not the party."

I looked at the bag on my own floor and said yes, and it had nothing to do with a stage.

—

His house that evening was full of people carrying paper. Signs stacked five deep by the front door, his name across every one of them in two colors. Two phones going at once in the kitchen, a laptop open on the arm of a chair with the coverage running, somebody's coffee going cold beside it.

Renata moved through all of it, touching people on the arm, using their names. My father stood in the middle of his own front room with nine people around him and nobody anywhere near him.

I took my drink to the corner and stayed out of every conversation in the house.

Around nine he came across the room and dropped into the chair beside mine. Renata took the room off somewhere else on purpose. For a minute neither of us tried to talk. Then he asked about the team.

So I told him. The travel. The kid on my line who calls me sir. What it is to be in one league while Ethan's in another, finding out what a four-hour drive does to a couple.

"You sound happy," my father said.

"I am."

He took that with a short nod. Nothing came after it — no lecture, no warning, nothing he could put in a speech later.

"Good."

District 14 was called too close at half past ten.

The room didn't go quiet all at once. It thinned. People stopped saying the confident thing and started reading their phones instead of the screen. A woman by the window covered her mouth for a second, then made herself stop.

His opponent went ahead by four hundred votes. Then eleven hundred. The network put it up on the screen a few minutes later. Somebody in the kitchen swore at the wall. That was the seat my father had held for eleven years.

Now he leaves his own face, I thought. He's done it to me at four different tables.

Instead he breathed out once and stood. Crossed to the door and started squaring the signs.

Nobody had asked him to. There were seventy of them, already stacked. My father stood in his own hallway on the worst night of his career and straightened the edges of a pile of cardboard until they sat flush.

Renata got both arms around him from behind and put her face against his shoulder blade. He let her. His hands never left the cardboard.

One of the staff came over and said he was sorry.

"Thank you, Danny," my father said. He got the name right. Nobody else in the house managed that all night.

Back in the chair beside me, he let me ask whether he was all right.

He looked at the screen. They'd already moved on — a different district, a different man's face.

"I lost an election."

I waited him out. I've learned that much from a Drake.

"I didn't lose my son."

He put no weight on it at all. It came out like something already settled, days ago, alone.

"Eleven years ago you'd have taken the seat," I said.

"Eleven years ago I did take the seat." His hands were flat on his knees. "I'd rather lose District 14 than lose you again. That's not a speech, Ares. It's arithmetic, and I did it too late, and it still comes out the same."

I did not put my arms around my father. That has not happened indoors, with other people in the room, in the whole history of us.

I got hold of his shoulder instead. His hand came down over mine and stayed. The coverage kept talking to a room that wasn't listening.

My mother didn't come up once between us all night.

—

Around midnight the front step was the only quiet place left, so I took it and called Ethan.

"Well?"

"He lost."

"Is he okay?"

"He's stacking signs." I sat down on the cold step. "He said he'd rather lose the seat than lose me again."

"Good."

Then I gave him what I'd been carrying in that car for four hours.

"She's been to games."

"What?"

"My mother. In the café. She said the away bench was on the wrong side, and she sat behind a pillar for an hour, and she wouldn't tell me how many. I had four hours in a car with you and never opened my mouth."

Ethan let that sit longer than I wanted him to.

"Why didn't you tell me."

Because saying it out loud means deciding what it means. "I wanted one more week of not deciding."

"Ares."

"I know."

"Ask her which ones," Ethan said. "Not how many. Which ones."

"I already know one."

Behind me somebody was carrying the signs out two at a time. The front door kept opening and shutting on the back of my neck.

"They moved that bench in October," I said. "She was in the building this season."