Page 84 of Power Play

“My grandfather taught me how to drive. My grandmother sat in freezing rinks before anybody knew my name. They paid for camps they couldn’t fucking afford because I told them I wanted hockey. When I moved in with them at fifteen, Grandpa converted half the basement so I’d have somewhere to keep my gear because Grandma said the smell was killing her plants.”

A small smile tried to appear and failed.

“They did every shitty, ordinary thing I spent my childhood begging my parents to care enough to do.”

Cade nodded slowly. “And now ESPN changed their minds?”

Briggs looked at the phone. “Now ESPN says I might go pro, and suddenly my parents want pictures. Dad wants to come to games. Mom wants to know whether I’ll be home for Christmas.”

His laugh came out rougher this time.

“I wanted them my whole fucking life.”

The table went quiet around him.

I understood that anger, even if mine came from a different kind of loss.

“My mother wanted me,” I said.

Briggs looked across the table while I leaned back in the booth and rested my forearms against the table.

“She wanted me every day she had me. My father wanted her, and loving me was part of loving her. Whatever his addiction did to him before the overdose killed him, I never grew up wondering whether my mother wanted me in her house.”

Briggs’s gaze held mine.

“Juanita loved me when we had food and when we didn’t. I knew it when the lights were on, and I knew it when she was lighting candles because the electric company shut them off again. Every night, she dragged my ass to that little kitchen table and made me read in two languages because she thought my brain deserved every door she could help me open.”

My throat tightened around the memory, though the pain had lived inside me long enough that I knew how to speak through it.

“My dad died when I was seven. Then my mother was murdered when I was eleven, and there wasn’t anybody left who could take me. That’s how I ended up in foster care.”

Briggs looked down while his fingers tightened around his glass.

“I lost the person who wanted me,” I continued. “You had two people alive who kept choosing not to show up. That shit is different, man. Your parents neglected you and disappeared on you in ways I don’t know how anybody expects you to forgive because some ESPN analyst finally told them you’re worth watching.”

For a few seconds, the only sound at our table came from plates and conversation around us.

Briggs swallowed before looking at me. “My grandparents came.”

“They came every chance they had.”

“Every game they could.”

“I know.”

“They chose me.”

“They did.”

His mouth twisted as he dragged his thumb over the condensation on his glass. “I still spent years waiting for them to decide I was too much too. Grandma used to tell me I wasn’t temporary, and it took me until almost graduation to stop thinking temporary was exactly what everybody eventually became.”

I watched him for another second. “That’s the part of your story I envy.”

His eyebrows pulled together. “You envy my childhood?”

“Fuck no. I envy fifteen.”

The confusion left his face.