Page 132

Maman's crying. Not a lot. Just her eyes, the way she does at weddings. She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine.

"Mon grand," she says. "I knew."

"You knew?"

"The Christmas call. On the video. You in the hallway with the crown on your head, whispering." She squeezes my hand. "You don't whisper to your captain like that. I'm your mother. I've known you since before you were born."

"Why didn't you say anything?"

"Because you didn't." She wipes her eyes with her napkin. "I thought, when he's ready, he'll tell me. I waited. I'm good at waiting. I waited nine months for you, and then sixteen years."

My dad hasn't said a word. He's sitting very still in his wedding shirt, looking at the fourth chair, at Maman's purse on it.

He stands up.

"I'm going to check the truck," he says.

He walks out of the restaurant.

I find him in the parking lot, sitting in the driver's seat of the truck with the engine running and the heater on, even though it's June.

The last time I saw him do this, I was sixteen, and I'd just told him, and he hugged me in the kitchen so hard my ribs hurt and then went outside and sat in the truck for an hour.

I open the passenger door and climb in. It smells like it always smells, like coffee and motor oil and the pine air freshener shaped like a tree. The radio's on, low. The Rimouski station, which it can't be, not here. He must have downloaded it on his phone.

We sit there.

"When you told me," my dad says finally, "at sixteen. In the kitchen. You know why I came out here after?"

"No."

"Not because I was angry. Not because I was ashamed." He's looking straight ahead through the cracked windshield, at the back of a dumpster. "Because I was scared. I was so scared I would say the wrong thing. One wrong word, and you'd remember it your whole life. So I came out here, where I couldn't say anything. I thought saying nothing was better than saying the wrong thing."

He grips the steering wheel.

"It wasn't," he says. "Saying nothing was the wrong thing. I should have stayed in the kitchen. I should have said I love you, I'm proud of you, nothing's different. Instead you sat in there alone for an hour wondering what I was thinking. Your mother told me. Later. She told me you cried."

"Papa—"

"Your captain," my dad says. "He said the wrong thing?"

"Yes."

"On purpose?"

I think about Pruitt's suite. The river outside. It was a mistake. His voice, so calm. His face, so blank.

"Because he was scared," I say. "The same as you. He was scared of saying the right thing. He's been scared his whole life."

My dad nods, slowly, like he understands that better than I want him to.

"Men like us," he says. "We're not good at this. We sit in trucks. We say nothing, or we say the wrong thing, and then we spend twenty years wishing we'd said something else." He turns his head and looks at me. "I'm not telling you to go back to him. That's your business. You're a man. You decide."

"Okay."

"But I watched you play last night," he says. "I watched you the whole game. You didn't look like my son out there. You looked like somebody wearing my son's jersey."

I don't say anything. My throat's too tight.