I shovel some pasta into my mouth and shrug. “It’s loud. Dad listens to his music louder than I do. Plus, he’s been playing again.”
Mom’s eyes go wide. “His guitar? Really?”
“Must be because he’s sober.”
Her eyebrows shoot up further, but she doesn’t comment.
After a long time, she says, “Is everything okay?”
I take a sip of my water. I came here for a reason, to talk to her about Dad, and now it’s time. “Dad told me, you know, about his parents and why he moved here. He told me everything.”
Mom doesn’t look angry, she just looks tired. “That story doesn’t exactly paint me in a good light.” She sighs, and for the first time I feel like she looks her age. “When I was younger, I had this idea that there was some kind of fairy tale love, and if you tried hard enough you were guaranteed a happy ending. And, unfortunately, your father paid the price for me being such an idealist.”
“You don’t believe in any of that anymore?”
“No.” She doesn’t even hesitate.
“When did you stop believing it?” I hope she can’t see that these questions are more than just questions. That there are things that have been going around and around in my mind for the past month. I don’t know what’s real anymore, and I don’t know what’s worth working for anymore. Don’t even know what I’m doing.
“Despite what your father thinks, it wasn’t him that made me stop believing in happily ever afters. It was me. He gave up everything to come here and help me raise you. And he got here, and we didn’t have money, and he didn’t have his band, and he was working all the time, and we were never together. He gave up everything. He came here, and all he got was an ordinary life with an ordinary person, and it wasn’t the fairy tale that we thought it was going to be. I still wanted him even when he started to drink, but I could see that we were destroying each other. I was destroying him. So I stopped believing in all of it because we did everything the way all the storybooks tell you to, and all it did was ruin our lives.”
This, at least, I understand. Because I feel like I did everything right, and look where it got me.
“Oli,” she says, and I look up at her. “If I could do it again, I would. I want you to know that. I don’t know if fairy tale romances exist, but I know that you can be happy. I know that real happiness exists as long as you’re not afraid to go after what you want.”
“What if I don’t know what I want?”
She shrugs. “What makes you happy?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing anymore.”
She laughs. “Nothing? What about the way your eyes light up when you put your favorite CD in the stereo in your car? Or the way you smiled for a week after you took that job at Spirits? Or the way I knew you wanted to date that girl you worked with before you even told me her name?”
Her words send a jolt through me, but she keeps talking.
“I’m sorry I made you believe there was only one road to take in this life. I just saw what happened to your father when he gave up his future, and I didn’t want that to happen to you.”
“Can’t give up what you don’t have.” I mutter the words, but she hears them anyway.
“Oliver, you have a future. I don’t know what it is or who it’s with or where it’s going to take you, but it’s there and it’s up to you to make it a good one.”
I can’t stop myself from thinking about Amy, as if I’ve stopped thinking about her even once since she sent me that letter. It’s under my pillow, always there because I still don’t know. I don’t know what to do.
“You make me believe in happily-ever-afters, Oli. You make me believe maybe I did something right.”
My heart is pounding, the way your heart pounds when you’ve made up your mind, when you know what you want, when you know you’re going to go after it.
JUNE
AMY
I SIT IN my assigned ticketed seat, and my leg bobs up and down. We’ve been through two openers, and so far there hasn’t been any sign of Oliver. I keep checking my phone even though I know I won’t recognize his number even if he does call or text me.
Every time I see movement at the end of the aisle, I spin around thinking that maybe it’ll be him, but it never is. I check the time on my phone. I look up an itinerary to see exactly what time the Lumineers will be taking the stage, and I only have three minutes left.
I can’t even pretend not to be upset when the music starts, and the seat next to me is still empty. The Lumineers are my favorite band, but as everyone else stands up, I sit in my seat and try not to cry. I guess the idea that maybe today would fix everything has kept me going more over the last month than I thought it has. Maybe he wasn’t calling or texting or showing up at my front door, but I still had this tiny little bit of hope that he would show up at this concert. And now that he’s not here, my heart is even more shattered than it already was.
I take a deep breath and stand with everyone else. I close my eyes, and I listen to the music. With every song, the muscles in my body start to loosen. Not everything can be perfect every time, not even a concert.
I breathe in the smell of sweat. The floor vibrates with each pulse of the drums. I smile to myself, feeling the buzz in my veins that only music gives me, like I’m alive. Really and truly alive.
And then they melt into my favorite song, “Stubborn Love.”
I remember that cold night, my and Oliver’s very first date, sitting in the back of his truck, wrapped in a blanket together and looking up at the stars while this song played through the open windows. A tear makes its way down my cheek. I feel like an idiot, crying in the middle of a concert, where anyone might see.
They’re moving into the final chorus when I feel something brush against my hand. My first reaction is to jerk away because I’m surrounded by strangers, and I certainly don’t want to be touched by any of them. But when I open my eyes and look down, I see a hand tilted tentatively toward mine, a very familiar hand. And I’m completely crying before my eyes even make their way all the way up the six feet and four inches of Oliver York, standing beside me.
He has this look on his face like I shouldn’t be surprised to see him standing here. Like there’s no reason at all why he wouldn’t have come. Like this, holding my hand after not seeing each other for almost two months, is a completely average occurrence.
He just holds my hand, and I let the tears get crusty on my face while I listen to the rest of the concert, feeling so alive, it just might kill me.
AMY
HE DOESN’T SAY anything while we walk to his truck. He doesn’t say anything while we drive out of Kansas City and into Independence. He doesn’t say anything as he pulls onto the same quiet road where we parked during our first date and stops the truck. And as the gearshift rattles with the hum of the engine and the Colourist plays softly in the background, Oliver looks at me, and I know he’s waiting for me to speak first.
“Oli, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wish I could take it back. I wish I could undo it.”