Hold On

When he was done I was wishing we had all kinds of time to be gooey.

Since we didn’t, I warned, “Don’t let Mom steal you away with her tater tot casserole. Just so you know, I have the recipe.”

Merry held me close in his arms and smiled at me.

My kid. My guy. My mom. Her tater tot casserole. And Merry smiling at me.

There it was again.

Fucking happy.

*

“This is delicious, Grace,” Merry told my mother.

We were sitting at Mom’s kitchen table.

Ethan was shoveling his gramma’s food in his mouth like he’d been told he was getting nothing but C rations for the next year after that meal.

I was freaking.

This was because somewhere between leaving my house and sitting at Mom’s table, something had happened to Merry.

Something extreme.

Gone was the mellow, funny guy he gave my kid. Gone was the thoughtful, gentlemanly guy he gave my mom. And gone was the teasing, hot guy he gave me.

He was quiet to the point he was distant, like he was there but he didn’t want to be.

Worse, he wasn’t hiding that.

At all.

Those four words were the first he’d spoken since conversation had awkwardly died when both mom and me sensed Merry retreating.

“Thank you, Garrett,” Mom replied. “I’m glad you like it.”

He nodded to her once, didn’t further engage, just turned back to eating.

My heart sank to my stomach.

That was so not Merry.

Mom looked at me and I instantly saw that her enthusiasm at having a new addition to her family dinner, this being a good guy who was into her daughter, had died.

She wasn’t freaking like me.

She was disappointed.

Then again, she didn’t go all out for dinner, cleaning her house, even putting out flowers Merry would most definitely see and know that was an outlay Mom didn’t splurge on often (her doing it to show Merry he was making the right choice of possibly wanting to be a part of this family) to have him act like the last place he wanted to be was there.

I had nothing for my mom, nonverbally and definitely not verbally, to explain what was going on with Merry.

What I wanted was to kick him in the shin, this my way of telling him to snap out of it at the same time asking him what the fuck was his problem.

That was the Cher way of dealing with things.

But after nearly blowing it with Merry, I needed to learn not to do shit like that. I couldn’t react, mouth off, or do something stupid and then face the consequences later. Not without risking fucking us up, and I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do that.

But this wasn’t Merry. Not even a little bit. I’d never seen him like this. Even when Tanner and Rocky were on the bumpy path of their reunion, something neither Merry nor his dad hid was just as bumpy for them, he didn’t get like this. Not when he had a shitty case he was investigating that took time and effort that, in the end if he closed it, only allowed him to give a small measure of relief to the people who’d had their lives irrevocably altered when the shit of life buried them under the stink.

“I hear you have a boat,” Mom noted, attempting to snap Merry out of it by engaging him in conversation.

“Yep,” he told his plate.

He said no more.

Well, that didn’t work.

“You got a boat?” Ethan piped up excitedly.

That got him. Merry looked to my son, the blankness leaving his face, and it softened.

“I do, bud,” he said quietly. “But, just to say, it’s for sale.”

I stared at him because I had no clue he was selling his boat. I’d actually never been officially informed he had a boat.

I didn’t do healthy relationships until now (arguably, especially at this moment), but that seemed like something to share, say, when he was hanging at J&J’s having a drink. Or perhaps when we were making out on my couch and feeling each other up last night after Ethan went to sleep. Or during dinner at Swank’s, waffles at my place, lunches (plural) at Frank’s, or in one of what I was now seeing were the not-very-informative texts he’d sent me.