“Adirondack Thunder,” Ryan’s dad said, grinning like he always did when his old team came up. “Not exactly the Rangers, I gotta tell you, but we did all right.”
Gabby smiled. She was putting on a good show, but Ryan could tell she was uncomfortable by the way she was shredding her straw paper while she listened, how she was only picking at her food. He couldn’t tell if it was just her usual run-of-the-mill weirdness about being in an unfamiliar place with an unfamiliar person or if it was something else, something more specific to this particular situation. Sometimes when Ryan hung out at Gabby’s house he could forget that he wasn’t one of them, the Harts with their 1,001 Crowd-Pleasing Party Appetizers and Friends of the Colson Public Library tote bags. Now, though, as Ryan watched Gabby watch his dad dig for a piece of pepperoni in his molar with a toothpick, the differences between their families were thrown into sharp relief. He felt enormously protective all of a sudden, though truthfully he wasn’t sure of whom.
He would have tried to smooth it out somehow, made a dumb joke or asked Gabby if she wanted to go play Skee-Ball at the back of the restaurant, but just as he was about to his dad turned to Ryan, his focus like a laser beam across the ragged checkered oilcloth. “So what was going on with you out there, kid?” he asked, leaning back on the hind legs of the rickety wooden chair. “Kind of bit it today, huh?”
Ryan felt Gabby stiffen, like his dad had reached across the table and smacked him; he shrugged, kept his voice light so she’d know the ribbing was no big deal. It just meant his dad was interested, in his hockey game and in him by extension. He actually kind of liked it sometimes. “Yeah, it was a bummer,” Ryan said. “Thanks for coming, though.”
“If you want me to come back, buddy, you’re gonna have to start giving me something to see.” Ryan’s dad shook his head, smirking a little. “You guys looked like a bunch of sad sacks out there, the lot of you. Getting taken down by a bunch of soft-handed, coddled private school kids?”
Ryan resisted the urge to remind his dad that two years ago he’d been one of those soft-handed, coddled private school kids himself. He didn’t mind his dad’s needling—after all, the guy just wanted him to get better—but there was something about him doing it in front of Gabby that made it seem less harmless than Ryan knew it actually was. “They outskated us, I guess,” he said with a sheepish smile.
His dad wasn’t willing to let it go quite so easily, though. “What was that mess there at the end of the second period?” he asked. “You looked like a bunch of damn ballerinas.”
Ryan’s smile dropped a bit. “Well, Coach Harkin said—”
“Coach Harkin doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing,” his dad interrupted. “That guy’s a joke. Your grandma could coach a better hockey team than him.”
“Coach Harkin spends a lot more time watching me play hockey than you do, Dad.”
That was the wrong thing to say; his dad’s face darkened, and Ryan knew he’d probably gone too far. “Well, that sounds peachy for you and Coach Harkin,” he said. “Maybe Coach Harkin wants to pay for all your damn gear from now on, too. Hell, maybe Coach Harkin wants to be your damn father.”
Ryan grimaced, eyes cutting over to Gabby. Shit, this was embarrassing. He needed to dial it back. “Dad,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm and even. “Come on, that’s not what—”
“I’ll tell you, kid, I think I’m about done sitting here listening to this shit from you,” Ryan’s dad said, still scowling.
Ryan realized too late that this was about to go from bad to worse; he was tired, he hadn’t thought fast enough to salvage it. “Look, Dad, I’m sorry,” he started. “You’re right.”
“No, forget it,” his dad said, shoving his chair back, the legs screeching against the sticky wooden floor. “Really. I’ll see you around, kid.”
Then he got up and left.
GABBY
Gabby stared at the entrance to the restaurant for a moment, then looked back at Ryan. “Did your dad just dine and dash?” she asked. It was so far outside her understanding of things that parents did that she sort of couldn’t comprehend it. If his dad had turned into a T. rex, ripped the roof of the pizza place clean off, and eaten it, she would not have been more surprised.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I think he did.”
“Is he coming back?”
Ryan rubbed a hand over his face. “Probably not,” he said after a moment. “He does stuff like that sometimes, if we piss him off bad enough. He left my mom and me in Princeton once. We wound up taking New Jersey Transit home.”
“He did what?” Gabby said, but Ryan looked so stricken that she immediately moved on. “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath and trying to sound casual, trying to sound for his sake like this was no big deal. “Want to just call your mom, then? She’s probably not that far; she could come back and get us.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, wriggling around to dig in his pocket, then swearing. “Phone’s in my hockey bag,” he said. “In my mom’s car.”
“Use mine,” Gabby said, pulling it out of her backpack. The battery was low—she’d worn it down fiddling around on Instagram at the game—but it had enough juice for a phone call.
But Ryan shook his head. “I don’t actually know her number,” he admitted.
“Your mom’s number?” Gabby asked incredulously. “Wasn’t it like, the first thing she had you memorize as a kid? Where you lived and her phone number?”
“It’s a new number,” Ryan explained, looking abashed. “She changed phone companies after my dad left, it’s—” He broke off. “She got a deal.”
“Okay,” Gabby said quickly. “Well. My parents are in North Carolina, but let me try Celia, maybe?” She did, calling Celia’s cell four times in rapid succession and then the house phone twice, and getting nowhere. Hi, said her mom’s voice on their ancient outgoing message. You’ve reached the Harts . . .
Gabby punched End on her cell phone, feeling her anxiety creep as the little red battery indicator got skinnier and skinnier. Her heart sped up, throat getting tighter; the soles of her feet itched inside her sneakers. What the hell were they going to do?
Then she glanced at Ryan, and felt herself calm down.
“Okay,” she said again, taking a deep breath and tucking her hair behind her ear. He was so clearly miserable and useless at the moment that it made Gabby feel weirdly capable, like she had someone to take care of all of a sudden and it was making her brave. She opened the Maps app on her phone, waited for the blue dot to find them, then squinted at the screen. “We’re like six blocks from the Greyhound station,” she reported after a moment.
Ryan looked skeptical. “You want to take a bus?”
“Well, I don’t want to stay here all night,” Gabby said, then felt herself soften. “I think we kind of have to bail ourselves out here, dude.”
Ryan looked like he was going to argue for a moment. After that he just looked sad. “Okay,” he said finally, digging some crumpled bills out of his back pocket and putting them down on the table. “Let’s take a bus.”
RYAN