Ryan smiled faintly. “Right between cosines and the Franco-Prussian War,” he assured her, though he couldn’t quite get the joke to land. “Are we okay?” he asked, hovering in the kitchen doorway with his hands jammed in the pockets of his jacket. “Like, money-wise? Is that the mortgage?”
“Of course we’re okay,” his mom said, not quite looking at him as she flitted around the kitchen, picking things up and putting them down again, using the sprayer to rinse the already-clean sink. “I mean, it would be nice if your dad could be bothered to send a check every once in a while, but—” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, lovey. Business has been slow the last couple of months, that’s all. There’s that new grooming place in Colson Village, and—” She broke off again and blew a breath out, a trilling xylophone kind of sound. “I don’t want you to be worrying about that stuff,” she said. “You deserve to be a kid.”
“I know,” Ryan said uneasily, scanning his memory of the last few weeks for signs that things were more dire than usual—the way his mom kept turning the heat down, maybe, or the suspiciously empty fridge. “But we’re a team, right? You can tell me.”
“Of course we’re a team, sweetheart. And I love you for saying that.” His mom dropped the dish towel she was holding and took his face in her two hands, smiling up at him like he’d hung the damn moon. “But all you need to do is go to school and go to practice and have fun with your friends, all right? Let me be the mother.”
“I know,” Ryan said again. “But long-term, and stuff—”
“Long as you lock down that hockey scholarship, we’re golden.” His mom popped up on her toes, planted a smacking kiss on his cheek. “That’s your job, all right? I’ll take care of the rest.”
That caught Ryan by surprise a little, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. After all, it wasn’t like he hadn’t known his mom was counting on him to get a scholarship to college. It wasn’t even like he hadn’t realized that was probably the only way he could go. But it was different to hear it out loud like that, the path toward the rest of his life narrowing so starkly in front of him. It made everything feel abruptly intense.
Still, his mom had a point: in a lot of ways Ryan owed it to her to take all her years of sacrifices and make sure they were worth it. He’d always known that hockey was an expensive sport to play. His gear mostly came from a place up in Orange that specialized in secondhand athletic equipment, but he knew there were times she’d needed something and hadn’t gotten it because he’d grown out of his skates and they didn’t have the right size at the consignment place. She’d gotten up early and driven him all over creation and never complained about it, because it was an investment.
It was Ryan’s job to make sure she got a return.
“Yeah, definitely,” he said now, hugging her one more time before gently extricating himself, glancing at the pile of envelopes next to the refrigerator before heading down the hallway to his room. “Consider it done.”
GABBY
Gabby got home from school and found her mom sitting in her tiny office off the living room, clicking through the accounting files on her computer. A giant iron horse’s head was propped in a chair beside her.
“That’s for a client, right?” Gabby asked, eyeing it suspiciously. Her mom was an interior designer; she’d worked for a famous lady in Greenwich until Gabby was in fourth grade, when she’d started her own business. Gabby’s dad had always said she should write a book, and this winter she was actually doing it, the desk in the office heaped with even more fabric swatches and mood boards than usual. “Not for us?”
“What, you don’t like it?” Her mom grinned. “I found it at a church sale down in Hartsdale,” she said, swiveling around and offering Gabby the last of the iced tea she’d been drinking. “Isn’t it the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen?”
“It’s kind of threatening,” Gabby agreed.
“It’s heavy as anything, too. I had to have one of the priests help me carry it to my car. Now I have to figure out how to ship it to the client in Wisconsin. I might buy it a seat on a Greyhound bus.” She sat back in her chair, clearly delighted with herself. “How was Shay, hm? She get all her applications in?”
“Uh-huh,” Gabby reported, slurping the last of the tea and chewing on the straw a bit. Shay was applying to colleges: Columbia and the New School and Purchase, plus a couple of conservatory programs Gabby was secretly hoping she didn’t get into because they were so impossibly far away. “She sent the last one yesterday.”
“Good for her. That’ll be you next year,” her mom pointed out. “Can you believe it? Crazy to think about, right?”
Gabby nodded, rattling the ice in the plastic cup. “Yup.” The truth was that college might as well have been parachuting into the Grand Canyon or climbing Mount Everest: something ridiculous and far-fetched that required a lot of special equipment, something for people who were far braver than her. It wasn’t that she didn’t think she could get in. That part would be easy. But the actual going, the moving, the idea of being surrounded by total strangers twenty-four hours a day—it gave Gabby vague waves of nausea to think about it, so mostly she didn’t.
If she’d turned faintly green, her mom didn’t seem to notice. “I ought to start dinner,” she said, getting up and motioning for Gabby to follow her into the kitchen. “Hey, this reminds me,” she said, opening the fridge, “I saw Luann at Stop & Shop on my way back from the church sale. It got me thinking, everything okay with Ryan?”
That got Gabby’s attention. “Yeah,” she said, leaning against the kitchen doorway. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know.” Her mom set a shrink-wrapped package of chicken on the counter. “Just curious. We just haven’t seen a whole lot of him lately, I guess.”
Gabby shrugged. She and Ryan had been hanging out a little less since she’d started dating Shay the previous spring, but that was normal, wasn’t it? All friendships went through stuff like that. “Hockey, I guess,” she said, although hockey had never kept them from seeing each other before. “He’s busy.”
Gabby’s mom nodded, didn’t push. She never questioned Gabby as hard as she questioned Celia and Kristina, and on one hand, Gabby thought it was probably one of the reasons the two of them didn’t fight as much as her mom and sisters did. On the other hand, sometimes she wondered if it was because her mom was afraid of what might possibly happen if she did.
“Dinner in half an hour, yeah?” her mom said, setting a skillet on the stovetop. Gabby nodded, headed up to her room.
RYAN