Begin Again

When Shay’s alarm goes off I burrow under the covers and let her leave without me. I wake up again when the sun is up, long after the radio show has been recorded. I can’t bear to listen. I have no idea how Milo handled the aftermath of everyone knowing his real name, and selfishly, I don’t want to—it’ll just make what I did more real.

I put a blast out to the rest of the students in the work-study to find a replacement for my Bagelopolis shifts for the rest of the week, and once they’re snatched up I start packing, tossing odds and ends into a suitcase without any clear intention of what I’m doing or why. I just know I need to get off this campus. Away from the studio, away from the glaring D on my exam, away from my friends, and away from this stupid, fragile feeling in my heart, like it’s one conversation with Milo away from cracking in two.

I pull out my phone. I’m going home for a bit, I text Shay. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help with the show.

I’m about to call the home phone to ask my grandmas to come get me, but before I can, my dad’s number pops up on the screen. It’s an unusual time for him to call, so I pick up without thinking.

“Hello?”

“Hey, A-Plus,” says my dad, his voice normal enough that I rule out any weird freak accidents right off the bat. “I know you said you wanted to meet up next weekend, but I’m nearby today, if you wanted to grab a bagel or anything.”

It’s an embarrassing relief to hear his voice. I feel like a little kid, pressing the receiver to my ear.

“Oh.” The reflex to brush him off almost kicks in, but then some other reflex beats it to the punch. “Well, um—I was actually—thinking of going home today?”

My dad doesn’t miss a beat. “Well then, let me take you.”

I stare down at the mess of pink and denim in my suitcase. “Don’t you have work?”

“Eh. It’s a slow day. Half hour from now sound good?”

I’m too stunned to question it. “Um—yeah. Meet you at Bagelopolis?”

“Sounds like a plan,” he says cheerfully. “See you in a bit.”

The whole thing is so seamless and so . . . casual. Like the way Shay talks to her dad on the phone, or the way people talk to their dads on television shows. I know we’ve had a complicated history, but it didn’t occur to me that it could just be that easy. Come get me. And a dad there to do just that.

I grab a few more random things to pack, unsure of how long I’m planning to be home, then call Bagelopolis and order the cheesy garlic bagel with strawberry cream cheese and the pretzel bagel with cookie dough cream cheese. Mercifully, Milo and Shay aren’t on today, so I grab it from the pickup shelf without anyone noticing me or asking about the suitcase. My dad pulls up seconds after I grab our order, rolling down the driver’s side window.

“Top of the morning!” he calls, in this dorky dad way I’d be embarrassed by if I weren’t so grateful for it. He’s grinning that same unselfconscious grin I’ve seen more often on Gammy Nell than I’ve seen on him, and he’s wearing the flannel Grandma Maeve and I picked out for him for Christmas at Little Fells’s one strip mall a few miles from our house. I clamber into his car, immediately comforted by the smell of his beloved vanilla-flavored Dunkin’ Donuts order and gasoline.

“I got your favorite,” I tell him, setting the distinctive white Bagelopolis bag between us.

My dad immediately reaches for the bag, deeply inhales, and then—like some kind of bagel savant—lists the flavors of not just his bagel, but mine, too.

“Whoa. I’m impressed,” I say, fastening my seat belt.

“And I’m grateful. Do you want to eat them now, or get out of Dodge?”

I’m glad he asked, even if I’m a little suspicious of the offer. Last I checked, all he wanted to do was show me around campus. But he must know something’s wrong if I’m heading back to Little Fells smack-dab in the middle of a school week.

“Let’s, uh—let’s just head out for now.”

“On it,” says my dad, revving up the engine and leaning back behind me to check for traffic. It’s a familiar gesture, one I was used to seeing from the back seat when I was little. My dad checking the mirrors, then resting his hand on the back of my mom’s seat and leaning back to check behind him again.

I blink it out of my brain, and we drive. My dad asks me about Shay’s major. About what the current seasonal bagel is at Bagelopolis. About the outdoor volunteer group I’m joining. All these little things that make it clear he’s been keeping up with me, even when I’ve been tacitly avoiding him.

And for my part, I hold it together. I answer all his questions as thoroughly as I can, even though I am staring out the window, just waiting for us to get home to my grandmas so I can safely fall apart.

But when my dad stops the car, we aren’t at the house. We’re in the parking lot of the Big League Burger a few miles away from it, the one next to the outdoor playground he and Mom used to take me to every weekend when I was little. I’d split a big milkshake with Connor and a plate of fries with my mom and chicken nuggets with my dad and chase all my friends through the tunnels and slides that seemed so big and infinite to me then, a maze of technicolor and plastic, like a separate little world.

“You always loved this place,” says my dad.

I nod. He takes it as a cue to cut the ignition, to open the door to the car. I follow suit, feeling numb as we walk toward the picnic tables where my parents and Connor’s used to sit.Copyright Nôv/el/Dra/ma.Org.

“I could go in and grab us a milkshake to go with the bagels,” my dad offers, jerking a thumb toward the actual building. “You still like chocolate caramel?”

The universe only knows why, but for some reason this offer is the straw on the camel’s back. My chest goes tight and my hands go wobbly, opening up the bagel bag so shakily that I end up ripping it.

“I messed everything up.”

My dad is somehow unsurprised by this emotional display after two hours of normalcy, taking a seat and pulling the bag from me to shell out the bagels himself. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

I shake my head. He sets my bagel in front of me and all I can do is stare at it like it’s some kind of evidence of my failure.

“You don’t even know,” I say miserably.

For a moment my dad doesn’t say anything. He’s never been great with emotions. Or more that he’s never been great at being around for them. I’m expecting him to sidestep the whole thing when instead he says, “Well. If you’re referring to that whole thing with The Knights’ Watch . . .”

I stiffen. “You heard about it?”

It’s mortifying enough that it’s campus-wide knowledge. Has it somehow spread to the entire state?

My dad calmly uses a plastic knife to cut my bagel into fourths for me, the way he used to do when I was a kid. “I listen to the show every morning. I heard the Knight reference something that happened yesterday, and did some prying to figure out just what.”

I mindlessly pick up one of the quarters, trying to make his words make sense. I’ve listened to the show for years, but I’ve had good reason—I wanted to keep up with Mom’s legacy. Last I checked, my dad was avoiding that like the plague.

“You listen to the show?” I ask cautiously. And then, with decidedly less caution: “Because of Mom?”

My dad shakes his head. A little boy squeals on the slide as a little girl plumes down right behind him, the two of them crashing together at the base of it in a fit of giggles.

“I checked in on it from time to time because of your mom,” says my dad. “But I recognized your voice a few weeks ago. I’ve been tuning in ever since.”

The revelation doesn’t know where to land. For so long the studio has been a hideaway, this quiet place where nobody can see me except for Milo and Shay. It feels like discovering there’s been a secret window the entire time.

“You have?”

Only then do I realize that my dad’s call was no coincidence. He already knows exactly what happened. His call this morning wasn’t an offer—it was a full-on rescue.

“Course. You’re made for the air.” My dad busies himself with a piece of his bagel, watching me process all this out of the corner of his eye. “Plus, I had to do something to get my ‘Bed of Roses’ fix, since you never sent me your clips.”

I blink down at my own bagel. “I, uh . . . I’ve been busy.” My throat is thick. “I didn’t realize you were listening.”

“I always want to know what’s going on in your world.”

I look over at him so quickly that I can see him bracing himself, his hands paused on the table, his shoulders set against the breeze. This is the part where I’m supposed to say something like, You’ve got a funny way of showing it. Something combative, something to cause even a fraction of the hurt I’ve felt for years.

My dad clearly is ready to take it, but suddenly, I don’t have it in me. I don’t want to hurt anymore. I just want to understand.

So I level with him. “I appreciate you trying. I really do. I’m just . . .” I can’t look at him when I say it, so instead I stare off at the shadows of the kids barreling through the tunnels, palms and knees knocking against the plastic in the distance. “There were times when I thought you were going to be more involved, and you weren’t. I don’t want to get my hopes up so you can just . . .”

Start over with someone else, I want to say. But I already feel raw enough taking it this far. I can’t say anything else without knowing what he’ll say, how he’ll react.

“The time I was gone—it was longer than I thought it would be,” my dad says.

I can tell it’s the beginning of an apology, but it can’t start like that. If we’re blowing this open right now, we’re blowing it wide open. “Longer than I thought it would be” isn’t going to cut it.

“You were gone for years.”

I’m surprisingly calm. Part of it, I think, is that I’ve been imagining some version of this conversation for a long time. Versions where I cried, versions where I yelled. Versions that eventually boiled down to the core of the issue: what I needed to say, what I needed him to hear. After that it was just a matter of working up the nerve to do it.

The other part of it is Milo’s voice in my head. If I had the chance to talk to my dad again . . .

I want to have that chance. Not just for this conversation, but all the ones that can come after. The kind that will only really mean anything if we try to fix this first.

“It felt like you were running away.” I sit up straighter, the bagel forgotten, the sounds of the kids fading away. “From Mom. From Little Fells. From me.”

My dad’s eyes close for a moment. “I never wanted to be away from you, Andie.”

As I watch him start to gather his thoughts, I realize I imagined this all wrong. It’s not what I need my dad to hear. It’s about what I need him to say. So I don’t protest, don’t point to moments in the past we both already know. I just keep watching him and wait.

“You’re right. I was trying to avoid Little Fells.” He glances past the playground to the row of trees beyond it, to the road that leads to the main part of town and branches off into side streets full of everyone we know. “It was sort of like . . . Groundhog’s Day. I kept trying to move on—for both our sakes. But every person here, they knew your mom. They loved her. And every conversation I had . . . it started with this grief. This pity. Everyone was hurting, every single time her name came up.” He shakes his head, like the words aren’t quite matching what he’s trying to say. “And your mom wouldn’t have wanted that. She would have wanted people to smile when they thought of her. But they didn’t understand that, and sometimes I’d just be so angry that—that they felt like they could understand, that they knew what we’d lost, when—when it felt like they didn’t know her at all.”

I hate that I know exactly what he means. It’s the same private kind of grief Grandma Maeve and I have always shared. There is a part of Amy Rose that belonged to Little Fells, and a whole of her that only belonged to us.

“And everywhere I went it was like—being at the funeral. All over again.” He adjusts the baseball cap on his head, lowering it over his eyes and then setting it back again. “The grief already felt like a mountain. It just got heavier and heavier the longer I stayed here. Like we were carrying it for everybody else, too.”

It’s more than I’ve ever heard him say about losing Mom. It didn’t occur to me that he’d be this frank. That maybe he’d been thinking of this very conversation as long as I have.

When he meets my eye again, it’s clear that he has. “I wanted you to come with me.”

I remember him offering. It was a courtesy offer, really. One he only made two weeks before he was planning to move.

“I could never leave Little Fells. Not then, at least.” I shift in my seat. “But I know what you mean. I felt that way, too. Like it wasn’t just our lives that changed, but everyone around us. Like we were never going to be the people we were to them before it happened. I couldn’t figure out if everyone else changed or I did.”

He dips his head. “I wish I’d talked to you more about it back then.”

I mirror him, glancing down at my lap. I think about that first school assembly where I choked, and everything changed. How it felt staring out at the other kids and feeling like I was on an island, and no matter how hard I paddled back, I could never step foot on the old shore. How the feeling only got worse over time with every year my dad stayed away, every year I struggled between trying to be my old self again and trying to find a new version who could be better. Who could fit somewhere else, since the old world didn’t fit anymore.

“Me too,” I say, glancing back up. “The whole thing just—made me feel so alone.”

His eyes are misty when he meets mine. I swallow thickly and press on.

“Especially because I couldn’t figure out why you did it. I thought for the longest time—maybe I was just too much like her, or something. Maybe that’s why you felt like you had to stay away.”

My dad lets out a soft laugh, surprising both of us. “Oh. Andie. You and your mom are nothing alike.”

The sudden jolt is almost welcome, after the heaviness of everything else. “Excuse me?”

The smile on his face softens like the edges of a memory. “I mean, you are in some important ways. But you—you’re a planner. You’re methodical about things. You put a lot of care into them. So did your mom, of course, but she was a whirlwind.” He’s talking to me, but staring outward at something else. “Never liked a plan. Always just went where the winds took her.”

Just then the wind happens to pick up, and for the first time in a long time, I feel my mom’s presence so strongly that it’s as if we’ve conjured her here—like she’s watching, part cheerleader, part referee. The idea of it buoys me, makes me dig deeper. All the way to the bottom of this, so we know how far it is back to the top.

“If it wasn’t that, then what was it?” I ask. “Because it wasn’t just the distance. It was everything else. You barely even called. When you were here, it felt like you had one foot out the door.”

I feel my fists curl with the familiar frustration. Sometimes I’d feel like a little windup toy when my dad was around, trying to think of anything I could say or do to hold his attention, to keep him in town. I’d make lists of movies we could watch together. Show him school projects. Text him pictures of things Gammy Nell and I were making in the kitchen. But I could only go on spinning for so long.

My dad is quiet for long enough that I’m worried he’s going to deny it. “I didn’t mean to,” he finally says. He lifts his head back up to look at me, and it’s with the kind of regard I’m still getting used to—like he’s not just seeing me as a kid, but someone fully formed. Someone he can be honest with.

“But that whole thing with planning—that’s something you got from me. Your mom would spin big ideas. I’d make the plans, help set them into motion when I could. We balanced each other out. I think that’s the most you can hope for when you’re in love; that you balance each other out. Make each other stronger.”

I try to think back to my memories of my parents together, but all I remember is the haze of knowing your parents are in love, and never questioning it. Never having a reason to, because what they had was built to last.

“But that’s the thing about being the one who makes the plans,” says my dad. “When they all fall through . . .”

I hear a car engine start behind us. At some point the kids in the play place were gathered up by their parents, and now it’s so still out here that it feels like we’re the only people in Little Fells. Nobody else’s grief to handle but our own.

“Everything was just gone. I was overwhelmed. This entire life I’d planned for the three of us—I just—she was my anchor,” he says. “I needed her. I didn’t know how to be without her.”

And then come the words I’ve been avoiding this entire time. The ones that have dug under my skin for years, the ones so private and so raw that they were too much to even let myself think.

“I needed you,” I tell him.

He lowers his head then, nodding just once before staring down at the picnic tabletop. Another breeze sweeps past us, and it feels like a separate wind has been knocked out of me. One I’ve held inside for so long that it felt like a storm in my heart.

But now there’s just quiet. The kind I still need him to fill now, even after all this time.

When my dad speaks again, his voice is hoarse with feeling. “I never meant to avoid you. It’s just . . . you were so happy with your grandmas. You came back to life in this way that you never were with me, and I knew that was my fault. That I was pulling you down.” He clears his throat. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted, Andie. For you to be happy.”

The words fall out of me too quickly for them to be anything but the truth: “I’d rather be miserable with you than happy without you.”

For a few moments, he doesn’t speak.

“I should have known that then.” He flattens his palms out on the top of the table like he’s grounding us in this moment. Pressing it somewhere into himself so we can’t cast it away. “I wish I could change it. And I’m not asking to start over. But I’m . . . I’d really love a chance to start something, Andie.”

When his gaze meets mine, some of the lingering bitterness falls away. I see it plainly now—the grief. The regret. And deeper still, the shame. It clouds his eyes, but makes something else all the more clear. The part that he’ll never really be able to say, because I don’t know if he fully understands it himself; he never wanted me to see this weakness. It just took all these years, maybe, for his need to fix this to be louder than that part of him that wanted me to think he was strong.

But this—it’s the strongest I’ve ever seen him. I wish there were a way to tell him that. But at least now it seems like I’ll have plenty of time to find one someday.

“I know I haven’t made it easy,” I admit.

My dad presses his lips together, collecting himself. “I’m not expecting you to. And for what it’s worth, I’ll keep trying. As long as you’re okay with it.”

My eyes well up unexpectedly. That’s the crux of the whole thing. I’ve been pushing him away before he can leave. Even now I’m scared—even as this supposedly adult, eighteen-year-old version of myself who shouldn’t need him, who shouldn’t be in a position to be disappointed by him anymore. But part of me is peering over the same edge I did at eleven and fourteen and seventeen, waiting to be let down.

“I don’t know if it’ll ever feel fully normal,” I admit. “But I never gave up on you. So . . . don’t give up on me, either.”

“Never.”

He pulls me in gruffly, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and pressing me into his. Then he relaxes his grip, the two of us just leaning on each other, watching another group of little kids pile out of a station wagon and sprint for the slides.

“I really do want to meet Ava,” I tell him.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He taps the table with his finger. “I don’t want you to think you have to be a part of that just for us to be a family. I’m going to be here no matter what. Okay?”

I nod, too overwhelmed for a moment to answer. For so long the word “family” has loomed over me like a threat, like something I stood to lose. But the way my dad says it, the word doesn’t feel like something I have to earn. It feels like something that just is.

Maybe it’s not so scary now that I’m starting to recognize that families take shapes of their own, and I’m lucky to have more than one. It’s like Milo said. I have my grandmas. My friends at Blue Ridge. This town that’s still here for me, even when I’m far from it. Things I never took for granted, of course, but maybe didn’t appreciate for what they were—the peace of being known. Of always having soft places to land.

If I’m lucky, Kelly and Ava might just be another one of them. But I’ll never find out if I don’t let myself move on from the past and give them a chance.

“Thank you for saying that,” I say sincerely. I needed to hear it. “But really. If you’re still free next weekend . . . I’d love to see them, too.”

My dad just nods, wisely not making any plans, giving me space to change my mind. It’s the kind of thing I’d be thinking about, too—trying to see into the future for someone else, into all 360 degrees of the decisions they’re making or trying to make. It’s weird to see this similarity in the two of us. For so many years I’ve been so fixated on following my mom’s footsteps that it never occurred to me that mine might be closer in shape to his.

I feel a sudden surge of questions I want to ask him, but there’s a relief in letting them come and then letting them go. In knowing I don’t need to ask them right now, because the door isn’t going to close. He’s back, and I’m finding my way back, too. We finally have time.