Page 82 of The Lodge

“I like it.”

“And now, a controversial question for you,” Tyler says as he rummages around in his bag of supplies. He pulls out a can of red beans and sets it on the island. “Beans in chili: genius or sacrilege?”

“Is it controversial that I have no strong opinions about it?”

“It would be in Texas,” he replies, taking my lack of opinionas permission to go forward with opening the can of beans. “My mother grew up there, and this is her mother’s recipe—except for one tweak. Red beans. The fight they had over it nearly tore the family apart.”

“That soundsserious!” I say, mentally marking this down as the first time he’s felt comfortable enough to mention his family around me.

“Oh, it was,” he says. “I was ten years old, and we’d gone down for a huge family reunion on the Fourth of July. I thought my grandmother was going to have a heart attack right there in the kitchen when she realized my mother had just, like, nonchalantly added beans to her prizewinning recipe. Everyone turned on my mom except for my granddad, who made the mistake of saying he never felt quite full enough after eating my grandmother’s chili, and—well.”

“I don’t understand how beans could be so divisive.”

“Have you ever been to Texas?”

“I have not.”

“Well, there you go,” he says as he drains and rinses the beans, then adds them to the pot.

“So what ended up happening?”

“People were so hungry that they ate it anyway—and then they had to apologize when they ended up loving it.”

I laugh. “Even your grandmother?”

“No,” he admits. “My grandmother was lovely in so many ways, but she was also extremely petty. She was so offended she wouldn’t even taste it, and she held a grudge about it until the day she died.”

“Wow,” I say. “Your poor mom.”

“My mom was amazing.”

His words hang in the air between us. The sizzle and pop of the bubbling chili now feels extra loud; he gives it a stir and it calms down.

“Was?” I say.

It felt like an invitation—or at the very least, an open door.

“She raised me on her own all the way up here in Vermont. Even before that reunion, we were always closer with friends—River and Julie’s family—than with our actual relatives.”

He adjusts the burner heat, sets the wooden spoon down.

“No one told me she was sick,” he says quietly. “We were on tour, andno one told me.” His eyebrows knit together like he’s staring into the past. “When she died, Jason told me, ‘Oh, shit, man. I didn’t think it was that serious.’?”

“Wait,” I say as the weight of his words sinks in. “Your managerknewyour mom was sick—someone trusted him with that information—and he just, like, decided not to tell you?”

“He’d known about it for a week, the whole time we were in Miami and Philly, but didn’t want me distracted on tour. And then she was gone.”

My head is spinning. How could anyone be so selfish, so cold? How could anyone have the audacity to withhold that sort of information?

And how did they keep it entirely out of the press? I was writing about the band that whole time and never heard a single tip about it.

I must have been processing out loud, because the next thing I know, Tyler’s saying, “My publicist covered it up somehow—she said I was going through enough with my grief and everything with Jason. That I didn’t need speculation and scrutiny from strangers on top of that. They wouldn’t even let me do a funeral.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “That must have been terrible.”

Terrible feels absolutely insufficient.

“It felt like someone had ripped the sky in half,” he says. For a second, I think he might say more—but he leaves it at that.

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