Page 57 of The Roads We Follow

He holds my gaze, and I don’t even try to swat the flutters away this time. “I think the two of us make a pretty good team.”

Of all the things he could have said, this hits with unexpected warmth. He can’t possibly know how un-team-like my world often feels. “I do, too.”

“There is something I’m going to need an answer to, though, before we can go any further in this new partnership of ours.”

My stomach clenches as I think of all the possible topics my family drama provided him tonight. No doubt he has lots of questions. I would, too. “What do you want to know?”

“Why on earth are you calledSunny Bear?”

I’m barely able to stifle my laugh to keep from waking Hattie. “It’s really silly, actually. My dad used to call me hislittle Rae of sunshine, emphasis on the Rae. ButRaenever really stuck, so then they started calling me variations of Sunny. Then one infamous day when I was about seven, Sunny morphed its way to Sunny Bear, which makes absolutely no sense at all, but that is the origin story of my nickname. It’s ridiculous.”

“I think it’s pretty cute.” His oversize smile causes his glasses to slip a tad on the bridge of his nose, which I think ispretty cute.

“I’m twenty-six. Sunny Bear’s life-span should have ended before I entered middle school.”

“We’ll have to agree to disagree, Sunny Bear.” When he makes no effort to look away, I’m suddenly grateful for Lynn’s journal-keeping. It’s clear I’m going to need a distraction from Micah’s glasses tonight.

I reach for the pile of hardbacks between us.

“Have you been reading these?” I find the one I flipped through on the bus and locate the last entry I read—when Lynn and my mother were making their first album with TriplePlay Records andmy parents were secretly dating to keep the guise of Mama being a young, eligible, blonde bombshell.

“I’ve read through two of them. She jumps months and even years in the coming entries. I don’t think journaling was as much of a priority to her when they weren’t on the road.”

“So you’re saying I have a lot of catching up to do?”

“Be my guest.” He slides over the second journal with the date range of 1976–1979. My parents’ unofficial wedding was in ’80, though their marriage the public knew about was in ’82. Adele was born two years later, and I’ve always wondered about those years leading up to it—what Lynn and my mama’s relationship was like back then, and how their slow but steady rise to fame affected it. I’m about to say this very thing when Micah’s voice cuts through my thoughts.

“Why did your mother name you after mine?”

Unlike before, this beat of silence that passes between us is thick and palpable.

I swallow. “I’ve often wondered that myself.”

“You’ve never asked her?”

“Not directly, no.” When I think back to the days before Mama’s final visit with Lynn, it’s difficult to recall the closed-off way she once spoke about her old friend, or about the time period before Luella Farrow was a standalone act on stage. I used to interpret Mama’s tight-lipped responses of thebeforeera as a lack of affection for a woman who had so obviously wronged her.

But as of late, I’m not sure I interpreted much about my mother’s past friendship with Lynn correctly at all.

I splay my fingers over one of Lynn’s hand-drawn crosswords near an entry in ’77 and think of how sad it is that her creative design was never completed.

“Honestly, Micah,” I say with extra care, “discussing some of the details of our mothers’ pasts might be a bit ... awkward.”

“You mean because we believed them to be mortal enemies once upon a time?”

My lips pull to one side. “Something like that, yeah.”

Gingerly, he rotates the journal from beneath my palm so that the clues of the crossword can be read by us both. We each take a second to scan through them, but my gaze halts at the clue given for four across. The only clue Lynn wrote was:Us.

The simplicity of it is distracting. I’ve just started to puzzle it out when Micah says, “I’m willing to lean in to the awkward if you are.”

I look up from the crossword. “What?”

“Lean in to the awkward. It’s something I use to say a lot in my school office. We’re trained from an early age to retreat from anything that makes us feel uncomfortable, but comfort never pushes us to grow or even view things from a different perspective. So, if given the choice, I lean in to it.”

I want to say something intelligent in response, but my insides are too rattled by the truth bomb he’s detonated. Everything he said sounds right, and yet I pretty much do the opposite. Maybe it’s not too late to try.

I prop my head in my hand. “Then I’ll lean in with you.”

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