Page 51 of Take Me Home

Ash didn’t speak for a long time, and everything she’d said echoed back to her. Hazel’s mother probably sounded monstrous compared to his. She wanted to explain better, that her mom had never wanted to live in Lockett Prairie, that her parents had moved there for her father’s job, and Nora had hoped eventually they’d leave. Resentments had built up. She’d lost herself in the mundanity of housework and childcare. She’d been completely honest with Hazel about this over the years, especially that summer in New York, when Hazel had turned up heartbroken. Never depend too much on a guy, she’d said. Never sacrifice your dreams or your freedom. And keep moving forward.

They never directly talked about Hazel’s father—the implied culprit behind these lessons learned. Her mother’s only acknowledgment of the impact on Hazel was to urge her to make the right choices before she had kids—ifshe had kids—because afterward it was much harder to choose your own health and happiness.

Hazel looked at it that way—that leaving had been the best thing for her mother—and most of the time, she left it at that. She didn’t dwell on what might have been better for herself, didn’t wonder if there could have been some acceptable middle ground that could have met everyone’s needs. Hazel had turned out all right. Really, she’d made it out of childhood better than lots of people. So.

Eager for a happier subject, she offered, “The last few years, I’ve spent the holidays with Sylvia’s family in Houston.”

“Hmm,” Ash said, wrapping a yellow-and-black striped scarf around his neck. It was a perfectly neutral syllable, which seemed intentional. “Does your dad ever visit you at school?”

She pulled a wine-colored dress with a drop waist and fringe from the rack and draped it over her arm even though she was likely too curvy for it. Even if the crowds weren’t bad, dress shopping would have been enough to sour her mood. Hazel could buy tops and bottoms off the rack, but finding one dress to accommodate her whole figure—curvy with wide hips and thick thighs, a long torso, and narrow shoulders—was an uphill battle from the start. Her annoyance bled through when she replied, “I’m a stop on his way to other people.”

“What do you mean?”

“He comes through when he has a conference or a friend to visit and I’m on the way. Buys me dinner, and gets back on the road. I think he was in town for five whole hours at graduation, and most of that was the ceremony.”

“He never comes just to visit?”

Hazel stopped sliding hangers. Ash was at the next rack over, idly lifting the skirt of a cute black dress she might have worn to a New Year’s Eve party. He was an expert at this, asking seemingly offhand questions that struck right at the profoundly personal. Underneath his question, she heard judgment, though it was likely all her own reflected back—First her mother, and now her father, too?Whydidn’t he come just to see her?

Because…that was just how they were. She hadn’t everaskedher father to come. And she hadn’t returned here to see him, either. Her already prickly mood had sharpened further talking about her mother, and now she was agitated, tension knotting in her shoulders and neck, a headache pulsing in hertemples.Shehad opened this door by grumbling about her father’s tacked-on visits, but the suggestion that there was more to it—that his priorities weren’t normal and therefore said something abouther—put Hazel on the defensive.

“We’re looking forcranberry,” she said, lifting the three total dresses in the entire store that matched her color and size needs.

He dropped the black dress and pulled out a burgundy one she’d missed. “I don’t know what size you are.”

She glanced at the tag—size four—and laughed. “Bigger than that. Shouldn’t you be looking for your own gifts?”

Ash shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “Eh.”

“Eh?”

“I’m not exactly flush right now.”

“Right. Sorry.”

“I’m not actuallybroke. I have savings. I just try really hard not to touch it.” He blew out a breath. “I mean, I know you’ve seen my shitty car and my tiny apartment—”

“Trust me, the people atApartment Therapyaren’t dying to do a spread of my place anytime soon.”

He gave her a small, joyless smile.

Hazel gestured to the dressing room down a long hall at the back of the store. Ash followed, dropping into an upholstered chair right outside the two stalls. The area was vacant apart from the two of them, and rather than ending the conversation, the quiet allowed her to hear him clearly when he said, “After my dad’s accident, my parents missed a tuition payment for the twins’ dance class. They didn’t want to bring it up and stress out our parents, so I covered it. Between that and my car dying…I get nervous when I have to use my savings. I can’t come back here after every accident or hug June after a bad audition orbabysit for Maggie, but at least I can send money. Unless some other shoe drops and wipes me out.”

“You’re a good brother.”

“If my parents find out, they’ll be pissed.”

“Why?”

She heard him shift in the chair, aware that he could probably also hear her shimmying out of her jeans and pulling off her sweater.

“Same reason I’m not allowed to fix things around the house. They’re the parents. I’m the kid. Never mind that I’m twenty-three.”

It didn’t sound so bad to Hazel, to have parents who still wanted to parent. She’d been used to her father’s unpredictable schedule since childhood, but after the divorce, he’d become absent in a less obvious but more confusing way than her mother—there but disengaged. By fourteen, Hazel made or ordered her own meals, managed her own bedtime, checked her own homework. When Justin tried to get her to break curfew, she never told him it was self-imposed.

“They wouldn’t even let me get a job in high school. Wanted me to focus on school and baseball, even when—” He cleared his throat. “Even when I got benched.”

Hazel tugged the flapper dress on, meeting resistance at her hips. She pulled it right back off.

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