Page 41 of The Rebel
I hadn’t cried for a long time. In the stadium as the crowd sung the Man City club anthem, Blue Moon, I’d been on the verge of sobbing like a baby, holding in tears as I lived the dream that should’ve included him.
Man, I missed him so much.
Sniffing, I dropped the shoe, frantically swiping at the tears trickling down my cheek. I pulled the mirror door shut and left in a hurry, careful to leave Mom’s door at the exact same opening as when I entered.
Back in my room, I headed for the shower, the unexpected rise in emotion unsettling me. The tears for Dad had dried up, or they should have. Silly that a pair of shoes and a couple of tuxedos could trigger it again.
A year and a half had gone by, so why was his memory causing this much emotion?
I let the shower hit me full on the face, drops of water mixing with tears. I’d promised Dad a lot of things on his deathbed—living life to the fullest, seizing opportunities, taking care of Mom and Ollie. And Ollie, from what I could see, was doing great, but had I missed something with Mom?
Mom loved her new job, she was active at Ollie’s school and helped out with their Thanksgiving Day float—which I’d missed because I was away. She belonged to a gym and went a couple of times a week and she had a close set of friends she’d go with to dinner or trivia night. And of course, there was Kristin Reid, though she tended to be away a lot with Paris now.
But why the need to keep a dead person’s clothes? To me, it didn’t seem normal.
Sure, Dad’s golf clubs and skis and bike and fishing gear were in the garage, but Mom had sold his car and she’d bought a new bed, but she said that had nothing to do with Dad, just the fact that it was nearly twenty years old.
I put on one of my Man City jerseys—one from several season’s ago which had been demoted to a bed shirt. I walked out with a towel around my neck, catching the drips from my damp hair.
A clunk from the living room alerted me to the fact that Ollie must have arrived home while I was in the shower.
“Hey, buddy...how was—?” I stopped as I saw it wasn’t Ollie at all, but Valencia standing by the mantelpiece above the gas fire, seemingly rearranging the photo frames.
“Oh, hi,” she mumbled. “Sorry, it fell down.” And obviously needing to explain further, she carried on, “I was just looking at these photos of your Dad.”
I stepped closer, running my finger over the photo of me, Dad and Ollie lined up in our ski gear at the Alpine Ski Resort. It was just before he got really sick. Her cheeks flushed, a pretty shade of pink.
“Uh, I didn’t know who was home,” she squeaked, looking apologetic as she checked the stand on the back of the frame.
“I am,” I rasped, coughing to clear my throat. “Mom’s out tonight. At her trivia night. She left lasagna for dinner.”
“Aw, is that the one she goes to with Mom?” she said. “I wonder how they’ll go without her. She's always bragging she’s the smartest in the team.”
“No way?” I said, “Mom says she answers most of the questions.”
“According to Mom, she’s a genius on the sport questions,” she said.
“Well, Mom reckons she’s a geography expert,” I said. “Apparently she knows all the countries and their capital cities.”
“Wow...who even needs to know that?” Valencia said.
“I know,” I said with a shrug, both of us laughing, mocking our mothers in a fun way.
As if she just realized she was still holding the photo, Valencia reached up and put it back onto the shelf carefully. “I remember your Dad really liked skiing and sledding,” she said in a small voice, flashing me a shy smile. “He used to take me sledding with you and Paris sometimes.”
I nodded, a memory I’d forgotten, but she was right. When we were about ten or eleven and Ollie was four or five, Dad would take us all to Chestnut Ridge. That was before Paris got serious about his tennis and was still allowed to do frivolous things like sledding.
“He was funny,” Valencia said softly, straightening the frame that didn’t need straightening.
My chest rolled and my eyes misted—he was funny,Valencia had said, and I wondered if that was her most prominent memory of him—a man who liked sledding and was funny.
I knew he liked sledding, of course I did, and I knew he was funny, but it was nice to be reminded of that.
Ollie’s arrival was announced with him barging through the front door and his guitar case clattering against the wall. I left Valencia by the fireplace as I went to give him a hand, or so I thought. But, she was right behind me.
“Hi Valencia,” Ollie acknowledged her without giving me a glance.
“I didn’t know you played the guitar,” she said.
