Page 69 of Into the Mountains
“That’s right. Yours is locked up, rig—ow.” Meredith elbows her fiancée in the ribs. Andy rubs the sore spot with a grimace.
“She is and she’ll be there for a long time. But I stopped visiting her years ago because she didn’t want me to. Stopped letting me see her, so I listened. She cared more about drugs than her kid anyway, so I figured why waste the effort.”
This is way too much trauma dumping on someone I am re-meeting and their partner.
“Anyway,” I draw out, ready to move past this conversation before it becomes even more uncomfortable.
“Anyway,” Meredith echoes, searching for an out. Thankfully one of the guys behind them gives us one.
“Hey, I’m Aaron.” A tall, black-haired man with some gray streaks threaded in-between who stands at least a foot taller than me reaches out to shake my hand.
A man my height comes behind him and puts his arm around Aaron’s waist. His hair comes to his shoulders and is almost all gray. “I’m Erin,” the shorter one says and waits for a beat as he assesses my confusion.
“Yes, we both have the same name. They’re spelled differently. Mine is A-a-r-o-n and his is E-r-i-n. No, it’s not weird. We have different middle initials so our mail or packages we order don’t get mixed up. And yes, we love having the same name, but rarely call each other by our first names. Did I cover all of it, honey?”
“You forgot to mention that we are Meredith’s dads.”
“Oh right, that,” he waves it off as his daughter rolls her eyes at him.
“So, Meredith, Andy, Aaron, Erin, and you are?” Charlotte points to the younger boy struggling with the buckle on his helmet.
“My little brother. He insisted on coming even though he’s barely old enough to play.”
“We tried to stop him, but you know Jayce. He was determined. And he had FOOMOO.”
Meredith’s cheeks redden as she rubs her hand down her face. “It’s not FOOMOO, Dad. It’s FOMO. Short O’s, not long.”
“Well, thank you for the phonetics lesson,” he jokes. “I’ll be sure to pass that along to your students next time I come to visit for a book talk.”
“Meredith is studying to be a teacher and Erin is a children’s librarian at the local library,” Andy explains.
A grumble of shouts and grunts crosses the field as the other team is huddled up and rocking back and forth like they’re about to play in the Super Bowl.
“So we are totally kicking their asses, right?” Aaron asks.
“We are definitely pummeling them into the ground,” Jayce says with a kind of determination I wish I had when I was a kid. He looks to be no more than thirteen. At that age, I was nowhere near as confident as he seems to be.
“No fucking way,” a voice calls from the other team. A lean dark-haired man starts walking toward me and there’s a familiarity in the way he walks, an arrogance I’d know from anywhere. Ash takes off his helmet and goggles, barreling into me for a hug before I have a chance to react.
“What the hell are you doing here, man?” He pulls back and slaps me on the shoulder harder than is necessary in my opinion.
Nervously, I push my hand through my hair. The last person I would have expected to see here was Ash. The last time we talked in our group chat last week, he mentioned he was inWinnipeg and was going to be there for the rest of the summer. “I—uh, I’m on a date actually.”
“No shit? With who?”
“Me.” Charlotte comes to my side and sticks out her hand to Ash. “I’m Charlotte.”
“Dude, no way!”
“Charlotte, this is Ash, one of my college roommates.”
“Heard a lot about you, Ash. It’s nice to meet you.”
“All amazing things from our Eli, I’m sure.” He gives her a flirtatious look that she ignores as she withdraws her hand from his.
“All amazing things,” she agrees even though I haven’t told her much about Ash other than how privileged he seems to be and how uncaring he is when it comes to school.
“Well, may the better team win.”
