Page 46 of The Best Parts of Him
“Fuck if I know.” Dabbs tossed his hands up. “I never watched cartoons as a kid.”
“How come?”
Those shows will rot your brain more than it already is. Turn that off and do something useful. Can you handle mowing the lawn or do I have to hold your hand like I had to hold your sister’s? She couldn’t figure out how to set the dishwasher, for Christ’s sake.
Dabbs shook his head, forcing his dad’s words out of his thoughts and the feeling of them out of his heart. The former was easy enough. The latter?
Why was it that the emotions words caused lasted longer than the words themselves? Even the echo of the emotion, diluted by years of distance, was enough to transport him to the past, to when he’d been a little kid living under the constant verbal abuse of a man who was never satisfied.
“My dad wouldn’t let us,” he told Ryland, keeping it simple.
“What did you watch instead?”
Ryland didn’t know it, but that question was about to open a whole can of worms. “Nothing. My dad was less the lazy-Saturday-mornings type and more the get-off-your-ass-and-do-something-productive type. Of course, that didn’t stop him from watching the baseball game while the rest of us made dinner or cleaned the house or did the yard work or whatever, and it certainly didn’t stop him from telling us everything we were doing wrong.”
Ryland’s eyes clouded. “Right. You mentioned your mom took you and your sisters away from him when you were kids.”
“I was ten.” Dabbs leaned back against the couch and stretched out his legs under the coffee table. “My sisters were eight and six.”
“That must’ve been tough,” Ryland said, wrapping strong fingers around Dabbs’ ankle. The touch was grounding, keeping Dabbs in the present.
“It was . . . an adjustment. We lived with my grandparents—my mom’s parents—for a few months before we moved into a tiny apartment in North Bay. My grandparents helped a lot. They didn’t have a lot of money to spare, but they babysat us whenever my mom had to work. They were great. Living with my dad, though . . . ” Dabbs looked out the front window, where the sky was an inky pool of darkness, remembering the shame and inadequacy that had settled on his young shoulders when his dad had torn up his seventeen-out-of-twenty math quiz and smashed his hockey stick. “It was ten years of listening to him tell me that nothing I said or did was good enough. For years I went through life thinking that every adult was going to find something wrong with me.”
Ryland squeezed his ankle. “I’m sorry. That’s no way to go through life.”
“Hockey was my outlet. I was a quiet kid, but I was angry too, and I took my aggression out on the ice. I was lucky that I had a youth hockey coach who was all about building confidence instead of tough love. Coach Pete.” Dabbs smiled softly. “He pointed my mom toward free mental health resources for youth, and I swear to god, the therapist they assigned me and my sisters was the most overworked therapist I’ve ever met.” He let out a little laugh. “But she always made time for us. Without her, we never would’ve worked through our shit, and without Pete, I never would’ve realized that I could.”
“That’s why your social media is full of posts advocating for better mental health resources for children and youth,” Ryland said in a very ah-ha! tone. “That’s really cool of you to do that.”
“I don’t know if it’s cool so much as it’s a way for me to use my platform for good. There’s a lot wrong with social media, but there’s a lot good with it too. And if just one person gets the help they need because they saw something on my feed, then I’ll count that as a win.”
Ryland’s thumb swept back and forth over Dabbs’ ankle. Dabbs wasn’t sure Ryland was aware of it, but Dabbs certainly was, his skin prickling at the sensation.
“Have you considered partnering with a charity to raise funds or participating in awareness programs?” Ryland asked. “To help reduce stigma and encourage others to seek help?”
“No, but . . . ” Rolling his lips inward, Dabbs regarded Ryland for a long moment. Long enough for Ryland to cock his head and lift a questioning eyebrow. “If I show you something, will you promise not to laugh?”
“No.”
Dabbs was the one who laughed then, both surprised and not by Ryland’s quick reply. “Asshole.”
“That’s what you get for not telling me what you said in French.”
Dabbs shook his head and rose to his feet much more smoothly than he had just a day ago. “Come with me.
“So, one of the problems I have with social media,” he said on his way up the stairs, Ryland behind him, “is that it’s fleeting. You see a post and forget all about it in the next few seconds. I want to bring awareness about mental health resources for youth in a way that’s steady, but also in a way that brings in steady revenue for a charity.”
Inside his bedroom, he took a deep breath and picked up a coil-bound manuscript from his dresser. “I wrote this.”
But Ryland was too busy looking around to pay him any attention.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t snooped in here already.”
Ryland scowled at him playfully. “I have not. Give me some credit.”
“It’s not all that interesting.”
“Are you kidding? It’s the secret life of Dabbs. Oh my god! Shannon!” He scooped the crocheted ice cream cone off the bookshelf and brought her up to his face, peering at Dabbs with big eyes from behind her. “You kept her.”
