Page 26 of Making the Save
“More?”
I nodded.
She doubled the handful and I grimaced.
“More?”
“Any chance you have another box? You know, if you want some too.”
“Oh,” she said, and then looked at me like she was seeing me for the first time. “Oh. Right.”
She pulled meatballs out of her freezer and a jar of sauce from her cupboard.
“No bread?” I asked, looking around for just regular sandwich bread I could toast and butter.
“Carbs are a luxury, not a necessity. You’re lucky pasta is my cheat meal.”
When it was all done and assembled we sat down at the kitchen island that was positioned with the best view of the ocean.
“This is great. Thanks,” I said, as I tucked into a pile of spaghetti.
“You’re welcome. I don’t want to scare you, but Tricia can be tricky.”
“I’m not scared of Tricia,” I said around a steaming mouthful of noodles.
“She’ll start with some softball questions, but there will be some wicked curves in there too. We need to know each other or she’ll catch us in a trap.”
I forked a meatball into my mouth and waved my fingers at her. “Ask me anything. I’m an open book.”
“You have a brother? Luke?”
“Liam.”
“And he plays hockey too?”
“Center for the New England Bruisers. He’s a beauty.” I said, using old Canadian hockey lingo. We’d grown up going to hockey camps and tournaments in Quebec, the vernacular stuck.
“That’s a good thing in hockey?”
I laughed. “Yeah, that’s the best thing. An excellent player, charming, charismatic. Team loves him. Fans love him. A franchise guy.”
“You’re proud of him,” she said, reading my expression.
“He’s a more gifted athlete than I am. Big, agile, skates like the wind and he can bend the puck in mid-air. Lately, he’s become a team leader. Which is not always easy to do when you grow up as the younger brother. The guys on his team know who he is at his core. They know he’ll always have everyone’s back no matter the fight.”
“Loyalty is an amazing quality,” she said, poking at her pasta. “And your parents?”
“My mom recently passed. Cancer, but she also suffered for many years with mental health issues. So things were never easy for her. For us. My dad is…struggling, but he’s doing the best he can.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. There was that touch again. The light touch on my forearm that felt like gently flapping butterfly wings. “How are you doing with your mom’s passing?”
“Fine,” I lied. There were days I couldn’t believe she was gone forever, and days when I wanted to bring her back from the dead so I could rail at her. How could she leave her son behind? How could she not tell us about him?
Shaking those thoughts away, I turned to her. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Parents? Siblings?”