The First to Know

by Abigail Johnson

  “Yeah. Awesome night for her.”

  “For all of you.” Selena sat next to me as I unlaced my cleats.

  “I didn’t know you were working with her.”

  “I wasn’t hiding it.”

  “You could have said something.”

  “Are you seriously mad that I just helped your pitcher win you guys the game?”

  “No,” I said, keeping my head down as I drew my other knee up to the bench to untie my other cleat. “But it would have been nice to know what my sister and my dad were doing.”

  “Now he’s your dad? Last night when I was practically begging you to play catch with him, he was your coach.” She sighed when I failed to respond. “Sadie asked for help, and we gave it to her. If you want help, say the word and Dad and I will do the same for you.”

  I didn’t want help, but I couldn’t shake the image of the three of them practicing together, Selena showing Sadie exactly how to grip the ball and Dad doling out rare compliments that I had to practically pull from him.

  “Look,” Selena said. “The point is that you guys won. Don’t let petty jealousy over something you’ve made no secret of not wanting ruin that.” She nodded at the girls still congratulating Sadie. “Be happy for her if nothing else.”

  I was happy for Sadie. She needed the emotional pick-me-up after Ryan the turd, plus she’d played phenomenally well. I’d been the first to charge the mound after her last strikeout. Looking at her out there, still grinning as the last of our teammates hugged her, I couldn’t help smiling too. It was only when I glanced at Dad that I felt like I was choking on something. And Selena calling me on it only made it that much harder to swallow, because it wasn’t that I didn’t want it—I didn’t know if I should.

  Muttering something under her breath, Selena left the dugout. When I followed a few minutes later—after another genuine hug for Sadie—I found her and Mom standing with a guy that could only be Gavin.

  The women on Mom’s side of the family were all vertically challenged. Selena was the tallest of any of us, and she capped out at a whopping five-four. Gavin was just barely taller than her, and that might have just been his hair, which was shorn on the sides and swooped across the top in an undercut.

  They were laughing together when I joined them.

  “Here she is! Gavin, meet my baby sister, Dana.” Selena had to loosen her grip on Gavin’s arm so he could shake my hand, but she reclaimed it as soon as possible.

  “Great game. It’s nice to finally meet you, Dana. Selena talks about you all the time.”

  I almost said She only told us about you a week ago, but it was painfully obvious that Selena wanted this first meeting to go well. “Thanks. She’s told me a lot about you too.”

  “Oh, you’ve got a—” Selena plucked a tiny mesquite pod that had blown into Gavin’s hair.

  “Thanks, Lena.”

  “Lena?” I said, glancing at my sister. “I thought you hated that nickname?”

  “No, I don’t,” was her immediate answer.

  Um, yeah, she did. I distinctly remembered her calling me Na in retaliation when I’d tried out the nickname years ago.

  Gavin ducked his head, but not before I saw a smile play at his lips. Reluctantly, Selena’s joined his.

  “Okay, fine,” she said to him. “Maybe you were right.” She looked at Mom and me. “I wanted to try it out because the name Selena is a little crowded in the music industry. I don’t want to be eclipsed by these other huge singers before I even open my mouth.”

  “Trust me,” Gavin said, and I noticed his thumb sweep across the back of her hand. “It’s not possible.”

  Selena glanced at their joined hands, smiling.

  “Besides, it was your grandmother’s name. You should keep it.”

  I didn’t have to see Mom’s face to know Gavin had just won major Brownie points with her.

  “Tell us how you met, Gavin,” Mom said. She was a romantic, but anyone who wanted to take her firstborn child across the country was getting grilled, especially since Dad wasn’t there yet.

  “Oh, well—” he smiled at Selena “—I happened to be in this coffee shop right by campus.”

  “And he doesn’t even drink coffee,” Selena said, grinning back at Gavin.

  “I don’t, but for some reason, I had this overwhelming urge for—”

  “—cappuccino,” they said together.

  “And while I was waiting, I heard the most beautiful voice singing, and I turned and there she was.” The smile slipped away, replaced by a look of awe. “I was gone from that very moment. I never even got my cappuccino.”

  “He’s exaggerating,” Selena said, though the color rising in her cheeks said she loved hearing it anyway.

  “And whose idea was it to drop out of school and move to Nashville?” Mom asked, visibly charmed by the smitten couple, but not so much that she forgot the important questions.

  “Mine,” Selena said, her chin lifting.

  “Hmm. And what did you think about that, Gavin?”

  “I know it was a hard decision for her, but you’ve heard her,” Gavin said. “She was made to sing. I’m only glad I heard her first.”

  “We haven’t, though.” Mom addressed Selena, who looked away.

  “Well, when you do hear her,” Gavin said, “you won’t have a single doubt. I don’t.”

  Mom’s expression said otherwise, but Dad showed up then, and the introductions started again. I had to give it to Gavin, he had all the right answers, and he was pretty good at minimizing the bad ones too. Even I wasn’t wholly convinced that Selena dropping out of college was a horrible idea by the time he was done.

  Mom and Dad continued to throw questions at him once we got back to the house. But by the time I went up to bed, I knew that Gavin was head over heels for my sister, and that there was no talking either of them out of Nashville. I wouldn’t be surprised if he proposed before they left.

  I pulled the covers up high to my chin despite the May heat rolling in and pretended to be asleep when the bed dipped sometime later and Selena slid in beside me. The timeline she had talked about was much faster than I’d been expecting. Selena was going to take every shift she could at Lava Java and hopefully have enough saved up to leave before the end of summer. That was barely three months away. Chase had said Brandon would be leaving for college around then too.

  My breathing sped up. I had so little time. They were both leaving. I’d come so close to telling Selena about Brandon the other night, but I’d stopped because I didn’t want the gnawing, gaping hole in my heart to spread to hers. What good would it do to tell her about a brother she couldn’t have if it came with questioning everything she thought she knew about our dad?

  Nothing. Worse than nothing.

  I didn’t want to lose Chase either, but I had to find out if Dad knew about his son. Everything depended on that. Everything.

  Chapter 29

  When I showed up at Chase’s the following afternoon, he greeted me the same way we’d parted the other night. The kiss was still shocking—the heat of him, the taste—but I was more undone by how easy it was to rise up and press into his kiss, and how hard it was to pull away.

  “So, you did a lot yesterday,” I said, grabbing for the closest box in an effort to distract myself from wanting to kiss him again.

  He rubbed the back of his neck and smiled at me. “Yeah, my mom is growing more anxious the longer it takes.” He moved closer to me. “So how come I feel like I could do this forever?”

  My heart felt like it was pressing up against my rib cage, urging me to step closer too so that I could say the exact same thing. But I ignored it. I had to. Because I could think about either Chase or my brother, and after witnessing Selena and Gavin the night before, I knew I couldn’t afford to drag things o
ut anymore. I needed to find pictures that either implicated my dad or else helped exonerate him, and I needed to do it before my siblings ended up in different states.

  “You want to start on the left side and I’ll take the right?”

  Before Chase could respond, a car pulled up to the curb behind us. I turned, my stomach lurching in the opposite direction, thinking it might be Brandon deciding to help after all. It wasn’t, but my stomach stayed poised to revolt again when I saw the woman who got out of the driver’s seat. There was only one person she could be.

  “Mom, hey.” Chase went to greet her and kiss her cheek. She looked young, late thirties, and pretty in an effortless way. “You’re early. I would have had this all cleaned up before you got home.”

  Her eyes darted to the mess of boxes and items spilling out onto the driveway and snagged on the near-bursting garbage bags. I saw her swallow.

  “You okay?”

  “Uh-huh.” She smiled at him, but her gaze returned to the garbage bags.

  “Okay enough to meet my girl?”

  His girl. There went my stomach, launching from side to side like a trapped animal. That was wrong on top of wrong. And so many layers that I couldn’t see where they began. Chase jogged up to me and took my hand. It was like I was outside my body watching but unable to do anything to stop the scene as he led me to his mom. I wasn’t supposed to meet her or any other members of his family. I wasn’t supposed to kiss him or hold his hand or any of this. I wasn’t supposed to want to.

  “Hi—” I didn’t know what to call her. Mrs. Anything seemed like a wrong move. “I’m D—”

  “Dana. It’s so nice to meet you. Please call me Sandy.” She kept talking. Each little thing she said sped up the havoc in my gut. He’d told his mom about me. Said lots of nice things about me. Called me his girl right in front of her. He was still holding my hand in front of her. It was too similar to the way Selena had introduced Gavin to our family—Gavin, whom she was planning her entire future with.

  I pulled my hand free, earning a puzzled look from Chase that I pretended not to notice.

  “It’s nice to meet you too, Sandy. You, um, have great taste in music. Chase said the signed Aerosmith T-shirt we found was yours. That must have—”

  “Where?” Her neck stretched to peer past me. “Where’s the box?”

  “Mom, we didn’t throw it away. I promised you I wouldn’t get rid of anything important.”

  She pushed past both of us, pulling open the first box she saw, scanning its contents, then moving to the next. I glanced at Chase for direction, but he was staring at her with an expression I felt guilty for seeing. His jaw was locked and his eyebrows were drawn together and lifted, not in embarrassment or anger, but something much more sorrowful. Without a word, he came alongside her and started opening boxes we’d already sealed.

  “Dana? Can you?” He gestured to his mom’s other side. Wordlessly, I went. It took twenty minutes to find the T-shirt, but by then it was too late. She was pulling items out of the garbage bags, growing more dismayed by the moment.

  “Chase, these are good. Why would you get rid of them?” She was holding up a pair of boys’ hockey skates from the bag marked Donate.

  “They’re from when I was seven.”

  She wrapped her arms around them. “I can picture you with your missing front teeth when I see them. These are staying.” She gasped as she drew another item from the bag, and another and another until the bags were empty. All of them.

  “Mom. We can’t keep all this stuff. You said it yourself just last week.” He waded close to her. “We can barely walk through here, and the bedroom is worse. I can’t keep sleeping on the couch. When I moved home, you agreed.”

  Her eyes squeezed shut.

  “You needed me home—here I am. You want me to stay, you have to let some of this go.” She let him take the bike pump from her hands.

  “We should keep that, though.”

  From where I stood in the corner, I saw the tendon in Chase’s neck jump as he pulled his arm back from the donate pile and instead added the pump to the keep pile.

  “And this,” she said, picking up a child-sized pup tent.

  I watched him watch her, the neck tendon jumping each time she retrieved another item. He was so focused on her that he started when I slipped my hand back in his. “Want to get out of here for a little while?”

  His hand tightened around mine.

  Chapter 30

  Chase pressed his keys into my hand without a word and sat just as silently beside me as I turned his truck toward Papago Park. Eventually, the neighborhoods gave way to flat desert, barren of all but the heartiest shrubs. Ahead, the normally reddish sandstone buttes glowed golden in the setting sun. I turned off at the first barely there dirt road once we left all trace of civilization behind us and killed the engine as soon as the main road vanished in my rearview mirror.

  I glanced at Chase, at the small frown that had remained between his brows since we’d left his mom emptying boxes in front of his house. “Come on,” I said, brushing his arm when the sound of my opening door failed to turn his head. He followed me out of the truck and down the path I picked out. There wasn’t an actual trail, just rocks and dust separated by ground-hugging brush.

  “What are we looking for?”

  I slowed and stopped by a small cluster of flat rocks, barely wide enough for the two of us. I sat and took a deep breath, looking out over the empty miles of land stretching to the hills. “I don’t know, space? It’s open and not...”

  “Open’s good right now.”

  I felt his gaze as he lowered himself next to me, but I didn’t know how to meet it. We sat, side by side, the sunset painting our shadows long and dark behind us. “This is when I steal your line and say I didn’t think this out. There’s not really anything to break out here and I didn’t bring my bats.” When Chase’s quick smile at my quip faded, I turned back toward the truck and stood. “Actually, I’ve got a baseball in my bag. We could play catch or—”

  “Dana.”

  “Yeah?” I turned, my voice and expression light, trying to contrast the scene we’d left at his house.

  “Sit with me?”

  I returned to the rocks, not sure what Chase needed from me in that moment. When I’d offered him the chance to get away from his house, he’d taken it. I’d thought that’s what we were doing out in the desert too, getting away, forgetting. I should have known better with Chase.

  He said my name, and when I met his eye, he slid his hand around the base of my skull, bringing me in for a kiss—the softest, sweetest kiss that somehow made me want to cry. When he pulled back, leaving our foreheads tilted together, my eyes felt watery.

  “I don’t know what to do anymore,” he said, letting his hand fall away from me, but not his gaze. “I know she doesn’t want to be like this, and she was trying, she was. Letting me go through the garage was huge for her. I mean, a year ago she couldn’t have done it.”

  Before he moved out, he meant.

  “Am I helping her, hurting her?” He straightened and shook his head. “Do I push her, do I not? And I love her—” he gestured at his chest “—so much, but I can’t live at home indefinitely. I want to do things and go places. I think she knows that. Maybe that’s why...” His head dropped.

  “I’m really sorry. I don’t know what to say.” I was falling into a greater intimacy with Chase and his family than I’d ever planned, one that made my ongoing selfishness all the more glaring. It wasn’t a nice thing I was doing to him, lying by omission, and glimpsing some of the issues going on in his life made it so much harder to rationalize my behavior.

  “What would you do?” Chase asked, his fingers brushing against my knee. I should have moved away, both from his touch and the fragile intimacy surrounding us. I had no right
to either, but I stayed exactly where I was, hating myself a little more with each passing minute.

  “I don’t know. I understand why she’s trying to hold on, but...you have to be more important.”

  The fingers against my knee shifted to my hand. It was so easy to touch him, to be touched by him, that I didn’t know who had reached for whom as I held his hand.

  “I’m okay staying at home for now, finishing my undergrad degree, giving her time to get used to the idea, but not living on the couch.” His hand flexed in mine. “And I want us both to be able to park in the garage so we don’t risk third-degree burns trying to open a car door in the summer.”

  I laughed a little. “Doesn’t sound like you’re asking for too much.”

  He didn’t laugh. “But I am. Brandon will be going away to college in the fall, and Uncle Bran will sell his house. She knows everyone is leaving. I don’t want to leave her too.”

  For once I didn’t pounce on the mention of Brandon’s name and twist the conversation for my own gain. I didn’t want to hear about my brother in that moment, I wanted to help my boyfri—I wanted to help Chase. This selfless and funny and honest and brave and really beautiful guy. This unbelievably amazing guy.

  “Where do you want to go?” I asked.

  Turning our linked hands over, he said, “Right now? Nowhere, but I need to know I can. That I won’t be destroying her when I do.”

  His skin was warm against mine, rough from working but still soft when I traced his palm with my thumb. “Maybe she needs you to do exactly what you’re doing—helping her let go of a little now so it won’t hurt as much when she has to let go of a lot later.”

  He nodded. His gaze was on our hands, but he was clearly somewhere else in his head. I wondered if he was thinking about his dad walking out on him and his mom, making a comparison that no one else would have.

  “You’ll always come back to her, won’t you? Whatever you do and wherever you go—”

  “She’s my home.”

  I lifted my hands on either side of his face and kissed him. Not because it would get me anything but because I wanted him to know what I felt and could never say.