Page 102 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
I reach forward to pick up my mug, the heat warming my palms. “He told me Dad used to call you after every game.”
She opens. Slightly. The way a door opens when the lock turns. “He did,” she says softly.
“After every game?”
“Every single one. Win or lose. He’d come off the ice with his knuckles swollen, and the first thing—before the shower, before the ice—he’d find that phone.” She holds the mug without drinking. “And he’d say the same thing. ‘I’m coming home. Tell Beck I love him.’” She looks down at her tea with a wistful expression.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
My mother’s gaze pulls back to me, head tilting slightly. “I told you. But you were young. Most nights, by the time the call came through, you were long asleep. But I’d still find you. I’d crawl onto the bed, or sit on the floor, wherever I could be close to you, and I’d whisper ‘Daddy called. He loves you.’ And if you were awake, you’d smile that cheeky grin—your dad’s smile—and you’d say ‘I love him back.’”
I try to imagine it, me at seven or eight, waking up to the promise that my dad was on his way. I don’t remember those nights. I wish I did.
“After the accident”—her voice snags for one split second on the word, the only concession to twenty-three years of grief—“I wanted to keep the tradition alive. You were eight, and you had all this grief. And you didn’t want me climbing onto your bed at night to tell you how much your dad loved you. You wanted to do something about it. To take all that grief and turn it into something. I think it was your little eight-year-old way of trying to provide…for me.”
She smiles. It’s sad. “Maybe I shouldn’t have let you push yourself so hard. But I thought—if the ice could hold you, I could let it carry what I was too exhausted to carry alone.”
“Mom—”
“But just because I stopped telling you, didn’t mean it was no longer true. Your dad, he loved you, Beckett.” She reaches across the table. “The night you were born…”
She pauses. Choosing to open a door she’s kept closed.
“Your father held you. Four hours old. This big man. Fierce. Terrifying on the ice. And you reduced him to tears.” Her eyes are bright. “And he said, ‘If all I ever get is this moment with him right here, it will have been enough.’”
The words enter me and find the hollow and fill it with something that is not anger and not shame. And maybe not grief either—at least, not the icy kind that keeps you cold, makes you keep people at arm’s length because the pain is too much to share. No. The kind that settles in your heart with a finality that sets things right.
“He’d be proud of the man you are,” Mom says. “On the ice and off.”
The moment holds, fills the room like a crackling fire. I smile back at her. “Thanks, Mom.”
We settle back into the quiet, sipping our tea and watching someone break down a garden retaining wall, unearthing something new behind it.
Minutes pass before my mom speaks up again. “So, are you going to tell me about what happened with Everly?”
I glance at her, a kid who thought he got away with detention without his mom finding out. Apparently not.
“I tried to call. Twice. You didn’t pick up. Then it was all over the news. I had half the hospital nurses chasing me down during my shifts this week to tell me how they saw my brave boy on the news.” She takes a sip, waiting for my side of the story. Waiting for me to explain why I said what I did about Everly.
“I made a mistake.”
“You did.” She doesn’t pull her punches this time. “So why did you say it?”
I let out a heavy breath, hands cupping my tea, which I still haven’t touched. “Rick told me it could jeopardize my contract if it looked like there was something going on between Everly and me.”
Mom looks at me, one brow raised in that mischievous way. “Well, was there?”
My gaze lifts. Holds. “Yes.”
Mom’s lips press together, attempting to stifle a smile and failing miserably. She reaches out and takes my hand, gives it a squeeze. “You know what I used to pray?” she says. “After your father died. Every night. For years.”
“What?”
“I prayed for you to stop.” Her eyes find the photos on the mantel—old pictures of me, the timeline of Beckett Benson. She goes on without looking at me. “Not that you’d stop skating—I never prayed for that. But that you’d stop carrying the weight of your father’s death on your eight-year-old shoulders. Because it never got any lighter. As you grew, the weight did too. It got heavier as you got stronger, always exactly as much as you could bear and never light enough to set down.”
Her hand tightens on mine.
“There’s a verse,” she says. “In Matthew. ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.’” She says it like the verse lives in her body, in the muscle and bone. “I’ve been humming it over dishes since you were nine years old. The hymn arrangement. You probably heard it a thousand times and thought it was just Mom being Mom. Background music.”
