Chapter Eighteen

Ben

I don’t know what I was expecting Hannah’s father to be like. She’s been beating herself up about disappointing him, which I get, but I guess I imagined someone more imposing like my father, someone with a wrath you don’t want to incur. He’s not at all like that.

Hannah greets me on the porch of their modest little, white, wood-framed house in the Cleveland suburbs. We have a minute alone to say hello properly, but it’s freezing and her dad is waiting, so she tugs my hand and leads me inside.

It’s warm and comfortable in her house with nothing remotely flashy— The polar opposite of my parents’ house. Hannah looks just like her dad. He’s on the short side, and they share light brown hair, which he wears a little long and unkempt. His round, wire-rimmed glasses make him look like a shorter, less gaunt, later-era John Lennon.

When Hannah shyly introduces me to him—she calls me her “friend” and blushes the whole time—he extends his hand and smiles broadly.

“Welcome to Cleveland, Ben. How was your drive? Can I get you a drink? Soda or… Oh, Hannah said you’re a senior, so I suppose I should offer you a beer, too, huh?”

He winks at Hannah.

“Dad.” She rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling, so this must be how they are with each other. He teases her, she pretends to be embarrassed, but she secretly loves it.

“Thanks, but I’m okay,” I say. “Thanks for having me, Mr. Gregory.”

He waves a hand. “Just Dale is fine. Hannah, why don’t you get Ben settled in, and then we go grab some dinner?”

“Sure, where do you want to go?”

“How about Finnegan’s?”

Hannah lifts her eyebrows. “Okay. Come on, Ben. The guest bedroom is upstairs.”

I follow her up the wood staircase. The wall is lined with framed family photos, with Hannah’s face at various ages peering back from most of them. My mother doesn’t display family photos in our house. She says it’s “low class.”

Scattered amongst the pictures are other mementos from Hannah’s childhood, every one of them related to science in some way. Certificates from prestigious science camps, statewide awards, blue ribbons for science fair entries. She’s had quite a career already and she’s only eighteen. My mother never hung this kind of stuff up, either. Our refrigerator was always fingerprint-free stainless steel, unblemished by a single childish drawing or excellent report card.

“He likes you,” she whispers over her shoulder.

“I just got here. How can you tell?”

After she reaches the landing, she turns and grabs the pocket of my hoodie, then tugs me closer. “Because Finnegan’s is like our place, his and mine.”

My eyes widen. “Shit. Do you not want to go there? We can go—”

She laughs. “No, it’s great. It’s his way of saying, ‘Welcome to the family.’ Hope that doesn’t weird you out too much.”

I loop my free arm around her waist. “It’s not weird at all. It’s actually pretty nice.”

She kisses me, but we keep it short and chaste because… Yeah, I’m sure Dale Gregory’s hospitality doesn’t extend to molesting his daughter on the stairs. Or anywhere else in his house. Dammit.

An hour later and we’re tucked into a booth at Finnegan’s, sharing a plate of the best chili cheese fries I’ve ever eaten while Hannah’s dad subtly checks me out. My dad would be grandstanding, asserting his own success to make sure that anyone we brought home understood our family’s superiority. He’d be asking pointed and rude questions, trying to shake loose a person’s weaknesses and ugly secrets.

Dale Gregory just asks me what I’m into. And when we discover a shared love of baseball, the conversation takes a twenty-minute detour into a dissection of our mutual favorite team, the Cleveland Giants. Hannah watches with a bemused exasperation.

“Hannah tells me you’re an English major,” Dale says when we’ve bored Hannah with all the sports talk.

And here we go. “Yeah, graduating in June.” Out of habit, I brace for subtle and not so subtle digs about my shitty choice of major. After all, he’s a scientist, which is a long way from literature. And if my own dad has proven anything, it’s that dads have a hard time approving of anything they wouldn’t do themselves.

He dunks a fry in a mountain of cheesy chili. “Eliot was always my favorite.”

I blink. Eliot? “What?”

“George Eliot. Read them all in college and loved them.”

I clear my throat and glance at Hannah, who looks just as surprised as I am. “Eliot’s great. I think I’ve read Middlemarch half a dozen times.”

He nods. “And you work at a bookstore?” Somehow his questions don’t feel like an interrogation. Is he genuinely interested?

“Prometheus Books. It’s a used bookstore—”

He breaks into a grin. “I remember Prometheus. Wow, that place has been there since I was at Arlington. Your mother loved that store,” he says to Hannah.

She stares. “She did?”

“Sure. I tried telling her that checking out books at the campus library was way easier on her student wallet, but she said there was something romantic about used books. Said they told more than one story.”

Hannah swallows and she grips my hand under the table. “Yeah, I get that.”

On one hand, I don’t know how Hannah could ever be afraid of telling her dad anything. This guy is great. And it’s so clear in their every interaction that they adore each other.

But on the other hand, I get her fear of letting people down, even the one not here. Even though she’s been gone for eight years, Hannah’s mom is always present. And considering how they lost her, how she and Dale joined forces to make sure no one else lost someone that way… Yeah, that’s a hell of a thing to turn your back on.

I squeeze her fingers in return. She’s got to handle this her own way, but I want her to know I’m here for her however she decides to do it.