I laugh. “I did! All I had was a brother eight years older than me who found me deeply exasperating. Probably because I was.”
“You? Exasperating?” He shakes his head. “Nah.”
“So rude!”
Alex grins, then takes another bite of his food. “So, just one brother for you?”
“Yep. Just three sisters for you?”
“Three is plenty. What about the rest of your family?”
I shift in my seat, poking at my food. “My parents are retired, moved to Columbus.”
“ToColumbus?” he asks.
“Yep.”
“Who retirestoOhio?”
“Apparently, their post-retirement dream life was one surrounded by fields of corn. And both their families are there.”
Alex is quiet, watching me, like he’s waiting for me to say more about them. I don’t.
“Getting the sense things aren’t… great with your parents?” he finally hedges.
I shrug, trying to ignore the dull, familiar ache in my chest. “They’re not great. But they aren’t terrible, either. That’s sort of it in a nutshell. We’re just… not very close.”
Alex nods. “Parent shit is hard.”
I peer up, surprised by that. Alex so far has given me tight-knit, we-love-the-heck-out-of-each-other, big-happy-family vibes. Going by his knowing tone, maybe I was wrong. “Yeah, it is. Nothing about my upbringing wasbad. It just… wasn’t…”
“Good, either,” he says.
I nod. “My parents were tired. I was an oopsie. My mom was my age when she had me, my dad was… well, your age. They thought they were done having babies, after my brother. Dad was in car sales, and the commission life is stressful. He was either gone all weekend and I missed him, or he was home on weeknights and grumpy, and then I wondered who I’d been missing in the first place. Mom was a dedicated public-school teacher, and her students and her teaching were what she poured herself into. By the time she’d come home to me on weeknights or handle me on her own all weekend while dad had his big sales days, she didn’t have much left. Neither of them did.
“To be fair to them, I think I was a handful. I talked a lot, askeda lot of questions, never slept in, never stayed put in my seat. I always asking for some newsomething—a toy, a game, an adventure, pushing for more than what was right in front of me. I didn’t make it easy for them to…”
Love me, I think. “Enjoy my childhood,” I tell him.
Alex gently knocks his knee with mine under the table. I glance his way but find it hard to meet his eyes, self-conscious.
I have no idea why I just told him all that. I never told Ethan all of that. It was too embarrassing, too humiliating, to admit that my parents never made me feel unloved, but they never made me feel particularly loved either, and for a long time I’ve yo-yoed between whether that was my fault or theirs, but whosever fault it was, I knew it wasn’t something you broadcast to the guy you hoped was falling in love with you. No matter who was at fault, it didn’t paint me in a flattering light.
“You sound like Mia,” Alex says.
There’s such affection in his voice for his little girl, whom I know from her StoryTime visits to be a ball of curious, precocious, talkative, always-moving exuberance—a little girl who reminds me a lot of the little girl I used to be. A lump settles in my throat.
“Well,” I tell him, “then may I recommend, if you get to the point where you’ve been poked and pleaded with so much you feel like you’re about to lose your mind, that you shove a stack of good books in her hands.”
Alex tips his head. “Is that what your parents did? Gave you books?”
“My mom did,” I tell him. “I think she was at her wit’s end. She took me to the library, told me that it was where I could find everything I was looking for, that reading a book was like getting to live another life. That sold me. I fell in love with reading. I mean, Ibecameobsessed.I tore through the entire kids’ section, then every middle-grade title at our local branch.”
Alex smiles.
“I didn’t love every book I read, but I loved even that experience. Knowing if one wasn’t my favorite, I’d find one that was. And I did. I foundso manyfavorites. And once I did, I started wanting to reread them, missing my favorite characters like they were friends who’d moved away, so eager to revisit their worlds, feel that magic again, and I’d have these meltdowns when I realized I’d returned a favorite book and couldn’t reread it. I got so sad that I couldn’t highlight my favorite passages, doodle hearts and thoughts throughout the best chapters. Dad figured out the solution to that part. He took me to the nearby secondhand bookstore, because we were always on a budget. I found so many of the ones I loved. And we bought so many books, we had to ask for boxes to carry them out. I’d never been so happy in my life.”
His smile deepens. “And now you’re a bookseller.”