Theo painstakingly peeled exactly one strip of skin off the carrot, then went over it a second time before judging the job sufficient to move on to the next section. “Yeah.”
“Well—some grown-ups never grow out of that.”
It took Theo until he’d finished peeling the carrot, his tongue sticking out between his teeth in concentration, to respond. “So Ty has a bully?”
Okay, so Theo understood perfectly what Ollie was still grappling with. That meant he was doing a good job as a father, right? That was what he was choosing to believe today. “Kind of. Sometimes people don’t like us and make our lives miserable for no reason.”
Theo handed Ollie the carrot to shred and picked up a second one. “Is that why Ty is going away?”
It would look like that to a kid, wouldn’t it? “No,” Ollie said. “He just has to go back to his job in Chicago.” When the carrot had been shredded until he could shred no more, he broke the remainder in half and popped one in his mouth, setting the other aside for Theo.
“So if we stood up to his bully and got him to stop, Ty wouldn’t stay?”
Something in Ollie’s chest pinched. “I wish it were that easy, kid.”
Frowning, Theo ruthlessly gouged away the carrot skin. “But Ty is rich. Everyone says so. He doesn’t have to go to work. Why can’t he stay here?”
The something unpinched and became a bruise. Ollie hadn’t let himself ask that question. After all, why would Ty want to stay when people treated him like this?
But not everyone did. Theo adored him. Henry and Eliza liked him. The kids on his baseball team looked up to him. And Ollie—
Ollie wasn’t going to be the guy who asked him to stay when he didn’t want to.
“His team in Chicago needs him,” he said finally. “And so do the people who live there. You know Ty—he likes to help people.”
Theo scowled. “I don’t know why he wants to help people when it gets him in trouble.”
Ollie finished off the last of the salad preparation and swept the veggie bits into a paper bag. Ty was militant about compost.
Then he let himself feel the impact of the words and turned to help Theo off the chair. “Hey, come here.”
He was pretty sure Theo didn’t understand why Ollie was hugging him like his life depended on it.
“Dad? Are you okay?”
No.
Despite his resolve to be truthful, Ollie let himself tell a tiny white lie this once. “I’m okay. I just need a minute to think about words, all right?”
Theo looked up with his arms still wrapped around Ollie. He had one eyebrow cocked—a trick Ollie had never mastered and one that made him look uncannily like a younger version of his mother—and an extremely dry expression for an eight-year-old. “You’re weird, Dad.”
Snorting, Ollie released him. “Okay, here’s the thing.” He pressed his lips together. “Everyone has power—all different kinds of power—and we can use that power to make a difference.”
Theo climbed up onto a barstool. “Even me?”
“Especially you.” Ollie ruffled his hair. “You’re young and you’re smart, so you have lots of time to decide what kind of difference you’re going to make. Ty uses his power to try to help people who are hurt, but it doesn’t always work. Sometimes people blame him for that and he gets in trouble. But he tries anyway.”
“Why?”
Because he is kind and brave and ungodly stubborn.“Well, you’d have to ask him to know for sure.” Ollie smiled, though that felt bruised too. “But I think it’s because he’d be really sad if he stopped believing he could make the world a better place. And that’s what I want you to remember, okay? Just because things are hard sometimes, or they don’t turn out the way you want, that doesn’t mean you should stop trying.”
Please never stop trying, kid.
An eternity passed before Theo nodded, apparently accepting this explanation. Ollie was halfway through letting himself relax when Theo asked, “Is that why you joined the Army?”
The words hit like a sledgehammer to the solar plexus.
Ollie wanted to say no. God, worse than that, he wanted theanswerto be no. He wanted to cling to what he’d told himself for more than a decade, that he’d joined the Army because he didn’t know what else to do with his life but he knew he wanted to make his own decisions.
