He avoided an immediate decision by turning the blender on, the annoying sound of it filling the space before he turned it off and glanced at me. “Nice hat.”
“Nice subject change,” I countered.
Chuckling, he relaxed just a bit as he started talking. “I was feeling edgy. Yesterday was, well.” He paused again, meeting my gaze seriously. “It was awful. Just… truly awful.”
I leaned forward on the kitchen bar between us, folding my arms. “At the casino side or the resort side?”
He pulled out two cups and divided the blender’s mixture between them, then set them both on the counter in front of me. “Yes,” he answered simply. “Maybe the worst Mardi Gras week I’ve worked.” He slid a shake across the bar to me, and I took it without fuss as sympathy warred with something else inside me. Something that was almost like euphoria at the way he was opening up.
I took a sip of the god-awful shake and held back my grimace just as he did the same, but he hummed in pleasure as though he actually enjoyed the taste.
So strange.
“Have you ever thought of trying something else? Doing something else?” I asked, genuinely curious about my dad’s aspirations. Ones I’d never considered before.
He sighed and leaned against the counter, mirroring me. “More and more every day.”
I laughed loudly, and he cocked an eyebrow in silent question even as he smiled in bemused, shared amusement.
“Neither of us knows what we want to be when we grow up,” I explained as my humor petered out. “I mean, I don’t even know what to do today.”
A short laugh escaped him too. “Maybe it’s a sign.”
“Of what?” I forced another sip of shake into my mouth.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But why don’t we go and take out some energy on the weights, and maybe it’ll become clearer to us.”
I almost asked if we could run this energy off instead but didn’t want to rock the newfound harmony we’d achieved, so I put my hat on the bar and kept my mouth shut as I grabbed my shake and followed him to the home gym that he’d outfitted in one of the spare rooms.
Half an hour later, I collapsed dramatically across the weight bench and threw a towel over my face, groaning loudly.
I wasnotin harmony with my dad, whose definition of a short circuit was clearly not in line with my own.
I thought I was dying.
He was barely sweating.
“That all you got, son?” he yelled over the classic rock blasting through a set of wall-mounted speakers.
I sat up and yanked the towel off so I could glare at him. “Are you shit-talking me right now?”
He grinned broadly, undisturbed, as he started a series of lunges. “I don’t know, am I?”
My knees screamed as I rose from the bench, grabbed a kettlebell, and copied his movements.
Dad smiled smugly over his shoulder as we lunged around the room, and I grimaced back.
“I’ve had a thought,” he said eventually.
“Me too,” I huffed, feeling like my chest was going to explode. “A murderous one.”
He chuckled again as he walked to the storage racks. I followed his lead, returning the equipment before wiping everything down.
“I’ve been thinking about real estate,” he announced, handing me a water bottle.
“Really?”
“Commercial, I think,” he elaborated as I took the water and drowned myself with it. “Yesterday, when you ditched me after our run, I went exploring.”
