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“She’s a pistol,” he says, happy about it. That’s all he says about her. He mops up ketchup with an onion ring, looks out the window at the lot, and says the drive back is going to be brutal with the construction on the interstate. Then he says, “Hey. The thing in the second period.”

“I know.”

“I know you know. I’m just saying it once, and then I’m done.” He puts the onion ring down. “You’ve got to get that shit under control, bud. You can’t give a guy like that a free two minutes because he said something about your mother.”

I sit there and play with an onion ring. An hour ago, my coach put me on a projector in front of everybody. And now this man is sitting across from me in a booth with ketchup on his thumb, warmly telling me to control my temper, and the ketchup is on the thumb of a hand I’ve watched him flex in the cold every winter for three years because it won’t close right.

“Do you ever think about it?” I say.

He looks up. “Think about what?”

I almost laugh. “Seriously?”

“Nash.” He puts the cup down. “Think about what?”

“You’re telling me to control my temper.”

He goes very still. He knows exactly what I’m talking about now. It takes him about a second and a half, and then his face closes up in a way I’ve watched my whole life. “That’s not—”

“The brush pile,” I say.

“We’ve talked about this,” he says, in the low, calm, reasonable voice.

“No. You talked.”

“It was an accident, Nash. I told you to step back.”

“You told me to hold the can.”

“I told you to step back, and you didn’t, because you were fifteen and pissed off about the showcase, and you never listened to a goddamn thing I—”

“You told me to hold the can while you were yelling at me about the showcase, and then you took it out of my hands and poured it on a pile that was still going.”

His jaw sets. The waitress is coming down the aisle with the pot, and she looks at our table and turns around and goes back.

“Keep your voice down,” he says.

“I’m not loud.”

“You are.”

I look at my hands flat on the table on either side of a plate of onion rings. My ears are roaring. “Every time,” I say. “You say sorry, and every single time the story’s the same. You didn’t listen. You were difficult. You moved before I told you.”

“You were difficult.”

“I was a kid.”

“I put it out with my hands, Nash.” He holds them up off the table between us, palms out, the shiny middle of each one catching the light from the window. “With my hands. What else was I supposed to—”

“I know you did.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“I want you to stop telling it like I did it to myself.”

He puts his hands down. “I love you,” he says. “You know that. You’ve always known that.”

“You say that all the time.”