Saint Mom and Sinner Dad

The tragedy of her martyrdom, the quiet triumph of his redemption, and the swing that tied it all together.

There’s a line near the end of A Pleasant Fiction that I still can’t read without pausing.

“I didn’t realize I was so loved,” says Calvin’s mother.
“Did she really not know?” Calvin thinks to himself. “I thought it was obvious.”

Those seven words — and Calvin’s reply — contain an entire lifetime of misunderstanding.

It’s where grief, guilt, and grace finally converge. And it’s where Calvin learns one of the hardest lessons we ever face: that love doesn’t count unless it’s known.

Saint Mom

Calvin calls her Saint Mom, and he means it, but the nickname is both tribute and critique. It’s admiration with a sigh at the end. She was the family’s center of gravity, a woman who carried everyone else’s weight but rarely showed her own. Her love was service, her language was labor. She was always busy proving it, never pausing to feel it.

Her tragedy is that she gave everything except herself. She loved through doing, not through being. And when she finally says, “I didn’t realize I was so loved,” it breaks something open in Calvin. It’s not that he failed to love her — it’s that he assumed she already knew.

But she didn’t.

That’s the quiet heartbreak of sainthood: you can spend your whole life giving love, yet die without realizing how much of it was coming back your way.

Sinner Dad

If his mother’s story is one of devotion misunderstood, his father’s is one of failure reinterpreted. In The Wake of Expectations, Calvin saw him as reckless — a man who gambled away the family fortune on a talentless gold digger. It was his great disillusionment: watching the man he once admired turn into someone he could no longer defend.

But in A Pleasant Fiction, that certainty unravels. Calvin learns the truth: his father hadn’t destroyed everything. He’d protected the family quietly, setting aside a hidden insurance policy they knew nothing about. The supposed ruin was never total — it only looked that way from the outside.

As Ryan puts it,

“I think he wanted to know that we were here for the right reasons. He wanted to be sure we weren’t making appearances just to secure an inheritance…I think that’s why he was so content at the end. He knew that the reason we were there was that we loved him.”

That line reframes everything. His father hadn’t been playing recklessly; he’d been playing with “house money.” He wanted to test not their loyalty, but the purity of their love. And by the end, he was reassured. They stayed.

So when Calvin reflects, “At least one of them knew,” it lands like an act of grace. The flawed man dies with the peace the saint never found.

Swinging and Missing

All of this ties back to the story that opens The Wake of Expectations.

Calvin’s father calls him out on a third strike — frozen, bat on his shoulder — and says the words that will echo for decades:

“You should have swung.”

At the time, it sounds harsh, almost cruel. But later, when Calvin hears his father say in the epilogue, “I couldn’t have made it happen for you any more than I made it happen for [Solitaire],” the full meaning comes through. His father hadn’t been scolding him — he’d been preparing him.

And then comes the realization that reframes his entire music management experiment with Solitaire:

that was his father’s swing.

Solitaire was the grown man’s version of that moment at the plate — his father living by the same advice he gave his son. He took his shot, risked everything…and missed. It was a bad pitch (pun intended), after all. The wrong pitch, for so many reasons.

But he swung.

For years, Calvin saw only the fallout — the financial ruin, the disappointment, the humiliation. But from the distance of adulthood, he can finally see what it was: a man trying not to die standing still. A man who refused to let fear call him out looking.

His father’s flaw wasn’t that he took the swing. It’s that he couldn’t explain why he had to.

The Grace of the Missed Swing

That’s what makes his father’s redemption so quietly profound. He didn’t ask for forgiveness or recognition. He just wanted to know that, even after all his mistakes, his family’s love was still there — unbought, unearned, unshaken.

And by the end, it was.

The hidden insurance policy, the understated inheritance — they become symbolic gestures, not rescues. His father leaves Calvin a gift he no longer needs. It’s a final nod from one man to another: You did it. You took your swing. You didn’t need mine to succeed.

In that sense, A Pleasant Fiction doesn’t end with resolution so much as recognition. The father’s advice, the son’s regret, the saint’s silence — all of it folds into a single truth: love and courage are rarely tidy. They’re often misunderstood, sometimes delayed, but real all the same.

Reconciling the Saint and the Sinner

Calvin’s peace comes from holding both of them together.
His mother’s sanctity becomes the cautionary tale — love unspoken, devotion unacknowledged.
His father’s imperfection becomes the lesson — love disguised as pride, risk mistaken for sin.

She did everything right, yet never felt loved.
He made mistakes, but died knowing he was.
And Calvin, standing between them, becomes the reconciliation of both.

He doesn’t idealize them anymore. He sees them clearly — as people who tried, failed, and loved in their own limited, beautiful ways. He inherits not their wealth or their virtue, but their humanity.

The saint reminds him that love must be spoken.
The sinner reminds him that failure isn’t final.
Both remind him to swing.

Because in the end, that’s the only real inheritance any of us get — the courage to keep stepping up to the plate, knowing we might miss, but doing it anyway.

Javier

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