When she stands and turns, she catches me watching her, but I don’t even care. I open the door and ask, “You okay?” because I really need to know.
But when she blows it off and says with mock humor, “My mother’s lost her mind, that’s all,” I see her walls.
“Wanna talk about it?” I keep on, trying to chip as she walks past me.
Turning to face me, she casually says, “Nothing to really talk about.”
I want to touch her, just brush her cheek, something, but I don’t. Being with her today, talking with her, laughing with her—she’s different. Sweet, funny, athletic, and soft. God, she’s soft. But it’s more than that; she has depth to her. A depth I’ve never seen with the girls I’ve been with. Not that I’ve been with them in a way to even notice if they did, but they all seemed so shallow. Even though she doesn’t mean to let on, I can tell there’s a lot going on under her exterior, and I feel this eagerness to explore.
When she walks back to Jase and lies down with her head in his lap, he asks, “What did she want?”
“She wanted to know when I would be home for Thanksgiving.”
“When are you going to leave?” Mark asks.
“I told her I would be there Wednesday night. I’ll probably leave Saturday morning,” she answers as I walk across the room and take a seat on the stoop of the fireplace.
“When are you and Mark heading out?” she questions Jase.
“Our flight leaves around noon on Tuesday,” he tells her.
“When do you guys get back?”
“Late Sunday afternoon.”
“What about you?” she asks me as she rolls onto her side to look at me.
“I’m going to go spend a few days with my family down in Cannon Beach in Oregon. My aunts and uncles always come to my mother’s house with my cousins for a big dinner.”
“Will you be there for the weekend?”
“Nah,” I tell her. “I’ll come back home that night. My mom and her sisters spend the day plotting for Black Friday, so I always come back home and just lay low.”
“Sounds like you have a big family,” Jase says.
“Yeah, man, three cousins and between them they have seven little kids. I love them, but shit they’re loud,” I say as I laugh.
“Must be nice though. I’m an only child with no cousins. Small family,” she tells me.
“So, it’s just you and your parents?”
“Mmm hmm.”
“They live very far?” I ask her.
“No. They still live in Shoreline where I grew up.”
Knowing that Jase is going home with Mark to Ohio for the holiday, I offer, “Well, I’ll be around.”
When I see a hint of a smile, I feel like maybe I’ve finally made a nick in her exterior.
Chapter Twelve
When I pull into my mom’s driveway, I see my family’s cars littering the street. I’m the last one to get here, and when I walk in, the noise confirms it. I make my way through the foyer to the back of the house, and the scene looks the same as always. The guys are drinking beer and watching football while the kids run around and play. The girls are all in the kitchen with the babies, laughing and gossiping.
“Sweetheart!” my mom squeals when she notices me walking into the kitchen. She gives me a big hug, and I wrap my arms around her. I feel like a lot has changed since I last saw her, so I take the embrace I feel like I’ve been missing for these past few months.
We exchange our ‘I love you’s’ and ‘I’ve missed you’s’ before I say hi to everyone else. The kids are running wild, excited to see me, as I hand Tori the keys to my jeep so she can go bring in the bags of gifts that I always have every time I see the kids. I love spoiling them, but it’s also my method of distracting them, and giving them new shit to play with keeps them occupied and out of their parents’ hair for a while.
When Tori walks back in, arms full of gifts, she mouths ‘thank you,’ desperate for the reprieve. I laugh and follow her into the living room where all the kids are. I sit on the floor with them as they rip through the paper, finding puzzles, toy cars, dolls, and a small bubble machine that is sure to keep these kids entertained by the hour.
“And where did you plan on the kids playing with that?” my mother gently nags, in only the way a mom can do.
“In the playroom upstairs.”
“Can I send you the bill for the carpet cleaning?”
Rolling my eyes at her, I say, “It’s bubble solution, Mom, not a turd.”
“What’s a turd, Uncle Ryan?” Madison, my three-year-old niece, asks.
Smiling at her, I say, “It’s poo poo.”
“Ewwww!” she squeals through her fit of laughter, and her mom, Katie, scolds me with a simple, “Ryan!”
I love getting a rise out of my cousins when it comes to their kids. I swear they can take the most harmless thing and make a big issue about it.
“Katie, they know what poop is. Relax.”
“Connor, you’re a turd head,” we overhear Madison say, and then I get the look from Katie as I start laughing.
“Hey, Tor. Can you grab me a beer?” I holler over to her while I sit next to her husband, Trevor.
“All these men are helpless,” I hear her tell my aunts.
My mother gathers the older kids and takes them up to the playroom, and when Tori hands me my beer, she sits on the floor between her husband’s legs.