22. Chapter Twenty-Two
Aspen
Twenty minutes in, another glass of wine down, and the wine catches up to me all at once.
It’s been doing this all night — arriving late, in waves. The room has gone soft at the edges. The light through the windows is low. I want, very badly, to blame the warm loose thing under my ribs on the wine.
I’m going to blame it on the wine.
My mother breezes past behind me with a stack of dessert plates balanced on her forearm.
“Stanley, I moved your bag upstairs, sweetheart. The den’s got Pat on the pull-out now, and the Lindbergs aren’t driving home tonight, so I put you in Aspen’s room.
There’s a trundle. You two will work it out.
” And she’s gone, through the door, the kitchen swallowing her before the sentence has finished landing.
I freeze with my wine halfway to my mouth.
I would have never thought my parents would allow him to stay in my bedroom. I had assumed he’d be forced to stay on the couch, in the den, the basement, or any one of the other rooms in this house.
I drink my wine.
“Trundle’s mine,” Stanley says, lifting his water an inch toward the room like he’s toasting the arrangement, and the table moves right along, because we are a couple, and couples share rooms, and the only person at this table for whom this is a five-alarm event is me.
The party falls back to its casual chats along the table. Aunt Lisa has her fork in Stanley’s pumpkin pie. It looks like she’s enjoying it.
“Stanley,” she says, turning a forkful over to study the underside of the crust. “This crust.”
“Ma’am.”
“Where does a young man learn a crust like this?”
“My mother, mostly.” Smooth as glass. “Some trial and error.”
Aunt Lisa nods slowly, as though this is a perfectly reasonable thing for him to have said. She eats the bite and considers it with her entire face.
“And the lattice.” Her fork is already going into the next piece. “Do you do that freehand. Or is there a little cutter?”
“Freehand, ma’am.”
“Mm.”
That’s all. Mm. And she eats more of it.
I know exactly what is happening because I watched my aunt do this to grown men my entire life.
She never accuses. She would consider it beneath her to accuse.
She simply asks pleasant, reasonable questions, one after another, each a half-degree warmer than the last, and then she waits. The Mm is not in agreement.
“It’s a beautiful pie,” she says. “Whoever made it should be proud of themselves.” A pause. The fork goes back in. “Course, a man who can turn out a crust like this and won’t take a straight compliment for it is usually a man with something to hide. But it’s a beautiful pie.”
Stanley lays a hand flat over his heart, wounded to the core. “I take compliments beautifully. I’m taking that one right now. It’s going straight to my head as we speak.”
“Mm.”
“That’s a real crust, Lisa. I bled for that crust.”
“It isn’t your family dinner yet, young man.” She says it without once looking up.
When I look at Stanley’s mortified face, I lose it.
My favorite person in this entire family is gently roasting the boy across the table because she knows he didn’t make it, and I confirmed it with her earlier.
Stanley catches my eye over the rim of his water. He knows what’s funny now. He’s caught on.
I purse my lips at him.
He widens his eyes at me, all wounded innocence — a man who has never told a lie in the whole of his honest life.
I have to look down at my plate.
Uncle Pete reaches over and tops off my glass, and I let him.
I know I shouldn’t. The room is already tilting warm and bright, the version of me sitting in this chair leaning toward the boy across from her and discovering, against years of hard evidence, that he is funny. And I keep turning over the thing he said to me upstairs.
Whatever a guy thinks about me is about him. Not me. I don’t pick it up.
I have spent this entire day being humiliated by what the people at this table think of me.
The seating chart and what it decided about who I am.
The toast I waited years for and got for a lie.
The thing humming quietly under every kind word anyone has said to me tonight — that I am the careful, contained, slightly cold Linwood girl who has somehow landed a warm, charming boy, and is lucky, frankly, to have managed it.
So maybe I practice. Right here. Right now, with a fourth glass of wine I should not have and am about to have anyway.
I let the table think whatever the table is going to think. I stop holding my spine like I’m being scored on it. I stop performing contained for a room that has never once, in all my life, given me a single point of credit for the performance.
I drink the fourth glass.
The table comes apart into smaller pieces the way they always do at the back end of a long meal — people lifting up out of their chairs, coffee migrating toward the living room, my mother finally surrendering and letting Beth carry something into the kitchen.
I drift, too. I find myself, glass in hand, over by the fireplace, where Stanley has gotten himself cornered by Mac and Hodge, the three of them folded down into the low chairs and talking the only language all three of them actually speak.
I slot in at his shoulder. I don’t think about doing it. I slide into the line of him like the space was kept for me.
“You all realize you’re going to be game-planning against him in a couple of years,” I say. “It’s a lot less fun scouting a man when he’s the one you’re trying to stop twice a season.”
Hodge laughs, delighted with me.
Mac doesn’t. Mac just tips his sparkling water in my direction without a grain of malice anywhere in it, and says, “If he signs. He could stall, he could get hurt.” A small shrug.
“Draft position’s a promise, sweetheart.
It’s not a contract, and it’s not twenty pro games. Talk to me when he’s done all three.”
It’s nothing. It’s a true thing, said kindly, by a man who plainly likes him — the oldest, fairest doubt in the sport, the gap every hyped kid has to cross, and plenty of them don’t.
And it goes hot and tight across the whole front of my chest.
“He doesn’t need my dad.” It’s out a half-beat too fast and a notch too hard, pitched just above the register the room is running at.
“He doesn’t need anyone. He’s that good on his own, and he’ll cross every inch of that gap on his own, and in five years not one of you is going to remember whose daughter he happened to show up to dinner with. ”
The little circle goes quiet.
Not a bad quiet. A noticing one.
Mac’s eyebrows go up, and something that’s almost approval moves across his face. “There you go,” he says.
Hodge gestures at me with his beer. “She wrote forty pages on his zone entries. She’d know.”
“Twelve,” I correct, before I can get a hand over my own mouth.
And the moment breaks up into laughter, the way these moments do, and the talk folds back over the top of it, and Hodge is already off into a complaint about Western Conference travel.
Stanley leans in. There’s no grin on him now at all. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
“I can take it, Linwood. I’ve got broad shoulders. Ask around.”
I look at my wine. “I didn’t do it for you.”
I just defended him to two men with nine hundred NHL games between them as though it were my own name they’d put a doubt in front of.
I felt the whole thing — the heat, the tightening, the flat no, you don’t get to say that about him — a clear second before I made any decision to feel it.
It surfaced on its own, fully grown, out ahead of my permission.
I did exactly what I told myself I wouldn’t do. I cared what they thought.
I drink my wine instead of going looking for the reason.
It’s late, or what counts as late in a house that started drinking at two in the afternoon. I’ve put almost nothing in my body all day, and the wine is the only thing in me with any weight to it, so I finally cut myself half a slice of the infamous pie and put a forkful of it in my mouth.
It’s good. It is stupidly, unreasonably good — the kind of good that makes you a little angry on its behalf.
“Oh my God,” I say, before any responsible part of my brain gets a vote. “Rowan makes the best pumpkin pie.”
Stanley’s hand closes over my forearm. “Shh.”
He cuts a fast, theatrical glance across the room toward my aunt.
“What are you doing?” he hisses. “Trying to blow our cover? Do you understand what’s at stake?”
I lean into his shoulder, and I’m laughing, properly laughing now, into the navy cotton of my father’s shirt on a man who is not my father.
“We have to protect my image here,” he manages.
“I think they all know.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “Your mom wants the recipe, so now I have to hunt Rowan down before she’s onto me.”
He plucks the fork from my fingers and takes a bite. His brows shoot up. “Wow.”
I take my fork back. “Get your own slice.”
He leans in, pushing me over a little too much. I grab his arm to brace myself, and he flexes under my palm, so I roll my eyes and push him back. He laughs, catching himself.
“Okay. I knew you had it in you,” he says.
I look up.
He’s already looking at me.
There’s just the six inches between his face and mine, and the thing he said. He’s supposed to be teaching me not to care what people think, but he’s doing the opposite right now with the pie. My head is spinning.
“I think I’m a little drunk,” I tell him.
“Oh, you’re gone.” He says it gently, fondly. “You’re a security risk, Linwood. You’ve said Rowan’s name out loud twice. I’m cutting you off after this one — it’s a matter of national security.”
He lifts the wine out of my hand and sets it down on the sideboard, just past where I can reach it.
And I let him.
I walked into this house earlier today, certain, all the way down to the bone, that I could not stand him. Right now, I cannot, for the life of me, remember why.
I tell myself it’s the wine. The wine is right there on the sideboard where he set it, just out of reach, and it is a perfectly serviceable explanation.
“Eat your slice,” he says, nodding at my plate.
I take another bite of Rowan’s stupid, beautiful, classified pie.
And I don’t bother to hide that I’m smiling.