Chapter 75 The Family You Keep on Purpose
BIRDIE hosted a dinner for seven three weeks later that I did not have anything like the emotional infrastructure for, and did it anyway, which my therapist — I have a therapist now, at the VA two counties over, on Thursdays, and I will not be taking questions on the subject — called “a really big deal, Roberta,” in the mild, dangerous voice she uses right before I end up crying in a parking lot.
The thing about the family you’re born into is that you don’t get a vote.
It’s assigned. The thing about the family you keep on purpose is that every single person at the table is there because two people looked at each other on some ordinary unremarkable day and decided, without any ceremony, to stay.
I set my kitchen table with Aunt Cass’s mismatched forks and understood, laying them out, that I was about to be surrounded, deliberately, in my own home, by people who had all quietly voted for me — and that this was the exact circumstance I’d spent three years and one packed duffel bag fleeing, and that I was going to sit down in the middle of it and let it happen anyway, over a lasagna I’d made too much of, because I don’t know how to cook for fewer than a platoon.
Ren came down first, with Theo and a bottle of wine and the specific bossy tenderness of a woman who has privately decided you are hers now and the paperwork is a formality.
Earl arrived with a toolbox, because Earl Hollis has never in recorded history entered a dwelling without repairing something in it, and he silently fixed the cabinet hinge I’d been apologizing to for a year while Marcy talked at a volume you could have calibrated a watch by.
Wes came bearing one of Fran’s pies, because Fran had insisted, and because he and Fran have an entire relationship now that consists mostly of her feeding him and him quietly fixing the walk-in cooler she refuses to admit is dying.
And Tox drove the full two hours from the dog farm with a rescue shepherd named Biscuit riding shotgun and the particular slow grin he only ever wears when he’s about to embarrass me in front of people who don’t yet know the material.
“So,” Tox said, roughly forty seconds after coming through the door, dropping into a chair like he’d bought it, addressing the entire table with the air of a man about to open a beloved book. “Did she tell you her callsign? No? She didn’t tell you the callsign.”
“Danny,” I said.
“They called her Mother,” Tox informed the table, with enormous satisfaction, “because she would check everybody’s gear twice, and make grown men drink their water, and text your girlfriend for you if you were too fried to remember to.
Meanest, steadiest, most stubborn tech I ever served alongside in my life, and she would cry — openly, no shame — at the dog rescue videos, in the tent, in front of God and everyone.
Both. Same woman. Took me about four years to stop being confused about which one was the real one, and then I figured out the answer was both, they were always both.
” He pointed a breadstick at me down the length of the table, and for exactly one second his voice dropped out of the joke and into the thing under it.
“Good to see you above ground, Birdie. It’s been a long damn time. I mean it.”
“Eat your lasagna, Sergeant,” I said, and he did, immediately, grinning, and under the table Wes found my hand and held it, and I did not bolt from my own kitchen, which I would like formally noted for the record.
The dinner had the specific chaos of people who have decided to like each other and are still working out the seating.
Marcy interrogated Tox about the dogs and then about whether he was single, in that order, without shame.
Earl and Tox discovered a shared and bottomless contempt for a particular brand of cordless drill and disappeared into it for twenty full minutes while the rest of us ate.
Ren kept refilling plates that weren’t empty.
And at one point Earl, who had said maybe eleven words all evening, set down his fork and looked around my crowded table — at the mismatched forks, and the too-much lasagna, and the dog under it, and the fire marshal holding my hand where he could plainly see it — and said, gruff, to his water glass, “Your aunt Cass would’ve liked this.
She always said this place needed more noise in it.
” Then he picked his fork back up before anyone could make it a moment, because Earl Hollis has a strict personal limit of one feeling per calendar quarter and he’d just spent it.
I had to get up and check on a dessert that did not exist so I could stand at the counter for a second with my back to the room.