Chapter 36 Dinner For Shmucks
M y consciousness was as touch and go as a dancer’s supporting foot during fouettes.
Point. Flat foot. Point. Flat foot. Up. Down. Awake. Asleep.
It ebbed in and out with only cuts of conversations absorbing fully through to my brain.
“Put her over here…”
“…How does someone go an entire day without eating?”
“We’re about to eat Thanksgiving dinner! If she just could have waited ten more minutes…”
“… Ethan, go wait in the kitchen. Monica’s got this handled.”
“I’m not leaving…”
It was the touch of a cool compress against my forehead that finally pulled me out of my unwilling slumber. The cogs of my mind began to rotate again in slow acceleration as the curtain over my eyes lifted just as slowly, and a face I most definitely didn’t expect to see came into focus.
“Well, there she is.” Mary’s closed-lip smile spread across her face. It was kind and welcoming, just like her, and the strangest urge to cry expanded across my chest as I looked up at her.
“How long was I out?” Shifting myself to sit up, my elbows sank back into the divots of what I now realized was my childhood bed.
“Only about three minutes. You didn’t miss anything exciting.”
Now that voice belonged to Monica, who was standing at the foot of my bed, nose deep in her phone.
“I’d say passing out on Thanksgiving is pretty exciting,” I quipped.
This got Monica’s full attention, her gaze lifting from her phone as a teasing smirk lifted just the same on her lips. “So long as you got it all out of your system now and don’t try to pass out on my wedding day.” She grabbed at my toes, shaking them and a small laugh from me at the same time.
“Oh, and I saw your missed calls yesterday. It was just such a shit show day at work yesterday that I forgot to call back.” A frown found her lips. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
I brushed her off, wanting the subject of yesterday as far gone as possible.
“It’s okay.”
Just as quickly as the unusually tender moment with my sister started, it just as soon ended with a typical ringing from her phone. She glanced down.
“I gotta take this. I’ll tell Mom and Dad you’re up and that they can start carving the turkey. Try and not pass out again while I’m gone.”
“I’ll do my best,” I replied with a weak chuckle.
Just before she left the room, she turned her head back around and set her stare somewhere past me. “Ethan, help her when she stands up, just in case.”
My still full of empty air stomach pinched tight as she said his name.
Before I could tell myself not to, I was looking in the direction Monica had spoken.
And there he was, sitting in the corner of my childhood bedroom in my furry pink lounge chair, my ballerina slippers wallpaper hanging behind his head, looking hugely out of place.
His elbows rested on his knees while his head sat on his clasped hands, and my heart gave a kick. He resembled a man plucked right out from a hospital waiting room. The worry lines chiseled into his forehead outlined a mask of bravery he was trying so hard to keep in place, but I saw past it.
His heavy stare touched mine from across the room and the mask crumbled, revealing the cracks of multi-colored emotions beneath that made up a rainbow of suffering.
Ethan was up and out of his chair hairs of a second later, coming to stand next to me. “How’re you feeling?”
I thought it over for a second, checking in with every part of my body.
“Hungry.”
This broke a grin into Ethan’s face that even he seemed surprised by.
He smiled with his eyes closed and exhaled a short laugh, a layer of anxiety visibly washing from his face.
“I’ve decided I’m going to start carrying around a cooler with yogurts and ice cream whenever we’re together from now on. ”
“And you will hear no objections from me about it.”
Together, we fell into a shared laughter that felt so natural and so good, that the sensation to break down into tears sizzled in my chest again like compressed air.
Maybe it was because I still hadn’t eaten or because my body was still catching up to normal functions, but all of my emotions felt like a fog rolling over top of the well-worn road.
Thick and dewy, sliding along the surface and leaving me driving blind.
With Ethan standing so close, I felt like I wanted to cry and laugh and scream and kiss him all at once. I wanted to push him away and drag him in close, to yell at him to leave me alone while begging him to never be too far. I was an oxymoron of emotions.
“For the record—” Mary’s voice snagged both of our awareness. “You guys are about as subtle as a tribe of naked women walking down the street with tambourines for tits.”
Shit .
Was it really possible I’d completely forgot another human being was in the room just because I was in the line of Ethan’s attention? Yes. Yes it was.
“Even if I hadn’t seen the photos, I’d still have spotted you two a mile away with the massive heart on’s you have for each other.”
“Mary,” Ethan tried to fight, but gave up seconds in.
“Don’t worry. I’m not judging. I feel for you guys. I really do.” She left my side and walked towards the door, turning back over her shoulder to us both with sympathy framing her stare.
“You’re just lucky that Monica never looks up from her phone long enough to see what’s right in front of her face.”
Then she was gone, leaving Ethan and I to stew in the revaluation she’d just set in our laps.
“We should get out there.”
I threw my legs over the edge of the bed, testing out my balance with only one fumble in my attempt to stand up. An arm I knew better than I should swept a warm embrace around my waist as I stood on my own.
“Ethan, don’t .”
The muscles in his stomach tensed against my body as I denied him, and I knew he knew better. “I’m not letting you fall.”
Too late.
“I’ll be fine.”
“I’m not letting you go.” And therein lies the problem.
A sigh swept from deep within me, realizing that he would not be taking no for an answer.
Together, we walked out of my bedroom and down the stairs, Ethan holding his grip firm around my waist the entire way down.
The moment our feet made first impact on the floor, a pair of eyes rose to his arm around me and rolled white with rage.
Stella’s livid stare cut straight to me and immediately, I shook Ethan’s arm from my waist and made it the rest of the way to the dinner table by myself, only stumbling once.
“Sit, sit, sit.” My mother’s voice ushered me into a chair she’d pulled out for me next to Monica. “Let’s get some food in you stat, baby girl.”
“Mom,” I whined, biting back a smile. I hated it when she called me that.
I hated how much I loved it and how it made me feel like I was a little girl all over again.
God, what I wouldn’t give to go back to nap times and no responsibilities.
As a child, there was no stress, no heartbreak, and most certainly no falling head over heels in love with the wrong man and potentially tearing your family apart at the seams.
The chair next to me moved and a flash of Ethan entered my peripherals, but not for long.
“Ethan, dear. Come sit next to me and your sister.”
His hesitation to follow his mother’s orders was tangible, but he wasn’t a son who would disobey his mother’s wishes so publicly, and she and I both knew that. Ethan pushed the chair next to me back in and went to sit next to Mary, who sent him a subtle pitying look as he sat.
My dad got to carving the turkey while everyone made polite conversation as plates of food were passed around, everyone taking a helping of what they wanted. Largely, I kept to myself during the conversation, only slipping in a few nods here and there to make it look like I was keeping up.
It wasn’t until I had a mouth full of mashed potatoes that Stella decided it was time for me to contribute to the topic at hand.
“Alice, are you bringing a date to the wedding?”
Just like that, all eyes were on me at the dinner table. Swallowing my potatoes past the lump in my throat, I responded.
“No, ma’am. I’m not seeing anyone right now.”
“Well, why don’t you bring that ex boyfriend of yours? Oh, what was his name?”
“Peter?”
My dad’s head snapped up, reading glasses jerking on top of his head.
“Who in the hell is Peter?”
“He’s no one,” I jumped in, reassuring my trigger-happy father. “We only went on a few dates.”
“Oh well, then that’s not the one I’m thinking about then.” Stella tapped her wedding ring against her coral pink lips, pretending poorly to be lost in thought. “The one that made you move in with Monica and my Ethan?”
“Fuckface Jonah ?” Monica’s disgust as she said Jonah’s name practically dripped off of her tongue. “If he steps a hundred feet within my wedding, I’m cutting his dick off.”
“ Monica, language,” Stella scolded while snickers came from both my parents at Monica’s remark.
“Yeah, young lady.” All eyes went to my father as he pointed the tip of his butter knife at Monica. “Watch your mouth. You know the J word is forbidden in this house, god-fucking-dammit.”
Barks of laughter drowned out Stella’s gasp of horror.
Even Mary and Ethan laughed along with my family, and for a moment, I thought how nice this dinner could have been if Stella weren’t at the table.
Even with my harboring a love for my sister’s fiancé and passing out, having Stella here was somehow the worst thing about today.
She proved it to be true, too, by her next line of questioning.
“So why did that relationship end?”
“Mom, don’t ,” Ethan warned. Stella pretended to look surprised by Ethan’s warning.
“What? I’m just curious.”
The atmosphere at the table turned tense, as almost everyone at it knew the uncomfortable answer to her question. I set my fork down on my napkin, having lost my appetite all over again.
“He cheated.”
The spark of satisfaction in Stella’s stare told me I had just handed her the card she’d been searching for throughout this conversation.