Chapter 37 #2
“Quit wiggling,” Tripp tells me, dropping a hand to rest at my inner thigh.
I rest my own on top of it, tracing the A on his pinkie finger, the first letter of the word ‘apostate’ spelled out between the pinkie and index fingers on each hand. A glance at his profile offers view of the corner of his mouth fighting not to tug upward.
What the hell is he so excited about?
Neither of them offer me any further insight as to what I should expect while we ride to the restaurant. Every question that I ask is dodged, every guess that I make dismissed.
They’re both in such high spirits, and I should be, too; but I’ve been here before. It all feels too good, too peaceful. I’ve settled in too much, and now something has to give. But what that something is, I can’t place.
The restaurant’s parking lot is packed when we finally roll into it, so Tripp drops us near the door before trying to find a place to park the car. Julia’s fingers wrap into my own as we step inside, met with a long line of people waiting near the host stand to be seated.
There have to be twenty groups of people waiting, each person dressed in their nicest suits and dresses.
I don’t see a single t-shirt or pair of jeans, and there aren’t any children around us.
Conversation is quiet and respectful, but there are so many people here that even the softest spoken words pile onto one another to make it loud.
“This is insane,” I comment. “It’ll be a two-hour wait, at least.”
“No, it won’t” Jules argues with a brilliant, teasing grin.
My brow pinches as she drags me toward the young woman standing behind the station to tell her that the Montgomery party is here to claim our table.
“Tripp got a new reservation this morning,” she tells me. “He was only asking you to pick somewhere to eat in case he needed to cancel it.”
As Tripp rejoins us, we’re led through a set of white double doors and into the warm evening air, where a small selection of tables wait. Each of them are topped with a crisp white table cloth and a cluster of small candles to offer ambiance, complimented by wooden chairs which surround them.
It isn’t long after we’re seated that our table is lined with appetizers and a glass of wine sits in front of each of us. I scan the plates of bruschetta, antipasto, breads topped with various cheeses, racking up the bill in my mind.
These two were fighting over fifteen bucks no more than six months ago, and now, here they are, happily ordering what feels like one of everything without a second thought.
My heart plummets in my chest as a realization hits me.
“You sold the shop.”
Resting his glass onto the table, Tripp’s head cocks to the side, his face pinching.
“Yeah, Schepp, I sold the shop and didn’t tell you,” he teases, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Of course I didn’t sell.”
“It’s your birthday,” Julia offers with a warm smile, the statement meant to shut me up, to keep me from asking any further questions.
For a while, I let it do exactly that.
I let myself enjoy the wine and the food, both of which are even better than I’d expected, but that little voice in the back of my mind nags at me. Something is off, tonight. I can’t place it, but I can’t shake it, either.
‘And that’s your problem, Connie,’ my sister would tell me. ‘You can’t just accept a good thing for what it is.’
Even in my own thoughts, that little twerp is right.
Appetizers and entrées fly off of our plates, and by the time we place our dessert orders, I feel like I need to unbutton my slacks to make room for it. Even still, when the decadent sweets are placed in front of us, I tuck into them.
My anxious mind would tell me that with my favorite foods and sweet desserts, the two of them have lulled me into a false sense of security. It might tell me that this is how prey animals fall victim to the predators who hunt them.
It tries, as they exchange cautious glances, but I stifle its voice with other bite of limoncello sponge cake.
“Listen,” Tripp finally says with a clearing of his throat. “We know we can’t do anything on paper, but in all of the ways that actually fucking mean something, you’re part of our family.”
Julia pulls her clutch bag into her lap, keeping it beneath the edge of the table as she digs through its small space.
“We wanted to give this to you on your actual birthday and make it a whole big thing, but…” she explains with a smile tugging at her lips. “Calling you a boyfriend or a ‘person we’re seeing’ just…”
“It’s not enough,” Tripp says as Jules shakes her head. “You’re more than that.”
On the table, Julia carefully rests a small wooden box, pulling open its lid. Inside, nestled into a cushion, sits a black metal band, identical to the one wrapped around Tripp’s finger.
“You’re our equal, and you matter,” Julia tells me. “We want you to have a symbol of that.”
Sliding the box toward myself as my chest tightens, I pull the ring from its place and run the pad of my thumb against the smooth metal.
“If this is some kind of joke…”
“It’s not,” Julia insists.
My eyes snap to Tripp, whose body is moving just enough to let me know that his leg is bouncing beneath the table. He’s locked onto me; waiting for an answer that seems like it has the potential to either fill his heart or break it.
“If I put this on, will you tell your brother?” I ask him.
“You put that ring on, I’ll stand up on the table and shout about it to everyone in this restaurant,” he tells me, using his head to gesture toward the box. “You’re our family, Schepp. We love you. I’ll tell B. I’ll even call Edie if you want me to.”
Jules bunches the napkin from her lap, looking up toward the evening sky as she dabs the corners of her eyes with a sniff.
Her brows stitch together as I turn the box over in my hand, a laugh bellowing out of my chest as my head drops into my free hand.
Tripp joins in her visible confusion, but all I can do is laugh.
“All day, I’ve been waiting for you two to drop the axe,” I explain through what seem like unstoppable chuckles. “I’m the axe-dropper; I know how nice it can look before it hurts.”
I’ve done it so many times that I feel like I may have actually invented the ‘feed them and leave them’ method. A good meal helps to soften the blow, especially a meal the other person has been looking forward to, like at an Italian restaurant they’ve had their eye on for the past year.
Devastation wrapped in a pretty package.
There have only been a few times that I haven’t used it; usually opting for another tried-and-true method, with one exception.
An exception which was an exception in and of itself, because while past partners and hookups had deserved the respect of a nice night on me, those two did not. I refused to give them that respect.
“In all that overthinking you were doing, you didn’t stop to think that maybe it was supposed to be dinner and then presents?” Tripp teases.
“It’s an imperfect process,” I counter, the corner of my mouth ticking upward.
Julia’s eyes are soft as she bites down a brilliant smile watching the cool metal slide onto my finger. It’s a perfect fit, which I can only assume was her doing. Pushing myself to a standing position, I take her chin in my hand and press my lips to hers before doing the same with Tripp.
Eyes are on us as I take my seat again, but none of us care about them. We don’t need their opinions or their judgments or questions. We don’t need anything more than what we have right here, at this table.
Through everything that we’ve lost and over the surface of the bumpiest roads that life has chosen to offer to us, we took the debris left behind and rebuilt something of our own, and I’m proud of us for that.
As we lift our glasses to clink them against each other, Tripp’s tongue wets his lower lip and he shakes his head with a laugh.
“Think Irina will give us a group discount when she’s licensed?” He teases, earning a playful smack with the back of Julia’s hand against his chest.
As we settle back into our meal – and as I finally allow myself the space to breathe – my focus is continually pulled to the band now secured around my finger.
My dad would probably squeeze in some raunchy joke right now that would have my mom slapping him for it, but she’d kiss him right afterward.
Their relationship was one of the good ones.
One where, like their love for me, I never questioned how they felt about each other. It was pure and it was good.
A lot of people swear off commitments because they’ve been hurt too much in the past, but I think a part of me swore it off long before anyone had ever hurt me.
That part of me looked at the way my parents loved each other and it said that they had it as good as it gets.
No one gets it like that, so what would be the point in trying?
When they died, I guess I figured that they took it all with them.
Irina got a piece of it, and if anyone in the world deserves that piece, it’s her.
I just hope she’ll stay okay with my piece.
Between a full belly and the relief of every fired nerve, by the time that we make it back to the house and in the door, I am exhausted. I’m not the only one. Tripp toes off his shoes at the door, loosening his tie as he treks up the stairs to change into something less restrictive.
I move to follow him as Julia lowers herself to greet Koda and Drumstick, but she bolts up as soon as my body pivots toward the staircase.
“Honey, wait,” she calls after me. Reaching into the space behind the television, she produces a small wrapped box, topped with a bow, and my brow quirks. “You have one more to open, then you can go.”
“I think you guys have given me enough,” I say with a chuckle, trying desperately to cover my discomfort with being so…spoiled.
“This one’s just from me, Tripp doesn’t get any credit on it,” she tells me with a playful grin.
My face pinches as I carefully tear through the cupcake-patterned paper, crumpling it in my hand before pulling open the small box inside.
Jules’s hands clasp behind her back and she bounces in place on the balls of her feet while she watches me, her teeth tugging at her lip as she bites back a smile.
I let the silver bell hang from my finger as I inspect the four-pointed symbol on its front. The warmth in my chest is impossible to ignore.
“It’s the North Star,” she effuses. “I was going to do a great dane, but I thought this one might help you remember to always find your way back home to us.”
I’ve never been a superstitious person. I don’t avoid walking under ladders or find myself feeling nervous around black cats. I never worried about stepping on cracks in the pavement, and my mom was always fine.
All of the trinkets hanging off of Tripp’s bike never made any sense to me.
They’ve always just seemed like distractions; but now, I think they may be the opposite.
He’s not hanging useless crap off of his bike to make it look cool, he’s bringing his wife and his son with him on every ride, and maybe that’s what brings him home safely.
Threading my finger through the silver ring at the top of the bell, I let my thumb trail over the raised design with a smile crossing my face which eventually melts into an amused huff as my fingers wrap around the metal.
“My mom was a horrible navigator,” I tell her with a shake of my head.
“She couldn’t read a map to save her life.
I got a call from her one day – I’d had my license for maybe two weeks at this point – and she told me she needed me to come get her, because she was stuck two hours away from our house.
When I got there, I asked her how in the world she ended up that far out. ”
I will never forget the horror on my mom’s face when I finally found her ‘stranded’ in a superstore parking lot.
There was less than a quarter of a tank of gas left in her car, because she constantly forgot to fill it, and she was ‘surviving off of’ a bag of potato chips that she’d purchased from inside the store while I was nervously navigating my way to her.
“She got lost after getting off of the highway, so she drove north and just…didn’t stop,” I cackle.
“I had to explain, to the woman who helped teach me how to drive, that you don’t go north when you’re lost, you find it.
” My fingers wrap tightly around the metal, bouncing it in my grip as my laughter ebbs.
“So you going with the North Star of all things is just…it’s one of those things, isn’t it? ”
Every one of her features soften as she looks up at me, a wan smile pulling across her lips.
“I’m glad you talk about them,” she tells me. “Whenever you miss them or wish that they were here for something. I’m glad you share them with us.”
“You can talk about him, too.”
Her fingers follow the angle of my chin, pointing toward the small gemstone secured to the dainty chain around her neck. After offering it a loving stroke of her finger, her hands find their way to my jaw and she closes the distance between us with a soft kiss.
Birthdays have never been that big a deal to me. Sure, I’ll go out and have a few drinks, and I always make sure that I get my birthday sex, but I don’t remember waking up and feeling any different. I don’t remember waking up on a birthday and feeling special.
Maybe it’s because I was too busy with my sister. Maybe, in some darker corner of the universe, it’s because no one’s ever really cared that much.
I think this year is the start of that changing.