Chapter Thirty-Four
Family Dinner
Winnie
Banks has faced down two-hundred-fifty-pound men for a living. He once played seventeen minutes with a cracked rib and didn’t tell anyone until after the final buzzer. He is, objectively, one of the most physically intimidating people I’ve ever met.
He is currently fixing his collar in the visor mirror of my car and has checked it four times in the last two minutes.
“You look good,” I tell him.
“If you say so.”
“You look great. My mom is going to love you.”
“What about your dad?”
I pause just a half-second too long.
“Winnie.”
“He’s going to love you too. Eventually.”
Banks drops the visor. “Eventually.”
“He’s just—he’s protective. Derek really did a number on all of us, not just me. My dad took it personally.” I reach over and straighten his collar for him, which was already straight. “Just be yourself.”
“That’s terrible advice.”
“I’m serious. You’re sweet. Charming.”
“I’m not charming.”
“You’re charming with me,” I point out.
“You’re different.”
I look at him. He’s staring through the windshield at my parents’ front door like he’s calculating exit strategies, jaw tight, and I have a very sudden, very clear idea.
“Hey.” I put my hand on his jaw and turn his face toward mine. “Look at me.”
He looks.
I kiss him. Not a quick good luck kiss—a real one, slow and deliberate, my fingers curling into his hair, and I feel him go from rigid to something looser, his hand coming up to my face without thinking about it.
When I pull back, his eyes are a little unfocused.
“There,” I say. “Better?”
“That’s—” He blinks. “That was manipulative.”
“Did it work?”
He pauses, still slightly thrown off. “Yeah.”
I grin. I knew it would. We haven’t taken the quiz, but I’m pretty sure his love language is physical touch.
It seems to calm him. Every time, without fail.
“Then let’s go.” I’m already opening my door.
“And Banks? Whatever you do, do not mention hockey to my dad in the first ten minutes. Let him bring it up.”
“Why would I mention—”
“He’s going to try to rattle you. Just let him talk.”
Banks gets out of the car. Over the roof, he looks at me. “You’re really not selling this.”
“I’m preparing you. There’s a difference.” I round the hood and take his hand. His fingers close around mine immediately, tightly. “You’re one of the toughest NHL players on the ice. You can handle dinner with my parents.”
“Right. Yeah. Fine.” He squeezes my hand once. “Let’s go.”
Banks
Her mother opens the door before we even knock.
I see where Winnie gets it—the blue eyes, the warmth, the way she smiles like she already likes you. She pulls Winnie into a hug first, then turns to me, and I brace for the handshake, the polite-but-measuring look, the standard meet-the-boyfriend routine.
Instead, she hugs me too.
I stand there for a second with my arms at my sides like an absolute idiot before I remember how hugs work and put them around her.
“We’ve heard so much about you,” she says, pulling back, beaming. “I’m Carol. Come in, come in — dinner’s almost ready. Gary’s in the living room.”
Gary.
Right. She might as well have just told me there’s a dragon in the living room.
The living room is warm and comfortable, the walls covered in framed photos.
No dragon. I catch a glimpse of Winnie at maybe seven or eight, gap-toothed and grinning on a beach somewhere, and I want to stop and look at it, but I don’t have time because Gary is standing up from his armchair, and he is not small.
Not as tall as me, but solid. The build of a man who was probably an athlete thirty years ago. He’s got Winnie’s coloring and the eyes of a man who is currently running some kind of internal calculation.
He shakes my hand. Firm. Holds it a beat longer than necessary.
“Banks,” he says.
“Mr. Garrett. Good to meet you.”
He looks at me. I look back. Winnie, beside me, is very still in the way of someone who’s watching something that could go several directions. Haywire being one of them.
“Sit down,” he says.
We sit.
Carol disappears into the kitchen. Winnie follows to help, which — I clock that, I clock her leaving me here, and I give her a look over my shoulder that I hope communicates traitor, and she gives me a tiny smile that communicates you’re fine, and then she’s gone.
Gary leans back in his chair. “So. Hockey.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How long you been playing?”
“Since I was six.”
“Where’d you grow up?”
I keep my voice even. “Different places. I was in the foster system. Moved around a lot.”
Something shifts in his expression, just briefly. He hadn’t been expecting that. He recalibrates. “Hockey kept you out of trouble?”
“Hockey kept me sane.” I pause. “I didn’t always stay out of trouble.”
He looks at me for a long moment. “At least you’re honest.”
“I try to be.”
“Derek wasn’t honest.” He says it flatly, watching for my reaction. “You know about Derek?”
“I know enough.”
“He hurt my daughter.”
“I know that too.”
“And?”
I meet his eyes. “And I’m not him.”
Gary is quiet. The clock on the mantle ticks. From the kitchen, I can hear Carol asking Winnie something about the salad and Winnie’s laugh, bright and easy, and I feel my shoulders drop a fraction just from the sound of it.
Gary notices. His eyes move from me toward the kitchen and back.
“She laughs more,” he says, almost like he’s saying it to himself as much as to me.
I don’t answer that. Feels like something I’d mess up if I tried to put words to it.
“She tell you she used to call us every Sunday?” he continues. “Like clockwork, every Sunday at six. Stopped for a while there. When things were bad with Derek.” He looks at his hands. “She didn’t want us to worry.”
“That sounds like her.”
“Started again about four months ago.” He looks up. “Calling on Sundays.”
I hold his gaze. I know what he’s telling me. I know what he’s not saying out loud.
“Good,” I say.
He nods once.
Winnie appears in the doorway. “Dinner’s ready.” She looks between us, trying to read the room. “Everything okay?”
“Fine,” her dad says, and pushes up from his chair. He claps me on the shoulder as he passes—once, solid—and heads for the dining room.
Winnie stares at me. What just happened? her face says.
I have no idea, I try to communicate back.
She grabs my hand and squeezes.
Dinner is Carol’s territory, which means it’s warm and loud and full of stories I wasn’t prepared for—Winnie at ten, convinced she could train the neighbor’s cat to do yoga with her. Winnie at sixteen, writing strongly-worded letters to the school board about their PE curriculum.
“She actually sent them,” Carol says, delighted. “Three letters. They changed the curriculum.”
“Of course they did,” I say.
Winnie points at me. “Do not encourage her.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Banks.” She kicks me under the table.
I suppress a grin.
Carol sets down the bread basket and looks at me with the focus of a woman who has decided something.
“How tall are you exactly?”
I glance at Winnie. “Six-four.”
“Six-four.” She nods slowly, like she’s filing it away. “And you weigh—”
“Mom.”
“Two-twenty-five,” I say.
“Two-twenty-five.” She sits back. “Winnie, how do you even—” She stops. Waves her hand. “Never mind.”
Nobody moves.
“Carol,” Gary says.
“I’m just observing. He’s a large person.” She picks up her fork like she didn’t just detonate something at the dinner table. “You’re very handsome too. I’m sure people tell you that constantly.”
They do not tell me that constantly. I become very interested in my plate.
“Mom, oh my God—”
“What? Gary, isn’t he handsome?”
Gary looks like he’s considering faking a medical emergency. He’s not the only one. I’m pretty sure I forget how to chew.
“I’m just making conversation,” Carol says pleasantly. “Can I just say something?”
“Mom—”
“I’m just going to say it.” She looks at me, then at Winnie, then back at me. “You two are going to make very beautiful babies.”
Winnie puts her fork down.
“Carol,” Gary warns again.
“I’m serious. Look at him.” She gestures at me like I’m a feature at an open house. “It would be a shame to waste those genes.”
I have no response to this, so I pick up my water glass and chug it. The whole thing.
“The only concern,” Carol continues, tilting her head, “is the size.”
“The size,” Winnie repeats flatly, eyes widening.
“Well, sweetheart. He’s very…” She waves her hand in my general direction. “A lot. And you’re not exactly—” Another wave, this time at Winnie. “So that’s just something to think about. For the future. Medically speaking.”
The table is very quiet.
“I’m in the medical field,” Carol adds, as if that explains it.
“You’re a dental hygienist,” Winnie says.
She picks up her fork, unbothered. “I just want to say—epidurals have come a long way. So there’s that.”
I look at Gary. Gary looks at the wall. There is absolutely no help coming from that direction.
Winnie turns to me. Her face is a color I haven’t seen before.
“I’m so sorry,” she says.
“Don’t apologize for me,” Carol says. “I’m coming from a place of love.” She pats my hand. “You’ll be a wonderful father. You have very kind eyes.”
I open my mouth. Close it.
“Thank you,” I manage, even though my voice sounds strangled.
She beams and passes me the rolls. Gary makes a sound into his napkin that he quickly covers with a cough. And Winnie is staring at her plate with the focused intensity of a woman who is considering a new identity in a different city.
I nudge her foot under the table.
She nudges back, hard.
Gary is quiet through most of it, eating, listening.
But he doesn’t look angry, only resigned.
And when Carol brings out dessert and Winnie protests that she said she’d bring dessert and Carol waves her off, Gary catches my eye across the table and tips his head toward his daughter with an expression I recognize—exhausted, fond, what are you going to do.
It’s the look of someone who loves a person completely and finds them slightly overwhelming.
I know that look. I wear that look.
He sees me recognize it, and the corner of his mouth moves.
It’s not a smile, but it’s close enough.
We say goodbye on the front porch, Carol hugging us both again, Gary shaking my hand. Firm, same as before—but shorter this time. Less of a test.
“Drive safe,” he says.
“Yes, sir.”
He looks at me one more time. “She calls on Sundays,” he says. “Keep it that way.”
“Yes, sir,” I say again.
He nods. Goes inside.
Winnie loops her arm through mine as we walk to the car, leaning her head against my shoulder. “Well?”
“Your mom is wonderful.”
“And my dad?”
I think about the clock ticking, the kitchen laugh, she laughs more.
“He loves you,” I say. “That’s the whole thing. That’s all he is.”
She’s quiet for a second. “He shook your hand differently when we left. I noticed.”
“Did you?”
“What did you two talk about while I was helping with the salad?”
“Nothing important.”
“Banks.”
I open her car door. “Get in, Win.”
She looks at me for a moment, then gets in, and I round the car and climb inside, and she’s still looking at me.
We’re two blocks away when she loses it.
Full, helpless laughter, the kind she’d been swallowing since the bread basket, and now it’s just pouring out of her, and she’s covering her mouth with both hands like that’s going to help.
“Go ahead,” I say.
“I’m not—I can’t—” She dissolves again. “She brought up epidurals, Banks. The first time she met you.”
“I was there.”
“Medically speaking.”
“Winnie.”
“She’s a dental hygienist!”
I keep my eyes on the road and say nothing because there’s nothing to say.
Carol Garrett looked me dead in the face over the dinner rolls and told me my genes shouldn’t go to waste, and the worst part—the actual worst part—is that I didn’t disagree.
I’ve been sitting with that for the last twenty minutes, and I still don’t disagree.
“She’s not wrong,” I say.
That stops the laughing.
“About which part?” Winnie asks carefully.
“The beautiful part.” I don’t look at her. “Our babies would be—yeah.”
The car gets quiet. Not uncomfortable, just—still. The kind of still that happens when a conversation becomes something neither of you planned for.
“Our babies?” she says.
I shrug.
There’s a beat of silence before Winnie turns to me fully. “Do you actually want that? Kids?”
I think about the version of me who kept that door closed. I don’t really recognize him anymore. “Yeah,” I say. “I do.”
“How many?”
“Four. Maybe five.”
“What?”
“You asked.”
“Banks, that’s a lot of children.”
“It’s a family,” I say, and it comes out simpler than I meant it to, stripped down to exactly what it is. “I never had one. I’ve wanted one my whole life, I just—” I shrug. “Didn’t think it was actually going to happen for me.”
She’s quiet for long enough that I glance over. She’s watching me with that expression she gets, the open one, the one she doesn’t try to hide anymore.
Her eyes are glassy. “I want kids too,” she says. “Not four or five, because dear God—”
“We can negotiate. That was my starting position. I’m prepared to come down.”
“To what, three?”
“Three might be reasonable.” I put my hand over hers on the console. “We’ve got time.”
She turns her hand over and laces her fingers through mine. “My mom is going to be insufferable when she finds out you want a big family.”
“Your mom is already insufferable.”
“She really liked you.”
“I know. It was alarming.” I squeeze her hand. “I liked her too.”
Winnie laughs, quiet this time, and leans her head back against the seat. “Four or five,” she says, like she’s still processing it. “You want a whole house full of kids.”
“I want a whole house full of our kids.” I say it and mean it and don’t take it back. “There’s a difference.”
She doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then she lifts our joined hands and presses her mouth to my knuckles. I feel it in my chest, that warm, solid thing that didn’t exist in my life a year ago, and now I can’t imagine being without.