Chapter 36
Chapter Thirty-Six
Devon
Tara is more excited about Jeff coming to dinner than she was about her own engagement.
Which says a lot considering the way she and Marcello sparkle when they’re together.
She’s dancing around, filling my prosecco glass after every sip, smiling like a lunatic while my mother works on the spaghetti squash that survived the massacre the deer unleashed on the garden last night.
Believe it or not, the screeching chickens, a five-foot fence, and an overweight golden retriever are not enough to deter the greedy beasties.
But my mom barely batted a lash when she noticed the pumpkin entrails spread across the soil this morning, murmuring something about the circle of life to me as I left for school.
Apparently, we were having a Mufasa/Simba moment while I wiped at the coffee I spilled on my jeans—a daily, unpreventable mishap.
“Top off!” Tara sings as she pours me more bubbly.
I stare up at her.
“You need to calm down.”
She touches my shoulder. Her nails are painted a striking shade of navy with a blush half-moon along the bottom cuticle. No chips. I look at my fingers and make a note to take off the remnants of last month’s polish. Woman-ing is hard.
“Do I?” she asks, sinking back into her seat.
I lift my brows and she waves my advice away.
She really does need to calm down. She’s been begging me for details all afternoon, stealing the two hours of quiet I require on Fridays after school to recharge.
I love her to death, but this school year is a pile of shit, with Principal Dickhead and his inability to stand up for what’s right and another week of watching Jessica fade away without any response from her mother, madam school-board president.
On top of that, rumors have begun to circulate about my legendary defiance of admin’s orders to take my posters down.
God knows who leaked that little tidbit, because I certainly didn’t.
And I know my favorite guidance counselor, Elizabeth Stanton, didn’t.
“I’m just saying—don’t make a bigger deal of this than it is,” I tell her again.
She flicks her wrist, shooing my concerns into the ether. She makes a noise with her teeth that makes me want to lick my finger and smear her perfect eyeliner.
“Are you still pretending this is just sex? Jesus, Devon. I’ve seen the way—”
Saved by the bell. The ring echoes around us. Tara and I both stand, exchange a look, and take off for the door like we are eight again, pushing and grabbing at each other to get there first.
“Devon! No hair,” she hollers when I grab a curl. Brutus is barking from where he lies in the kitchen and my mom is yelling for us to grow up.
“I didn’t want to touch the designer silk,” I laugh, using my ass to block her as I twist the doorknob and pull open the door letting a rush of cold air into the house.
The late afternoon sun hovers just above the tree line.
Its light frames Jeff like a paper cutout, his wide shoulders blocking the pinks and purples stretching across the sky behind him.
When I blink hard, my eyes focus on his warm and easy smile, the one that makes me feel like I’ve just won the lottery.
He looks so natural on my mom’s welcome mat.
Like he grew up next door. And came to dinner every Sunday.
“You two ok?” he asks with a laugh, and I feel Tara still pulling on the hood of my sweatshirt while I stick my ass out to keep her back—box her out like I’m LeBron.
“Why wouldn’t we be?” I ask.
Tara ducks under my arms to give him a hug. My hug. I look on helplessly while she tugs him past me, his eyes bright as he kisses my head on the brush past, into the kitchen where my mom greets him and takes the bakery box and bottle of red wine out of his hands.
“You know, Jeff. You don’t need to keep bringing dessert,” my mom ensures him.
“Yeah he does,” I say. Jeff winks over my mother’s head. The cupcakes are a living, breathing part of our relationship at this point. Jeff enjoys me eating them. I enjoy me eating them. Win win.
“Beer?” I ask him on my way to the fridge.
“Please,” he says, before asking my mom if she needs help. She shoos him away and he takes a seat beside Tara at the table. Brutus immediately shuffles over and falls onto his feet with a harumph.
Tara is in full swing by the time the poor guy can crack open the lager.
“So, obviously I have a rigorous interview process for anyone who dates my sister,” Tara says, her voice low like I’m not standing right behind Jeff as she talks to him.
“Oooh, careful with the d-word. She’s got rules,” Jeff says with a crooked grin my way.
“Can we not?” I say, giving Tara a look as I make my way to my seat.
Tara ignores me.
“But then she told me you and she were just—” She steeples her fingers together and taps a few times, her brows waggling suggestively.
“Building a teepee?” I ask.
She ignores me again.
“Which by the way lost me and Kev a hundred bucks each—”
“You bet on your sister’s sex life?” my mom asks from where she’s chopping.
That’s right, Mom, you tell her.
“And you didn’t think to loop me in?” she adds.
What the—?
“Next time, Ma. Anyway, Jeff, you pass inspection—based on the conversations you and I have had,” Tara finishes.
She gives Jeff a meaningful look, but he doesn’t see it because he’s watching me across the table, his lips pressed together while his eyes crinkle in the corner.
Is he enjoying Tara’s blindness to boundaries?
Or is he pleading for me to make it stop?
I would try to help, but now I’m curious.
“What conversations?” I probe.
He lets out a breath and my sister turns to me like she’s just realized I’m at the table.
“Private conversations.” She tips the dregs of the prosecco bottle into my already full flute. I have to bend over the table and sip it so that it doesn’t overflow.
“Mmmhmmm. Private. It’s funny how you define private, T,” I murmur.
“Tara basically pointed out the fact that I was infatuated with you long before you became—available to me,” Jeff says.
I feel that little hiccup in my heart that he keeps giving me every time he says something sweet or looks at me like this—like I’m a gift.
“Infatuated, eh?” I carefully lift my drink to my mouth.
Jeff just lifts a brow in response. I’ll take infatuated. Even if it does feel a little temporary. I’m sure he’s not analyzing his vocab choices right now with my mom buzzing around us like a thirsty mosquito.
“Jeff, dear, do you like mushrooms?” my mom asks, putting her fingers on Jeff’s shoulder. His shoulders are my new favorite. They’re firm like a melon rind and there’s a sharp dip between his blade that I like to trail my nails—
“Devonnnn,” my mom drags out my name like she’s been calling it for several minutes.
“What?”
“Can you go grab some mushrooms from the log?”
Mushrooms. Log. Got it.
I stand and tell Tara to be good. Then grab a knife and head outside toward the shiitake mushroom log I’d ordered from Terrain last year.
The deer luckily can’t get into the makeshift greenhouse my mom crafted on the deck.
As I cut the stems flush against the log trying not to let my shivering cause a slip and finger loss, I watch Tara and Jeff through the window.
She’s talking excitedly with her hands in a way that makes me think she’ll fit right into her new home in Milan.
The countdown to her departure has been a bittersweet murmur I hear every so often beneath the laughter and other sounds that Jeff and I have been making these last few weeks.
If I weren’t three hundred percent sure that Marcello is going to work his ass off to make her happy, this ache would be a hell of a lot worse.
But watching her fingers flutter through the air while Jeff’s deep laugh reaches me through the thick glass reminds me that Tara wasn’t made to stay still.
She’s supposed to be out there. Working her magic on the world. While I grow fungus in a log with Mom.
By the time I arrive back at the table, Tara has slid her chair closer to Jeff and is looking at pictures of his niece, Sammy, sitting atop a huge Clydesdale.
I’ve had the pleasure of talking to her quite a few times in the past weeks as she frequently calls Jeff to sneakily report the goings on out West. Though her intel isn’t exactly trustworthy, since she told us last weekend that Grandma had gotten a check for a million dollars in the mail and she believed her mother had a date with John Stamos.
Sammy has a tendency to hear what she wants to hear, coupled with a superb imagination.
Either way, while listening to Jeff’s conversations with her as she hid in the coat closet from Jenny, who was obviously avoiding his calls at all costs, it became very apparent that Sammy and Jeff are close.
And that he adores her. Which in turn makes him more adorable.
“She’s so beautiful, Jeff,” my sister tells him.
“Thanks,” he says, smiling at the screen.
He misses his family. He doesn’t try to hide it. In fact, he tells me quite often.
“I’d love to have a niece,” she says wistfully while I snort the prosecco that’s risen into my sinus cavity. Jeff laughs as my eyes tear up and my mother does a mediocre job of coming to my rescue.
“Are you going home next weekend for Thanksgiving, Jeff?” my mom asks from across the kitchen island.
Jeff presses his screen blank and looks up at me. His face is open, but unreadable.
“I’m not sure if I can,” he says simply.