Chapter 24
“Holy fuck, Bubble, whose car is that?” Who the fuck is Bubble?
Bubble, I realized approximately three point six seconds later, is my EPA.
Sabrina Broe, rhymes with snow, is known affectionately as Bubble, rhymes with trouble.
She’s greeted warmly by every person in the yard and inside the house, no exceptions.
A baby materializes from nowhere and is thrust into her arms, but not before a hairy horse comes galloping toward us, minus the saddle and rider.
“Oh, Jesus, sorry. Wait. Hey, can somebody grab the dog?” Bri yells before making tentative steps inside the house while holding the screen door open with her hip and toting a baby on the other.
She flicks the ends of her hair out of the grabby child’s fists while adjusting the fall décor on the door.
I’ve always known the woman can multitask. Now I understand why. It’s a circus.
“And who is this exquisite specimen then?” A woman steps forward, wiping her hands on faded jeans. She has the same dark hair as Bri, with a mix of softer browns and the beginning of some temple grays.
“Mom, this is Mason. Mason, this is my mom, Molly.” Molly reaches for me, but instead of holding out her hand in greeting, pulls me into her for an embrace so fierce it could double as a vice. She’s shorter than Bri by a couple of inches, but just as robust.
“Oooohhhh, Mason is magnificent,” croons another voice, an almost clone of Molly Broe.
“Fuck, Aunt Maeve. Don’t go scaring Bubble’s date.”
People descend on us like farm animals to a feed trough. This horse-dog keeps sniffing my crotch and the baby, having given up on Bri’s/Bubble’s hair, now reaches for my jacket.
“Fuck, don’t let the dog out. Chippy! Where is Chippy?
Bubble, have you seen Chippy? He was just here.
” She might as well be speaking a foreign language.
If Bubble is Sabrina, and we will be getting to the bottom of that later, is Chippy the guy at the door, the one who yelled at Aunt Maeve?
Chippy must be the brother, okay, now we’re getting somewhere.
“Bubble?” My brow arches as the smirk breaks free.
“Ugh, I’ll explain later.” A hint of blush coats the apples of her cheeks.
“Oh, yes, you will.”
“Oh my God, look at that bracelet; it almost looks real! Glyndon come see this.”
We are smooshed down a hall to the side of a sitting room overflowing with beanbags and cushions, toy cars and spilled chips the dog hasn’t noticed yet because it’s attached to my groin.
Shoo! The walls heave under a collage of framed photographs.
There must be over fifty. Family pictures of seven of them standing in front of a beat-up old truck in a paddock somewhere.
There’s a cluster of five photographs displayed in a frame with seashells, depicting tiny Broe children with plastic toys and sandcastles.
Another is a shot of all boys in hockey gear on a frozen pond with a goal fashioned from pipe and some kind of orange netting.
These are snapshots of joy. Camping, snow days, and beach castles.
Three kids, four kids, and shots of all six.
The younger daughter is the spitting image of Sabrina, with shorter hair and a shy smile.
She has terrible hairstyles in the earlier photos, or is that Sabrina?
I don’t want to move from this time capsule of made memories and a family that enjoyed spending time with each other.
These walls are as foreign as their language.
“Bri, we need to call Trys and get him over here. He would love this!” I take in the chaotic scene, the dog hair sticking to everything but the horse dog with its nose still hovering near my crotch.
“Um, sure.” Her hesitation is surprising.
“Tell him to ditch his contacts and wear those glasses.” She nods.
Is she trying to keep her worlds so separate that she’s uncomfortable with even me being present?
Trystan’s remaining family would vie with mine for the biggest assholes in existence, hence his refusal of the earlier invitation to Greenwich.
But this scene, this spontaneous sitcom would warm the cockles of his cavernous, rusty heart.
“I’ll pay for the extra food. I… I just think that he needs something like this.”
“Hey, Molly, can you feed us two, and one more?” Bri asks as a hint of a grin curls her plump lips.
“There is always a place for one more at our table, Bubble, you know that. But if you be calling me Molly again, you’ll be doing the dishes and cleaning the fucking toilets for a week. Toilets used by all the boys, you hear me. I didn’t birth six fucking kids to not earn me the title of Mom.”
Twenty-six people are jammed around a table, most of whom talk over each other and get progressively louder to get their point across.
Um, well, yeah, this wasn’t on my calendar this year, either.
And it’s not a table per se; it’s two scratched, old doors bolted together, balancing on what I believe must be the actual dining table.
It’s safe to say that family Broe is synonymous with spontaneity, not spite.
Unlike the clusterfuck earlier in the day, this house is filled with happiness, memories and…
love. They’re all loud as fuck, talking a million miles an hour in thick accents I don't always catch. But they’re real.
Even the repurposed wooden doors make do for a situation where turning people away, or segregating some families from others, was never an option.
These people don’t discriminate; they champion.
Children presenting for food are met with warm smiles and a tousling of hair.
Others are dragged onto vacant laps, the beginning of juvenile conversation, something beautiful to watch.
The kids are not shunned or discouraged.
No, here they are revered and embraced. Something I don’t experience as a fully grown adult, much less a toddler.
My cell buzzes in my pocket. Before I can fish it out, Bri snatches it from my grasp and banishes it to her lap under the table.
“What the?” the room collectively gasps.
“Molly doesn’t allow phones at the table. She’s big on face to face, present conversations. She’s also not a woman you want to see angry,” comes a voice from my right.
Bri tilts the screen to an angle where she can read the message. Trystan’s message.
Trystan
I’m here. Is this address correct? I’m going to get jumped, I just know it.
Bri offloads another younger baby into my arms, cargo I was unprepared for.
While she now has two hands free to text Trystan back, telling him to come to the door and she’ll be right there, I’m looking down at an actual sleeping baby.
Sleeping, yes, but silent, no. This warm, wriggly mass is emitting the kind of noises I was not prepared for.
“He just ate,” says a kind-faced woman on the other side of Bri, who I think may be the mother.
Does she want to reclaim her spawn? I don’t do babies, lady.
I don’t do children either, really. I lived, from a respectable distance, what Nic and Fraze had to go through with Ava and Ramsey, and wondered where they found the well of strength to draw on in those uncertain times.
Not just days or weeks either; these were months of agony and uncertainty.
Plastering my best helpless, please take this squirmy individual back, face on, Bri ignores me completely.
She extricates herself from the table, not before placing a soft kiss on the baby’s downy head and moves toward the entry door.
She has saddled me with a tiny human and abandoned ship in less than a minute. Nice!
The woman on the other side of Bri, whose name I didn’t catch, doesn’t swoop in either.
She stabs at her carrots with a fork, scooping the discs in turn before downing them all with a hefty sip of white wine.
Someone must want this kid. Someone, anyone?
The guy to my right is inhaling slices of roast meat as if he’s coming off a fast. I doubt he’ll put down his utensils to cradle a newborn.
He’s barely slowing to masticate. Trystan emerges from the narrow hallway with Bri on his heels, right as the baby jolts.
His eyes, like saucers, grow impossibly wider when the infant lurches, jolts, and then throws up geyser-style what must have been four gallons of partially digested, sour-smelling milk. All over me. Fuck!