“See?” I say as I turn back to face Carter. “He can already use a word in a sentence.”
“Okay, stop. Take a deep breath. Of course I think you’re a nice person. I think you’re an amazing person. But I think we all know that you are not a Stepford Wife and Gavin isn’t conjugating French verbs while listening to Mozart.”
“MY WIENER EXPLODED!”
Carter drops his arms from my waist, and I jump around in horror at Gavin’s scream.
“Never mind. I just spillded milk on it. I have a milk wiener now.”
I shake my head and turn back to face Carter.
“I rest my case,” he says with a laugh.
I frown and try to act indignant but Carter can see the wheels turning in my head and cuts me off.
“I love both of you exactly the way you are. I love that you have no filter, and I adore that Gavin can make grown men cry. There is not one thing I would change about either one of you, and if anyone doesn’t like it, they can kiss my ass. You guys are my life and my family now. Nothing else matters.”
Carter bends down and presses a soft kiss to my lips and pulls me tighter against him. His words push aside some of my fears about his family, but it doesn’t change the fact that I still want to try again with them. I plan on spending a very long time with this man. I'm still not sold on the whole marriage thing, but I still want him in my life forever, which means I needed to find a way to get on his parents' good side one way or another. If I have to get them drunk, so be it.
“Thank you. But I still want to have your parents over for dinner. I want to at least show them I can act like an adult most of the time.”
10. Ceiling Fan Baseball
“Oh my God! You guys are doing it all wrong. Obviously we need to go over these rules one more time. The dinner roll needs to be thrown under hand at the ceiling fan. That’s the only way you’ll get the arc you need for a good pitch. We’re not going for speed, people. We’re going for accuracy. Someone pop another batch in the oven so we can start the third inning for fuck’s sake!”
After my mother finishes her explanation, she hefts the wooden cutting board up to her shoulder by the handle and readies herself for the pitch.
“Carter, if you bend over like that in front of me again, I might have to grab that sweet little tush of yours and call your mother and thank her.”
I’ll toast to that.
I raise my wine glass in the air for a toast while Drew does a couple of practice throws.
“I got this one, Mom. Dear Mrs. Ellis, thank you for pushing Carter out of your vagina and having such good genes that he has the most perfect ass I’ve ever seen,” I say with a snort and a wink in Carter’s direction.
“Um, thank you?”
My eyes go wide and with my wine glass still held above my head. I turn around slowly and find Carter’s parents standing in the dining room doorway looking around at the scene in front of them in shock and awe...but mostly shock.
In hindsight, I should have known better than to listen to anything my mother suggests. Carter’s parents had canceled coming to dinner at the last minute because his father was feeling under the weather. How was I supposed to know they would just show up an hour after dinner was over only to find me talking about her vagina, her son naked from the waist up with his shirt tied around his forehead, my dad sitting in the far corner of the room with a bowl of mashed potatoes in his lap, Drew wearing an apron that said, “I didn’t wash my hands before I fondled your meat,” and Liz and Jenny crawling on all fours around the kitchen table, eating the broken pieces of dinner rolls off of the floor and giggling.
From now on when my mom says, “Beating a dead horse around a bush during a blue moon won’t fix anything,” I’m going to plug my ears and walk away.
Two hours earlier
“Does it make me a bad person if I feel really bad that your dad doesn’t feel well, but feel even worse for myself because I did all this work and now they won’t see it?”
Carter laughs and uncorks a bottle of wine.
“I still can’t believe you thought their anniversary was the perfect day to have my parents over for dinner.”
He pours me a glass of wine as I slide on oven mitts and pull the roast out of the oven.
“Daddy, I wanna help cook the food. What can I make?” Gavin asks as he comes bounding into the kitchen.
“Well, I think Mommy’s got everything just about done. How about you take people’s coats as they come in the door?”
The doorbell rings and Gavin, happy with the chore he has just been given, scampers off to see who is here.