The phrase kept repeating itself in Asa’s head as he stood outside his sister’s door with Lauren, waiting to ring the doorbell.
He blamed sex with Lauren. Well, blame was the wrong word, but being with her had given him such a rush of euphoria, of bravery, that he’d let his guard down. It had scrambled his brain, or maybe it was more accurate to say it had unscrambled it. Suddenly it had seemed possible, not that his family would’ve magically changed, but that he’d be strong enough to withstand it when they hadn’t. And at the very least, he wouldn’t feel like he was running from it anymore.
But now they were standing there, an hour and a half late, empty-handed. Lauren looked Audrey Hepburn pretty in a black dress with a pale pink cardigan, her hair in a French braid that had blown his mind to watch her do herself. Meanwhile, he was still dressed in his rumpled clothes from the night before, because there hadn’t been time to stop at his apartment to change. He’d rolled the sleeves down over his tattoos, and kept messing with the buttons at the cuffs, unused to the feeling of having fabric loosely circling his wrists.
“Do I smell okay?” he asked.
Lauren pressed her nose to his shoulder, taking a deep inhale before letting it out on a little sigh. “You still smell amazing,” she said. “It’s honestly obscene.”
“Maybe it’s better if we don’t go,” he said. “I’ll visit her after she has the baby. I’d always planned to do that, anyway.”
Her gaze was calm and steady on his face. “Whatever you want.”
Before he could talk himself out of it, he reached forward and pushed the doorbell with one finger, depressing it long enough to hear the tones ring out inside the house.
He didn’t recognize the woman who opened the door, and for a second he had the bleak, anxious thought, I haven’t seen my sister in so long I’ve forgotten what she even looks like. But then he realized that the woman wasn’t eight months pregnant, and was looking at him with a polite, if slightly quizzical smile. Of course. She must be a friend of Becca’s.
“Sorry we’re late,” he said. “I’m—”
“Oh my god, Asa?” His sister’s voice came from behind the woman, and before he could react, she’d enveloped him in a hug, her very convex belly making the embrace more awkward than it already was after the noticeable delay before he returned the gesture. When she finally pulled back, her gaze went immediately to his hair. He could tell she wanted to make a comment, but didn’t, so perhaps that was progress of a sort.
“This is Lauren,” he said, resting his hand briefly on the small of her back. He didn’t quite know how to introduce her—coworker laughably inadequate at this point, friend closer but still not enough, girlfriend a hopeful zap to his heart but not officially sanctioned—so he left it at her name. “Lauren, this is my sister Becca, and my future niece . . .”
He trailed off, realizing he didn’t even know what they planned to name the baby, if they had a name picked out at all.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Lauren said, reaching out to shake Becca’s hand but getting treated to a hug instead.
“I can’t believe you came,” Becca said, ushering them both in and shutting the door behind him. “I mean, obviously I’m glad you did. We just finished eating, but there’s lots more in the kitchen, so help yourselves. We were just doing the gifts, so everyone’s in the den, if you wanted to . . .”
Asa couldn’t keep up with whatever his sister was asking him to do. She’d mentioned food, but was leading them right past it without pausing for them to fix plates, so he supposed they were meant to worry about that later. He hadn’t yet eaten and should be starving, but the idea of snacking on little appetizers while surrounded by his family and sister’s friends made his stomach twist. He’d forgotten that she’d be the kind of person who had a “den” now, in addition to the more formal living room they’d already stepped through at the front of the house. He couldn’t remember what her husband did, but it was something that clearly paid well, because he was willing to bet that most of their furniture had been sourced from actual stores instead of the side of the street.
When they entered the den, there were at least thirty people piled around the sectional and seated on wooden chairs that had been pulled over from the dining room, and every single pair of eyes immediately turned on him. Most people seemed to have an expression similar to the woman who’d answered the door, politely curious but welcoming, but Asa could only focus on the two people seated in the middle of the longest part of the couch.
His mother stood up, a shaky hand going to her mouth, while his dad stayed seated, his arms resting on his knees like he didn’t have a care in the world. God, they looked . . . older. Of course they did. But it still struck him—the gray in his father’s hair, the lines around his mother’s mouth. She was thinner than he remembered, but he didn’t know if that was the effects of time or memory. Probably both.
“This is my brother Asa,” Becca said, introducing him to the room with a bright smile. “The new uncle. And this is . . . I’m sorry, did you say Laura?”
“Lauren,” Asa bit out. Already he could feel himself getting defensive, ready to take any oblivious comment as a slight.
“Hi,” Lauren said to the group from next to him. “Congratulations on the baby. Madeline is a beautiful name.”
How the fuck did she know the name, when . . . Asa’s gaze caught on the banner hung up across one wall, realized there had been similar banners throughout their short journey through the house. Welcome, Madeline!!! Okay, so maybe his family didn’t have the corner on obliviousness.
“Oh!” an older woman seated on the armrest of the couch said, pointing directly at Lauren. “You can’t say that word!”
“They don’t have clothespins yet,” Becca said. “So that doesn’t count.” She turned to him, rolling her eyes in that private way she used to do across the dinner table when their dad was off on one of his lectures about living for God’s glory. It was the first time she looked like Becca, the impossibly cool older sister he remembered from childhood, and it socked him right in the gut.
Becca reached into a decorative dish on a side table, retrieving two clothespins, and handed them to Asa. “The idea is that you’re not allowed to say the b-word—you know, the kind of shower this is. If you do, someone can take your clothespin. If you catch someone else saying it, you can take theirs. The person with the most at the end gets a gift bag.” She gave him a conspiratorial smile. “It’s not much. A gift card and some nail polish.”
From the couch, his dad made a sound like a grunt. It could mean anything—was probably just him clearing his throat—but from the timing of it, Asa didn’t think so. He had an immediate flashback to the one time he’d painted his nails black in middle school, how quickly his mother had handed him the remover and told him to get rid of it. “You’ll be bullied,” she’d said. “I’m trying to protect you.”
And sure, there had been some snickers from kids in his class. But they hadn’t really bothered him as much as that look on his mother’s face, the way he knew even then that what she really meant was that she was trying to protect him from his dad.
Lauren took the clothespins from him, clipping one to her cardigan before clipping the other to the collar of his shirt. She leaned in, her mouth brushing his ear as she said, “Watch me clean up in this game.”
He snorted a laugh, the unexpectedness of it burning his nose. “So competitive,” he murmured, pulling her close to kiss her hair.
When he looked up, his mother was still standing, watching them with an expression of such raw pain that he had to glance around the room, blinking away the sudden sting at the corners of his eyes. There was a pile of wrapped presents in the corner by an empty wing chair, and he gestured vaguely over to it.