Grandpa sat next to Mom as usual, but this meant he was right across from us and used this position to glare at Briana. To her credit, she didn’t seem bothered.
“So, what do you do?” Mom asked Briana, passing her a plate of garlic bread.
“ER physician, like Jacob,” she said, taking two slices and passing it to me.
“You know, he didn’t always want to be a doctor,” Mom said. “He wanted to be a veterinarian.”
Briana looked at me. “I could see that. Why didn’t you?”
I passed the garlic bread to Jane. “I couldn’t deal with seeing abused or neglected animals.”
Briana laughed. “We just deal with abused and neglected humans instead.”
“There’s a little more recourse for it when they’re humans.”
She bobbed her head. “True.”
“And what do your parents do?” Dad asked her.
“Well, my dad left when I was eight. But my mom is a nurse. She’s retired. She immigrated here from El Salvador when she was eighteen.”
“Oh! Do you speak Spanish?” Dad asked.
It occurred to me that I didn’t know the answer. Briana was right. We hadn’t been ready.
Briana nodded. “Yeah. It was my first language.”
“Hmong was my first language,” Gwen said. “It was so hard in school.”
“I did okay,” Briana said, shrugging. “I think it was harder for my mom. She didn’t have any family here or anything.” Briana turned to Walter and nodded at his shirt. “Do you work with that rescue?”
“I own it.”
Briana beamed. “That’s awesome.”
“Yeah, we got almost thirty dogs right now. Springtime’s the worst.”
“I’ll make a donation. What’s your Venmo?” Briana asked, pulling out her phone.
Walter was directing her to the rescue’s website when Jafar started weaving through our feet under the table. He was talking to himself, reciting every bad word he knew, interlaced with the word Bieber. This was particularly horrifying, since, according to my sisters, that was my parents’ safe word. I prayed to God Briana didn’t ask about it.
You could feel him climbing over your toes. I knew exactly when he got to Briana’s because she made a little surprised squeak noise next to me.
“So do you have any baby pictures of Jacob?” Briana asked, trying visibly not to react to the parrot on her foot.
“Oh, lots,” Mom said, serving Grandpa. “I’ll show you after dinner. Wait until you see his third-grade Halloween costume. So cute.”
I internally groaned.
Briana was trying to seem interested in me, which I was certain she wasn’t. I felt bad she had to sit through this. I was not a good-looking kid. I was awkward and had acne. I didn’t hit puberty until I was fifteen.
I bet Briana was one of the cool kids in school. I couldn’t picture her ever having an awkward phase. She probably ruled her high school the same way she ruled the ER. Popular and well liked. Girls like that never talked to me—or maybe I was too afraid to talk to them.
Not much had changed.
“So what was Jacob like when he was young?” Briana asked Mom, twisting her pasta around her fork.
“Oh, he was such a good little boy,” Mom said, putting salad on her plate. “So self-contained, even at a young age. He could play by himself for hours. He loved to be held—a very sensitive child. Couldn’t stand tags on his clothes or wet hair. Do you remember that, Greg? He couldn’t wear anything scratchy.”
Dad nodded. “Yeah. I had to buy the underwear that didn’t have a label in it, or he’d take them off and run around naked.”
Jewel laughed. “I just remember him pooping his pants at school.”
“Jewel!” Jill snapped.
I shot Jewel a look.
She rolled her eyes. “What? It was like twenty-five years ago. Get over it.”
“It only happened like eight or nine times,” Jill said. “You make it sound like he did it every day.”
“You guys…” Jane said, looking embarrassed for me.
I flushed and Briana took an extra-long swallow of wine next to me.
“He had a nervous stomach,” Mom explained. “He was always in the nurse’s office, poor thing. It made him a little hard to potty train. But such a sweet boy, truly.”
Jafar shrieked “BIEBER!!!” from under the table at the top of his lungs, and everyone started tittering.
Between this, tagless underwear, and the grade-school diarrhea story, I wanted to curl up and vanish. It was like my family had a competition going for who could embarrass me the most, and even the parrot was in on it.
Lieutenant Dan got up from where he was lying next to me and put his head in my lap. But when I went to pet him, Briana’s hand came down on top of mine and gave me a reassuring squeeze. My heart jumped the way it had in Dad’s taxidermy room.
I glanced at her, and she smiled gently at me.
“You know,” she said, turning back to the table. “I read this study that said highly intelligent children are harder to potty train.”
Jewel seemed to think about this. “Yeah. I could see that. He’s pretty fucking smart.”
Jill nodded. “Totally.”
“I used to tell my friends that my older brother was a genius,” Jane said. “He’s like, the smartest person I know. Didn’t he skip a grade?”
“Yup,” Dad said. “And breezed through med school.”
Briana squeezed my hand again. I let a small smile crack. My parents shared some sort of private look that I couldn’t interpret from across the table.
An hour later, the night was over. Mom put Briana through only one photo album. I managed to work our catchphrase into the conversation when Mom passed Briana the Edible Arrangement at dessert and it had cantaloupe on it. I blurted, “Not on my watch!” before diving for the fruit like it was going to jump up and bite her. That was my grand awkward finale of the night.
After that, Briana made good on the promise of giving me a break and announced she had to get home to feed the cat so we could leave.
They all hugged her on the way out. They seemed to really like her, which I knew they would. So we pulled it off. At least today we did.
And I wondered how much she regretted agreeing to this…
Chapter 20
Briana
It was almost ten-thirty when Jacob walked me to my door.
“Well, that was a nightmare,” he said, slipping his hands in his pockets. “Thanks for sticking it out.”
“What?” I said, digging in my purse for my keys. “I had so much fun. And I think we did pretty well. I mean, the phrase drop was a little rough.” I pulled out my keys and turned to him. “I think you could work on your transition next time, but I still gave it a solid six out of ten.”
He looked amused.
“Also, those Halloween pictures of you were so cute. I can’t believe you were a mermaid.”
“A mer-man,” he said with mock seriousness. “I was a mer-man.”
I laughed and it made him laugh and his eyes wrinkled at the corners. I liked it when he loosened up. He seemed lighter now that the whole thing was over. He had that relieved, saved-from-a-near-death-experience thing about him.
“Thanks for the potty-training thing,” he said. “Making fun of me is part of the family initiation process, apparently.”