He can feel Mae watching him with amusement, but he doesn’t look at her, because if he does, he knows he’ll be distracted by how she purses her lips when she’s thinking about something, or how the dress she’s wearing today—a yellow so sunny that he can’t stop looking at it—inches up when she sits down, and how even though she’s so much shorter than he is, her legs somehow seem to go on forever in it.
“Have you ever been?” he asks the sisters, who both laugh.
“No, we’ve neverbean,” Karen says, mimicking his accent. “But maybe one day. I’d sure like to see that castle. What’s it called? The one where the queen lives.”
“Buckingham Palace,” Hugo says. “But that’s in London. I’m from a place called Surrey, which isn’t too far from there.”
“So how did you end up on a train in Iowa?”
“How does anyone end up on a train in Iowa?” Mae jokes, and they both turn their attention to her.
“You’re not from England,” Karen points out.
“No, I’m from New York. But also not the city.”
“How did you two meet?”
“It’s a long story,” Hugo says, reaching for Mae’s hand underneath the table. She clasps his back, and he feels an instant warmth spread through him. Outside, the sun has dipped low, casting long shadows on the fields of corn. They pass a herd of cows huddled close, a road with a dusty pickup truck lumbering by, a small town with an American flag waving high above the buildings. It all feels unreal somehow, sliding past like this, as if it’s part of a film montage.
Once they’ve ordered—a steak for him, some sort of chicken dish for her—they hand back their menus. The sisters are on their second glass of wine each, and Trish winks at them from across the table. “If you’d just spent six days with our mother, you’d be drinking too.”
Karen lifts her glass. “Amen.”
“So what’s England like?” Trish asks.
Hugo shrugs. “You know, mostly just tea and crumpets. That sort of thing.”
He’s only teasing, of course, but they both nod very seriously. “Do you go to college here or there?” asks Trish.
“Neither,” he says. “Yet.”
There must be something in his voice that warns her off a follow-up question, because she nods and turns to Mae. “How about you?”
“I start at USC next week,” she says. “That’s where I’m headed now.”
“Well, isn’t that wonderful,” Trish says, then nudges Karen. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
Karen nods. “Wonderful. My three are still little, but I’d love it if they got into somewhere like that one day. Or somewhere in England,” she says, looking over at Hugo. “Do you miss it?”
He grins at her. “Would it be absolutely horrible if I said no?”
“Trust me,” Trish says, “we get it. We just spent a week watching soap operas and learning to crochet. Home can be overrated.”
“It’s just that I’ve never really been anywhere else,” he says. “And it’s nice to be on my own for a bit. But it’s only been a few days. I’m sure I’ll start missing them all soon.”
“You have brothers or sisters?”
Hugo glances sideways at Mae, then says, “Both. There are six of us.”
“Older or younger?”
He hesitates, as he always does at this point in the conversation. “The same age, actually. We’re sextuplets.”
They both stare at him blankly.
“Multiples,” he says. “We were all—”
“Yeah, darlin’, we know what sextuplets are,” Trish says, shaking her head. “It’s just…wow. There are really six of you? All the same age?”
