Anyway, this long winter hibernation thing isn’t sounding too bad, especially after hearing the way Gloria screams my name when I walk into their apartment, like I’m a long-lost relative or Jesus or something.
“Missed ya, bitch!” Izzy or Tala shriek from somewhere down the hall.
I can’t help but grin at their dramatics. “Hey, everyone.”
I bend in half so she can kiss both of my cheeks, moving down the line to bear hug everyone else in his immediate family—Ben, Izzy, Tala and her wife Jill. Their kids wrap themselves around my waist. I inexplicably find Gloria again at the end of the line, except this time she is holding a plate almost sagging in half with the weight of the food on it.
She shoves it into my hands. “Eat,na,” she says.
Grimacing, I keep my mouth shut about the sheer amount of food on the plate that I can’t possibly eat.
I look over at Oliver for help, but I start a little instead, almost dropping my plate—at the way he is looking at me, with his beautiful face, with his thick eyebrows and freckles and crooked tooth, gorgeous eyes shining at me with something intensely warm, wearing a small smile like he has a secret.
He comes up to me with an empty plate, taking a spoon and dumping half of my plate onto his. Horrified, I look around for Gloria, but she is puttering around in the kitchen. “It’s better than her seeing you throw food away,” he reassures me, bending to drop a kiss into my hair.
I freeze. Even more horrified this time, I look around for his other family members, dismayed when I see every single one of them grinning at us, his nieces sounding like teakettles with the way they are squealing.
“What?!” Gloria calls from the kitchen.
“Nothing,” we all yell in unison.
After we eat, Izzy claps her hands, signaling the end of the meal. “We have to teach you how to line dance,” she informs me.
“Huh?”
“Line dancing at parties is like the national sport of the Philippines,” Tala says.
“I think that’s karaoke, actually,” Oliver chimes in.
“What party?” I ask, quickly losing the plot.
“Tita Tess told me she invited you to her seventy-fifth birthday party,” Izzy says impatiently.
“Oh… honestly, I forgot,” I admit, honestly too swept up in everything to even think about it.
Gloria gasps loudly. “I won’t tell her you said that. She thinks it’s the event of the year.”
Suddenly, all the furniture is being pushed to the side of the room, their living room becoming our dance floor.
“Okay, so there’s two basic types of line dancing that we can apply to songs of this beat, but the main song is Todo Todo,” Gloria explains, while pressing play on her phone.
The song plays over their living room speakers. Quicker on her feet than she looks, she shows me the first type of dance, which looks like a more complicated, salsa-ish version of the Electric Slide. The second version looks exactly like the steps of the Electric Slide, just with more spinning. Her daughters and daughter-in-law and granddaughters dance behind her dutifully, looking like a fantastic, multi-generational girl band.
Gloria drags me over to them. I fall over on my first attempt, crashing into Paloma, who screams with laughter.
Oliver and Ben chuckle from where they stand in the kitchen. Oliver holds up fingers on his hands—zero out of five.
“What is this, the Olympic trials of line dancing?” I shoot at them. “You two would never even make the cut.”
Oliver and his father look at one another and smirk, identical dimples making an appearance on their left cheeks.
“Start it from the top, Izzy,” he tells his sister, and the Flores girls clear the floor, giggling.
The first few notes of Todo Todo play, and Oliver and Ben glide into a perfectly executed routine, light and graceful on their feet, hips popping out at just the right moment to make it look smooth. They twirl and clap simultaneously, as if they’ve practiced for this moment their entire lives.
I stare, open-mouthed, the other Flores women hooting and hollering around me, until Oliver drags me into the middle of the living room dance floor and moves my body through the steps.
“I hate you,” I tell him.
