“Diana, did you invite your neighbors?” my dad asked from his spot at the grill.
“Yes,” I confirmed with him for the second time. My thinking was, if I invited them, they hopefully wouldn’t complain when my visitors parked in front of their houses. Just two days ago, Louie and Josh had walked around, leaving invitations on doorsteps as I waited on the deck with Mac. I’d made them address the envelopes and almost died when I saw how Louie had spelled Dallas’s name.
“Hello!” a female voice shouted from over the other side of the fence.
All of us—my dad, Josh, Louie, and me—all turned to look in the direction we’d heard the speaker.
And sure enough, four different people peeked over the chest-high fence. Three of them were smiling; the fourth one not so much, but they were all well-known and loved faces. At the front, the taller of the two women in the group, was the face I’d just seen on television a month or two ago. Pretty, a hair older than me, and at one point, someone I resented a lot because she was so awesome and magnificent, and I was… not.
But that had only been when we’d been little kids. My cousin was nothing short of amazing, especially because she didn’t think or act like she was too cool for school. Nobody likes a stuck-up, snobby bitch, and she was nowhere even close to that. I was probably more of a stuck-up, snobby bitch than she was.
“Sal!” I yelled, waving. “Come in!”
She beamed at me, swinging her arm over the top of the fence to undo the latch and push the door open. She filed in first, followed by her mom who was my aunt, and her dad who was my dad’s brother, and all the way at the end was her husband. I didn’t think I would ever get used to calling that man her husband. Out of the handful of times I’d met the retired soccer player, I’d probably only been able to look him in the eye twice.
Sal smiled as she walked over, her arms extended forward like she hadn’t seen me in years. Which was true, it had been almost two years since I’d last seen her in person. Living in Europe most of the year didn’t leave her with a whole bunch of time to come back home. “I’m sorry for crashing the party without RSVPing—”
“Shut up,” I mumbled, taking her in a hug. “I didn’t even know you were in town.”
“We flew in yesterday. I wanted to surprise my parents,” she explained, squeezing me. Pulling back, she grinned and I grinned back at her. Despite being two inches taller than me, we’d each inherited our dads’ eyes and leaner frames. Where hers was a work of lean, muscular art, mine was more a masterpiece of Pop-Tarts and good genes. Average: the story of my life. Slightly lighter skinned, which she got from her mom, and way more freckle-faced, the family resemblance was still there between my cousin and I. Our parents used to say that, when we were really young, we would tell everyone we were sisters. “Rey!” she called out over her shoulder.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my uncle and aunt talking to my dad, giving him hugs, and Reiner—I had a hard time not calling him by the name half the world knew him by—standing off to the side by them. At the call of his name, he said something to my dad and came over to us, all long and lean and too good-looking.
By some miracle, I managed to keep my face even. He was my favorite cousin’s promised one after all. The love of her life, for real. I wouldn’t hold it past her to cut someone if they put the moves on him. She might be well-off now, but she hadn’t always been. You could take the girl out of the hood, but you could never take the hood out of the girl.
“Rey, you remember my cousin Diana,” she stated rather than said.
“Hi,” I kind of giggled for a second before catching myself and extending my hand out toward him. I couldn’t be too greedy and ask for a hug; the only person I’d ever seen him hug other than Sal had been her immediate family and my mom. She’d talked about that hug for three months afterward.
“Hello,” he stated evenly, shaking my hand firmly.
Switching my gaze back to my cousin so I wouldn’t get caught ogling the hottest forty-two-year-old in the world too long, I grinned back at her as if a man worth over three hundred million dollars hadn’t just been touching me. “Are you hungry? We have water.”
“I’ll take some water and some food,” Sal said as Reiner reached up to place a hand on her shoulder. “Di, where’s your mom? I need to tell her hi before—”
“Salomé!Mija!” my mom cried out from the back door at the top step.
Mija. Her daughter. God help me.
I just barely held back an eye roll. She didn’t even call me that. Since Sal had gotten married, everyone in the family acted like she was a celebrity instead of the kid who had fallen out of the tree and broken her arm at our house in El Paso. My mom was probably the worst about it; it really got on my nerves. And maybe justmaybemade me a tiny bit jealous that she was more affectionate and proud of my cousin than me.
It wasn’t Sal’s fault.
“Brace yourself,” I whispered to her.
She elbowed me with a snort.
The next two hours went by in the blink of an eye as a few friends of Josh’s from school and their parents showed up, mixed in with the family we had in San Antonio, and the young couple from next door and their kid. There must have been at least fifty people in the backyard and the birthday party was still going in full swing. We still hadn’t cut cake, socked the shit out of a piñata, or opened presents.
“You need help with anything?” my cousin asked, coming up behind me with two used royal blue party plates in her hands.
I was squatting by one of the coolers, trying to rearrange more drinks inside. “That’s okay. I’m done.”
She watched me as I stood up, her pretty face beaming. “There’re so many people here.”
“I know. I’m pretty sure I don’t know ten of them,” I huffed, zoning in on the group of adults I really was pretty positive that I’d never met in my life. “Anybody bothering you guys?”
“No.” She shook her head. “When he has his hat on, no one pays attention.”
