He picked up the second pie and headed back to the table, and by the time Tennessee made it back to his seat, he’d forgotten that strange expression on Finn’s face.Maybe not haunted, really.Maybe more like he’d been sucker punched.
But it got swept away because the rest of the evening—despite the built-in weirdness of meeting your own grown siblings, though it felt less weird by the minute—was actually pretty great.
By the time they were ready to leave, they were all talking like old friends.Or new friends, Tennessee guessed.Either way, they all told stories about their various childhoods without anyone straying too far into dangerous territory.Not that Tennessee or anyone else failed to talk about what an asshole their father was, but no one dwelled on it.No one got deep.
It seemed that there was an unspoken agreement to keep it all light.To keep the night fun and bright andgood.
To follow their mothers’ lead and make this the happiest damn family around.
“Every week,” Finn said as they all stood up and piled back into their winter gear.“The LPL Club meets right here and excuses are unacceptable.”
“Who put you in charge?”Raleigh asked with a laugh.“I would have voted against that.Was there a vote?”
“No one’s in charge,” Tennessee said.“This is a fully democratic family.”
“Is it?”Cat asked in an exaggerated tone.“This is the first I’m hearing of such a thing.”
“I’m betting that like Finn,” Helena said as she wrapped her scarf around her neck, “what he means is that the broader LPL family is a democracy.The formally established nuclear families, however, can expect the same dictatorships we’ve always experienced.”
“I don’t want to run your life, Helena,” Finn told her, calmly.Always so calm, Tennessee thought.He liked it.He was going to have to think on thisvelvet hammerthing that Finn had going on.“I want you to.”
“So condescending,” Helena said to Cat, with a roll of her eyes.
Cat slipped her arm through her sister’s and pressed her shoulder close.“Let me tell you a little story.It involves me and my husband getting together and those two gorillas beating on their chests and dragging their knuckles on the ground as if I’m not, in fact, a fully grown adult.”
Tennessee could have argued that.He could see from the look on Dallas’s face that Dallas was about to jump in himself.They’d come to a place of peace with Wilder Carey—or near enough—but the fact remained that the man was sneaking around with Cat.Tennessee and Dallas had simply shined a little light on the situation.
As any good brother would feel duty bound to do, in his opinion.
“If we have to be the gorillas in her story, let her have it,” he said.That obviously shocked his brother, because Dallas looked at him as if Tennessee had sprouted a new head.Maybe that was what a lack of sleep and too much Matilda did to him.Either way, he’d said it, so now he had to run with it.“If it makes the family happier, she can call me a gorilla all day long.”
“She will,” Dallas retorted.“But I guess in your case, that’s an upgrade.”
Raleigh thought that was funny, so the two middle brothers walked out together too.And that left Finn and Tennessee to make their way out into the cold, bitterly frigid night.
Though Tennessee didn’t think he was mistaken that Finn looked back a time or two on the way, in the direction of the counter, where Kitty was talking up a storm with two of her friends.Esther Wayne—the deputy sheriff’s younger sister who had some kind of podcast thing, according to Cat, which Tennessee didn’t care about because who had time to listen to podcasts?And Juliet Cross, one of the newer schoolteachers at the elementary school.
But only Kitty was facing this way.Tennessee filed that away.
“I know where Helena, Montana, is, of course,” he said as they all came to a shivery sort of stop outside the door of Mountain Mama’s.“And I’ve heard of Raleigh, North Carolina.”He looked at Finn.“Finland?”
Because they were all named for places.They knew that.Places that Tennessee would have said that his father had never visited, but now it turned out that none of them knew the first thing about their father anyway.
“I know you’re Catalina,” Helena said to Cat.“I looked it up.California.”
Dallas shrugged.“Mine is not mysterious.”
“It would be fun if it was Finland,” Finn said with that smile of his.“But as it turns out, it’s a tiny little ghost town west of Helena called Finn.Another casualty of the gold rush, I believe.That’s where they got my name, and bytheyI mean that our dad apparently insisted.”
“Because even when he was a tiny little baby,” Helena said, her eyes glinting in the light from inside, “they could tell that Finn was more of a ghost than a real boy.”
“You can tell that we really are a family,” Dallas said, and he actually grinned.“You’re all funny and you all kind of suck.So we fit.”
Everyone seemed to agree with that, too.There was a lot of slapping arms and backs, and things that looked almost like hugs, but not quite.
When Tennessee broke away from them to wander back across the road, leaving Dallas to drive himself all the way up to the lighthouse and Cat to drive back out to her home on enemy territory out at the Careys’ High Mountain Ranch, he was feeling pretty good.
So good that he was all the way up on his porch, nearly to his door before he realized that there was a shape that shouldn’t be there, sitting on a porch swing he’d never used even once and now thought he was going to have to remove.
