“Can we not?” I say, giving Tara a look as I make my way to my seat.
Tara ignores me.
“But then she told me you and she were just—” She steeples her fingers together and taps a few times, her brows waggling suggestively.
“Building a teepee?” I ask.
She ignores me again.
“Which by the way lost me and Kev a hundred bucks each?—”
“You bet on your sister’s sex life?” my mom asks from where she’s chopping.
That’s right, Mom, you tell her.
“And you didn’t think to loop me in?” she adds.
What the?—?
“Next time, Ma. Anyway, Jeff, you pass inspection—based on the conversations you and I have had,” Tara finishes. She gives Jeff a meaningful look, but he doesn’t see it because he’s watching me across the table, his lips pressed together while his eyes crinkle in the corner. Is he enjoying Tara’s blindness to boundaries? Or is he pleading for me to make it stop? I would try to help, but now I’m curious.
“What conversations?” I probe.
He lets out a breath and my sister turns to me like she’s just realized I’m at the table.
“Private conversations.” She tips the dregs of the prosecco bottle into my already full flute. I have to bend over the table and sip it so that it doesn’t overflow.
“Mmmhmmm. Private. It’s funny how you define private, T,” I murmur.
“Tara basically pointed out the fact that I was infatuated with you long before you became—available to me,” Jeff says.
I feel that little hiccup in my heart that he keeps giving me every time he says something sweet or looks at me like this—like I’m a gift.
“Infatuated, eh?” I carefully lift my drink to my mouth.
Jeff just lifts a brow in response. I’ll take infatuated. Even if it does feel a little temporary. I’m sure he’s not analyzing his vocab choices right now with my mom buzzing around us like a thirsty mosquito.
“Jeff, dear, do you like mushrooms?” my mom asks, putting her fingers on Jeff’s shoulder. His shoulders are my new favorite. They’re firm like a melon rind and there’s a sharp dip between his blade that I like to trail my nails?—
“Devonnnn,” my mom drags out my name like she’s been calling it for several minutes.
“What?”
“Can you go grab some mushrooms from the log?”
Mushrooms. Log. Got it.
I stand and tell Tara to be good. Then grab a knife and head outside toward the shiitake mushroom log I’d ordered from Terrain last year. The deer luckily can’t get into the makeshift greenhouse my mom crafted on the deck. As I cut the stems flush against the log trying not to let my shivering cause a slip and finger loss, I watch Tara and Jeff through the window. She’s talking excitedly with her hands in a way that makes me think she’ll fit right into her new home in Milan. The countdown to her departure has been a bittersweet murmur I hear every so often beneath the laughter and other sounds that Jeff and I have been making these last few weeks. If I weren’t three hundred percent sure that Marcello is going to work his ass off to makeher happy, this ache would be a hell of a lot worse. But watching her fingers flutter through the air while Jeff’s deep laugh reaches me through the thick glass reminds me that Tara wasn’t made to stay still. She’s supposed to be out there. Working her magic on the world. While I grow fungus in a log with Mom.
By the time I arrive back at the table, Tara has slid her chair closer to Jeff and is looking at pictures of his niece, Sammy, sitting atop a huge Clydesdale. I’ve had the pleasure of talking to her quite a few times in the past weeks as she frequently calls Jeff to sneakily report the goings on out West. Though her intel isn’t exactly trustworthy, since she told us last weekend that Grandma had gotten a check for a million dollars in the mail and she believed her mother had a date with John Stamos. Sammy has a tendency to hear what she wants to hear, coupled with a superb imagination. Either way, while listening to Jeff’s conversations with her as she hid in the coat closet from Jenny, who was obviously avoiding his calls at all costs, it became very apparent that Sammy and Jeff are close. And that he adores her. Which in turn makes him more adorable.
“She’s so beautiful, Jeff,” my sister tells him.
“Thanks,” he says, smiling at the screen.
He misses his family. He doesn’t try to hide it. In fact, he tells me quite often.
“I’d love to have a niece,” she says wistfully while I snort the prosecco that’s risen into my sinus cavity. Jeff laughs as my eyes tear up and my mother does a mediocre job of coming to my rescue.
