“Freehand, ma’am.”
“Mm.”
That’s all. Mm. And she eats more of it.
I know exactly what is happening because I watched my aunt do this to grown men my entire life. She never accuses. She would consider it beneath her to accuse. She simply asks pleasant, reasonable questions, one after another, each a half-degree warmer than the last, and then she waits. The Mm is not in agreement.
“It’s a beautiful pie,” she says. “Whoever made it should be proud of themselves.” A pause. The fork goes back in. “Course, a man who can turn out a crust like this and won’t take a straightcompliment for it is usually a man with something to hide. But it’s a beautiful pie.”
Stanley lays a hand flat over his heart, wounded to the core. “I take compliments beautifully. I’m taking that one right now. It’s going straight to my head as we speak.”
“Mm.”
“That’s a real crust, Lisa. I bled for that crust.”
“It isn’t your family dinner yet, young man.” She says it without once looking up.
When I look at Stanley’s mortified face, I lose it.
My favorite person in this entire family is gently roasting the boy across the table because she knows he didn’t make it, and I confirmed it with her earlier.
Stanley catches my eye over the rim of his water. He knows what’s funny now. He’s caught on.
I purse my lips at him.
He widens his eyes at me, all wounded innocence — a man who has never told a lie in the whole of his honest life.
I have to look down at my plate.
Uncle Pete reaches over and tops off my glass, and I let him.
I know I shouldn’t. The room is already tilting warm and bright, the version of me sitting in this chair leaning toward the boy across from her and discovering, against years of hard evidence, that he is funny. And I keep turning over the thing he said to me upstairs.
Whatever a guy thinks about me is about him. Not me. I don’t pick it up.
I have spent this entire day being humiliated by what the people at this table think of me. The seating chart and what it decided about who I am. The toast I waited years for and got for a lie. The thing humming quietly under every kind word anyone has said to me tonight — that I am the careful, contained, slightlycold Linwood girl who has somehow landed a warm, charming boy, and is lucky, frankly, to have managed it.
So maybe I practice. Right here. Right now, with a fourth glass of wine I should not have and am about to have anyway.
I let the table think whatever the table is going to think. I stop holding my spine like I’m being scored on it. I stop performing contained for a room that has never once, in all my life, given me a single point of credit for the performance.
I drink the fourth glass.
The table comes apart into smaller pieces the way they always do at the back end of a long meal — people lifting up out of their chairs, coffee migrating toward the living room, my mother finally surrendering and letting Beth carry something into the kitchen.
I drift, too. I find myself, glass in hand, over by the fireplace, where Stanley has gotten himself cornered by Mac and Hodge, the three of them folded down into the low chairs and talking the only language all three of them actually speak.
I slot in at his shoulder. I don’t think about doing it. I slide into the line of him like the space was kept for me.
“You all realize you’re going to be game-planning against him in a couple of years,” I say. “It’s a lot less fun scouting a man when he’s the one you’re trying to stop twice a season.”
Hodge laughs, delighted with me.
Mac doesn’t. Mac just tips his sparkling water in my direction without a grain of malice anywhere in it, and says, “If he signs. He could stall, he could get hurt.” A small shrug. “Draft position’s a promise, sweetheart. It’s not a contract, and it’s not twenty pro games. Talk to me when he’s done all three.”
It’s nothing. It’s a true thing, said kindly, by a man who plainly likes him — the oldest, fairest doubt in the sport, the gap every hyped kid has to cross, and plenty of them don’t.
And it goes hot and tight across the whole front of my chest.
