by Roxie Noir
I take a deep breath, get out of the car, and hope my nine-year-old niece can’t tell that Uncle Seth is feeling a little rough right now.
“There you are!” she says, skidding to a stop by the trunk of my car. “Guess what!”
“Chicken butt?”
Rusty gives me a look like I’ve just suggested she roll in sewage.
Note to self: chicken butt is no longer funny.
“No,” she says, that look still on her face. “We went to the hardware store yesterday! Uncle Levi is gonna help me do the construction but he said you and Uncle Caleb would be better for helping with the plans. Come on.”
Every Sunday, my mom hosts dinner at the house where we all grew up. All five of us are expected to attend Sunday Dinner if we’re able, and over the years that’s grown to include anyone else we’d like to invite — girlfriends, wives, best friends, you name it.
“Is your Uncle Caleb here yet?” I ask, opening my trunk and grabbing a basket covered with a tea towel, wedged between a first aid kit, emergency blanket, extra jacket, and pair of old-but-usable hiking boots, because you never know what you’ll need.
“No,” she says, walking backward while waving her arms around in circles. “Violet and June made name tags.”
“Name tags?” I echo, shutting the trunk.
I probably should have had one more cup of coffee. Maybe it won’t be too suspicious if I make some inside.
“So Thalia knows who everyone is,” she says, then pulls her jacket open.
HELLO
My name is
RUSTY
- Daniel and Charlie’s daughter
- Knows skateboarding tricks
“Do you?” I ask, and she looks down, then back up at me.
“Of course,” she says. “Come on. I got a ruler and a calculator and big paper and everything!”
Rusty turns, waving one puffy pink-jacketed arm for me to follow her. I lean into my car, grab the basket of scones, then remind myself that there are much worse things to be doing while hungover than helping a nine-year-old draw up plans for a trebuchet.
Right now she’s into unicorns, sparkles, and medieval siegecraft. Aren’t all third graders?
“Seth!” she shouts, already back on the front porch while I’m still standing by the trunk of my car. “Are you —"
“Hold your horses, kid, I’m coming,” I call back.
“I don’t have any horses.”
“It’s a figure of speech.”
“I know, I was making a joke,” Rusty says as I clomp up the porch steps. “It was funny. What’s that?”
“Scones,” I say, flipping aside the tea towel I’ve got wrapped around them to show her. “There’s blueberry-lemon, cardamom-vanilla, and —”
She’s already taken one and bitten into it.
“ — Double chocolate chunk,” I finish.
“Mmmm,” she says, her mouth full, tiny crumbs flying out. “It’s good!”
“Thanks,” I say, dryly. “Save some for everyone else, will you?”
Rusty just grins at me with chocolate-covered teeth.
The moment I walk into my mom’s house, at least two people are shouting at me. One’s my mom, telling me to close the door because she’s not paying to heat the outside — never mind that I’ve been inside for less than ten seconds — and the other is my sister-in-law Violet, asking what I want on my name tag.
“Does it matter what I want?” I call back, still standing by the front door, basket in hand.
“It’s a good starting place,” she says, over the general din as I hang my coat on the rack and take my shoes off, then toss them on the pile. Somewhere under the pile there’s a shoe bench, but I couldn’t tell you where.
I pass through the living room, where Daniel and Levi both give my basket of scones a suspicious look, and head into the kitchen where Violet and June, Levi’s fiance, are sitting at the kitchen table with Sharpies and name tags.
“You haven’t even done mine yet?” I ask, putting the basket down.
June glances at the basket, but doesn’t say anything.
“You just got here,” Violet says. “Everyone else got theirs when they arrived, too.”
“You did theirs,” I say, pointing at Caleb and Thalia’s name tags.
“They’re the guests of honor,” Violet says, straightening them. “Well, Thalia is. And I guess Caleb gets to bask in her reflected glow.”
“They’re still coming, right?” June asks. “We didn’t already scare them off somehow, did we?”
“This family? Never,” I say. “Who could possibly get scared off?”
“Put wiseass on his,” June tells Violet.
“I can’t, Rusty’s here,” Violet says. “And then she’s going to ask Daniel what wiseass means, and then I’m going to have to hear about it, and I don’t want to hear about it.”
“I’m nearly positive Rusty knows what wiseass means,” I point out.
Violet just frowns at me, contemplative, and taps the Sharpie against the table. June joins her.
I watch them, wondering what it’s like to have a normal family.
“Okay, got it,” Violet finally says, and starts writing on the name tag, covering it with her other hand. A moment later, she tears it off the sheet and holds it out.
HELLO
My name is
SETH
- Older brother
- Stress bakes
- Co-owns the brewery
“You forgot handsomest and best at ping-pong,” I say. I guess older brother is right if we’re talking about Caleb, who’s only got the one kind.
“No, we didn’t,” June says, grinning. “The name tag is perfect and correct. All hail the name tag.”
I just sigh and stick it on the breast pocket of my flannel shirt, even though Thalia has already met me several times and even stayed at my house.
It’s sweet of them, really. My family can be a lot sometimes — just through sheer numbers — but they’re almost always the good kind of a lot. They’re the kind who’ll hassle you and meddle nonstop, but out of love.
A few minutes later, Caleb and Thalia show up, and the pandemonium increases because Eli immediately tries to involve her in an argument he’s having with Levi about wood, Rusty wants to show her something, and everyone else just sort of… descends.
Frankly, I’m glad for the distraction.
Dinner passes uneventfully, if you can call a twelve-person dinner where at one point someone starts a chant of free the tadpoles! uneventful. Afterward, I volunteer to clean up. Caleb and Daniel volunteer to help me, and we fall easily into the old, familiar after-dinner pattern that we all shared until we moved out of the house.
“Thalia doing all right?” I ask Caleb, rinsing plates and handing them for dishwasher loading.
“I think so,” he says, glancing over his shoulder toward the living room. “Last I checked, she was teaching Rusty to experiment on Thomas’s brain.”
Thomas is Rusty’s four-month-old brother. He barely has a brain to be experimented on.
“So long as it’s the careful kind of brain surgery,” I say.
Behind me, Daniel snorts.
“When I left Thalia was explaining object permanence and hiding a stuffed monkey behind a box,” Caleb says. “Hopefully they haven’t progressed to sharp objects just yet.”
“There’s no screaming,” says Daniel, stacking silverware on the counter next to the sink. “I’ll worry when the screaming starts.”
“Not yet,” Eli says from across the room, walking into the big farmhouse kitchen.
“The screaming?” I ask.
“The object permanence,” he says, opening the fridge and grabbing a beer. It’s one of ours, a Southern Lights IPA. “Every time the monkey comes back Thomas is surprised and delighted.”
“Same. It’s a cool monkey,” Caleb says.
Eli grins, then leans against the counter right in front of the dirty dishes.
“You here to help?�
�� I ask, reaching around him for silverware.
“Nope,” he says, taking a drink. “I cooked, remember?”
“Then quit being in the way.”
He moves about six inches along the counter, still drinking and giving me looks I studiously ignore.
“So,” he finally says, when it becomes clear that I’m not volunteering anything. “Yesterday didn’t go well?” he finally asks.
I rinse the hell out of a platter. It’s the cleanest platter in the world.
“Yesterday went fine,” I say, grabbing a dirty saucepan.
“You showed up hungover with scones,” Eli says.
“I baked for my family.”
“Which are good, by the way,” he goes on. “Though the cardamom ones are still a little dry in the middle, you probably need a tad more liquid if you’re not going to include fruit or chocolate.”
“I’ll make a note,” I say, swishing water around.
“Why there are hangover scones?” Daniel finally asks.
“Because I love you all and want you to be happy,” I say.
“Do you two know?” he asks, ignoring my answer.
I shut off the water and look at him over my shoulder.
“You’re seriously asking them while I’m standing right here?”
“You’ve had your chance,” he says, mildly.
Briefly, I wonder what it’s like to have a family that doesn’t consider your personal business to be up for public debate. Is it nice? Do people leave you alone every so often? Can you just make them scones without inviting them to form an investigative committee?
“One time, I want to keep my personal life personal,” I say, balancing the pot atop the platter. It’s a little precarious, but I’m feeling reckless. “Just once.”
“Wow,” Eli says.
“It’s not an insane request,” I point out.
“No, wow that you thought attending a four-hundred-person wedding with your ex was somehow going to stay a secret,” Eli says.
“You went to a wedding with her?” Caleb asks.
He’s now ignoring the open dishwasher and stack of dirty dishes to stare at me. I pick up a serving bowl and put it in the sink, pointedly ignoring him.
“Her younger sister got married, and Delilah’s date had to cancel at the last minute,” I tell them, calmly. “So I did her a favor.”
“I’ll say,” Caleb pipes up.
I can practically feel the pointed stares shifting focus from me to him.
“He got home at six this morning,” he explains. “Even tried to tell me he’d been on a run.”
“Bless your heart, you tried it,” Eli says to me, in a slow, sarcastic drawl.
I close my eyes, lean my head back, and count to ten before I do something stupid like throw silverware.
Normally, I don’t mind the brotherly ribbing so much. It can be annoying, sure, but I’ve done my fair share in the past so I can’t complain that much. Like when we told Eli that everyone knew he was having a thing with Violet, and I thought he might stab one of us with a carving knife.
Right now, however, I’m hungover as fuck, the coffee and aspirin is wearing off, and I feel like gum scraped off the bottom of someone’s shoe. My eyes feel like sandpaper. My brain feels like sandpaper.
This morning, just as I was leaving the bedroom, Delilah rolled over, still in bed, and for a moment I thought she was waking up. I thought that maybe she’d lift her head and open her eyes and see me standing there, dressed, ready to leave.
I thought maybe she’d tell me to stay.
She didn’t. She didn’t even wake up, so I got one last eyeful of her — on her stomach, face awash in wild orange curls, red and blue and orange of her tattoos bright against the white sheets, and I left just like I said I would.
For once I did the reasonable, sensible, adult thing, and it sucked.
“Why would I ever want to keep any of you from knowing my every waking thought and movement?” I ask, eyes still closed.
“Remember the time you dragged me into the attic and made me kiss Charlie while you watched?” Daniel says, sounding far happier than I’d like.
“Yeah, you really hated that,” I deadpan, finally opening my eyes.
“Are you talking about me?” says Charlie’s voice.
“Only nice things,” Eli says.
“You better,” she says, and walks into the kitchen. “Anyway, Thalia’s entertaining both our children at once, so I think Caleb should marry her.”
Caleb turns stop-sign red.
“Sorry,” she says, coming over. “Just kidding! I mean, or not. Your call. I like her and all but there’s no rush, I didn’t mean to make it weird. Move at your own pace! Don’t let society dictate how your relationship should proceed? Why are we all staring at Seth?”
Dammit.
“He went back to his ex again,” Daniel says calmly. “Did you have a scone? They’re good.”
“They really are, I had a cardamom one and it was great,” she tells me.
“You didn’t think it was a little dry?” Eli asks, still leaning against the counter.
“I think I’m not gonna look a gift scone in the mouth,” Charlie says. “Which ex, the bad one?”
“She’s not bad,” I tell the cabinets over the sink a little more forcefully than necessary.
“Oh, she holds you under her thrall to feed on your soul but she’s not bad,” Caleb says, shutting the dishwasher a little harder than necessary.
“What the fuck?” I ask, turning toward him.
“Name a time in the last ten years you’ve seen her and been happy afterward,” Caleb says, crossing his arms over his chest. “Go on, I’ll wait.”
“Wait. Ten years?” Charlie asks.
“We’ve had a very on-again, off-again thing,” I tell her, still glaring at my brother.
“Sure. He disappears for a weekend, she drains him of his life force, and then they don’t see each other again for months,” Caleb explains.
“Go fuck yourself,” I suggest.
“Both of you stop it. This is Delilah, right?” Charlie asks, holding out her hands toward us, like we’re children she can separate.
“Yes,” we say in unison.
“Redhead with a lot of tattoos?”
“Right,” I say, crossing my arms, leaning against the sink.
Despite myself I think of her last night, in the mirror, wearing the robe. Letting me trace the lines of the clockwork heart tattoo on her warm, slightly damp skin. The way I could feel her chest rising and falling under my fingers.
And later, watching a trickle of sweat drip from her hollow of her throat and over it as she rode me slow and hard, her eyes half-closed, her lips parted.
“I took a yoga class with her last year,” Charlie says. “She seemed cool. The squid tattoo is badass.”
She seemed cool.
“It’s a kraken,” I tell her, and she grins.
“Actually, the main thing I remember is the time she farted in the middle of class and then laughed so hard at herself that she fell over,” Charlie goes on, starting to laugh. “And I was the only other person who laughed, and you could tell the teacher was kind of mad but yoga teachers can’t get mad so everyone just pretended it hadn’t happened, which only made it funnier, and I thought the two of us might die. From laughing at a fart.”
She clears her throat.
It’s the first time in years anyone in my family has said something nice about Delilah. I stare at Charlie for a moment, lost for words.
“Anyway, don’t tell her I told you that because it’s not the most flattering story,” Charlie finishes.
“Also, she once left Seth at a motel and he had to walk eight miles to get back to civilization,” Caleb says, as if this is fun, new information.
“I didn’t have to walk eight miles,” I say, crossing my arms like it’ll help keep my temper in. “I could’ve called any of you assholes —"
“A year before that after he saw her, he didn�
��t answer his phone for a week and when Daniel finally went to his house, he was applying for jobs on Alaskan fishing boats,” Caleb goes on, still talking to Charlie.
“You’d be awful at that,” Eli points out.
“Before that, when he came back from his fuck weekend he chopped so much firewood at mom’s house that there’s still some left after four years,” Caleb says.
“I didn’t realize you two had been seeing each other,” Charlie says, very politely.
I give Caleb a good, hard glare that doesn’t cow him in the least.
“It’s complicated,” I admit, arms still crossed.
“That’s a way of putting it,” says Daniel.
“Seth just has a really delicious soul,” Caleb says, and that’s it.
I swear my vision crackles, and before it’s fully out of his mouth I’ve turned toward him, unfurled my arms, taken a step so we’re face-to-face.
“You’re fucking your twenty-two-year-old-student,” I say, managing to keep my voice low. “She got you fired.”
Caleb doesn’t move, but I can feel his whole body tense.
“I got myself fired,” he says, voice matching my own. “And now my girlfriend is in the living room, playing with my niece and nephew. Where’s Delilah?”
“At least I don’t have to grade her papers.”
A muscle tics in his jaw.
“I’d rather grade papers than get fucked and discar—"
“STOP IT!” hisses Charlie.
I turn, and she’s standing two feet away, hands in fists at her sides. We both take a step back.
“Caleb, don’t be a dick,” Daniel says, calmly.
Caleb looks away, shoves a hand through his hair, the universal Loveless gesture of psychological distress.
“Sorry,” he says, shooting me a glare.
He’s not. I know he’s not, but I’m glad he’s being nice enough to pretend.
“Thanks,” I say, then lean against the counter. “Sorry.”
“Seth, you okay?” Daniel asks. “You seem rough.”
“Fine,” I say.
It’s not true and everyone in this room knows it’s not true because I showed up hungover with a giant basket of scones. Ever since I finally learned to bake a few years ago, it’s been my go-to when I feel shitty about something.