out onto the front porch.
“I asked your daddy to start the grill,” she hedged.
She’d done no such thing.
What she had done was play interference so that I wouldn’t follow them outside.
I didn’t like the look of Clayton and Connor following them out.
More importantly, I didn’t like that they were outside while I was inside wondering what was going on.
“Just let it be for now, baby,” my mother ordered.
I sighed and went back to peeling potatoes.
“I’m nervous because I don’t want them to say anything to make him leave,” I admitted. “I enjoy being here, and I’m having a really good day after some really shitty ones. I want to be with my family, and I want him to be here, too.”
She looked at me with a grin on her face.
“When he asks you to marry him, you’ll say yes?” she teased.
I scoffed. “In a heartbeat.”
“You love him?” she asked, turning to face me now that she’d washed her hands free of meat juices.
“I love him,” I confirmed. “I’ve loved him for a while, I think. But the quarantine only served to magnify it. I didn’t realize that I would like him as much as I do. He’s smart, kind, and funny. He’s also very quiet and unsure because of how he was raised. Do you know that when he was ten, he started this whole thing with the presidential run? Look at this picture. I found it when I googled him.”
She leaned in close and I showed her a photo of him on Christmas Eve standing in front of some Christmas trees on the lawn of the governor’s mansion in Little Rock.
“The only people around him are his security details,” I said. “In almost every single picture, it’s just him. He’s walking by himself, ten paces behind his parents. When his parents are in the picture, it’s the security detail that he’s closer to, not them. It’s just… he’s so used to being alone. I don’t want to overwhelm him.”
She looked at me with love in her eyes.
“You’re not going to overwhelm him,” she said. “A person like that? It’s not that they prefer to be alone. It’s that they’re not sure how to be around people. People like that are starving for people. Starving for human touch. Starving to be included.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “I know that you don’t want to hear this, but Saint doesn’t just take after your daddy name-wise. He’s a lot like him personality-wise. Daddy was very used to being alone. But he did let someone in… and look where that got him.”
She tweaked my cheek, causing me to roll my eyes.
“With three awful kids?” I teased.
She snorted. “Y’all aren’t awful. Nico’s kids are awful.”
I laughed then.
Nico was my uncle and my mom’s brother and his kids were awful. But they’d all grown up to be great people, despite their attitudes when they were small.
“Booth and Bourne are really good now,” I pointed out.
She rolled her eyes. “If you say so, baby. If you say so.”
I walked over and pressed my nose to the glass door that separated the kitchen from the back porch and stared at the four men on the back deck.
“I should’ve taken lip-reading classes,” I said, making the window condensation puff up around where my mouth was. “Saint looks nervous. Dad, Connor, and Clayton look pissy. Like they get when you’re lecturing them about picking up their trash instead of just throwing it on the ground wherever they happen to be standing.”
Mom snorted. “They still haven’t quite gotten the hang of that. Just yesterday your dad got a package in the mail. It had a plastic bag around the box because they thought it might rain. So when he gets inside, he rips the plastic wrap off, throws it on the ground, then slices his knife across the packaging tape. When he pulls out this thing that he’s ordered, all the packing peanuts went flying. And instead of picking any of it up, he literally left it all there so he could go hide the present underneath the tree. I left it, thinking that he’d come back, but he never did. I cleaned it up last night before I went to bed. But saying that, I’ll take a whole lot more from your father than I will from your brothers. Because I’m raising your brothers not to be douchebags like their father.”
I giggled as I pulled back, then wrote ‘hi’ in the condensation on the glass.
Saint’s eyes flicked to