too flashy, my makeup is subtle, I’m not wearing any ostentatious jewelry. Should I take my watch off? I hate to because of my tan line . . .”
“Eliza Sidwell soon to be Harper. Listen to me. My mom wears shorts and tank tops to hang out in the yard. She wears a watch, she likes mascara, she loves dangly earrings and gaudy necklaces she gets at the secondhand store. You look beautiful and demure and still somehow sexy as hell at the same time. I don’t know why you’re freaking out like this. You already met my mom!”
“Your grandmother and your sister are there, Rason!”
Rason’s laugh was so loud that I jumped. I had a quick thought about choking him to death with his seatbelt, but I closed my eyes and tamped the urge down.
“My sister.” Rason laughed some more and then gasped for air. “My sister has a nose ring, loves wild jewelry, and drives a Lexus. She’s got I don’t even know how many tattoos, cusses like a sailor, and she’s married to a tattoo artist who has the word ‘fuck’ tattooed on his fingers and a tattoo of my sister’s lip print on his neck. My parents love him as much as they love me, so your watch is not even going to register. As far as my grandmother? She’s a sweet little lady who has lived in a one room hut with no indoor plumbing for most of her life. Until my parents brought her here, she’d only ever been in her remote village. Dad said that my grandmother is currently obsessed with the television and thinks that the hot food coming out of the microwave is poisoned by magic. Believe me. You look fine.”
“The microwave is really a mysterious thing, so don’t fault her for that. Can you explain how it gets the food hot?”
“No, but I bet you can.”
“Well, I read about it,” I said primly. “That’s the only reason I don’t think it’s magic.”
“You haven’t even met my grandmother and you’re already defending her.”
“My grandparents were all gone before I could make any memories with them,” I told him softly. Then I whispered, “I want yours.”
“I love you so much that it hurts, Eliza. You just don’t even know.”
“I love you too.”
The rest of the drive was uneventful as we talked about our families. He had a dozen cousins on his father’s side and even more on his mother’s, but most of them lived in Vietnam.
Rason told me funny stories about his siblings and their spouses and how difficult it was for his sister-in-law to adjust to the way his parents did things at their home. He explained that it was all okay now, but there were a few years that his brother stayed away because of his wife.
I would not be that person in Rason’s life that took him away from his family.
“Here we are,” Rason said as he turned down a long driveway. The grass around the house was trim and green, but the fields around it were high with growth. He had explained earlier that his parents lived in his grandparents’ old house, the same one where his father was raised. The fields were leased to a farmer close by because Mr. Harper had chosen a job in town rather than to farm like his father. “This is where I grew up.”
It was a two-story farmhouse with a screened porch. It looked like a stereotypical home that you’d see in paintings of rural America. There was a flagpole set in the middle of the circular drive, and it flew the US flag up top and the Texas flag below it.
Rason had grown up in a Norman Rockwell painting.
We pulled up next to the house and got out. Rason opened the back door of the car and pulled out the box of vegetables we’d harvested this morning.
“Jesus, Ras. It’s about time you got here!” I heard a voice and looked up to see a beautiful woman who was almost as small as me walking around the side of the house. She was barefoot, wearing a pair of cut off shorts and a tank top, and her dark hair was up in a knot on the top of her head. “I need backup!”
Rason set the vegetables on the trunk of the car and picked his sister up for a long hug. He spun her around a few times until she begged him to put her down, but the two of them