If I can do that by learning how to make a meal for her, then, I will.
“Hi there,” Kaylee says, poking her head around the doorway. “Dinner is almost on the table. You can just go inside.” She gestures toward the dining area.
When we walk in there, I laugh, because Lucy and Cara are sitting there clutching one fork in each fist, their hands planted firmly on the table, toothy smiles on their faces. “What are you two doing?” I ask.
“Waiting for food,” Lucy says, her expression not changing.
“Did you see this in a cartoon?”
Cara frowns. “No.”
At the same time, Lucy, whose expression is still frozen, says, “Yes.”
Sarah looks amused if a bit uncomfortable but sits down next to me at the table.
“Do you like horses?” Lucy asks the question very seriously, her eyes trained on Sarah.
“I don’t really know any,” Sarah says.
“I’m named after a horse,” Lucy says.
I laughed. “Yeah,” I say.
“My big brother named me.”
She sounds proud of it. And that feels like an ice pick right to my heart. In the best way. But that’s one thing I’ve learned over the past decade. Love hurts. Even if it’s in beautiful ways. But feeling anything for people, for animals, for a community, has the potential to wound you. Even in happy moments. For me, it’s because I’m always so aware of what I didn’t have for all those years, and about all the people who still don’t have it. Like Sarah.
Yeah. This one hurts a little bit because I’m thinking about Sarah.
Kaylee comes in a moment later, a bowl of pasta in her arms, and my dad follows with two trays of bread balanced on one arm, and a bowl of salad.
They work in tandem, setting the dinner down on the table, smiling at each other as they do, and this is another moment where all this love hurts just for a moment.
“Glad you could join us,” Bennett says.
“Yeah. No worries.”
Though, as soon as we dish up all the food, they begin interrogating Sarah. What she does for a living – which quickly turns into a discussion about her aspirations. The fact that she had success earlier with the job hunt, and for a brief moment, glances back to when she and I met in foster care.
My dad looks down, then back up, his expression grave. “I know that we don’t know each other. But I’ve always been appreciative of you. When Dallas told us about you… I realize how much you took care of him for all those years when I wasn’t there. I have a lot of guilt. A lot of guilt around the fact that I wasn’t there for him in those early years. But you were. It means a lot to me.”
Emotion rises up in my throat, tightening it, threatening to strangle me. I feel like a basket case. I know it’s all of this with Sarah, the past being so close to the present. It’s not a bad thing, not necessarily, but I’d kind of like a reprieve from it. I don’t need to get emotional over everything from my wild little sisters to my dad being sentimental, and a piece of garlic bread that just tastes like home.
But I am. It’s that kind of night.
We finish up dinner, and my mom gets out dessert, a giant bowl of the richest banana pudding you’ve ever tasted. It’s a copycat recipe from some famous bakery in New York, and she always complains about how criminally easy it is to make, particularly given how much that’s in it. The fat in the pudding is my friend, not my enemy, and I’ve never met a dessert that I thought was too sweet, which makes it my absolute favorite thing. I know she made it for that reason.
I take a helping that’s probably too generous, and Sarah scoops herself a small amount.
“Thank you,” she says softly. “Again. I don’t know that I’ve ever really had a family dinner before.”
Her words are soft, devastating in their simplicity. I see Kaylee’s eyes welling up, but she looks away, does her best to hide her reaction. I look at Sarah, trying to see if she’s aware of just how horrible an admission that is. I also get it. Because yeah, we got included sometimes in the houses that we lived in growing up. But we always felt acutely out of place. Either with the other kids that were sitting there at the table, with the parents, or with ourselves. It was just a dark time all around. And then inall the years since, I know she’s felt so isolated. So Goddamned isolated.
“We’re glad you’re here,” my dad says, his words firm and definitive, glossing over the emotion of the moment, and I’m grateful for that.
She doesn’t need to be made to feel like an alien. We don’t need to have moments that highlight how different our pasts make us from other people. They are inevitable, and they happen, but it’s always weird when they do.
In this house, people at least understand that.
