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The whole bustling scene was both familiar and foreign—a lot like his own family’s busy celebrations, but with a foreign set of customs and behaviors.
If Kal could manage to work things out with Rosemary, he might find himself at this table again. Part of this family, if only peripherally.
It wasn’t such a bad prospect. The Fredericks seemed to have a pretty good handle on the important stuff.
“Mojito?”
Allie extended a silver tumbler with a sprig of mint on the rim. Kal accepted it, glad to have something to hang onto amidst the chaos that had descended on the Fredericks home.
“Ben made it,” Allie said, “so I can’t guarantee it’s not completely weird. He does that—he’s a chef, so he has to, I guess, and sometimes his food is completely transcendent, like this one time he gave me an apple when I was sad? You’d think, it’s just an apple, how can it be transcendent, but it was a Ben apple, so you’d think wrong. But other times he hands you a plate of, like, pork belly with pineapple and capers or something, and you just want to ask him what’s actually wrong with him, and why does he hate you?”
“I can hear every word you’re saying,” Ben said from the kitchen.
“I’m not afraid of you,” Allie replied. “I only speak the truth.”
Kal sipped the drink. It was weird—some kind of melon flavor, and something bitter happening on the back end—but it was also stiff, which was a blessing. His mental state was somewhere between revved up to a thousand with excitement and teetering on the verge of collapse. The stakes were high. Like, entire-lifetime-potential-for-happiness high.
Look at me, princess. Look at me, look at me.
“You’re really sure about this Ben fella?” Allie asked her sister. “You haven’t had any second thoughts, like, Maybe I should fall in love with someone who isn’t perpetually one step away from mass murder?”
“I like this Ben fella,” May said. “He has his charms.”
“They are invisible,” Allie replied, drawing the word out.
Rosemary raised an eyebrow at her ex-husband, who sat beside her.
“What?” he asked.
“You’re really sure about this one?” Her tone was arch, her eyes warm. “You haven’t had any second thoughts, like, Maybe I should fall in love with someone who’s less like a force of nature in a sparkly tracksuit?”
“I like this one,” he replied. “Sparkly tracksuit and all. She’s good for me.”
“Aww.” Allie kissed Winston’s cheek. “You are the sweetest.”
Winston blushed. Rosemary smiled at him. That was good—it was good she got along with her ex. If only Kal could get her to smile at him.
She’d turned up twenty minutes ago, all calm graciousness, her eyes a little red, her mouth a little sad. Kal wanted to fix it.
He just had to catch her alone first.
He had a whole plan. Before he even came in the house, he’d called back Brian in Kathmandu and set up a meeting, and he’d returned Chris’s call from the other day and told him, sure, he’d write an article. They would get together in the city next week.
He’d texted his mom and his brothers and Sangmu to tell them he loved them.
That part had backfired, actually. His siblings were currently mocking him in group chat. His phone kept buzzing in his back pocket, dig after dig. Maybe he should’ve thought that part through first.
Dinner arrived on the table. Ben and May took their places, May beaming, Ben scowling, both of them taking turns explaining the food. Kal was grateful for the tour. Nothing on his plate looked familiar.
Rosemary cut her meat with her wrists high. She dabbed her napkin at the corners of her mouth. She held her salad fork upside down, the tines placed precisely into bites that were never too large or too small. She laughed when everyone else was laughing, made witty remarks at all the right moments, thanked Ben for the lovely meal with three seconds of sincere eye contact.
Kal had spent more oxygen-deprived nights than he could count high on the slopes of Everest, actively losing brain cells, and he had never felt more like he was dying than he did in this moment.
Breathe.
The conversation flowed easily across the table, jumping from Ben’s restaurant to May’s children’s book contract to Beatrice’s movie and its bottomless budget.
“I’d like a producer credit,” Winston said. “Given how deeply I’ve invested.”
