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He means every single word.
“Yeah, sweet girl. I’ll work to keep you.”
And though it’s a small change in the phrasing, it’s everything I need to hear.
Forty-Six
-Lola-
As promised,about a month after the disaster that was the gala, we’re in the car driving back to Springbrook Hills. This time, we’re going for an entire weekend. I’ve spent the last three weeks recovering and training my two—yes, two!---new employees to feel confident in our weekend away, but I know Ben is anxious.
This time, we’re not going for a quick eight hours and the excuse of celebration.
This time, we’re going to be with his family, to spend time with them, and, from what Ben tells me, inevitably get into some kind of argument.
But with everything we’ve gone through, I know we’ll be fine.
So I reach over, grab Ben’s hand and pull it into my lap, where I use my fingers to trace the inked-in lines. When his face turns to me, I smile at him, and when he smiles back, just a hint of the anxiety has melted away.
-Ben-
We’re sitting at the kitchen table with my family, and the sound of utensils on china is deafening.
We’ve been here for a total of one hour, an hour that was filled with Lola and Jordan chatting about weddings and instantly becoming best friends while Mom hid in the kitchen, shooing everyone out until she called us in.
It shouldn't be a big deal. I’m an adult—what should my father’s opinions of me mean to me? But still, my gut churns with the knowledge of what’s coming.
We’re at the long table my father built my mother some forty-odd years ago. Lola is by my side, my brother across from me, his fiancée across from Lola. Mom is on one end of the table, Dad on the other.
Just like when we were kids.
It’s strange, being here again, feeling like a kid but being in my thirties. It’s like some part of you never truly outgrows the feeling of being small at a family table.
But stranger is the silence.
And my sweet girl, she can’t stand silence. Not for a moment.
“So, Jordan, I hear you work with Tanner, right?” I gave her their entire, tangled backstory the other night when we lay in my bed, telling her about how my brother met his new fiancée two years ago when she was running from her country star ex and landed in Springbrook Hills, dropping the bombshell on Tanner’s best friend, Hunter, that she was his half-sister. They couldn’t stand each other for a while but eventually realized they worked.
Seems like my family has this issue often.
“Yeah!” Jordan says, relief in her eyes. From what I know about her, she likes silence about as much as Lola does. “It’s been a blast. I work in the office, books and clients and that kind of thing, definitely not out on the site or anything.” She laughs, and it’s a pretty laugh, but the look my brother gives her when she speaks? Half amused, half eye roll, but full-on enamored with her? Fuck, it’s familiar. “Tanner does that, though. Always out on the site working with the men.”
I feel the mood shift before my father even opens his mouth, the chill in the air. Lola does, too, because her hand moves from the table, slipping underneath and resting on my thigh.
“Tanner’s doing a great job over there. Really took the reins, did his duty to our family.”
I want to argue.
I catch my mom’s face, her eyes wide in a way I’ve seen before.
The battle is warring in her: keep the peace in front of company or rage on my dad.
I look at Tanner, who, now that he’s older, has a look I’ve never seen staring back at me. One that says,you make the call, I’m backing it.
Those times in the past, when this conversation erupted in this same dining room, Tanner was young. Too young to jump in and take my side. And for a moment, I wonder what it would have been like to have a Lola in my life. To have someone to have my corner, ready to smash whatever comes my way. I hope Lilah knows how lucky she is.
Jordan’s eyes are on her plate, and something tells me she’s biting her own tongue.
