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I swallowed at the massive lump rising in my throat. How humiliating. I prayed nobody in the dining room had noticed and that the moment would die a swift death once I met his family. They looked up from their plates as we entered, and I was quick to smile at them before they could see my frown.
“Hey, hey!” A man around Peter’s age stood up to clap him on the back. “The hell took you so long?”
“Not all of us are used to waking up at the ass crack of dawn,” Peter grumbled good-naturedly, hugging the man I assumed to be his brother.
“Ass crack of dawn,” his brother mocked. “Nine o’clock isn’t the ass crack of dawn.”
“Can we go one meal without cursing?” a woman asked with an exhausted sigh, and I knew that must be his mother. “And, Peter, are you going to introduce us to your friend?”
Peter did introduce me then—and not as his friend. He proudly let his mother, father, brother, and sister-in-law know that I was in fact his girlfriend. And, Lord, did that feel nice—to be claimed so openly and without hesitation. I loved the way it felt to have his arm wrap around my shoulders as he led me to a chair, then sat and loaded my plate before thinking of his own. For the first time in my life, I knew what it was like to be in a real, honest-to-God relationship, and there wasn’t anything I didn’t enjoy about it. Ex-girlfriends and all.
And then his family started to talk.
“So, how long have you two been seeing each other?” his mother asked.
“Uh,” Peter said, laughing awkwardly, “a couple months, I think?” He looked to me for corroboration, and I nodded. “Yeah, a couple months or so.”
“A couple months, and we’re only just now meeting her?” his dad asked before scoffing. “What, are you ashamed of us or something?”
“No,” Peter replied, snickering a little. “We just haven’t been over here.”
“You’re over here all the time,” Jeff, his brother, pointed out.
“Whatever.”
“So, Lennon, what do you do?” Margaret, Peter’s mother, asked.
I sipped too loudly on my apple juice before quickly lowering the glass to the table and saying, “Um … well, I’ve been, uh, doing some writing, and—”
“Writing? Like, for a job?” Jeff asked mid-bite.
I hesitated. Was I allowed to say it was my job when I hadn’t actually made any money yet? The answer seemed obvious, so I shook my head. “N-no, not really. I—I haven’t published yet, but I’m hoping to soon, and—”
“So, what do you do for work then?” Ted, his father, asked.
I dropped my gaze to the plate of bacon and scrambled eggs before me and said, “Well, I don’t really … have a job exactly. But I, uh …”
Jeff stopped eating abruptly. “So, you don’t make money?”
“I—”
“Lennon can’t see well, so she has a hard time finding work,” Peter answered for me, his tone hard and flat.
“Some blind people work,” Margaret replied, unimpressed. “I just saw something on the news about this completely blind woman waitressing at a diner. It was really inspiring.”
“Oh, I think I saw that,” Tiffany, Jeff’s wife, replied. “She was incredible.”
“Everyone is different,” Peter muttered, laying his hand on my shoulder and giving it a little squeeze, as if to say,Hang in there, champ.
But I wasn’t hanging in there. The minutes ticked by, bringing more and more self-consciousness and embarrassment my way with every passing second. Peter’s father asked if I had any plans for my future while his mother asked where I went to college, then demanded an explanation as to why I chose not to go to college at all. His brother questioned what actually was wrong with my vision before asking why I wasn’t more aggressive in trying to make more of my life. I told him I was trying, hence the book, but he dropped the subject, clearly bored and unamused by my silly dabbling in something he felt shouldn’t be more than a hobby.
The conversation then steered in the direction of Jeff and Tiffany, who had apparently bought a house recently in a nicer part of town. They were working hard on having a baby, had been trying for a little over three months, and couldn’t wait to finally grow their little family past the two of them and their golden retriever.
Peter remained quiet as they spoke, and so did I.
After, as I helped Tiffany and Margaret clear the table, Margaret casually mentioned running into someone named Lisa and how she had just finished her residency at the local hospital.
“Oh, that’s great!” Tiffany replied with an annoying amount of enthusiasm. “God, I miss her. What else has she been up to? Is she seeing anybody?”
