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Then Conner finally faced me again, pulling a comically exaggeratedyikesface that almost made me crack a smile. Almost. I hadn’t had any coffee yet.
“Tell you what,” I said. “Give me fifteen minutes to take aquick shower and get dressed, and then we can grab some breakfast and come up with a plan. Sound good?”
WE ENDED UPat the nearby Waffle House. There was something so comforting, so consistent about the place. I immediately felt ten times more at ease freezing my ass off in a booth across from my brother, both of us peering at the greasy place-mat menus as though we wouldn’t choose the same thing we always had, than I had in that old house.
“So,” I said after we’d ordered. “How’s Shani?”
Conner’s face lit up. It really was sickening, how much he loved his girlfriend. I wasn’t proud of it, but I’d even muted Conner on social media for their anniversary month, because he was posting every day about one more thing he loved about her. The cute scrunch she got in her nose when she laughed. The way she cooked her Indian mother’s masala dosa recipe. How she’d always been there for him. The list went on and on.
He’d come up with a hashtag and everything. Not that #ShaniLove was that creative, but still. The picture that had really sent me over the edge was one where he’d written the hashtag in mustard on a hot dog to commemorate their fifth date at a baseball game. Who even remembered where they went on afifthdate?
“She’s great,” he said. “She’s got one more year left of nursing school and then she’ll be done. She said she’s really liked working on the neurology floor, but there aren’t as many jobs in that department so she’ll just take what she can get and go from there.”
His leg was bouncing a mile a minute under the table. Irecognized the habit from when he was a kid and he was excited about something. There was more he wanted to say, I could feel it.
“Okay...” I said, feeling him out. Maybe he and Shani were thinking about moving after she graduated? But then I didn’t know why he wouldn’t just tell me that. I was only planning to stay in Florida long enough to get Dad’s house cleaned and sold, so it didn’t matter to me if Conner moved away, too.
Shit, was Shanipregnant? But then he wouldn’t be talking about her school and job prospects like they wouldn’t be affected, right?
“I’m going to propose!” Conner blurted, reaching into his pocket to take out a midnight blue velvet box, which he opened and presented to me. In my peripheral vision, I could see the only other guest in the dining area look up from his newspaper, and my hand shot out to quickly close the box.
“Jesus,” I said, “put that away before everyone thinks you’re proposing tome.”
“Sorry,” he said, but opened the box to glance at the ring inside one more time before sliding it back into his pocket. “I sold my virtual reality system to buy it. It was four hundred bucks but I got it for three fifty, and they upgraded me to the nicer box for free.”
“That’s great,” I said. My voice came out sounding weaker than I wanted it to. It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy for my brother, but the news was hitting me all at once. It seemed so fast. “You don’t think you should wait? Until you’re... older?”
I winced even as I said it, but Conner didn’t seem to take offense. “Nope,” he said. “That girl has my whole heart. Why wait to let her know?”
The waitress came then with our food, and Conner went into a whole routine about how the bacon was so overcooked it could stand up by itself. The waitress went from stiffly asking him if he wanted it remade to laughing with him as he pretended to march the bacon across his plate. That was my brother.
His words shook me, though, and I didn’t know why. Was it just because I worried about him, hoped he wasn’t acting impulsively? I didn’t think so. He was barely out of college, which felt so young to me, but he and Shani had also been dating since their senior year of high school, so it wasn’t like their relationship was brand-new. My knee-jerk reaction aside, I liked Shani a lot from the couple times I’d met her, and she and my brother seemed really happy together.
Was it because I was jealous? My last relationship couldn’t even really be called one. I’d hooked up with a guy I’d had a crush on since our first-year bibliography class, a truly beautiful blond-haired Adonis who’d been aBeowulfscholar (my first fucking sign), who’d given me a few nights of lackluster booty calls (another sign, I supposed) before ghosting me entirely.
But that had hurt my pride, not my heart. And I think it was that phrase that had burrowed deep, like a splinter—my whole heart. Had I ever given anyone or anything that much of myself? Did I even want to?
“Are you going to eat the egg whites?” Conner asked, his fork already poised over my plate.
A petty part of me wanted to sayyes, but he knew I ordered eggs sunny side up only to dip my toast in the yolks and then ignore the rest. He used to call it the Eye Gouge Special.
I pushed my plate toward him. “You could at least wait untilI’m done eating,” I said as he started cutting the whites away from the yolks and sliding them over to his plate.
“But then they wouldn’t be as hot, Pheebs,” he said, his eyebrows wagging.
“So,” I said, “when are you going to propose?”
“It’s not aboutwhenso much ashow,” Conner said around a bite of egg.
I waited for him to finish, then twirled my hand in a circle to prompt him when he didn’t. “Okay... sohoware you planning to propose?”
“I don’t know!” Conner said. “That’s why I haven’t figured out when. It has to be epic, like, viral-video, clickbait-headlines-about-how-you-won’t-believe-what-happened-next type of epic.”
It seemed to me that the fastest way to guarantee that kind of response was to have something go epicallywrong, but I didn’t say that.
“A rose petal path leading her to some significant location,” I suggested.
“Amateur hour.”
