Page 4 of Spicy Ever After
I shrug, glancing down at the front of my dress. “I might as well be a monotreme.” I look back at the two of them, and they’re making the face I’ve learned means more explanation is needed. “Monotremes don’t have—” I stop myself before saying the word and instead gesture with my two index fingers towards my breasts with swirling motions.
Grandma Eloise’s lips pale. “Hillary, what is she?—”
“Hattie, honey, why don’t you sit d?—”
“I’m just trying to explain that monotremes are mammals that don’t have nip—” I gulp, catching myself just in time. “They still have mammary glands, you see. It’s just that their milk dribbles out onto their fur and their babies just lick it off?—”
Mom yanks out a chair from the long table. The motion makes a terrible, echoing screech, and I cover my ears with both hands.
Thank God I’m not wearing a bra because raising my arms like this would be even more uncomfortable.
I read Mom’s lips when she tells me to have a seat. I sit but have to stand up again almost immediately because Margaret arrives with her best friend, Camille, and then Merrick’s mom Ms. Alicia, and Merrick’s sister Brianna, and then Margaret’s friend Lacey, and then our little cousin Cecelie, who is going to be the flower girl, and so on until all twelve places at the long table are full.
I sit down and stand up thirteen times, and every time, I am hugged. And every time I get hugged, the cap sleeves choke my arms and tulle scrapes against a different part of my body. My chin. My cheek. My boobs with their invisible nipples. My thighs.
By the time the server takes our lunch orders, the restaurant has gone from noisy and echoing to deafening and inescapable. Like a gun range housed in an oil drum.
It isn’t until Mom taps me on the shoulder that I realize the server is waiting for me to order. Cecelie chatters about her family’s upcoming trip to Disney World, but everyone else is looking at me.
“Sorry,” I mutter, pulling the menu closer. I glance up at the server. “Could you maybe start with someone else?”
Someone scoffs. My money is on Grandma Eloise. Mom settles a hand on my elbow and whispers. “Everyone else has already ordered, honey. What about the shrimp and avocado salad?” She pastes on a smile. “That’s what I’m having.”
I adore my sister Margaret, but if I have to sit here in this chicken-wire dress while the echoes of laughter and chatter and the clinking of glasses and the rattle of dishes pinball off the walls and floors and high ceilings, I am not having a fucking salad.
I flip over the menu to the brunch options because, let’s be honest here, brunch is the evolutionary pinnacle of dining. The Mac Daddy of Meals. The Queen Bee of?—.
“Hattie?” Margaret asks softly. “You good?”
But I don’t look up or answer her because this kind of selection can’t be rushed. And it already takes all my concentration to tune out the noise and not break out in hives with all eleven—twelve counting the server—pairs of eyes on me while I decide.
“Harriet, it’ll be dinnertime before you know it.” I don’t have to look up to know this is Grandma Eloise. Probably smiling like a shark.
Mom shifts in her seat beside me.
“I’ll have the Breesus Boudin Biscuits,” I announce. “With the cheddar corn grits.”
“Filling,” Grandma Eloise mutters.
Mom resettles the napkin in her lap.
The server turns to stride away.
“And a sweet iced tea,” I add, raising my voice over the noise. Except maybe I raised it a little too high?
Half of the other diners in The French Press stare at me and our server—a tall, thin blond guy—looks a little afraid.
I duck my head and glance at Mom and then Margaret. “Sorry.”
“All good, Hats,” Margaret waves me off. Mom pats my thigh twice under the table. I wrinkle my nose at the scrape-scrape of the tulle.
I think about the Aurifil color card instead of how good the fried boudin biscuit sliders are going to be. My stomach is already rumbling. Every now and then, the table erupts in laughter, and I have to cover my ears again. But each time I do, I look up at Margaret, because she’s beaming, laughing huge.
More than once, our eyes latch, and we smile at each other.
Margaret is two years older than me. She just earned her Master’s in speech pathology and audiology in May. She and Merrick have been together for two years. He proposed a week after her graduation when we were all at the beach house in Miramar.
I hate sand. But I love the beach.
