Page 25 of Handful

“Very. Betty was just telling me about the challenge of managing a room full of drunk men in an MC.”

He looked at Betty. She looked at him over her glasses with an expression that said she would get to him when she was ready.

“What did you tell her?” he said.

“Nothing she couldn’t have figured out herself,” Betty said. “Go away, Handful.”

He went. But the look he gave me on the way out stayed with me — warm and unhurried, like he was already planning his next excuse to come back through that door.

Lilac finally glanced up from her board. “You may not have noticed but he’s been in that doorway three times since you arrived.”

“I’ve only been here twenty minutes,” I protested.

“He’s protective of you.” She went back to her chopping. “I like it.”

I watched one of the boys — Luca, I thought, based on Handful’s descriptions — catch the ball on his chest and redirect it around a table leg while his brother sprinted past. The dog had given up chasing and was now lying under a table, panting.

“That’s Gunner,” Lilac said, following my gaze.

“He looks exhausted.”

“He’s been exhausted since the twins learned to walk.” She glanced at me with something that might have been sympathy. “You’ll adjust. The volume is always like this. It just stops being noise after a while.”

Through the window I could find Handful without trying. He was out on the grass with Dutch and a cluster of brothers, doing the thing men did at these things — standing in a loose circle, hands in pockets, saying very little. His head was tipped to catch something Dutch was telling him, and whatever it was, it made him laugh.

As if he’d felt me looking, he turned and found me. Lifted his chin once: you good? I looked at him for a second, lifted one finger off my glass — barely — and turned back to the room. Through the glass behind me, I was almost certain he was smiling.

Behind them a prospect was losing a slow war with Colt and Lilac’s younger twins. Graham and Danny were coming up on two, walking now and fast with it. The prospect’s entire job seemed to be keeping them out of their older brothers’ soccer game, and away from anything they could break. Colt drifted between the brothers and his sons, pretending he wasn’t hovering.

It was the most old-fashioned arrangement I’d seen in years — women in the kitchen, men in the yard — and the only person who didn’t seem to know which side he was supposed to be on was Handful who kept popping in to check on me.

Nobody put me to work. I’d half expected to be handed a spoon; instead Lilac waved me off the one time I reached for a board — guests don’t work the first time — so I leaned against the counter and let the kitchen move around me. Lilac chopping, Betty folding, Indira sweeping through with Maya on her hip and one hand fending the baby off everything within reach. This was what Handful had been trying to describe when he said family dinner. Not the sanitized version. The real one, where the kids were loud, the dog was tired, and someone was always yelling from another room.

Eventually Lilac wiped her hands and called that it was done. The kitchen door swung open and the men came in — Dutch first, then Handful and Colt and a pair of prospects, collecting pots, boards and the big foil trays, and carrying them out to the tables to be dished up. Handful passed me with a dish in each hand, caught my eye, and grinned.

I counted seventeen people at the table, and that wasn’t including the kids who were eating standing up or the prospect who was still ferrying plates from the kitchen. Dutch at the head, Indira beside him with Maya. Colt across from Lilac. Betty at Lilac’s side, serene, eating slowly. Holden and Bea across from each other — his hand on the table, hers covering it.

Glitch was at the far end with Wren. She was tucked under his arm the way Handful had described — small, blonde and quiet, her whole body oriented toward Glitch like he was the only person in the room. He had his phone in one hand, showing her something on the screen, and she was leaning into his shoulder and smiling.

She caught me looking. She gave me a small, shy smile.

I smiled back. She looked down at her plate, but the smile stayed.

“Seb?” she said, quiet enough that I almost didn’t hear it under the table noise. “Can you pass the bread?”

“Yeah, sweetheart.” Glitch reached across with his free hand, not looking away from his phone, and set the bread basket in front of her. The movement was automatic — he knew where she was without looking, knew what she needed, attended to it the way you attended to breathing. They were a cute couple.

Handful was beside me, his knee pressed against mine under the table. “Betty’s going to test you,” he murmured. “Wait for it.”

She did. It was a question about Prohibition and American cocktail history.

I watched Handful’s face while I answered. The amusement he was carefully not showing was almost better than the question itself.

“How did you know?” I said, when Betty had turned back.

“She does it to everyone. First dinner. If she asks, she’s already decided you’re worth talking to.” He reached for his water glass. “If she doesn’t ask, she’s already made up her mind about you.”

After that he was quiet — watching me take it in, letting me figure everything out at my own pace, not narrating or explaining. I appreciated that. He was learning when to be quiet, and it was one of the best things about the version of him I’d been getting to know.