Hadley’s eyes cast to the side as she gnawed her bottom lip. As they passed the biscuits, the glass bowl of green beans with slivered almonds, and the large casserole dish decorated with bright-yellow sunflowers, she kept looking back at the door as if waiting for Adalyn to walk in. When she didn’t, Hadley pushed her food around her plate, listening to the conversation but not joining in as it whirled around them.
Needing in a way he couldn’t quite explain to distract her from stewing about what had happened with her sister, he scooted his chair close and lowered his voice. “I’ve never had casserole.”
Hadley turned toward him, her eyes wide. “They don’t have that in your rich-kid boarding schools?”
“We only had the finest steaks, rarest seafood, and most expensive wines.”
“You didn’t get alcohol at school.” She rolled her eyes.
“Didn’t get steak, either.” He couldn’t even imagine what that would have been like. The dean would have stood in traffic first. ‘The Gravestone School believed in the old-school break-them-down tradition. It was all lukewarm showers, room-temperature meals, and a rigid devotion to social customs.”
“That does not sound like fun,” she said, her nose wrinkling in sympathy as she grimaced.
“It could have been worse.” It could have been their grandmother’s house. “Anyway, Web made it fun.”
“Here, I gave you an extra helping.” Stephanie handed him a plate loaded down with a creamy, cheesy chicken pasta with veggies mixture topped off with toasted bread crumbles and two large biscuits. “Put honey on the biscuit. You’ll thank me later.”
Once everyone was at the table, they bowed their heads and said grace, and then he took a bite of the casserole. It was warm and filling and settled in his stomach like a hug. After everyone had their delicious first bite, it was all smack talk about game night as they ate with everyone steering clear of any wedding discussions. Adalyn still hadn’t come down for dinner, and while everyone was trying not to draw attention to it, her empty chair was a physical reminder.
“So,” PawPaw said as he stood from the table and picked up his plate. “Are you ready for Pictionary?”
“Nooooooooo,” Hadley said, groaning.
“There’s no avoiding it.” PawPaw shrugged. “Louise must have used weighted dice when we rolled for who got to pick the games.”
“Stop accusing me of cheating, you old bugger,” Aunt Louise hollered from over by the sink as she rinsed off her dishes and put them in the dishwasher. “I won fair and square.”
“Pictionary sounds great.”
Looking around at everyone—Louise grinning, Hadley groaning, and PawPaw glaring at his sister—Will was having a hard time trying to figure out what the fuss was about.
Thirty minutes into the family’s version of the drawing game and he understood. Hadley was a detriment to any competitive person’s sanity during the game. First of all, she was awful at drawing—even her stick people were a strange alignment of squiggly lines and circles. Then, there was her insistence on drawing the same pattern of shapes over and over as if on the twentieth try, he or PawPaw would understand that the arrow shooting out of the circle at the end of another line was a lightsaber, leading them to the correct answer of Star Wars. The real killer, though, was how she called out the most bizarre answers that made zero sense and the house rule that each team only got to throw out three answers. Invariably, at least two of those came from Hadley and were a full 180 degrees from the correct answer.
By the time it came down to the last phrase, PawPaw was stress pacing in the back of the room while Hadley read her clue and started for the giant dry-erase board up on an easel. Meanwhile, Will kept getting distracted by the way she chewed on her bottom lip while she drew squiggly vertical lines with what looked like lightning shooting out from the top in every direction and a rectangle that looked like maybe it was on fire. She put the cap on her marker with a snap and turned to him and PawPaw, a hopeful smile on her lips.
“Explosive farts,” PawPaw said.
“Do you have to be so crude?” Aunt Louise said without even a hint of censure in her
voice.
“Look at the picture!” Taking the bait, PawPaw’s voice rose as he waved his hand at the dry-erase board. “What do you see?”
Will cocked his head to the side and squinted, trying like hell to see something besides a stick figure with an impressive amount of gas, but there was no hope. Once PawPaw put that image in his head, there was no seeing anything else.
“It could be interpreted in many ways,” he said, grasping for something—anything—else that it could be.
The timer on Stephanie’s phone rang out, and Aunt Louise gave a celebratory hoot. Hadley shot him and PawPaw a glare.
“It’s Jungle Book. How did you not see the trees?” She pointed to the vertical lines and then the exploding rectangle. “And the book?”
Will took a billionth look at what she’d drawn on the dry-erase board, but even with her explanation, he couldn’t see any of it.
“Well,” PawPaw said, shaking his head. “That puts us in the consolation round.”
Hadley took another look back at her drawing and, judging by the way she cocked her head to the side, even she figured it was a lost cause. “Sorry, PawPaw.”
Her grandpa got up and gave her a quick hug. “All you have to do to make up for it is beat Louise’s team in the next round.” He lowered his volume so only Hadley and Will would be able to hear. “There’s no way I want to spend the next month getting snarky texts from her.”