Sweet (Landry Family 6)

He lowers his chin and looks into my eyes. “Try me.”

I feel heat in the apples of my cheeks.

“Look, I understand how lucky I am to have been adopted by the Carmichaels. Okay? I get it. I went from being invisible and ignored in foster care to chaos and candy on the beach. They’re absolutely wonderful. All of them.”

“But?”

I sigh, taking my drink from Gina and then thanking her.

“It wasn’t that it was hard getting swamped. It was more about my …” I restart. “I had a hard time understanding that I belonged there. It took me a long time. Years. I struggle with it now some days, if I’m being honest. I don’t look like them. I don’t like the same foods they like. I’m not doing a marathon on Thanksgiving morning, or any other day if we’re being honest, and I never met my grandma Carmichael, who was like the patron saint of fucking sunshine, I guess.”

He chuckles.

“Clearly, I didn’t get that DNA.” I grin. “It can be hard. And it makes me feel like a jerk, and then I get sweaty about it, and then I need space because who wants to feel like a sweaty jerk in front of the people who shouldn’t make you feel that way to start with?”

Hollis brings his glass to his lips. “Punctuation is your friend.”

I snort.

My brother’s attention is taken away by the television—or that’s what it seems. In reality, I think he’s just trying to process what I’ve said and figure out how to respond. This is something I’ve learned about Hollis. He’s a quiet processor. I appreciate it.

I twirl my straw around my glass and think about my admission too. It’s the truth. All of it. But I’ve never vocalized it to anyone. I don’t think I’ve ever even said it out loud.

I wanted nothing more growing up than to find a family. Then I did, and I just wanted to be one of them. Desperately. I wanted to fit in somewhere.

What I didn’t want?

I didn’t want to be the dark-haired little girl who everyone judged with hefty skepticism as I walked with my fair-haired family down the beach. I resented my curvy build that stuck out in family photos. I also seriously hated that I couldn’t answer what my heritage was in school or if my family had any medical conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, or kidney disease.

I don’t know, Doc. The last thing I knew, I was being carted off from school in a white van, and my parents were sent to the pokey for manufacturing methamphetamine in our basement. Could be some issues there, clearly.

Gina sets our plates in front of us and asks if we need anything else. We politely decline.

“You know,” Hollis says, taking a napkin and folding it onto his lap. “I felt just like you do until I met Larissa.”

“So she fixed you?” I pick up a fry. “She have any brothers?”

He grins. “No. She didn’t fix me, smart-ass. She just made me look at things differently. Before her, I thought there wasn’t a place for me. I had no one, right? And then she came along, and I realized that I belong where I say I belong.”

Deep.

I blink twice and avoid discussing how that might apply to me … or not. “And what about the brothers?”

“No brothers.” He laughs, bringing his burger to his mouth. “You’re funny.”

I bite off the end of my fry. “I guess when God was handing out brothers, he gave them all to me.”

Hollis swallows and then takes a sip of his drink. I ignore the impending question by squirting a heavy dose of ketchup onto my plate in the shape of a moon.

“You’ve always done that, huh?” He motions toward the ketchup design. “I have memories of you doing that.”

My heart warms that he remembers. You don’t realize you’ve missed someone knowing things about you until someone does.

“Tell me about your brothers,” he says. “You’ve not said a lot about them.”

I drag a fry through the ketchup. “They’re good guys. They’re all older than me, but we’re pretty close. We have a siblings text group that gets a little wild.”

He smiles.

“I want to throttle Banks sometimes, but what can you do?” I shrug and eat another fry.

“Is he the one you’re closest to?”

“Yeah. He’s a turd,” I say, laughing. “He always said that Mom and Dad bought me because they couldn’t have a girl. We’d pass this little shop in town with this big pink-and-yellow sign out front. I think they sell surfboards or something. Anyway, every time we’d pass it growing up, Banks would whisper, ‘Look, it’s the store where Mom bought you. She still has the receipt.’”

A shadow passes Hollis’s face. “Sounds like an asshole.”

“He was kidding,” I say, picking up another fry. “I mean, he is kind of an asshole, but he broke a guy’s nose for me once, so I can’t talk too much shit about him.”