His face, too, with that jaw and that nose and those eyes that looked right down inside her and made her feel perfectly herself, and perfectly okay. But she didn’t get a lot of opportunities to look at his face, just sneaking glances when she hoped he had his attention elsewhere so he couldn’t tell she was doing terrible, combustive pining.
“Allie!”
“What?”
“I just said your name four times.”
“Jeez. Sorry. This is a little bit too exciting, I think. I’m getting loopy.”
May handed her a clipboard. “You’re just being you. Here. Hold this.”
“This is Ben’s vegetable order.”
“Right, but it makes you look important, and it feels good to hold onto.”
Allie took the pen from behind the clip, clicked it open, and pushed the clipboard into her stomach, hard. “It does feel good.”
“Is this everybody?” May asked.
Chasity was parked at the table closest to the door, with Bea and Jean beside her. Cath and Nev shared the next table, and there was Winston—she zoomed her eyes over him, but not fast enough to keep from noticing that his socks were some kind of thin purple silk trouser sock situation, because he was the sexiest man in the universe. Dad sat at a table by himself, May was with her, and Ben stalked back to the kitchen from yet another grim glance out the front door, no doubt to whip up another set of weird fig-jam sandwiches as an outlet for his stress.
“Everybody but Mom.”
She said it without thinking, because looking around, it felt true. In some way she didn’t understand yet, these people were…everybody.
“Why would Mom be here?” May asked.
“She wouldn’t. Forget it. You ready to do this?”
“I’m not doing it. You’re doing it.”
“Why am I doing it?”
May pushed her with both hands toward a cleared area by the kitchen. “This is an Allie job if there ever was an Allie job. I’m B-Team.”
“You should come up here with me and be A-Team.” Secretly, though, Allie liked the idea of being the A-team, even if it was just for public speaking, outlandish outfits, and mad schemes.
“Nopes.”
“It would be good if we had sister solidarity.”
“I’m solid. We’re solid. You’re just the spokeswoman.”
“One of you get up there and start talking, or I’m leaving,” Chasity said, just as Ben slammed an enormous plate onto the pass-through and said, “Appetizers.”
“I’ll just take that around,” May said. “Make sure nobody’s too hungry to do good listening.”
“Traitor.”
Her sister winked, and Allie smiled.
It had taken her several sleepless hours, a lot of texts back and forth with May, and an hour’s worth of whispered, interrupted conversation at the 9/11 Memorial for Allie to get to a place where she felt like smiling, but now she kind of couldn’t stop. It just felt so…big.
It was big to learn that her mom wasn’t a serial adulterer, though Allie was learning to accept that even if she had been, her mom was a woman she could talk to about it, talk about all the kinds of choices women were faced with.
It was big to learn her mom was someone so interesting—that she was unknown in a way Allie had never considered, and part of the world in a way she’d never understood.
It was big to hear from her dad, for the first time, exactly what he thought about the circumstances of her birth.