“It will. And don’t worry about the raccoon thing. To be honest, this isn’t even the creepiest thing I’ve ever had happen on a date. You’re all good.”
He laughed despite himself. Then he went a little serious again and looked away from me. “I don’t want you to think that I do this often.”
“Roadkill?”
He came back to me. “No. Lie to my family.”
I pivoted in my seat to look at him straight on. “Jacob, you do not need to tell me what kind of person you are. I know.”
He gazed at me a long moment. That quiet, thoughtful look he gave me sometimes, and I realized that behind that expression was probably the wheels of his brain, working overtime. Trying to assess the situation, worrying, overthinking like I knew Benny always did. His anxiety pinging around. A clawing internal panic nobody else could see.
But I could see it. Because I’d seen it in my brother his whole life.
I think that’s why Benny’s diagnosis was so hard on my brother. He wasn’t just living what was happening. He was living what might happen. An infinite number of what-ifs, fueled by his anxiety, each one experienced like they were going on simultaneously, eating away at him, terrifying him, tormenting him. And once he started down that path, it was so hard to stop the progression. It was a self-perpetuating cycle of emotional destruction.
One that Jacob’s selfless gesture had knocked off its trajectory.
Jacob had given Benny a reason to stop the inside screaming and look at just one way forward instead of all the possible worst-case scenarios his brain could conjure. He’d given him hope. And in doing that, he gave his restless mind peace.
And I could see, in this one quiet moment in this truck, that the screaming was going on inside of Jacob. He didn’t have to say a word for me to know it. He was worried what was going to happen with his family today. He was worried what I thought of him. He was dealing with the fact that his ex was marrying his brother, and he was probably afraid we’d get caught in this lie.
I decided right then and there that my job was going to be to quiet it all down. I would be a buffer. An emotional support person. I would throw myself over him like a bulletproof vest. Wrap him up in my protection.
“Look, everything is going to be okay,” I said. “We’re ready. My cheekbones are contoured. We’ve got wine and the dead thing…”
The corner of his lip quirked up the tiniest bit.
“We’re going to smile, and eat, nobody is going to know what we’re doing, and it’s going to be fine. Trust me.”
He let out a long breath through his nose. “Okay.”
This time he seemed to believe it. Or at least he appeared to want to believe it.
He drove us another few blocks, and we pulled up in front of a nice two-story house with half a dozen cars parked in the driveway. He sat staring up at the home through the windshield.
“It’s going to be chaos in there,” he said almost to himself.
“Okay. I’m good in chaos.”
“I’m not,” he mumbled.
I cocked my head at him. “Do you want to play a game?”
He arched an eyebrow. “A game?”
“Yeah. I think you’ll like it. I used to play it with Benny when we’d go to stuff like this.”
“Okay…”
“I give you a catchphrase. And you have to work it into a conversation. The second you do, you’re allowed a time-out from peopling. We go sit on the stairs with the dog or something.”
He eyed me. “A catchphrase? Like what?”
I twisted my lips and looked sideways. “Liiiike, ‘Not on my watch,’” I said in a fake British accent.
He smiled a little.
“Benny liked it because it gave him a goal and it forced him to talk to people.”
He seemed thoughtful. “All right. I’ll try it.”
“Sweet!” I got unbuckled. “Any last-minute tips?”
“Yeah, don’t give Grandpa any cigarettes, no matter what he says. He’s very convincing. And do not under any circumstances bring up sex toys to my mom. You will never escape the conversation. No one will be able to save you.”
“Uh, I somehow don’t think sex toys are going to come up while I’m talking to your mom.”
“I think you’d be surprised how easily she works it in,” he muttered. He put his shoulder to the door and got out to get Lieutenant Dan.
I grabbed my purse and met him around the front of the truck. “Should we hold hands?” I asked, my voice low. “Like, coming up the walkway? In case someone’s looking out the window or there’s a Ring Doorbell or something?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think you should have to touch me as part of this deal. I think we can pull this off without it.”
“I don’t mind it.”
He shook his head. “I think we’ll be all right.”
When we got to the front door, he didn’t knock. It was unlocked and he let us in. It was like stepping into a Dave & Buster’s. Music, laughing, kids screaming, a video game turned up too loud, a blender running. The warm smell of cooking food.
A parrot flew through the vestibule and I ducked. “Whoa!”
It landed on top of the coatrack and squawked, “MOTHERFUCKER!” at the top of its lungs.
“Sorry,” Jacob said, already looking flustered. “That’s Jafar.”
Then two children darted to us from out of nowhere. “Uncle JJ!” they called in unison.
Jacob smiled and crouched to catch them in a bear hug and hoist them up. The kids wrapped their arms around Jacob’s neck. “What socks?”
Jacob smiled, his honey eyes creasing at the corners. “Frogs, like you said.”
“Yay!”
He turned so they could see me. “Carter, Katrina, this is Briana.”
The little boy looked over at me. “Hello.”
I smiled. “Hi.”
The little girl peered at me curiously. “You’re pretty.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I like your necklace.”
She didn’t reply. They wiggled out of Jacob’s arms like they’d exchanged some unspoken agreement to take off. They hit the floor and were gone, yelling like town criers that Uncle JJ was here with some girl with long hair.
Jacob looked at me. “Those are Jewel and Gwen’s twins. And that’s going to be the easiest introduction of the night.”
“The animal-socks thing is very cute,” I said.
“Sometimes they can’t agree, and I have to wear two different ones.”
I laughed.
Then adults started streaming into the vestibule. They came down the hallway in a wave of humanity and fanned out around me, all smiles and excited greetings.
I could practically feel Jacob’s body tense next to me, and I had a knee-jerk urge to reach over and squeeze his hand to let him know I was okay, but I didn’t get the chance because they edged him out to get close to me. I was completely surrounded. A cat started rubbing on my legs, the twins skipped around the throng, and Jafar squawked obscenities from the coatrack as people started shaking my hand, introducing themselves faster than I could keep up.
A young, pretty girl named Jane in a pink sundress. Jewel, who I’d already met; her wife, Gwen, a blue-haired Asian woman with a nose ring. Jill, a petite woman with Jacob’s auburn hair in capri pants and a conservative white blouse, and her burly husband, Walter, a Black man wearing a T-shirt for a pit-bull rescue. An old man on oxygen in an electric wheelchair rolled in and bumped into my leg and then sat there glaring up at me in silence. Someone introduced him as Grandpa. He ignored me when I said hello.