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“Projected.” Beau shrugs it off the way he shrugs off everything that matters. “Lot of season left. Lot can still go wrong.”
“He’s being modest,” Cash says, mouth full, “which is disgusting, don’t let him do it. He’s gonna go top fifteen and buy us all boats.”
“I’m not buying you a boat.”
“You said the boat was on the table.”
“The boat was never on the table, Cash.”
“It was on the table,” Theo says, to his plate, and the room comes apart, because Theo speaking is an event and Theo speaking to bury Beau is a national holiday.
Danny’s grinning now. He’s watching Beau take it — watching the whole table climb on him and watching him just sit there warm and easy and let them, the captain who doesn’t need the room to know he’s the captain.
“You watch his games?” Danny asks me.
“I go for the concessions.”
“She’s lying,” Danny tells the table, settling back, an older brother with ammunition and an audience, which is the most dangerous animal in any house. “When she was sixteen she made me drive her four hours each way to watch some boy play juniors. Kid never knew she was alive. She brought a book and held it the whole game and turned the pages in all the wrong places, because she was watching him over the top of it.”
“I did not —”
“You wore the good lipstick. The once.”
Beau turns to look at me, lit up, the same look he gave the fog. “You own a good lipstick?”
“I’m wearing it right now,” I say. “Try to keep up.”
“I always keep up,” he says, easy, and reaches over without looking and takes a roast potato off my plate like it lives there. And Danny watches him do it. Watches Beau’s hand go to my food without asking. Watches me let it. And some long-held thing goes out of my brother’s shoulders, and the two of them have an entire conversation in the half-second it takes Beau to eat my potato, and I’m not in it, and it’s about me, and it’s good.
“Okay, settle something.” Cash aims his fork at the table at large. “Hot dog. Sandwich, or not a sandwich.”
“Not a sandwich,” June says, instantly, with feeling.
“It’s structurally a sandwich —”
“It’s a taco,” Wren says.
The table stops.
“It’s a taco,” Wren says again, and goes back to her plate, refusing to defend it, which is the single most devastating thing a person can do to a dinner.
“I need her to elaborate,” Margo says.
“She’s not going to elaborate,” Wyatt says. “That’s the whole move.”
“Daniel. You’re neutral. Adjudicate.”
“I’ve been on three continents,” Danny says, “and I have never once heard anything as unhinged as ‘the hot dog is a taco,’ and I’m counting things men said to me under fire.” He tips his head at Wren. “Respect.”
“Respect,” Wren says.
That’s the part nobody warned me about. I always thought the danger was the bad nights — the fights, the floor, the leaving. Nobody mentioned the dangerous thing would turn out to be a Monday with roast potatoes, the brother I kept and the boy I kept looking at each other over my head and liking what they found.
Margo waits until the noise dips, which is a thing Margo does, she has a lawyer’s ear for the gap.
“So, Daniel.” She folds her hands. “Intentions.”
“Margo,” I say.
