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DYLAN
There were worse ways to be greeted in your own home than by catching your mother spread-eagle, plastered against the glass backyard door, getting mauled by her fiancé. But I couldn’t think of any of them as I stood at the entrance tightening my fist around the door handle, fighting—and losing—a war against my gag reflex.
“Yes, Marty! Yes. Right there, dio mio—don’t stop.” Her muffled cries, blurred by his palm as he tried to make sure they wouldn’t wake the toddler upstairs, trickled into my brain, burning themselves into my core memory.
My knee-jerk reaction was to scream, “MY EYES, MY EYES!” à la Phoebe Buffay and charge out of the house, town, state, and planet with my arms flailing in the air. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do that. First, because my three-year-old was asleep upstairs and I wasn’t going to leave her behind. Second, because at the ageof twenty-six, I still lived with my mama, albeit in the gorgeous mini mansion my brother had built for her. She had more right to this house than I did.
Third? Get it, Mama. Props to you for living your best life.
Throwing up a little in my mouth, I shut the door with a soft click and flung myself back into my red 1999 GMC Jimmy, giving them their privacy. I slammed the ancient driver’s door behind me. In retaliation, it tore off its hinges, collapsing onto the muddy ground with an angry thud.
Closing my eyes, I choked the steering wheel, inhaling deeply.
Everything is okay. More than okay. Great, really. You have a roof over your head. A steady job. A kid you worship…
My phone danced inside the flimsy front pocket of my diner uniform. The outfit consisted of a pale pink minidress short enough to moonlight as a napkin and a checked apron with an array of indistinguishable stains, from tomato sauce to coffee, vomit, and grease.
What can I say? It was a life of luxurious extravagance, but someone had to live it.
My eyes tapered to the image of my best friend Cal’s face on my screen. It was a photo of her with her head tossed back, laughing carelessly, my brother’s demonic face buried in her neck as he kissed her, with the Eiffel Tower as their backdrop. I chose this as her contact picture to remind myself of the one and only flaw in her otherwise sunny character: she was screwing Lucifer’s doppelgänger, a.k.a. my overbearing, controlling older brother.
I mean, they were married. And hella cute together. Maybe I was just annoyed because everyone around me was paired up, cocooned in their own loved-up universes. My only boyfriends in the past four years had been battery-operated and made of silicone.
I glided my finger across the screen but didn’t speak. I was afraid I’d throw up if I opened my mouth.
“Dyl,” Cal laughed breathlessly on the other end of the line. Row growled in the background in that grizzly-bear way he always used whenever he was kissing her.
I wasn’t jealous Cal was living her happily ever after. She’d earned it through taming my half-civilized sibling.
“You won’t believe who we just ran into in Cannes!” she shrieked.
Closing my eyes again, I talked myself out of a spontaneous mental breakdown.
Ed Sheeran? Taylor Swift? King Charles? God?
Their life was full of celebrity parties and Pinterest-worthy vacations and food too picture-perfect to eat.
It wasn’t Cal’s fault I’d just finished a twelve-hour shift at my dead-end job in Dahlia’s Diner. It wasn’t Cal’s fault I was a single mom. It wasn’t Cal’s fault I was still living with my mother. It wasn’t her fault my life felt like the middle section of a painstakingly boring book, the pages stuck together, a never-ending chain of to-do lists and chores.
“Dylan? You there?” Cal moaned after a few seconds of silence.
Unfortunately.
I thought I heard Row grunt the words “stand still and just take it.” Seriously, who’d I kill in my previous life to deserve tonight?
The wind shrieked and swirled in a violent dance, slipping into the car like a thief, burrowing into my bones.
“Row,” Cal chided, “I’m trying to eat here.”
“So am I.”
Oh god. Would Child Protective Services intervene for a twenty-six-year-old?
“I just caught Mama and Marty boning each other against the backyard door,” I blurted out.
This is why you’re bussing tables and not keeping government secrets, Dylan.
“Holy shit,” Cal—or Dot, because of the cluster of freckles on her nose and cheeks, proof God had sprinkled her with magic dust—said. “I mean, go Zeta. She deserves some action, but also…sorry for your loss.” Cal snort-laughed. “You know, of appetite, libido, et cetera.”