The Best Thing

by Zapata, Mariana

  I didn’t need to do the math in my head. “Shouldn’t you be getting more?”

  Jonah did that small, shy smile, but leaned his forehead toward Mo’s as he said, “Yeh… but this is more important.” He tickled her belly with an index finger.

  I let that answer hang in the air. And in my heart.

  Those honey-colored eyes moved toward me, and the little smile he gave me was deceptive. “My mum is here.”

  I glanced down at my clothes. Or lack of clothes.

  Then I decided, it was Sunday, it was nine in the morning, and he was at my house. If she wasn’t going to like me because I walked around in my pajamas, then she wasn’t going to like me for the hundred other real reasons I could give her.

  “Cute socks.”

  It was my turn to probably turn a little pink as I ignored the fact they were flamingo socks that Luna had given me. They clashed perfectly with my red T-shirt from the last time I’d donated blood. “I’ve seen your Spiderman underwear, champ, you don’t have room to talk.”

  His laugh made me smile, but I wasn’t the only one; Mo grinned up at the man too as she said a string of consonants and vowels that didn’t totally work together.

  But I knew right then that she knew. She had to know somehow who he was. She was already trying to crawl out of my arms to go into his every chance she had, and that said something major.

  “Is your sister here?”

  “No, she went shopping.”

  “Lenny! Stop running your mouth and come eat!” Grandpa Gus hollered from the kitchen, making me roll my eyes.

  “Want me to take her?”

  He shook his head.

  We headed into the kitchen a second later, and I instantly spotted Sarah, his mom, sitting at the island with a cup of tea in her hand. It was a good thing I’d ordered some for Mr. Innocent, I guess. Grandpa was at the stove, dealing with his whole-grain pancakes, and Peter was at the island, cutting up berries because apparently we were spoiling our guests instead of eating thawed frozen berries.

  “Morning,” I said, holding the door open for the two and then letting it swing closed as I headed straight for my grandfather, giving him a kiss on the cheek first—we both made eye contact with each other because he could’ve done me a solid and texted me a warning but intentionally hadn’t—and then did the same to Peter, who I wasn’t going to blame because we both knew who the mastermind behind all rude things was: the ancient evil in the house.

  And it was that awkward moment as I was pulling away from Peter that I made eye contact with Sarah and had no idea what the fuck to do. Wave? Handshake?

  Fuck it.

  I went around the island and gave her a kiss too, ignoring the surprise on her face as I did it, but not being able to ignore the man smiling from where he was standing at the other side of the island holding our girl.

  “Good morning, Elena,” the woman said, surprise all over her voice too.

  Heh.

  I shot Jonah a sneaky look as I stretched my arms over my head—my shoulder shooting me a slight fuck you in the process—and asked, “Need help with anything?”

  From the looks of it, we were being fancy and shit. We usually fended for ourselves after Grandpa made pancakes or waffles or whatever he was gracing us with, but from the platters I suddenly spotted on the counter, he was done. There was fruit salad, tofu scramble with potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and bell peppers, a bottle of maple syrup and another bottle of honey, and as soon as Peter got done, there were going to be berries too for topping, along with the pancakes.

  Whether he was trying to fuck with Sarah or with Jonah, I had no idea. We hadn’t done anything special any other time Jonah had eaten with us but knowing Grandpa, maybe both, because except for the holidays, we didn’t do buffet-style meals. So I knew he was up to something. Showing off? Killing them with fake kindness? I should’ve been surprised he hadn’t run out to the store and bought placemats at the rate he was going.

  But as I looked at my grandfather’s profile, he didn’t look like he was up to no good, and I didn’t know what the hell to do with that.

  He was purposely not looking at me either, so….

  “No, everything is done,” Peter answered as he pushed the bowl of berries toward the middle of the island, catching my eye as he stood straight and then winked at me.

  What’s going on? I mouthed, not able to keep from frowning because I could expect some devious shit from Grandpa—of course I could—but Peter being in on it?

  The grin he flashed me didn’t make me feel better, but it did at the same time.

  “Jonah, coffee or tea?” Peter asked.

  “Tea, please. Herbal if you have it,” he replied, standing there while the baby in his arms slapped his cheeks and made his eyes go wide. He whispered something back that had her talking back to him.

  Peter’s head swiveled toward me, and I nodded.

  “I’ll drink whatever you have,” Jonah amended, I guess noticing our back and forth.

  “We have herbal,” I told him as Peter went back to the container where he had grabbed Sarah’s. I’d told both him and Grandpa about it a few days ago when the box had arrived with my regular shipment of matcha tea I took to Maio House.

  “Lenny ordered you some,” Grandpa mentioned under his breath, peeking at me as he turned the knob on the range to turn it off.

  I felt my nostrils flare.

  “You got what? Four different kinds, Len?” the other man I was planning on disowning as soon as we were in private said as he turned toward the island holding a plate with what looked like twenty pancakes stacked on top of each other.

  “Yes.” I glanced at Jonah before moving around the island to grab forks from a drawer while everyone else sat wherever they wanted. In my head, I could sit by myself on one end, he could sit with his mom, and The Traitor and Up to No Good could be beside each other.

  No one said anything, and when I turned back around with silverware in my hand, my hopes for the seating arrangement had disappeared.

  Fortunately—or unfortunately—Mo’s high chair was beside Sarah, who had already angled her stool toward her. There was an expression that I wouldn’t have believed she was capable of yesterday on her face as she watched Mo, like she was a fucking unicorn or something. Which she was.

  Jonah, though, was on the side I’d planned to sit on next to Peter, with a free stool beside him. I slipped into it and looked around expectantly.

  What the hell was everyone waiting for? Did they… did the Collins family pray before eating? Because it was a Sunday? Was that why Peter and Grandpa weren’t moving? Jonah had never prayed before a meal.

  Uh….

  “Baby Jesus, thank you for our food. Amen,” Grandpa Gus rushed out all of a sudden out of fucking nowhere, startling the fuck out of Peter and me, who both stared at him like we didn’t know who the hell he was anymore.

  And….

  Did he say baby Jesus?

  The cough beside me had me glancing at Jonah, who had his lips pressed together and his gaze straight ahead at the wall behind his mom and Mo.

  Glancing back at Grandpa, his cheeks were pink like he didn’t know why the hell he’d said that and was debating whether or not he regretted it.

  “Ah, amen,” Sarah managed to get out, sounding pretty damn graceful and not like my gramps had just thanked baby Jesus of all people.

  “That’s the last time I let you watch Talladega Nights,” I muttered under my breath just loud enough for my grandpa to hear.

  And apparently Jonah too because he coughed, a lot.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Grandpa replied before nudging the plate of pancakes closer to the middle of the island, avoiding eye contact. “Okay, let’s eat unless someone else wants to… pray or make another useless comment that I have no reference for.”

  I laughed.

  But it was Jonah beside me who cleared his throat, reached for the spatula, slid two pancakes onto it before transferring the
m over to my plate first, as he said, very quietly, very calmly, “I do have a question, were you praying to eight-pound, five-ounce baby Jesus or….”

  I threw my head back and laughed a second before I slid off the stool and onto the floor.

  It was a long, long time before I managed to start eating.

  * * *

  “So…,” I said a while later as I swallowed the last piece of tofu scramble. Beside me, Jonah mopped up the maple syrup he had left over with his final triangle of pancake. I hadn’t kept count, but I was pretty positive he’d eaten at least six of them. Grandpa Gus had mastered the whole grain pancake game a while ago. They were the shit—nutritious, with very little sugar and even a little banana and flaxseed thrown in. “I was going to take Mo to the park and sneak her onto a swing if I can pay some little kid to hop off for a few minutes. Do any of you want to come?”

  Please God, please God, don’t let Sarah come….

  “I’m meeting Allen for a matinee at noon,” Grandpa was the first one to answer as he wiped his mouth with a napkin.

  “I promised Frank and Carl I’d watch the last day of a jiu-jitsu tournament,” Peter added after taking another sip of his coffee.

  Please. Please. Please, please, please….

  “My only plan was seeing the two of you. It’s my day off from conditioning,” Jonah replied, shooting me a much gentler smile than the rest he’d been shooting me after the baby Jesus incident had landed me on the floor and had Grandpa Gus scowling for an hour. “Mum? You can take the ute if you would rather do something else.”

  Sarah, who had been pretty silent the entire breakfast, picking and choosing very specific questions and conversations—but maybe that was because she’d been too busy looking at Mo, handing her pieces of pancake and basically touching her every chance she got—chose that moment to look away from the messy baby who had eaten a record amount of soggy pancake. She blinked. And what I was pretty sure was dread poked at my chest as she said, “I could go for a walk.”

  Shit.

  I forced a smile onto my face that my grandfather and Peter could recognize from across the fucking galaxy, and I hoped that Jonah couldn’t but wasn’t totally convinced. It was one thing for his mom to be the one who was snappy at me, but it was another for me to be bitchy toward her.

  Plus, she’d come today. So that had to be something, I guess.

  “Okay,” I said, trying to keep my inner whine out of my tone. “Let me take my little monster upstairs and get her dressed, put some clothes on so I don’t moon anyone, and we can get going.”

  “I can get her dressed,” the man at my side claimed.

  I lifted a shoulder and nodded before shifting around in my seat and getting up. I grabbed my plate, Jonah’s, Grandpa’s, and Peter’s—Sarah had already rinsed hers and left it in the sink—stealing a smooch against the small head as I passed by, and rinsed those off too.

  “Leave them in there, Len. I’ll set the dishwasher later. I found a couple recipes for Mo I wanted to try before I leave,” Grandpa said, still sounding annoyed his baby Jesus thing hadn’t gone unnoticed.

  “What kind of recipes?” Sarah asked in a polite voice.

  “Apples and chicken.”

  That had me making a face. “In the same mush?”

  Grandpa Gus shot me a look that said he hadn’t forgiven me yet and wasn’t going to. “Yes. Apples and chicken. I don’t remember what else goes in there, carrots and cinnamon too, I think, and don’t make that face at me. You ate everything I put in front of you when you were a baby and everything I didn’t put in front of you.” He snorted. “You still do.”

  I frowned. “These muscles don’t feed themselves.”

  “I thought I was the only one who noticed how much Lenny ate. It’s impressive.” This fucker Jonah was nodding at Peter, who was telling him with his own dip of a chin that yeah, he wasn’t imagining how much food I put away every meal. “I’ve wondered a time or two where it all goes.”

  That was a nice compliment, at least.

  “You should have seen her when she was competing in a higher weight class. She was packing in around five thousand calories a day,” Grandpa Gus said, sounding pretty damn cheerful all of a sudden.

  “How many kilojoules is that?”

  How the hell he knew the conversion was beyond me, but it only took Peter a second to reply. “About twenty thousand kilojoules.”

  “I was doing physical activity for several hours every day,” I tried to explain drily, not enjoying the stunned face Jonah was making.

  “I eat around twenty-thousand now to maintain my weight,” he said, his expression turning into an amused grin that still didn’t amuse me at all.

  “I have a high metabolism. It’s a gift,” I threw out again to the haters. “And I needed to gain weight. Thank you. It was your idea, Grandpa, for me to go up a weight class.”

  No one was listening to me.

  “We used to joke that one of us was going to need to get a job at the grocery store to get an employee discount,” Peter chuckled.

  “Darling, you have no reason to tease,” Sarah commented out of nowhere with a properly contained smile.

  I turned my head to cheerfully gaze at the man who was still looking extremely pleased by the conversation.

  “You would eat your meal, then eat whatever your brothers left. Did you forget about hiding cans of Watties when you were in primary school?”

  Color rose up on his face instantly, and I couldn’t fucking help it. I couldn’t. “What kind of food did he hide?”

  That got the first laugh out of Sarah I’d heard. “Canned spaghetti. Baked beans. Loved them. He would try taking them in his school bag so he would have a snack to eat on the walk home from school.”

  I opened my mouth and turned to look at Jonah with it still open. “Did you have to carry around a can opener to eat cold spaghetti and beans?”

  His face just got even pinker. “I was growing.”

  He had. I was going to die from cuteness overload. My body didn’t know what to do with that.

  “Darling, you didn’t grow hardly any until you were sixteen, or did you forget that as well?” Sarah egged on with another light laugh that seemed totally opposite of the distance she’d been showing.

  “I was saving up the calories and the energy for the future,” he replied under his breath.

  I snickered.

  “It’s hard to see it now, but he was a skinny thing for so long. We thought he was going to take after me instead of his dad. Do you remember all those talks we had with you when you were younger?”

  “Yeah,” he responded with a normal smile. “Used to tell me how it wasn’t important that I was smaller than the other boys. That all that mattered was that I use my ticker and that I try my best and work harder than the rest of them. Dad would have a list of all the shorter players who made careers of it, so I’d know it was possible. If I remember correctly, you fed me all that food to get me to bulk up so at least I wasn’t all skin and bones.”

  Then he sniffed and blinked, and I had to swallow because was he getting fucking emotional thinking about his parents trying to make him feel better about being short and scrawny? To tell him that he could still pursue this dream of his even though biology worked against him? Damn it. Goddamn it.

  I pressed my lips together and forced myself to keep my eyes open for a few seconds.

  The heavy chuckle that came out of Sarah told me I wasn’t the only one thinking this over a lot. “Then you grew and kept on growing. If I thought you ate so much before, it was nowhere near as much as you did after that.”

  For some reason, I glanced at my grandpa to find him side-eyeing Jonah with a heavy-lidded expression on his face like he was contemplating something. Whether it was a good something or a bad something, I had no idea. I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask.

  “Bigger than your father now. Bigger than all your brothers and grandfathers too,” Sarah finished with a smile.

  That remi
nded me he still hadn’t shown me a picture of his siblings, other than the ones I’d come across when I’d been looking for him.

  “Do you have any siblings, Lenny?” the woman asked all of a sudden.

  But it was Grandpa Gus who answered with, “No. She would have tried to drown any other brothers or sisters if she’d had them.”

  I blinked.

  And the silence was fuel for the man who had even less shame than I did. “I hope Mo takes more after her dad than her mom because Lenny took things to school, but it wasn’t anything food related.”

  I knew where this was going, and there was no stopping this train of memories I had never been allowed to forget.

  Grandpa reacted the same way he had every time he brought up this story for the last… twenty-five years. He fucking closed his eyes because he instantly started laughing so hard it was difficult to understand him.

  A glance at Jonah showed him looking really expectantly.

  Grandpa Gus had his hand over his face as he kept on losing his shit, recounting this story. Probably one of his most favorite stories of my childhood. It was one of mine too, not that I’d admit it to him.

  “What did she take?” my girl’s dad asked.

  It was hard to understand him but not impossible as he answered, “She took… she took nunchucks to school and got suspended for two days when she was in kindergarten. The principal said it was a school record.”

  I groaned again. “All right. I’ll be upstairs now.”

  He ignored me. “Remember? You told Noah the night before you were going to beat him up if he pulled your hair again and he did, so you took them to school to do the job so you wouldn’t get in trouble with your coach?” Grandpa Gus cackled, grabbing at his middle like it was seriously the first time he’d recounted the story when it was probably the millionth, and he still thought it was as hilarious as it had been the first.

  I glanced at Jonah as I undid the tray of Mo’s high chair and lifted her out of it. The dark-haired man was smiling, but it was… it was a weird smile. Like he was thinking about something a little too hard.