"This looks great, mom." Justin he pulled out my chair and then reclaimed his own seat. "I don't know how you got by cooking for such a large family."
"Oh, well," said Betty as she dished out a heaping spoonful of bread pudding and then a dollop of vanilla ice cream, "after having fed three teenage boys, I think I can handle just about anything. Lucy is a walk in the park at this point."
She patted her daughter's shoulder as the young girl dug into her dessert with ravenous gusto. Betty sighed, looking at her casserole dish that was already looking quite bare before setting it down in the middle of the table.
"Well, I'm not much of a cook, but at least I know Dani has the skills for keeping a small army fed so long as they're happy with bread."
"And donuts," Brendan pointed out with a mouth full of syrupy dough.
"Yes, donuts too," said Justin with a smile that would have felt comfortable on a used car salesman. "Of course," he continued, shifting in his seat and glancing over my way, "I'm thinking four kids may still be too many. Probably more like three will do. Don't you agree, Dani?"
He positioned his smile towards the table, flashing his teeth at his family, while his eyes slid to their corners and watched me with anxious anticipation. He set the ball up, sending it flying over the net, and now I had to bat it back.
"I, um, don't want that."
I looked down at my bowl, feeling the shift in the air around me as my words dissipated and filled the room.
"Oh," said Justin with a touch too much drama in his voice, "I didn't know..."
"I'm thinking more like two, maybe even just one."
The words flew out of my mouth, but I did not try to bite them back. I sent the ball careening towards Justin's side of the playing field and pelted him straight in the chest. When I looked over at him, he was just a crumpled mannequin in his chair, his eyes glazed and his mouth half open. I couldn't look at him for long and so instead I turned to Wes, who, like the rest of the family, was completely oblivious to my unsportsmanlike conduct.
"I want to keep my family small since I know it will be difficult to find time with my work schedule," I said with an even monotone and a steady chin. "But I want a family, even if work makes me an untraditional mom."
Wes held my gaze, but eventually put down his spoon and leaned back into his chair with his eyes directed to the windows.
"You'll make it work," said Randall, as if nothing transpired between me and his two eldest children. "I had some long shifts back when I was a paramedic and I missed most of Wes's first year when I was in the army."
"I'm not going to even have kids," said Brendan in between mouth fulls. "I'm going to own a yacht and sail the world. Kids would just weigh me down."
"Well, you'd need a woman to have kids with in the first place, so I don't think it's really a worry for you."
Lucy snickered at her own taunt, which earned herself a vicious poke in the arm by Brendan.
"Mom," whined the teenager, her wide eyes pleading as if she were an innocent victim.
"You know what," sighed Betty, helping herself to some more bread pudding, "maybe I was wrong. Four is too many. In fact, maybe we shouldn't have had any."
Betty laughed at her casual teasing, but her comment brought some life back to Justin, who straightened up in his seat and turned his attention back to me.
"What do you think of that? Do you think maybe children are too much?"
"No," I answered with a firm timbre. "I want a family. Do you not want kids?"
"No, I mean, yes, I want kids..." He stumbled and the chatter around the table settled as the nerves burned Justin's throat. "But, but I want three kids you know and if you don't, well, that might be a deal breaker..."
"Oh, don't be silly," said Betty with a pat on his arm. "No one can know what the perfect size of their family is going to be. I thought I wanted two and now I'm a happy, or mostly happy," she glared at Lucy and Brendan, who still scowled at each other, "mother of four. You'll figure it out as you go along. So long as you both want kids, there really isn't a problem."
Justin openly groaned, his exasperation naked before the table. However, with Brendan and Lucy returning to their squabble—which now involved a disagreement over whether Brendan's girlfriend was real—no one noticed Justin's slow descent into madness. I, for one, would not be around when they noticed.
"I'm sorry," I said, rising from the table. "I need to go. It's getting late and I have work early in the morning."
"Of course, dear," cooed Betty, who stood up to give me a hug. "We're so glad we could finally have all of us together."
Some wetness collected along the bottom edge of her eye, and she wiped it away before giving me another hug. As she held me, I looked over her shoulder and saw Justin glaring up at me. I swallowed back my guilt.
The others said their goodbyes, though Wes only offered me a stiff nod and an averted gaze. I wasn't sure I could look at him either. So I took his distance as a bit of a blessing. Justin, however, followed me out so he could drive me home. I would have been happy taking the subway, but I knew he'd want to share a few words with me.
"What were you thinking?" he snapped once the doors were closed and he secured the roof of his convertible above us.
"You know, this family is going to keep spiraling down into this pit of lies and despair unless someone tells the truth." I growled back at him, my voice rising with the inflection of a parent berating a petulant child. "And if the only way to get this family to realize that is by an outsider coming in and dishing out the honesty, then I guess I'll take up that role and own it. So here it is." I cleared my throat and looked Justin right in the eye. "I love your brother and I'm not ruining my chances with him by claiming I don't want kids."
The words hung in the air between us, obscuring Justin's face as he computed this new information. After a few moments of unuttered words that bounced his jaw, he finally found his voice.
"Please tell me you mean Wes."
"Of course, I mean Wes," I said with a roll of my eyes.
"How long has this been going on?" he asked, a bit taken aback by the sudden bruising to his ego. "You couldn't have met him more than a few weeks ago."
"Really, you're going to judge me after you've been lying to your family for the past three years and cheating on your fiancee with imaginary, and sometimes not so imaginary, girlfriends?"
"All right, fair enough," he replied before turning to face the quiet suburban street.
He placed his hands on top of the steering wheel, his fingers tightening around the leather as his bottom lip jutted out in thought. After a breath flared his nostrils and a shake of his head tore his eyes from the horizon, he looked back at me.
"You realize, us still being engaged doesn't really help your chances with Wes."
"Yeah, well, we have until the wedding to work that out, now don't we?"
Justin groaned, but he didn't counter me. Instead, he started up the car and took me back home.