Now, in the comfort of her adult home, it seemed that the infatuation had never really ended. Alix couldn’t tell if it had started up again, or if it had only become dormant by means of time and space.
Alix watched Jodi put her hands to her mouth. Emira’s body was soaring across the table both in slow motion and also with a quickness that made Alix jump in her seat. Even slower was Kelley’s rise as he stood up from the table and swung his arm around Emira’s waist, inches above pots of almost-gone butternut squash and a platter of lukewarm dark meat. In the shuffle, Alix couldn’t properly collect the fact that her child was throwing up at the dinner table. She could only stare at the same hand that used to hold the underside of her jaw after varsity games and coed scrimmages. It had only been a few months, but at one time in her life, Kelley made Alix so wonderfully nervous, and he used his hands to steady her. “Hey hey hey.” He’d once said this outside the girls’ locker room. “You gotta be still and let me like you a little bit.”
And now his hands were wrapped around Emira in Alix’s house on Thanksgiving Day. Alix had the sudden urge to remove Kelley’s hands from Emira’s hips, and not just because of the sexual familiarity that they displayed. In the same funny muscle memory that makes you take out your metro card to open your front door, or call your third-grade teacher Mom, Alix found herself ready to slap Kelley’s wrists away from her sitter. In the same voice and motion she used almost every day, she felt herself almost say, No no no. Don’t touch. That’s Mama’s.
Jodi squeezed Alix’s arm so hard that it was clear that it wasn’t the first time. Alix was suddenly back in the room as Briar started to cry. For a moment, when Jodi said, “Alix-honey, grab your girl,” Alix thought she was referring to Emira.
Eighteen
Briar’s face pinched together underneath the vomit-filled napkin, and it reminded Emira that the little girl rarely cried. Emira’s heart raced from diving over the table, from almost falling on top of it until Kelley caught her in his massive hands, and then from seeing a tiny face at the other side begin to moan in shock and discomfiture. Emira cupped the vomit in the napkin and brought it from Briar’s chin upward past her nose. With nothing in front of her face, the three-year-old began to scream.
Tamra said, “Oh no,” and Peter ran to get a towel and Prudence said, “Eww!” and Rachel laughed. “Party foul.”
Mrs. Chamberlain finally blinked. “Oh God.”
She went to pick Briar up, but Emira stopped her. “Actually, can you just unbuckle her? I’ll grab her.” Emira said this with such urgency that Mrs. Chamberlain obeyed. Emira said, “B, stand up for me,” and she swung the toddler into her arms, Briar’s face dripping with snot and tears.
Mrs. Chamberlain said, “Oh no, Emira, you don’t have to do that—”
“No, it’s okay, I got her.” Emira ascended the stairs and passed Peter and a bartender carrying paper towels and cleaning bottles in their hands. When she made it to the kitchen, she heard Walter say, “That was incredible!”
In the upstairs bathroom, Emira sat Briar down on the toilet seat and closed the door behind her. Briar did that nervous and uneven breathing Emira saw other children do when they skinned their knees or popped their balloons. It was alarming to know that this type of crying had been inside Briar all along, that she’d always been capable of it and just chosen not to.
“Hey.” Emira took a washcloth and began to wet it with warm water from the sink. “Hey, mama, it’s okay. Look at me.” She wiped Briar’s mouth and neck as Briar gasped for air so hard her whole body trembled every few seconds. “I’m sorry, big girl. That’s no fun to throw up. But hey, I think I caught it all. Your dress is still clean.”
Briar started to whimper as she touched her dress at the hem. “These is itchy,” she said.
“Yeah.” Emira took Briar’s fingers and wiped each one down with the towel. “This dress isn’t really my favorite either.”
“I don’t—I don’t like . . .” Briar calmed herself enough to point at the ceiling with her free hand and say, “I don’t like when Catherine bees the favorite.”
Emira stopped. She hung the washcloth on the side of the sink and sat back on her heels. “What did you say?”
“I don’t—I don’t like when Catherine bees the littlest favorite to Mama. I don’t like that.” Briar had stopped crying and she said this with a calm and specific certainty, both that she had explained it correctly and that this was in fact how she felt.
Emira pressed her lips together. “B, you know what?” As she formulated her words, Emira held Briar’s knees in both of her hands and thought, This is the littlest your knees will ever be. “You can have . . . favorite ice cream. Or favorite cereal. But guess what? When you have a family, everyone is the same. Do you have a family?”
Briar put her fingers in her mouth. “Yesh.”
“Do you have a mama?”
“Yesh.”
“And a dada?”
“Yesh.”
“And a sister?”
“Yesh.”
“Exactly, that’s your family. And in families, everyone is always the same.”
Briar touched her shoulders. “How come?”
“Well . . .”
In Emira’s family, Justyne was so obviously the favorite, but Emira was her brother’s favorite and so it seemed to even out. Her mother favored Alfie when it came to Christmas gifts, and her father favored Emira when it came to birthdays and phone calls. Emira didn’t figure this out until high school, but Briar was doing so at the tender age of three. Emira looked at the little person on the toilet and felt as if she were pushing an enormous boat out into the ocean. She slumped as if the situation were completely out of her hands and said, “’Cause that’s what family means. Family means no favorites.”
Mr. Chamberlain knocked twice and the cracked door swung open. When Briar saw her father she frowned and said, “Hi.”
By the time Emira came back downstairs, the bartenders were clearing away plates and everyone was gathering in the living room for dessert. Kelley made a very theatrical show of putting his own plate into the sink upstairs, and helping the two hired women push the dining room chairs back underneath the table. A few bites into a sugary strawberry-rhubarb pie, Prudence began to have a breakdown about needing more whipped cream (this marked the third time, in Emira’s opinion, that Prudence had reached number three). Cleo started to cry as well, and then Rachel stood to slip on her jacket. Rachel explained that she was meeting a man-friend in town and would be back in a few hours. She tapped Briar on the nose and said, “I’m off like a prom dress,” before heading for the door. Emira took the moment to squeeze Kelley’s arm. “We should probably get going, too.”