“Bummer.” Savannah looked as crushed as if Eugenia had just dropped the bad news about Santa. “Still. Maybe someday.”
“Anyway, I don’t know if I told you,” Eugenia went on, ignoring Savannah’s obvious disappointment. “My father was a twin.”
Maggie slid a slice of Brie onto her plate. “Oh?”
Thomas couldn’t figure out how they’d jumped from Godzilla to Alfred Hitchcock to twins. Maggie, though, didn’t pause at Eugenia’s non sequitur. “Identical or fraternal?”
“My dad said the doctors couldn’t tell.”
The look on Maggie’s face said one hundred percent intrigued. “I take it your father and his twin were both male?”
The cheese plate came around, but Thomas passed it to Eugenia, who forked a slice of Havarti. He’d preemptively lost his appetite.
“Couldn’t tell the other baby’s sex, either.” Eugenia laid the cheese onto another slice of bread and took a hefty bite. She had everyone’s attention now, all of them wondering how it was possible to not know if a baby was a girl or a boy. Thomas looked at Maggie, who eyed her guest. He could see she was willing to ask the inevitable next question, but Eugenia didn’t give her a chance. “My dad ate his twin. In utero. My grandmother claims he kept passing the teeth in his stool.”
Thomas squeezed his eyes shut as tight as they’d go, trying to block out the room. It was his only option, since he couldn’t exactly stick his fingers in his ears and begin to hum.
“Oh—dear.” Their grandmother didn’t sound flustered often, but she was flustered now. “I... I’m not sure how to respond to that.”
“My siblings and I don’t know if we believe it or not, but that was the family story. Never could get our dad to question it.”
Conversation stopped for at least a full minute. Dead air that Thomas would have to edit out. He opened his eyes to see Chef Bart come in from the kitchen holding a second basket of bread, but, upon seeing their faces, silently backed out again. Savannah looked about ready to bolt for the bathroom, and Thomas wondered if he was going to have to beat her to it.
“Do twins...run in your family?” Maggie finally asked. She was usually pretty good at changing topics, but even she didn’t seem to know where to steer this one.
“Not sure. Haven’t had any since,” said Eugenia. “That we know of.”
“Oh my g—” Savannah choked on her cheese, and they sat for another minute while she tried to cough it up.
Thomas, meanwhile, thought he ought to be awarded some kind of prize. He thought about jumping up on his chair and declaring himself victorious—he’d known this was going to be one of those dinners. Eugenia Banks and her condom comments and germ phobia and her inability to maintain normal conversation. He’d spotted all the red flags, and he’d been right.
“Can we please just get through at least one dinner without our stomachs turning?” He realized too late that the words in his head were actually coming from his mouth. Everyone stared at him.
“Thomas!” Maggie scolded.
Savannah sniggered.
Eugenia Banks forked another slice of Havarti. “Well, I didn’t enjoy the grayish tofu, but the rest of the food has been quite acceptable.”
Maggie began to nod vigorously, obviously stupefied. “Thank you, Eugenia. We are quite blessed to have Chef Bart feeding us.”
Savannah’s phone buzzed and she again began thumbing furiously. Stupid Trigg. Stupid Savannah. Stupid twin-eating-storytelling Eugenia Banks and stupid Maggie for inviting her.
“I’ve never met my father,” Thomas said, looking directly at Eugenia. “But I’d like to.”
The whole room stopped, as if all the air had been sucked out. Where had that even come from?
Then, Savannah. “Seriously, T! This again? It’s like all you ever talk about lately.”
“I said it once!” Thomas threw a leftover scrap of bread at his sister. He had only brought it up once to her lately, even if it had been on his mind every day. “How would you know what I talk about anyway? Your face is glued to your phone 24-7.”
Eugenia Banks reached for the cheese plate. “Far be it from me to overstep my bounds, but I’m not sure that’s appropriate dinner conversation, young man.”
“Yeah, young man,” Savannah mocked. “Way to throw a wrench into an otherwise lovely dinner.”
“Shut it, Van.” Thomas panicked and turned toward his grandmother, suddenly waking up to what he’d done. They never talked about their father. Maggie didn’t seem open to it—as if she expected Thomas and Savannah to tiptoe around the subject of him, as if their father was Beetlejuice, or a ghost in the attic who would wake up by saying its name. As if they’d be fine, as long as they never let themselves need him.
“Maggie, I didn’t mean—” He felt the weight of everything he’d just said settle in his throat. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean you’re not enough. You are. You’re everything to us. It’s just—”
“I know,” Maggie finished for him. Spoke the truth of what he’d been keeping to himself for so impossibly long. “The reality is, I’m not nearly enough, at all.”
Three
Maggie
“Are you sure this is what you want?” Maggie sat with Thomas and Savannah at the kitchen table, the pendant lamp overhead wrapping them under a soft cone of light.
Chef Bart had cleaned up dinner quickly and left the three of them alone to talk. His daughter, Nadine, had heard everything from the kitchen and she gave Maggie and Savannah hugs, then hustled out behind her father. Eugenia hadn’t been difficult, either. When the food stopped coming, she stood up and announced she had somewhere to be.
Now Maggie looked at Thomas’s almost-man face—the sculpted cheeks, the blue eyes that had appeared so enormous as a baby, the whisper of a someday mustache. Bess had been gone for what finally felt like a long time. Thomas and Savannah were barely teenagers when she died, and now they were nearly adults. Legally, at least. Soon they would no longer need Maggie’s permission for much, if anything.
“I’m not sure what I want.” Thomas shrugged helplessly. “It’s like, right now I don’t know what I’m missing. He could be a great guy.”
“Savannah?” Maggie said. It hadn’t escaped notice that her granddaughter had said very little since dinner. “Are you curious about your father?”
“Of course I’m curious.” She pulled at a strand of hair, some of which she’d recently dyed lavender, wrapping and unwrapping it on her finger. “I just—we never talk about him. Like, we’re not supposed to. Or maybe Mom didn’t want us to.”