Dallas nodded and followed me inside, locking the door behind us. I started organizing the dishes as he asked, “Mind if I get one from the fridge?”

“Nope, make yourself at home,” I called out over my shoulder, still arguing with myself about having him help me or not.

Soon enough, I had the plates and glasses organized on the side of the sink and partly inside of it, and Dallas came to take the spot right beside me. Like he’d suggested, I scrubbed and handed them over, letting him rinse and set them in the drying rack. Maybe in a few months, I could invest in a dishwasher, I thought. But all it took was a look at the floors to know that was a dumb dream. I would rather get new flooring put in than get a washer. I was just tired.

“Most of the people here today were your family?” he asked after a few minutes of silence.

“Yeah. Almost all of the adults. Half the kids are related to us somehow and the other half were friends of Josh’s from his new school and his last.”

“He looked like he had a good time,” he noted, probably remembering the image of Josh doing the Slip-N-Slide over and over again.

“He better have. I almost had to beg him to have a party to begin with. I hope Louie’s okay with us going to Chuck E. Cheese’s for his because I’d rather not ever do this again.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. You know, it was our first birthday here at this house….” I trailed off and shrugged as I handed him a plate. “The last two years we lived in an apartment and couldn’t do much there. We had to celebrate at my mom and dad’s house. When I was a kid, my parents always threw me a birthday party at home. I felt like I owed him since we have our own place now that isn’t tiny.”

The deep grumble in his chest said he understood.

“Next time, I’ll just save up more money to hire a cleaning crew afterward, or make my family stay and clean before I let them leave. I’ll keep their keys hostage or something. Even my mom and dad bailed.”

He laughed, and the sound seemed to travel right along the sensitive skin at my neck. It had a beautiful, deep ring to it. When he finally spoke again, it was to say the last four words I would have expected. “I liked your parents. I could tell your mom didn’t like my tattoos much, but she was still nice.”

“My mom, yeah, she is really nice.” And because I couldn’t help myself, thinking about the incident at the table with Sal, I muttered, “As long as you aren’t me.”

There was a brief moment of awkward silence, and I thought I had gone too far talking about my mom, but then Dallas said, “I kinda noticed she gives you a hard time.”

I hummed. “Thanks for defending me, by the way.” Did I sound as bitter as I felt? “What she doesn’t remember or tell everyone is how when I was younger, she would get mad when I’d go outside and get dirty. She’d say that’s what boys did, but girls weren’t supposed to do that kind of stuff. There was a brief phase when she didn’t let me wear pants, if you can believe that, but it didn’t last long.” Just thinking about that made a nerve somewhere on my face throb.

I sighed. “She just… thinks I do everything wrong. She always has, and for a long time, I did do a bunch of stupid stuff. I’m not my cousin or my brother, and I never will be. I think it’s her weird way of pushing me, but sometimes all she does is make me feel like I can’t do anything right and I never will.” I coughed, embarrassed I’d even said that out loud. “That was deeper than I wanted it to go. Sorry. It’s fine. We’ve always had a weird relationship. We still love each other.” When we didn’t want to kill one another.

God. Had I really told him all that? Why?

“You think she likes your cousin and your brother more?”

I scoffed. “I know she does. My brother was awesome. She always said he was her treasure. Her miracle. It’s fine. I was the accident baby that almost killed her.” Now that I thought about it, maybe she did have a good reason for me not being her favorite. Huh.

“But your cousin? The one that was here today? You think she likes her more?”

“Yes.” Of course she did.

“Why?”

Why? Was he serious? Had he been zoned out the entire time we sat at the table with Miss Pearl talking about Sal’s achievements? “Do you know who she is?”

“Your cousin.”

“No, ding-dong—”

The laugh that cut out of him was loud and abrupt, and it made me laugh. Standing there so close together, his body heat against the side of mine, for some reason, only made me laugh more.

“I’m sorry. I spend way too much time with the boys. No. I mean, yes, she’s my cousin. But she’s like the best female soccer player in the world, and I’m not just saying that because she’s family. They have huge posters of her plastered all over Germany. When you watch anything with women’s soccer, they’re going to have her on there in some way. She’s the kind of person, when you have a daughter, you tell her be like Sal. Shit, I tell Josh all the time to be like her. She’s one of the best people I’ve ever met. I get why my mom loves her. It makes sense.”

His elbowed bumped my upper arm by accident. “She’s married to that famous soccer guy, isn’t she?”

“Yes.” I shot him a look. “He was here almost all day with her.”

He stopped what he was doing and turned that big upper body to face me. I wasn’t going to admire how impressive it was. Nope. “You’re fucking with me,” he scoffed.