My brother Nick lifted up from the seat beside Darren and grabbed one of the pieces of dough stretched out on a plate in the middle of the tray.
“What are you talking about, Darren? These things are delicious,” he said.
They were nothing more than canned biscuit dough wrapped around the end of a stick and roasted over the fire until done, then rolled in butter, but they were always a favorite treat on those long-ago camping trips. Cheap and fast, they were an easy way for my parents to feed their brood of four boys, and because they could be dipped in either cinnamon sugar or salt once buttered, they pleased everybody. As we got a little older, we’d graduated to adding garlic or sometimes chili powder to the savory ones, but the cinnamon sugar option was left untouched, a sacred part of summer.
Unless you were Darren and thought you were too grown-up in all of your twenty-three years to wrap a piece of biscuit dough around a stick and shove it in a fire. Too bad for him. I’d eat a can of biscuits’ worth myself. I grabbed my own piece of dough and got it toasting, taking a draw of my beer as I did. All in all, I was feeling pretty good about life in general. My racing company was doing well. My bank account was nicely full and getting more so every day. I had my house, my brothers, my parents, my friends.
“Are you seeing anyone special?” my mother asked.
Shit.
And then there was that.
I took another long sip of my beer and looked at the bottle to determine if there was enough left in it to get me through the rest of the conversation or if I’d need another.
“No,” I answered after determining I could carry through.
“Are you seeing anyone at all?” she asked.
“No. I’ve been really busy. Not exactly a lot of time to devote to dating,” I said.
“That’s a shame. You really need to meet someone, Quentin. A nice woman who will understand your career and appreciate your lifestyle. Someone to come home to at night and take care of you.”
And I was officially wrong about the beer. Getting up, I downed the last of the bottle in my hand and headed over to the cooler to select another. A quick snap with the opener mounted on the table removed the cap, and I headed back to my bench.
“Not interested right now, Mom,” I said.
“But why?” she asked, her eyes wide as if she couldn’t possibly grasp what I was telling her.
It gave me a flicker of guilt. Just a flicker. Not enough to change my stance.
“You know what happened with Victoria,” I said.
My brothers groaned, remembering my disastrous last relationship far too well.
“She wasn’t right for you,” Mom relented. “But there has to be someone out there who won’t be like her.”
“And maybe one day I’ll find her,” I said. “For now, I’m good with living the single life.”
The truth was, I hadn’t had very much luck with women. It seemed the ones I encountered were far more interested in my money than they were in me as a person. Anyone could have been attached to the other end of the bank card as long as the women got to be the ones to swipe it. I’d been burned more than once, and I’d officially gotten it out of my system. That type of relationship had no appeal to me, and I’d much rather just focus on the single life.
Not that it was really settling. My life was far from boring and even further from empty. Full of family and work, it kept me running most of the time. And I was fine with that.
Mom was merciful in letting the conversation drop before I made much more of a dent in the beer cooler. The same couldn’t be said for Darren. For all his scoffing over the biscuit dough, he roasted at least six of them and stuffed himself with hot dogs and s’mores on top of it. With nearly every bite he took a swig or two of beer, and by the time my parents were ready to leave for the night, he was feeling no pain. The four of us brothers hung out around the fire for another hour, giving the alcohol enough time to soak into every fiber of his being, join up with more that he downed during that hour, and render him a mess.
“Let me get the guest room ready for him,” I told Vince and Nick as we watched Darren dance around the fire to one of his favorite songs. “No need for him to try to leave tonight.”
“Well, at least you can say you throw a good party,” Nick said.
“Yeah,” I said with a laugh as I headed up the stairs back onto the deck. “Nothing says party hard like your mother grilling you about why you don’t have a nice wife and a gaggle of babies.”
“I don’t think she mentioned a gaggle of babies,” Vince pointed out.
“Not in words,” I said, turning around to face them and using two fingers to swirl melodramatic circles in front of my eyes. “I saw it in her eyes.”
I left my laughing brothers and went to the guest room to make sure it had everything Darren would need to crash there that night. After adding a bottle of water to the nightstand, I went back down to help Nick get him upstairs. We yanked off his shoes and jeans, rolled him into the bed, and covered him up. I couldn’t resist snapping a picture of my drunk baby brother drooling on the pillow before turning off the light and heading out of the room. That would make a fun addition to the family group chat the next day.
After saying goodbye to my other two brothers, I locked up the house and went for a shower. I stood under the hot water for a long time after
