Page 37 of It's Always Sonny

“See? So I need to get it set up.”

I grimace. “But it’s still not happening. Not tonight, at any rate.”

She looks like she’s praying for strength. “You just said your family would like it. Emma and Elaine both approved the itinerary. Why isn’t it happening?”

I run a hand over my short hair. “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s a killer idea. All your ideas are.”

“So what’s the problem? It’s me, right? I can’t possibly tap into the Luciano spirit?”

“No! It’s not that,” I say. I exhale loudly, and then I realize that my knee is throbbing. We’ve stood this whole time, and I’m supposed to be icing this thing every four hours and I haven’t done it once today. “Your Hungry Hungry Hippos idea is textbook us, but Sienna’s really competitive, and I made a crack earlier about a game of capture the flag we played a few years ago. So we’re organizing a rematch.”

“You told them to ignore my itinerary?”

“No, I mentioned capture the flag!”

Her mouth falls open. “You incepted them.”

“What?”

“Like the movie Inception. You put the idea in their head knowing they’d want to play because you want to play. You’re masterminding without lifting a finger.”

“I’ll lift two fingers when I capture their flag.”

She ignores the crack. She looks hurt, and that makes me hurt. “Sonny, why? Why can’t my plan be good enough?”

“It’s not that it’s not good enough! It’s …,” I gesture to my sister. “This is hard for Sienna.”

“So?”

I hold out my hands, wishing they could explain for me. “I want her to be happy.”

“And she can’t be happy playing Hungry Hungry Hippos?”

I glance at my sister, who’s animatedly scheming with her husband. She loves being with our family as much as anyone, but being here is a reminder of what they don’t have. All she wants is to be a mom. She and Chris were made to be parents. And her body won’t let her.

“I don’t get why you would do this,” PJ says.

It’s not like I can tell her about Sienna, can I? Yes, I want her back in my life, but she isn’t actually back in my life, and it was a break of her own making. “It doesn’t hurt anything for us to play Capture the Flag. It’s just a game.”

She folds her arms tightly in front of her chest. “I’ve heard that one before.”

“This again,” I whisper, but she can’t hear me over my raucous family.

The last semester of our sophomore year, I was walking PJ to class after lunch when I caught a Frisbee. I sort of turned that into a whole disc golf league. Near the end of the semester, she started complaining about it, but that didn’t stop her from missing or being late for class occasionally to play. Of course, I encouraged her more than not …

“Listen,” I say, wanting to give her something. “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought up Capture the Flag, but I was trying to distract Sienna, and then Anthony and Cousin Eli overheard, and they started talking about how their team got robbed, and Sienna got so into the conversation that I wanted to keep it going. Then some of the teens heard, and they were too young to play last time, and now everyone wants in on it.”

She looks past me to my family, and my gaze follows hers. Noah, Cousin Emma’s kid, is mobilizing the teens, and the excitement is palpable. Even one of the younger kids, Harry, is watching with excitement. How can she not appreciate all of this joy?

“What about the kids?” she asks. “There’s no way they can play.”

My gaze moves from the excited teens to the sullen little kids. I scratch my neck. “Yeah. That’s true.”

“And what about their parents? They’re going to have to pick and choose who puts kids to bed and who gets to play.”

“They’d have to do that if we were staying up late to play cards,” I point out.

“But this is happening now. You proposed a game that will take hours over one that could include everyone for a single hour and allow everyone to spend time together.”

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