Page 36 of It's Always Sonny

Someone at Anthony’s table tries to step over Felix and Max’s “wall,” and Felix throws a spoon at him. Anthony scoops Felix up, shaking his head.

Then he takes Felix into a corner of the pavilion and sits with him.

Parker stares at them in obvious disbelief.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ll have to get back to you on that one, too.”

“Parker Jane, you keep this up, and I’m going to think I don’t know you at all anymore.”

“Stop it,” she bumps me with her hip playfully, and it’s another thing I don’t recognize. She never bumped me with her hip when we talked about her parents. Although, I guess I never really talked about them with her. When she brought them up, the heaviness was so oppressive, all I wanted to do was lighten it. I still want to lighten it. More than anything, I want to cast that burden away. Permanently.

“Some of us have grown,” she continues.

“Thank you for noticing,” I say.

“Oh, right. Says the only adult who entered the kids’ hula hoop contest tonight.”

“But you specifically included ‘grandkids’ on your list, and I stopped hula hooping as soon as I beat Noah. Back in the day, I would’ve kept going for another five minutes just so everyone knew I could.”

“I could have beat you,” she says.

“But you didn’t.”

“Only because this isn’t my family reunion.”

“It could be.”

She rolls her eyes, but she’s not mad. “You are incorrigible.”

“You love it.”

We both lean toward each other, and I feel like fireworks are going off in my chest. It’s so frenzied, so wild, my breathing speeds up. There are no barriers to us getting back together. She broke up with me so she wouldn’t get in the way of me playing football. I play football.

Ergo, we can and should get back together. Tonight.

Now.

I can tell she’s feeling the same almost cosmic pull I am, but when one of the tables explodes in laughter, the distraction knocks us from each other’s orbit. PJ inhales loudly, punctuating the end of the moment.

“I should probably go get the game ready.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” I say. “I don’t think we’re doing the games.”

“What do you mean?” she asks, sounding almost alarmed. “Emma told me you guys would want to have a game night.”

“Oh, we do. But we’re not talking a chess tournament.”

“Come on. Do you honestly think I’d organize a chess tournament for a family reunion with a six-month-old present?”

“That’s fair. But Emma should have warned you. There won’t be any Connect 4 or Settlers of Catan, either. That’s not the sort of ‘game night’ we do.”

Her gaze sharpens. “You have seventeen kids here, and a half dozen of them are under the age of ten. But you also have grownups who like to play hard. So I planned a life-size game of Hungry Hungry Hippos.”

“How does that work?”

“We rigged furniture dollies for someone to lie down on and hold a basket for catching balls—the hippo. A second person controls the hippo by holding their legs and pushing and pulling them to catch balls in their upturned basket. I’ve broken the family up into four teams and have different rounds to ensure it’s fair but competitive.”

She says this almost smugly, and she’s right to. “Wow. I’m impressed, PJ. That’s exactly the sort of thing my family would like.”

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