Page 89 of One Night

"I get along with them separately, but as a couple, all they do is fight and I don't like being around that." She tenses up, her face tight, her shoulders stiff.

I hold her hand. "You want to talk about it?"

She fakes a smile. "There's nothing to say. That's just how they are. So anyway, do you guys do anything else on Thanksgiving besides dinner?"

"Watch football." I give a sideways glance to Gramps.

"Interference!" he shouts, pounding his fist on the chair. "No wonder they lost this game!"

Amber startles every time he yells but I barely even notice. He's been this way for as long as I can remember. When my grandma was alive, she'd tell him to quiet down but he never did.

"What about your family?" I ask Amber. "Do you guys do anything besides the big dinner?"

"My sisters and I used to go to the movies, just to get out of the house. I kind of miss our Thanksgiving movie tradition."

"Then let's go after we eat."

"Go where?"

"To the movies. There's a new theater just a few miles from here. It has like sixteen screens."

"What about watching football?"

"I can skip it. I'm not that into football. I catch a game now and then and that's good enough."

"But won't your parents be mad if you leave?"

"We don't have to leave right away. We'll have dinner, hang around for an hour, and leave." I get my phone out and find the theater. "Here. Pick what you want to see."

Two hours later, we've finished dinner and are having dessert, except for Gramps, who's still working on his turkey leg.

"Damn gristle," he mumbles to himself. He always blames the food for why he takes forever to eat, even though we all know it's because of his dentures, but he refuses to get new ones.

"So you never said how you met," my mom says as we're eating our pumpkin pie.

Amber chokes and coughs on her pie. She was hoping this topic wouldn't come up and now she's panicking.

I hand her a glass of water, then calmly say, "We met at a party."

"Oh." My mom pats her mouth with a napkin. "I guess I assumed Austin set you two up. Amber, isn't Austin's girlfriend your roommate?"

Amber's gulping down her water so I answer for her. "Yeah, Kira and Amber share an apartment. They grew up together back in Michigan. But I actually met Amber last May, before I knew Kira."

"And you're just now dating?"

Amber jumps in. "We didn't exchange numbers at the party. We lost track of each other and I didn't see him again until just recently."

Amber desperately wants to get off this topic. She's nervous, her foot tapping the floor under the table.

Luckily for her, the conversation is interrupted with a loud noise across the table coming from Owen. It's his fake fart noise. He's done it three times now and laughs every time.

"Owen." My mom gives him her warning look. "Stop it."

"What? It's the chair. I swear."

Amber's trying to hold in her laughter. She knows laughing will just encourage him. He loves an audience, especially someone new to entertain.

Just as I take my last bite of pumpkin pie, a real fart noise cuts through the silence in the room. It's long and drawn out and when I look at Gramps, I see him still gnawing on his turkey leg, as if nothing happened.

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