A Beatley Christmas

Chapter Eight

    Ringo couldn't decide where exactly he should start. There was so much food he had no idea what he wanted to eat first. He decided that he'd need at least two plates to get a bit of it all.

    He had learned long ago that if he wanted to polite, he should eat everything that everyone had brought to the party. So that meant that he'd eat Linda's green beans, no matter how much he despised them, Yoko's weird Japanese food that had some really long name, and he'd have Olivia's quinoa, which kind of looked like rice but was different. He wasn't exactly sure what the heck it all was, but he'd eat it all the same. Most of the time, polite actions like this gave him an express trip to the bathroom because everything seemed to go through him after having his appendix removed when he was a child.

    His plate was literally a mound of food when he finally sat down. John looked at him with amusement. His plate only had quinoa and green beans on it.

    "Are you on a diet, John?" Ringo asked politely, beginning to dig in.

    "Oh, you know. I just thought that I should cut back a little," he said, shrugging.

    "Oh," Ringo said, shoveling green beans into his mouth.

    "That's all you're eating?" Paul exclaimed once he'd come to the dining room table. He set his plate down but wouldn't take a seat.

    "Um, yeah," John said, sounding unsure.

    "This won't do," Paul said. Linda came to the table and set her plate down, sitting down next to Olivia. "Linda, look what John has on his plate!"

    "Oh, that won't do," Linda said, shaking her head.

    Ringo looked between them incredulously. That was a telltale sign of being married way too long.

    "John, I'm going to get you some more food," Paul said, snatching John's plate before he could protest.

    "You couldn't have just had that," Linda continued after Paul had left for the kitchen. "It's Christmas! Splurge a little!"

    "Yeah, splurge," John said, appearing to roll the word around in his mouth a little like he enjoyed its taste. That was probably a new word added to his vocabulary that he'd used in an obnoxious way in his latest book.

    Yoko smiled slightly. Her tiny smiles reminded Ringo of Mona Lisa. You know, that slight smile that was just a ghost of an actual smile. He studied her for a few moments, wondering what Mona Lisa would look like with Yoko in it instead.

    "John, where's your plate?" George asked once he'd arrived at the table.

    "Oh, Paul took it. Said that 'it won't do,' " John said casually.

    "Ah," George said, appearing to have lost interest. He sat down and promptly began inhaling his food. Across from him, Dhani was also inhaling his food. Ringo looked between them, counting all the similarities he could see, kind of like one of those Find the Difference puzzles. He couldn't find many differences.

    James started bouncing around in his seat, telling Dhani an exciting story about being at Walmart and knocking over bra racks. Ringo was trying to listen because the story was entirely too entertaining, but he couldn't really hear over the other dinner table chatter.

    "James, sit still please," Linda said softly, but he didn't stop bouncing.

    Paul came hurrying back with John's plate, which didn't even look the same anymore. It looked like Ringo's; a smorgasbord. "There you are, Johnny." He set the plate down and sat down beside Linda, placing the napkin in his lap.