by Holley Trent
“Maybe she won’t notice. And really, where’s Joey?”
Like hell if Lisa going to troubleshoot a turkey disaster on her own. She had no legal obligation to do that.
Yet.
“Last I heard from him, he was going to run home and change his clothes. Was going to come here direct from work, but I guess he didn’t want to hear Ma’s mouth.”
That sounded about right for Joey. He always tried to neutralize the threat of critiques from his mother, but she was going to find something to nitpick, anyhow.
Lisa thought the dynamics were hilarious. The Novaks couldn’t even pretend to not be dysfunctional.
Lisa thrust her coat into Jennifer’s outstretched hand and stepped out of the way as the door swung inward.
Without missing a beat, Joey pulled Lisa against his chest, kissed the top of her head, and then shouted, “I swear to God, if you don’t turn that music down, you’re gonna have those assholes on that Nextdoor website screeching about the foreigners again.”
After a few beats, the kids stopped screaming and the music volume lowered to a less bone-rattling level.
“It’s not even the neighbors. It’s those jackasses who moved in across the street,” Jennifer said with a sigh. “Neighbors don’t care what we play. Their families have been on this block as long as we have. They got Norteño and reggaeton going all hours of the day. Did you know there’s such a thing as Christmas reggaeton? Well, there is. I can tell because they keep saying ‘baby Jesus’ and something about a manger. Oh, hi, who are you?”
Jennifer was talking so fast and blurring one subject into the next just like she always did. Usually, Lisa kept up pretty well, but it took her a moment to process that last bit.
Who?
Someone cleared her throat.
The door closed behind Joey.
“Oh. Sorry,” Joey said. “Always lose track of my manners whenever I step a foot into this house. I wonder why that is.”
Lisa squirmed out of his arms to get a look at who was behind him.
Finch was on the doormat, nervously working leather gloves off shaking hands, eyes wide in that overwhelmed way.
As confused as Lisa was about why she was even there, she also wanted to pull her close and say, “It’s fine. They’re just loud. That’s how they’re programmed.”
She was glad to see her. More than glad.
Finch being there meant she’d recovered from that awkward spectacle at the Bungalows.
But why is she here?
“That’s Finch,” Joey said. “She works at Athena. She didn’t have anywhere to go today so I thought I’d treat her to the Novak pre-Christmas dinner.”
“You must really hate her,” Jennifer said.
In a split second, that babe-in-the-woods expression on Finch’s face went cold as she looked to Joey.
Lisa snorted and tugged the woman away from the drafty door. She made tracks for the kitchen. They needed to get that turkey situation resolved before Mrs. Novak cried, because once the waterworks began, there’d be no way to dull their collective pain except with booze, and Bitty Novak didn’t allow hard liquor in her house. “I’m curious about how he sold this to you.”
What are you doing here?
“Well…” Finch’s voice came out in a nearly incomprehensible volume. She cleared her throat. “Well, he didn’t have to try that hard.”
“You didn’t have anything better to do?”
After what happened at the retreat?
“Your hair’s looking whiter, Joey,” Jennifer called out from the back of their moving clump. “Just thought I’d let you know.”
“You know where you can shove your thoughts, Jenn,” Joey muttered.
“There’s no turkey,” Joey’s youngest sister, Tanya, announced from the open garden doorway. She was probably smoking. She’d quit seventeen times already, and always seemed to pick the habit back up around holidays. “You hear me, Lisa? There’s no turkey.”
“What do you mean there isn’t a fucking turkey?” Joey nudged the ladies aside and stormed through the kitchen and out the back door. “You were gonna bring the turkey. Goddammit, if you flaked again—” The door shut on their argument.
Jennifer pressed her hands to the edge of the kitchen table, took a deep breath, and gave Lisa a searching look.
Lisa didn’t like that look. “Where’s Mrs. Novak, Jenn?”
“Took some of the kids out to get hot cocoa and something for dessert. Dane drove them. I told him to try to stay out there for a while so we have some time to figure this out.”
“What’s happening?” Finch asked. “Maybe I’m missing something.”
“Better if you stay in the dark,” Jennifer says. “Save those brain cells for something more important like remembering all the kids’ names. There are seven of them. Four of them are mine.” She bounced her belly skin demonstrably.
Lisa laughed and turned to Finch. “Long story short, Mrs. Novak is…”
“Overreactive,” Jennifer provided helpfully. “Coddled. Daddy, may he rest in peace, spoiled her. She can’t handle inconvenience now.”
“Be nice,” Lisa warned. While it was true that Mrs. Novak was a handful, on a whole, the family wasn’t any more difficult than her own. Lisa suspected that the difference was in sentiment. Lisa thought fondly of her messy, loud family—including, somehow, Keely who had brazenly invited herself down to the big holiday dinner at the Cartwright place—and expected ridiculousness. Cops regularly showed up at her family’s gatherings because the neighbors feared violence, but by the time they arrived, the supposedly feuding parties were standing side-by-side in the “Electric Slide” line.
The Novaks hadn’t yet registered that they were constitutionally messy and that they should just own up to it.
“And you’re missing a turkey,” Finch said.
“Yep,” Jennifer said. “Checked all the places nearby. Nobody has enough birds for us to feed seven growing kids and eight adults. We would have needed to put the order in last week.”
“Did you try the wholesalers?”
Jennifer leaned forward and cupped her ear in that, “I heard you, but speak English now,” way.
“Restaurant suppliers. That’s where my parents always get birds for holidays because they have accounts with them. They probably still have some. I could try calling a couple in Brooklyn and seeing if they’ll let us take them.”
“I’m sorry, who are you again?”
“Finch. From Athena. I…edit.”
Jennifer took Finch’s hands in hers and squeezed. “Finch from Athena, if you can find twenty-five pounds of turkey in the next hour, me and the kids will be your personal palanquin bearers for the next six weeks. Anything not to hear Ma with the crocodile tears.”
Finch rooted her phone out of her pocket. “Is there someplace…quiet I can make a call.”
“Oh! Yeah. Basement. It’s soundproofed.”
“I’ll show you where it is,” Lisa said. “Used to be Joey’s room way back when.”
“He’s got a lot of white coming in at the back of his head,” Jenn called after them. “You should tell him, Lis. He won’t listen to me. I’m just trying to be helpful.”
Lisa snorted.
She guided Finch downstairs, turned on the lights, and opened the window that seemed to have to be open for anyone to get cellular reception in the basement.
Finch perched at the edge of the bed, covered high with boxes and old newspapers, and warily met Lisa’s gaze. Fondling the phone, she nibbled the corner of one of her lips.
“Well?”
“I…” Finch shrugged jerkily. “This is awkward.”
“Not for me.”
“I would imagine not. You don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”
“Do you?”
“Have you forgotten last week?”
“No.” Lisa hadn’t forgotten a damned thing.
She hadn’t forgotten her first experience with overbooking and successfully manag
ing the finicky needs of two corporate groups.
She hadn’t forgotten Keely’s bombshells and her father’s generous plans to improve Lisa’s crumbling ballroom.
She certainly hadn’t forgotten how Joey had burst onto the scene with Lisa’s heart in his fist and muddled what she thought she’d decided about him, and life, and their futures.
And she hadn’t forgotten the unrest she’d felt both when Finch had arrived, ever the outlier, and how she’d left without a word.
“I…imagine Joey didn’t tell you I was coming,” Finch said.
Her voice was so quiet.
She spoke the way people who thought what they had to say didn’t matter spoke.
Lisa picked her way through the maze of boxes and sat beside her. “I take it you could have found other things to do today.”
“I could have. I’m always welcome at my parents’. I could have started the drive to Massachusetts.”
“But you came here.”
A door slammed upstairs and voices rose.
Lisa and Finch sat extremely still, staring upward as though they could see bodies through the ceiling.
Lisa picked the voices apart in her head.
It was just Joey and his sisters and a couple of kids.
She relaxed and turned her focus back to Finch, who was fidgeting with her phone again.
“Whose idea was it?” Lisa asked, though she suspected she already knew.
“Joey’s.”
“And what did Joey expect would happen?”
“Perhaps that you’d laugh in my face and send me away crying. I don’t know.”
Lisa didn’t feel like laughing.
Not even a bit.
She leaned back against the pile of forgotten artifacts on the bed and nudged Finch with her elbow. “You’d better make that call. It takes those things hours to cook.”
Finch nodded grimly. As she scrolled through the contacts in her phone, her knee bobbed with unease.
Lisa pressed it down. “Chill.”
“I imagine that’s easier for you to do.”
“Sweetheart, I just do a good job of pretending I’m not bothered. I’ve had a lifetime of practice.”
“I never practiced at all,” Finch said, almost like an afterthought.
She put her phone to her ear and chatted with whoever was on the other end of the line.
While Finch talked, efficiently segueing from one question to the next, Lisa watched Joey slowly descend the stairs.
He leaned against the wall near the light switch and folded his arms over his chest. His expression was inscrutable, but Lisa could recognize a test when she was in one. What she didn’t know was what he thought the right answer was.
Or even if there was one.
Finch ended the call and pressed her phone to her lap. “Strusso’s. They just had a delivery come in from one of the farms they work with. If you can get someone down there in the next thirty minutes, they’ll let you have the first pick of what came in. Tell them Harry Alice’s daughter called about it. They’re expecting you.”
“Be right back.” Joey bounded up the steps, calling ahead to Jenn.
Finch stared at her hands and bobbed her knee.
Lisa didn’t know what about the situation made the other woman more uncomfortable—if it was the sudden attention for having to save the day, in a way, or the fact that Lisa was sitting there so close, trying to figure her out.
The door clicked closed.
Heavy footprints pounded down the stairs.
Once again, Joey leaned against that wall. Waiting. Watching.
For a moment, Lisa watched him and tried to understand.
But perhaps she had to create her own understanding.
“Tanya’s heading over now to pick them up,” Joey said. “Jenn’s watching the kids. Probably more excitement than you anticipated, huh, Finch?”
“I should be used to unplanned excitement. I work in publishing.”
“Oh, just wait until you end up being the one with your arms up turkey asses pulling out the giblets. Last year, Lisa got press-ganged into doing the heavy lifting.”
“I wasn’t sure how that happened,” Lisa said.
“Novak magic. Blink and the next thing you know, you’re on the hook for several hours of hard labor and they won’t even bother saving you any of the leftovers.”
Lisa snorted. “I know what I’m getting into now.”
“Yeah?” Joey intoned dryly. “Do you?”
The question seemed rhetorical, and Lisa had never been the kind of person who talked just to hear the sound of her own voice.
And she was getting bored with the tap-dancing and the innuendo. If Joey was pushing her buttons to see how she’d react—how she’d compartmentalize the flood of uncertainty he was directing toward her—she was more than happy to provide him with some data.
She put an arm around Finch, pressing her palm onto the mattress top next to the other woman’s hip. If Joey wanted to see, she’d let him see.
“Hey, Finch?”
Finch’s eyes opened a little wider and she turned toward Lisa. “Hmm?”
“Lean a bit this way.”
Furrowing her brow, Finch leaned into Lisa’s bubble.
“A little more.”
Finch had to scoot closer to do that.
“Almost. Just a bit more.”
“Any closer and I’ll be on your lap.”
“I know. I threw out my back a couple of days ago moving furniture at the Bungalows. It’s happier when I don’t have to twist.” She lifted Finch’s left leg over her right and positioned Finch in the exact right place for kissing. She could feel Finch’s frenzied breathing tickling her through her thin shirt.
Lisa may have been good at appearing outwardly that she was unaffected by the way people responded to her, but on the inside, she was like a machine flicked on to its highest level. Her gears were turning so rapidly that she feared that if she didn’t throttle that engine soon, everything would come apart.
Usually, it was she who made other people come apart.
Finch’s gaze swiveled to Joey.
Lisa took her face in her hands and tilted it away from the stairs.
Away from him.
“I’ll do all the worrying about him,” Lisa whispered. “Focus on me. Understand?”
Forcing down what seemed to be an arduous swallow, Finch closed her eyes and nodded between Lisa’s hands.
Lisa leaned in and closed her eyes, too. She let the tickle of Finch’s breath guide her targeting. When their mouths touched, Finch gasped.
Smiling against her mouth, Lisa whispered, “What did you think would happen?”
“Maybe I didn’t think anything would happen.”
“Well, here I am.”
And there Finch’s tongue was, cautiously peeking between her lips, barely touching Lisa’s mouth.
Sometimes Lisa could be patient.
Other times, the suspense was tedious and unwanted, and she just wanted to go ahead and rip the seal off the thing she wanted to consume. It didn’t matter if her preparation was sloppy or undignified. The taste would be exactly the same.
She pulled Finch’s head close, giving her no choice but to interact—to commit to the act they were doing.
It took her a couple of tries, but finally, Finch gave in to the circumstances and grabbed Lisa’s shoulders to kiss her deeper, more hungrily.
Something inside of Lisa uncurled like a fist that for too long had been gripping a safety railing that she really didn’t need. There was relief in pulling Finch against her—onto her—and letting her hands rake through her hair and skate down her ribs and hips.
There was satisfaction in being on the receiving end of Finch’s hungriness—her gropes and fervid suckling of Lisa’s lips—and knowing she’d been holding all that inside of her just for Lisa.
Lisa wanted her to always have that—to always feel like she could do that—because it exhilarated her, too. It satisfied her and
filled her up. When humans found the right partners to belong to, there was no relief that compared.
And Lisa would know. She’d felt the same way when she’d first tangled with Joey.
But sometimes “right” didn’t mean easy.
Joey was hard, but she was going to fight that battle with him because she had a fierce love for him that sometimes scared her.
She didn’t know what him throwing Finch into the mix meant.
He was still leaning against the wall and wearing that expressionless face when Lisa and Finch pulled away from each other.
She opened her mouth to ask, “What now?” but before she could get the words out, Jenn called down the stairs, “Hey, Lisa, I hate to ask, but you remember that thing with the sweet potatoes you did last year? Yeah, well, Ma was talking about that, and so…”
Joey rolled his eyes. “No need to fill in the blank.”
“I don’t mind, Joey.”
“Not sure yet if I do.”
“What do you mean?”
He didn’t respond.
He grabbed the sack of sweet potatoes from the pantry overflow shelves and went upstairs.
Lisa followed, wondering what kind of mess she’d just stepped in.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Staring at it’s not going to get it into your body, Mrs. Novak,” Lisa told Joey’s mother. “You have to actually lift your fork.”
“You’re so mean to me. Everyone’s so mean to me.”
Joey rolled his eyes.
If not for the fact that his mother had Seen Some Shit in her long life, it’d be easy for him to tell her she had nothing to complain about. He wouldn’t feel like such an asshole.
He’d never been able to strike the right balance between pushing back and outright meanness, so most of the time, it was smarter for him to just let her ramble on.
Eventually, she moved on to other topics.
Lisa, being exactly the ballbuster she was, twined her fingers together and rested her chin atop them as she stared down toward the end of the table at his mother. “We cooked you two turkeys, three different vegetables, an extremely luscious baked macaroni-and-cheese no reasonable person on Twitter would dare criticize, a bunch of Polish stuff I still can’t spell, and there’s a chocolate cake sitting on the sideboard. I think we’re pretty nice.”
