by Cat Kelly
"Are you serious?" Marianne felt her heart beat regroup, but it was still unsteady, her nerves fragile. The anticipation of seeing him again today after a week of no contact had put her on edge, made her snappish.
"Ms. Miller, I'm always serious. We'll leave now."
"Home is Vermont. Have you forgotten?"
"No. I believe you drummed that into me quite well."
She didn't know what to say.
He added, "By the way, I have your Blu Cantrell CD. It's in my car. If you want it back."
Blackmail! Might have known he'd resort to these tactics. Finally she managed, "Don't you have plans for Thanksgiving? With your family?"
Jack looked as if he was about to burst out laughing. Instead he pressed his lips together and shook his head.
"Not with Alana?" she pressed.
Through puzzled eyes he looked at her. "Where do you get the impression that Alana Shepherd is my fiancée?"
She thought again of the newspaper gossip column and her endless Google searches. Afraid to admit she'd done her research, Marianne shrugged. "Word gets around. And she let me know the lay of the land soon enough when—"
He'd closed the distance between them in two steps, put his hands around her waist and kissed her. His lips were firm and cool and very determined. Marianne grabbed the lapels of his jacket to keep her balance, shocked delight speeding through her. He smelled so good. Tasted even better.
"I'm not engaged to Alana. I have no intention of ever being engaged to her. In fact I had a long conversation with her last night on this very subject. Not the first conversation, but definitely the last. Better now?"
She swallowed, tried hard to maintain her composure. "I'm sure it doesn't matter to me. You're entitled to do as you please."
"Am I? Apparently other people think differently and like to speculate on my love life. They've been doing it since my wife died. At least, unlike my brother, I was never the subject of a poll in Cosmopolitan about who I would marry next."
He was still holding her waist and now he wound his arms around her, keeping her body pressed to his. As Claudia, of course, she'd been this close. But never as Marianne. It took her a moment to adjust. "I'm so sorry about your wife," she managed. Breathe. Breathe, you idiot. He's just a man. Underneath everything else that's all he was. She had to keep repeating that to herself.
He nodded.
"And I'm sorry," she muttered reluctantly, "about all the pink."
Eyes dark and steady, he looked down at her. "Ah yes, I'm not sure how you're going to repay me for that, Ms. Miller."
Chagrined, she slipped backward, out of his arms, and tightened her belt.
"But I'm very glad you like pink," he added cryptically.
Marianne decided there was too much else to worry about at that moment and pink cushions were the least of their problems. She pulled her woolly hat over her head. "If you're driving me to Vermont we'll have to leave now. Dinner's at four."
"Excellent." He beamed, looking too handsome with the addition of a refreshed tan.
Oh god, why was she doing this? He was going to meet her family. She was going to sit in a car with him for eight hours round trip and he would meet the dysfunctional woman responsible for spitting her out into his world. Well, if she really wanted to scare him off, she mused, this was the best way to do it.
"I have to stop at my apartment first to feed Pebbles and Bam Bam," she added.
"Aaand... I'm not even going to ask what that is."
* * * *
Fortunately it wasn't snowing. Yet. The leaves had turned beyond their prettiest peak and a lot had fallen, leaving the tree branches bare, rattling in the stiff wind. The clouds were grey and slung low over the horizon, but despite the dull day she felt cheerful, energized.
Even the prospect of dinner with Veronica was less ghastly with Jack beside her, but really it should have been worse. She was taking her boss—and her Dom—to Thanksgiving dinner. It had to be the weirdest thing she'd ever done.
Marianne kept glancing sideways without moving her head, not wanting him to know she looked. The fabulous Jack Marchetti. Who, in their right mind, would offer to drive an oddball like her all the way to Vermont and back? Surely he had other things to do? But he'd chosen this one thing. With her.
Just the way he once chose her at an auction, picking her out when he could have had anyone else. But that was sex with Claudia.
This was something more. This was Marianne letting him in to her real life.
She picked at her belt with nervous fingers. "I can't imagine what you'll think of my mother. She's not like me at all."
He briefly turned to look at her and then back at the road, flexing his fingers on the wheel. "You mean she's sane, charming and friendly?"
"She's none of those things, I assure you."
"Oh," he laughed, "not like you at all then."
Marianne scowled, tugging her hat down further over her cold ears. "Absolutely not."
He kept laughing, trying to hold it in and failing. Her scowl deepened. Scrabbling in her pocket she located a stick of gum and hastily unwrapped it. He shouldn't have kissed her like that, she thought, and she should never have let him bring her home. It was breaking down her rules and her barriers.
"I hope there will be pie," he said with fake solemnity.
"Yes," she replied stiffly. "That is what normal people have for Thanksgiving dinner. What did you have? Shoeless orphans poached in wine?"
"How did you guess, Ms. Miller?"
She stuffed the gum into her mouth and stared morosely through her window.
* * * *
Jack felt his phone vibrating away in his pocket and slyly slid a hand in to turn it off. She was already out of the car, slamming one door and opening another to grab the wine from the back seat. Her boots trudged over the frosty ground, her expression set in grim, weary acceptance of something in her fate. He took the wine from her before she dropped it.
"You'd better go in first and introduce me." He grinned.
She looked him up and down, tongue tucked in her cheek.
"I might be a shock to them," he added.
Glowering up at him from under that ugly hat she looked like a vengeful pixie thrown out of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory for giving the finger to little children.
"Onward Ms. Miller. I'm hungry."
She stormed ahead.
It was a Victorian-style farmhouse with broken shutters and peeling paintwork. Once it must have been a pretty building, but no one bothered to maintain it, evidently. A greenhouse standing nearby had only a handful of glass panes intact and it looked as if the plants inside, although dead and brown, had taken over, zombie-like.
Marianne marched up the crooked steps and swung open a dirty screen door. "Just don't ask to see any pictures of my childhood," she warned fiercely.
"Why? What will you do to me?" He walked by her with a confident stride, not waiting to be introduced after all. There was a small, cluttered mudroom inside the door and then an over-heated kitchen from which the odor of burned food floated in a thick cloud, along with arguing voices. Jack held his breath and moved bravely forward.
As the screen door clattered shut, the people in the kitchen all turned to see him standing there with the wine in his hand.
"Who's that?" demanded a small child with a runny nose.
"Hello. I'm Jack."
Before he could say anything more, Marianne squeezed around him, snatched the wine out of his grip and handed it to a trim, curly-haired woman with a paisley scarf tied around her head, a pierced eyebrow, and a cigarette balanced precariously between her long, paint-spattered fingers. "Here you go. My contribution to dinner. How are you, Veronica?"
The two young men seated at the kitchen table both stood to greet the new arrivals.
"I thought you weren't coming," one of them muttered, casting Jack a wary glance. "I thought that horrible boss of yours needed you to work."
"I did," said Jack calmly.
Immediately her mother put the wine down, stubbed out a cigarette, and offered her hand. "Mr. Marchetti? Of course, she wouldn't bother warning us to expect a guest." She nudged the young man near to her. "Mikey, open the wine."
"I don't want to be an inconvenience. Please don't worry about feeding me. I just gave your daughter a ride. Not a problem. Pretend I'm not here." He tried not to stare at the eyebrow piercing, but he'd never seen a woman over forty wearing one. Not that there weren't other things equally interesting about her appearance.
Marianne's mother wore a South Park t-shirt split open at the neck, and a pair of paint-dotted, denim cut-offs frayed around her knees. She padded around the kitchen barefoot, with painted toenails, and an ankle chain. He waited, expecting mother and daughter to embrace, but instead Veronica lit another cigarette and greeted his companion with, "I thought you'd find an excuse not to be here. Not a phone call in three months."
"I did phone and there was no answer. And the phone line works both ways."
Veronica drew hard on her cigarette and the end burned bright orange. As she exhaled a lung of smoke, she croaked out, "I suppose you can't put the cookies down long enough to think about anyone else," and broke into a hoarse chuckle.
Jack pointed to the stove. "I think something's boiling over."
"Fuck!" Veronica dashed back to her cooking.
"This is my brother, Mike," Marianne, apparently unfazed by her mother's comment, introduced him to the faces as they appeared through breaks in the steam. "My eldest brother Ben and his wife, Julie. My nephews and nieces..." The kids ran around the kitchen emitting eardrum-piercing squeals and then disappeared through the screen door letting it bang shut just as she'd done.
"I'm pleased to meet you all," he said, smiling.
Her brothers just stared, completely nonplussed it seemed. The sister-in-law was the only one who smiled back and her mother simply blew a smoke ring before shouting across the kitchen, "How did Wednesday Addams bribe you into bringing her all the way up here then?"
He would have laughed at that name, for it so perfectly suited her, but he could tell from Marianne's face that this was not a good time. So he replied, "She promised me pie."
Her mother coughed, her eyes watering. "I hope you won't be disappointed."
"I'm sure I won't."
Marianne suddenly grabbed his sleeve. "Come on. I'll show you around," she muttered, tugging him out of the steamy kitchen and away from the curious stares.
The house was quite dark and stifling inside, the layout cut up into lots of rooms, which suggested it had never been renovated since it was built. If yuppies had moved in, it would be open-plan by now, the damask wallpaper torn down and heavy, dark woodwork painted over. But the house was clearly not her mother's concern.
The only relatively modern item in view was a large oil painting of wild horses, ridden by muscular, naked men, and racing dramatically across a grey landscape.
"Veronica's work," she said dully.
Suddenly the penny dropped. "Your mother is Veronica Shelton, the artist." He'd seen her work in exhibitions and although he didn't know a lot about art he remembered Alana saying it was very avant-garde. He had no idea there was any connection with Marianne. "So that's where you get your creative streak."
"Sadly yes. Except my mother's specialty is wild beasts—men and horses. Mine is the strategic placement of furniture."
"Of course. There's nothing wild about you." Nothing he wouldn't have fun trying to tame.
"If you look closely, you'll see they all have very tiny, malformed penises."
"The horses or the men?"
Marianne unpursed her lips long enough to snap, "The men."
He studied the painting. "Well, they do all look as if they're on steroids, which could account for the shrunken...members."
"That's my mother's view of the world. That's what I grew up looking at."
Jack gave an arch smile. "Must have been quite a shock when you saw mine, Ms. Miller."
"Oh, it was." Briefly her cool fingertips reached up and brushed along his jaw.
He wanted to kiss her in that over-stuffed, moldy, stagnant living room. Wanted to carry her away on one of those horses, take her where the air was fresh and clean.
She took his sleeve again and led him into another room, lined with books. A chessboard sat by a tall narrow window overlooking the back yard. "This is—was—my father's study. I spent a lot of my childhood in here."
"Hiding from the tiny, crooked penises?"
"Maybe."
Hmmm, that explained a lot, he thought, looking around the dark, gloomy room. There were two wingback chairs placed near the chess table. One had a thick cushion placed on the seat to boost someone higher and he could imagine a young Marianne somberly sitting there, feet dangling, waiting for her turn. The sadness in that stuffy room was palpable.
"I bet you're sorry you came already," she mumbled so quietly he barely caught the sound.
But he wasn't sorry in the least. She had let him in. Seeing where she grew up, and how, helped Jack get a lot of confused thoughts straight in his head. It helped him make up his mind.
* * * *
Her brothers, although cautious at first, eventually warmed up to Jack. His hearty, over-the-top enjoyment of Veronica's badly cooked offerings was certainly amusing in a morbid way, as were Veronica's attempts to flirt across the chipped tureens. Once or twice Marianne felt his hand under the table, laid over her thigh, stroking slyly.
"We can't stay long," she'd said, almost as soon as they got there. "He has to be back in the city tonight."
Although she used Jack as their excuse, he hadn't actually told her any such thing. Marianne simply had no intention of letting her mother suggest they use the spare attic room. She was going back to civilization tonight, thank you very much.
It was the first time they'd spent the entire day together, she realized and it wasn't too stressful, so far. But she daren't risk more than that. Dare she?
Ben, who, at the urging of his wife, had undertaken a religious reformation, decided they ought to say a prayer before eating. Mike and Marianne exchanged glances. "I think the prayers have come too late for this turkey," Mike whispered from the corner of his mouth.
Marianne lifted her knife and fork. "Plastic? What happened to the real cutlery?"
"It's her new thing," Mike explained under his breath. "She's making sculptures out of metal and recyclables. It's very....green."
At the far end of the dining table, Veronica coughed up half a lung and brushed her eldest son's desire for prayers brutally aside. "I'm an atheist, you know." She looked smug "What are you, Jack?" Naturally she had no qualm calling him by his first name already. Marianne noted the tear on Veronica's shirt seemed to have got longer. The lack of a bra was evident, as always. When Marianne was eleven and wanted her first bra she'd had to get advice from a magazine filched from the beauty salon in town, and she went by herself to make the purchase with her allowance. Religion was only one of many things in which Veronica didn't believe.
"I was raised Catholic," Jack replied. "But I guess you could say I...lost my way over the years since."
"Oh yeah, your wife died. I remember."
Marianne shrank in her chair as Veronica's voice echoed shrilly down the table, subtle as a sledgehammer.
The man beside her resumed his meal, unperturbed - at least on the surface. "I hadn't been a regular churchgoer for several years prior to that, but yes...I did lose my wife."
"And never married again?"
"No."
"Don't blame you. Life's much easier without that."
Marianne paused her attempts to chisel a cheap plastic knife into a raw potato. "I didn't think marriage ever made much difference to you, Veronica," she muttered.
Her mother lit up another cigarette. "You have no idea. Marriage isn't the roma
ntic state you read about in books. Not for more than ten minutes, anyway. It's soul destroying, deadly to spontaneity and creativity. But look at you sitting there with your pinched lips. Think you always know everything, little ice princess. Just like your father, so disapproving of other people's opinions when they don't agree with yours."
As Marianne made another swipe at the potato, her plastic knife snapped and the blade flew across the table. "I don't mind where anyone finds pleasure, unless it hurts other people. There are rules in society for a reason. We'd be savages if we all went about doing exactly what we want with no thought for anyone else."
"Hark at you! You never had any responsibilities. Never cared for anyone or anything."
"Neither," she replied, pointedly, "did you."
Ben interrupted gently, "Marianne don't speak like that. It's Thanksgiving and we have a guest."
Veronica cackled carelessly and addressed Jack directly. "Now you know why I've been a chain-smoker for twenty three years. I hope she doesn't preach at you like this."
He gave her a pained half smile. "Only when I deserve it."
No one at the table knew what to make of that, including Marianne.
"I never wanted another baby, after I had my lovely boys," Veronica added, her eyes boring into her daughter. "Girls are so hard, so resentful of their mothers. Don't know how good they have it these days. Of course, I grew up when women were fighting for their rights and their independence. She's never had to fight for anything."
"I always think it's amusing," Marianne observed out loud, "that those who talk loudest about rights and independence, are really only interested in their own and haven't got time for anyone else's."
Silence followed this remark. She felt Jack's hand on her thigh again, gently squeezing.
"So how's out little sis doing at work?" Mike asked, allowing a great glob of lukewarm gravy to drip over his burned crisps of turkey.
Jack took a while to formulate his answer. She couldn't tell whether he was struggling to chew food, or giving the question, and her, a great deal of thought. "She's incredible," he said finally, turning his head to look at her.
