The Kids Are Gonna Ask

by Gretchen Anthony

  You’re getting maudlin again, Mom, Bess whispered, catapulting Maggie out of her memories into the here and now.

  Maggie waved her daughter’s accusation away. Bess had been gone for four years, and still, she had a knack for sharing her opinions whenever Maggie least needed to hear them. And she wasn’t getting maudlin. There was something, some thing missing from her relationship with her grandchildren. It hadn’t always been gone. Not when they were small, not even after they lost Bess. There had been a time when they were a unit, when they’d flourished under the unbreakable bond that is family. Only now—

  Savannah burst through the kitchen door, followed closely by Thomas.

  “Welcome home,” Maggie chirped. “Tell me all about your days.”

  The rush of air as her grandchildren blew past was so strong it mussed her hair.

  “Fine!” came their reply in unison, then they were gone to their rooms.

  Oh well.

  Maggie wiped at a smudge on the red table and tucked her shirt back into her pants. She didn’t have time for a walk down memory lane. She had to get Thomas to the orthodontist and Savannah was out of deodorant. Chef Bart would return soon to start cooking, and they were hosting a guest for one of the famous McClair Friday dinners. A woman named—what was it? Maggie tried to jog her memory. She’d met her on the parkway while walking Katherine Mansfield, their standard poodle. The woman had been in the airline industry. Negotiated with hijackers. What was her blasted name?

  In the aftermath of Bess’s death, Maggie had struggled to fill the silence that swallowed her family. Some days she heard little more from her grandchildren than the scrape of a fork at dinner. She tried reading aloud at mealtime from the pages of once-favorite magazines—Rolling Stone for Thomas and Variety for Savannah. When that brought little reaction, she encouraged them to invite their friends over, but after several awkward dinners it quickly became clear that middle school children didn’t know what to do or say in the home of the recently deceased.

  Maggie believed in the power of silence. She also knew that too much became a poison.

  One morning, Maggie had looked up from her oatmeal and asked, “How would you like to meet some of my friends?”

  “All right,” answered Thomas.

  “Friends are good,” said Savannah.

  Maggie and George had been people collectors together, and for more than twenty years, their house hummed with new acquaintances. There was Officer Priestly, who’d helped Maggie retrieve the contents of her purse from the lanes of Interstate 35 after she’d driven away with it on the roof of her car. And Richard Endres, who’d developed the “Cough it up for Lung Cancer Research” advertising campaign back when George was on the board of the Minnesota Cancer Foundation. They’d met Alice Overberg, who raised money for the Minnesota Orchestra, and Tilley Thillis, who styled the blunt, silver-white bob for which Alice was so famous. The McClair house was a revolving door.

  Throughout it all, the McClairs prioritized one thing: interesting conversation. Maggie hoped her once-beloved dinners might just be the antidote to a silence, a sorrow so hungry it threatened to devour her family whole.

  There at the red table, with the help of her acquaintances, Maggie offered the twins all the riches on which she herself had been raised—food and conversation and laughter and debate.

  Little wonder that the quest to find Thomas and Savannah’s father would take root at the red table, as well.

  * * *

  It all started with that night’s Friday dinner. Chef Bart bustled in the kitchen with preparations, cooking something that smelled of nutmeg and apricots and anise. “I’ll pay fifty dollars to anyone who correctly guesses the mystery spice!” he called from the kitchen.

  Chef Bart had come to Maggie’s and the twins’ rescue four years ago, soon after Bess had passed. Maggie’d met him in the produce section of the co-op near her house when she had started to cry while holding a pomegranate.

  “They’re so sweet,” she wept to the kind stranger. “But almost too difficult to eat.”

  He took her next door to a café, bought her a cup of coffee and taught her how to seed a pomegranate right there at the table.

  “I understand grief all too well, myself,” he’d confessed. “Good food is my favorite medicine.” She offered him a job on the spot as her personal chef.

  These days he arrived in time for lunch and stayed through dinner, bringing with him fresh produce, heirloom recipes and a bottomless good will. He also brought his sixteen-year-old daughter, Nadine. Strangers sometimes bristled when Maggie mentioned having a personal cook, but friends never did. They knew Chef Bart allowed Maggie to put her attention where it needed to be—on her grandchildren. And she could afford it. George had left her with plenty; real estate development was a good game in the eighties. She had a bookkeeper for the bills, a handyman on speed dial and a cleaning team every Monday. But she counted her lucky stars for Chef Bart, a gentle soul, who was to Maggie what Vitamin D was to one’s diet—good for the heart and the mind.

  Nadine, Savannah and Thomas sat at the red table, flipping through Maggie’s ancient collection of church basement cookbooks. Katherine Mansfield lay at their feet sporting a neckerchief awash in spring colors, waiting for a scrap to fall from Chef Bart’s chopping block.

  The twins didn’t go to the same high school as Nadine—Minneapolis had ten—and they didn’t socialize outside of the McClair house. But Maggie believed that sometimes, fate works on people like a warm morning breeze. They might not have known it, but they needed each other.

  “Oooh, here’s a good one,” said Savannah. “Unusual Tuna Loaf.”

  “How about Beefy Bunwiches,” laughed Nadine.

  “Mother’s Helper Hot Dish.”

  “Lazy Daisy Cakes.”

  “Let’s hope Mother’s Helper doesn’t turn out to be Lazy Daisy,” said Thomas.

  “True. That would make Unhappy Father,” agreed Nadine.

  “With a side of Disappointed David.”

  Maggie sat, content, waiting for their guest to show up. She’d been gathering friends to her home like this for years. Decades, really. All the way back to when Bess was a child and George was busy building his real estate business, the period of their lives when she made a pot of coffee every morning for her husband, sent their daughter off to school and got to work doing her part for the common good. “I’m a people gatherer,” she liked to say. “Life is best lived among, don’t you think?”

  The doorbell rang, and Maggie sang cheerily, “That must be her!”

  She would look back on this as the moment the course of their lives changed. If they hadn’t opened that door, hadn’t allowed that guest to walk through, perhaps nothing would have gone awry like it had. But they didn’t know this yet.

  “Would you please answer the door, Thomas?” Maggie said.

  Thomas did as he was asked.

  Two

  Thomas

  Thomas opened the door to find a brick of a woman in a brightly hand-knit tam and matching knee socks on the front stoop. She was wearing massive clogs, practically the size of shipping crates.

  “I’m Eugenia Banks,” she said. “Maggie McClair invited me for dinner.”

  “Right, of course—Maggie is my grandmother. I’m Thomas.” As he held the door and ushered her inside, Thomas extended his hand, but the woman didn’t shake it. Instead, Eugenia stepped through and passed him her shoulder bag, also hand-knit. Two wooden needles poked out the top.

  “So, it’s you and your twin who do the podcast, then?”

  “My sister Savannah and I, yes.” Thomas hated when people substituted the generic twin for their names. “Are you familiar with podcasts?”

  Eugenia grunted. “Does it matter?”

  And that’s when Thomas knew. This was going to be one of those dinners.

  It had bee
n Savannah’s idea to start the McClair Dinner Salon podcast in the first place. It was last year when they were in tenth grade and she needed a project for her Modern Broadcasting class.

  “Maggie’s always bringing interesting strangers home for dinner—what if we record the conversations and edit them down into a podcast?”

  “What do you mean, ‘we’?” Thomas hadn’t looked up from his textbook. He was trying to finish his homework for World History, and he’d read the same boring paragraph about Hessian soldiers three times. If he looked busy, maybe she’d leave him alone.

  Savannah kept up her pleading, anyway.

  “I only need one episode, two at the very most. And you’re great at audio stuff. Every class presentation you do has some multimedia component.”

  Thomas put his pencil down on the text to mark his place and turned. “But I don’t know anything about podcasting.”

  “Neither do I.”

  Typical Savannah. “So you want to fail your project, is that what you’re saying?”

  “No, silly—”

  Thomas braced for the coming charm offensive. His sister only ever called him by one of two nicknames—“dummy” when she was mad, and “silly” when she wanted something.

  “I want to do something incredible, something no one else in the class can do. Think about the people Maggie brings over for dinner—remember the guy who invented Count Chocula cereal? She met him at the vet’s office.”

  Thomas smirked. “True, but that’s also where she met the lady who talked about her cat who loved to eat lipstick, tube and all.”

  Savannah flashed him her most inviting smile. Thomas was close to being convinced, and she knew it. “Don’t forget the woman who worked at the Sound 80 studio back in the seventies. Remember her? She told us all those stories about meeting Prince.”

  That lady had been especially cool, regaling them with stories of meeting other celebrities like Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens. And that was enough to get Thomas to agree to help.

  They still had to convince Maggie, though. “Why on earth would we do that?” she’d asked.

  “Because,” Savannah said, “I need a final project. Plus, you’re always telling us to do something worthwhile. A podcast is the perfect match of our skills. Thomas can handle the audio and all the technical stuff, and I can do the writing and producing.”

  “It’s pretty much just a few microphones and an audio file uplink,” he said.

  Maggie stopped them. “I don’t even know what a podcast is, let alone a file updo—whatever you said.”

  “Think of your favorite NPR program,” said Thomas. “Now imagine getting to listen to it on your iPod whenever you want.”

  “Like a DVR for my ears?”

  “Um—sort of.”

  Maggie liked that idea, and she agreed to allow it in her home.

  That was twenty-four episodes ago. Now the McClair Dinner Salon had three hundred-some loyal fans, and tonight’s dinner with Eugenia Banks was set to become episode twenty-five.

  Once Eugenia was inside and her knitting bag was tucked away in the front hall closet, Thomas directed her on the proper placement of her clip-on microphone.

  “After a few minutes, you won’t even remember it’s there.” He handed her the battery pack.

  Eugenia examined the small black box. “I heard they wrap these in condoms before taping them to an actor’s skin,” she said. “I don’t want mine in a condom.”

  Thomas did his best not to grimace. “Just...your pocket. That’ll be fine.”

  Savannah joined them.

  “Hi, I’m Maggie’s granddaughter, Savannah.” She extended a hand, but Eugenia recoiled like it was crawling with maggots.

  “I don’t shake hands. Germs. It’s a perfectly logical concern, but pull out a bottle of Purell after meeting someone and they act as if you’ve slapped them across the face.”

  Savannah smiled politely and dropped her arm. “Uh, sure. Anyway, I thought I’d give you the rundown for tonight. After everyone is seated, Maggie will open the show. I wrote her a script for that, but you don’t have to think about anything—just enjoy yourself and your dinner.”

  Thomas gave his sister a look that said, Beware. We’ve got a strange one tonight. She shrugged, clearly eager to get the podcast recording started.

  Savannah’s passions—writing, movies, podcasts, television—weren’t uncommon. It’s just that she was so weird about them. Obsessed, more like. While Thomas spent his free time with friends, she spent her weekends mostly alone, bingeing Netflix and writing down the names of every woman listed in the production credits. Then she’d hole up in her room clacking out letters to them on the ancient typewriter she insisted on using because it gave her correspondence a “brand.” If he complained about the noise, she’d reply, “Unlike you, Thomas, us regular people have to work to stand out. I wasn’t born with good-looking, white boy privilege.”

  Thomas and his sister were opposites in almost every way. She was short—five foot even to his six foot one. But unlike him, she looked like she belonged in their family. Savannah and Maggie were so much alike with their dark hair and eyes, their mom used to call them “the Hershey’s Kisses twins.”

  And who did Thomas look like? Who’d he get his strawberry-blond hair from or the gap in his front teeth that the orthodontist was charging Maggie a few thousand bucks to fix? How come he could look down on his entire family by the time he was in sixth grade? Their mother had never told them anything about their father, and now that it was too late to ask her, Thomas felt the question of his father’s identity burn brighter with each passing day. He had mentioned it casually in passing to Savannah the other day, like a test balloon to see how she’d respond. Which, of course, she hadn’t. She’d ignored him, like always.

  Some days, Thomas wondered if the only things he and Savannah shared were the podcast, a last name and the upstairs bathroom.

  And Maggie. They had her, too. But she was a whole other bunch of weird.

  For starters, their grandmother was always bringing home strays—people she treated like old friends, even though she’d just met them twenty minutes ago. Not that everyone was annoying. How else would Thomas have gotten to eat dinner with the former ambassador to Uganda if his grandmother hadn’t met her shopping for fresh mung bean sprouts at the Vietnamese grocery? The problem was, Maggie thought almost everyone was fascinating, which meant they’d also had to spend an entire dinner listening to her podiatrist talk about foot fungus.

  And now, here they were with another strange one, Eugenia Banks.

  The four of them sat down at the red table and Thomas gave Maggie the thumbs-up to begin recording.

  “Welcome to this week’s McClair Dinner Salon,” she read. Maggie sounded stilted with a script, but Savannah insisted on a written opening every week anyway. “Fix yourself a drink, find a comfortable chair and join us as we dig in to four courses of intellectual delight.

  “With us at the table tonight is Ms. Eugenia Banks, who I met recently outside the architecturally renowned Purcell-Cutts house in Minneapolis. We chatted about everything from Eugenia’s interest in Icelandic knitting to our shared fascination with an odd little sleep disorder called idiopathic hypersomnia. Ms. Banks has lived a very full life, my friends. First as a stewardess and now, raising chickens in her backyard and selling the eggs out of her refurbished milk truck. Tonight, I sincerely hope she’ll tell us the story of the time she successfully negotiated with hijackers. Last, but certainly not least, our dinner, as always, has been prepared by our fearless Chef Bart.” She looked at Savannah. “Would you do the honors and introduce our family, love?”

  Maggie and Savannah both knew that wasn’t actually a question. Every week, Savannah found a new metaphor to explain their atypical family, and Thomas braced for her newest description.

  “Think of our McClair family like a
BLT lettuce wrap,” Savannah began. “Thomas and I started out like your typical sandwich, a slice of bread for our two parents. But we never knew our dad, which made us an open-faced sandwich from the very beginning. Then, our mom died, and suddenly, we were like just bacon and tomato with nothing holding us together. So Maggie, the lettuce, wrapped Thomas and me up and she’s the one who holds the family together now. A BLT, but with a lot fewer carbs. And if you hear a dog bark, that’s our poodle, Katherine Mansfield.”

  Maggie was visibly trying not to laugh. “Thank you, Savannah. The three of us make a BLT lettuce wrap—I like it. Chef Bart has just served our appetizer course, tofu steak crostini with shiitake mushroom glaze. Please, let’s dig in.”

  With that, they were off.

  “Ms. Banks, tell us,” Maggie said. “When did you start working for the airlines?”

  “In 1969,” she said. “Braniff. The one with the airplanes painted like jelly beans.”

  “Oh, 1969,” Maggie said. “That was quite a year, wasn’t it? I don’t think I’ll ever forget. Did you feel it on your flights? The social change? The simmering tensions?”

  “Well, they made us stewardesses wear Pucci boots, if that’s what you mean. We looked like go-go dancers. Ridiculous.” Eugenia picked up her tofu steak with her fork and examined it. “Is this supposed to be gray?”

  Thomas stifled a laugh. This was definitely one of those dinners. He heard Savannah’s phone buzz against the dining room table, and immediately knew who it was. Savannah and her best friend, Trigg, couldn’t go ten minutes without each other.

  Shut it off, he mouthed.

  She ignored him and thumbed out a text, laughing silently to herself.

  These days, Thomas thought of Trigg as one of those girls you couldn’t escape. She was everywhere, even when she wasn’t. Like now, interrupting the Dinner Salon. Or in school. You might not see Trigg’s head poking above the chaos at passing time, but you couldn’t miss the sound of her.

  Eugenia, meanwhile, brought her hand into the air and twisted it. “All this knitting lately has given me an issue with my wrist.”