There was lots of emotional undertow here. More even than he was used to. The difference from his own family was that a lot of opinions were being expressed, but they weren’t the real ones, any more than the oppressive silences in his own family revealed the actual issues.
On the upside, Jen looked great and he was glad to see her. He’d never seen her wearing anything other than the standard waitress uniform, but today she was wearing a coral pink dress. It was tailored like a shirtdress, again showing that contrast between a comparatively austere design and a soft fabric. No frills and rosebuds for Jen, just crisp pintucks in a feminine color.
She wore shoes that were almost flat, shoes that let him admire the perfection of her long legs. The young and scrumptious Audrey Hepburn had invited him for dinner. The color of the dress was perfect for Jen, made her look soft, and showed that her eyes were golden brown. Her lashes looked thicker and darker, and she might have been wearing a bit of lipstick. Her lips certainly looked soft and inviting.
This should have been a good thing, meeting her family and getting to know Jen herself better, but it wasn’t working out quite that way.
Jen’s family hated him. Zach was sure of it. Even worse, he didn’t know why. Zach hadn’t even done anything that would get him in trouble in his own family. He’d been careful and it was backfiring completely. Zach couldn’t figure it out. It was as if he was the enemy simply because he existed.
Maybe they were protective of Jen, like Murray was. But they didn’t know him, and they didn’t seem to want to know him.
Well, he had to amend that as he glanced around the dinner table and took a tally. Not all of them hated him outright.
Jen’s mother and Gerry had decided against him, apparently on the basis of the flowers alone. Who could have guessed that would be a bad move? Not Zach, whose mother practically chucked guests out the door who didn’t bring either wine or flowers. Wine had seemed like the riskier option to Zach, which was funny if he thought about it.
Or it would be funny later.
Pluto wasn’t far behind the older couple, although he covertly laughed at Zach’s jokes. His eyes were cold, though, unwelcoming, and that wasn’t just due to their pale blue color. M.B. and Ian were still deciding about his merit, or else were too hard to read easily. Zach wasn’t sure. Cin was a flake who could be thinking anything, independent of what she said. Zach wouldn’t have trusted her as far as he could throw her and had a new appreciation for Jen’s earlier comment about her sister being nuts. Jen’s grandmother was Zach’s sole supporter.
And Jen, he was pretty sure, had expected nothing different. He wasn’t even sure that she was in his corner, given how she sat back and let events unroll as if none of this had anything to do with her.
Yet she hadn’t warned him. She wasn’t protecting him or even setting him up. It was really odd. She almost ignored him in her grandmother’s house, even though he was supposed to be her date.
It made no sense.
It was Ian who explained to him the various unfamiliar appetizers. Zach tried everything, as he’d been taught to do, and swallowed even the ones he didn’t like, as he’d been taught to do. He complimented the various contributors, finding something to admire in each concoction, just as he’d been taught to do.
This didn’t get him any points either.
Zach was relieved when the turkey was presented, though surprised at its relatively small size given how many of them were in attendance. There were cabbage rolls and roasted vegetables and something tofu in a roll to be sliced and three kinds of pilaf. The turkey, to Zach’s relief, had the familiar trimmings of gravy and stuffing and mashed potatoes. No candied yams, which was okay by him.
It was only after he had taken some turkey that he realized that he and Jen and her grandmother were the only ones partaking of the traditional feast.
Jen’s grandmother beamed at him and urged him to take a little more. “If you like, you can take some leftovers home,” she offered. “There’s always a lot left and I don’t eat that much these days.”
“Thank you, that’s very generous of you.”
“Well, I know that single men living on their own don’t always eat a good dinner.”
Jen looked suddenly as if she’d swallowed a lemon. Why was she scowling at him? Zach was mystified.
He was also confused as to how there could be much potential for leftovers. “Doesn’t anyone else take leftovers home?”
“We don’t eat meat,” M.B. said flatly.
“But it’s turkey.”
“Just the same. It was alive. We don’t eat things that bleed when they’re killed,” Pluto said.
Zach looked down at his plate, uncertain how to proceed. The turkey did smell good. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a homemade turkey dinner.
He smiled at his only ally and told her so.
Jen’s grandmother sat three inches taller. Jen’s mother watched Zach with pinched lips. Ian took a sliver of turkey out of some kind of camaraderie. Jen just ate, as if all of this was perfectly normal.
Or as if she’d been turned into a robot.
And as soon as plates were filled, the interrogation began.
* * *
Zach had expected to be asked a few questions, of course, but the comments over the flowers were nothing compared to what happened over the dinner table.
“So, Jen says you have a trust fund,” Pluto said as an opener. “What’s it like, having all the money you could ever need without having had to work for it?”
“Soul-destroying, I’m sure,” Gerry said. Natalie nudged him but his attention was too fixed on Zach for him to notice.
It wasn’t too hard to guess what these two thought of it. Maybe that was the issue.
“Actually, I don’t have a trust fund.” Zach watched Jen look up.
“Then you have a job?” Gran asked, pert with the prospect.
“No, I don’t.”
“Between jobs, then?” Ian suggested, cautious but helpful.
“No.” Zach looked down at his plate, then decided to just go with the truth. The mood couldn’t get much worse. And maybe he’d startle them enough to shake their game.
Playing along certainly wasn’t getting him anywhere. “I’ve never actually had a job,” he confessed easily.
Jen sat straighter and blinked. “I thought you met your friends at law school.”
“I did. The difference was that they finished and I dropped out.” Zach had a feeling that his wasn’t the right answer.
“Just like Jen,” M.B. teased. “Unable to decide what she really wants to do, so she waits tables everywhere.”
Jen looked down at her plate and said nothing in her own defense. Even M.B. looked a bit surprised by this.
“Going to college, then,” Gran suggested with approval. “You can’t go wrong with a solid education. You must have changed majors.”
Zach took his time with a bite of stuffing and gravy. “No. After I dropped out of law school, I never went back. It just wasn’t for me.”
Gran’s lips thinned and she stabbed her fork into her turkey with unnecessary force. “That seems to be quite the fashion,” she said, flicking a glance at Jen.
“I’m starting to see what you two have in common,” M.B. teased and Jen blushed.
Had Jen dropped out of university? Zach was intrigued even though Jen didn’t look ready to confide any more information than that.
“Dropped out? Man, I can relate to that,” Pluto said with a smile. “You’ve got to step out of the system to find yourself.”
Zach could see that this would be like negotiating a diplomatic treaty: winning one person’s approval would mean losing that of another. The truth was the only way to go, in that case.
“What are you doing now?” Natalie asked.
“Well, I was doing some photography.”
M.B. leaned closer. “Where? What kind of photography?”
“I went to Venice and then around Europe a bi
t. I came back to Savannah and New Orleans,” Zach smiled at the memory. “Shot some great stuff.”
M.B. and Ian laughed. “It’s easy to see how you two found so much in common,” Ian said to Jen. She flicked a lethal look at Zach, but still didn’t say anything.
“Jen has waited tables in twenty-eight countries,” M.B. supplied with some pride.
Zach tried to not look shocked. That Jen had a wanderlust to match his own seemed to be something he should have known already. “That many?” he asked her.
Jen met his gaze, her expression sober. “Only sixteen, really, but who’s counting?” She shrugged. “I couldn’t decide on a major, so I bought a plane ticket instead of paying my tuition.”
Zach stared at her in awe, trying to hide his response. No wonder he felt such a strong connection with her.
“And traveled far and wide,” Natalie said with satisfaction. “I’ve always believed that backpacking around the world was the best way to both learn about the planet and to find oneself.”
“Absolutely,” Zach agreed.
“I doubt you travel student class,” Gerry said to Zach.
“Actually, I walk a lot,” Zach admitted. “I’m more likely to snag a good shot that way.”
“And here I’d thought you were a Club Med kind of guy,” Jen said.
“But instead, he’s environmentally responsible,” M.B. said with a nod. “Bonus.” Jen didn’t look very pleased with this bonus. “You know, Zach, I’d love to see some of your work. I teach high school art, which doesn’t mean I’m an expert by any means, but photography has always been something I admire.”
“It would be great to have another opinion,” Zach said, surprised by how easily the words came.
“New Orleans is some place,” Pluto said with approval. The mood was changing around the table, Zach could sense it. They were starting to side with him, and he was determined to win them over even if he couldn’t understand it. Quitting law school and going to Europe to take pictures had, after all, almost gotten him disinherited from his family.
Strangely enough, Jen had done something similar but her family approved. That was a bit weird, but he thought he could navigate this meal with the information at hand. He stuck with a safe and popular subject.
“New Orleans is a great place, unique in America,” he said with enthusiasm. “All that wrought iron and old architecture, misty mornings, great coffee. The history is incredible…”
“There was money there before the Civil War,” Gran said. “From the cotton trade. It was the biggest city in the colonies.”
“Due to slavery and the exploitation of people who had no choice,” Gerry interjected.
“True,” Zach agreed. “It’s not a part of our history to be proud of. New Orleans itself, though, has this artistic mood, this joie de vivre that’s very seductive.”
“We should go there,” Cin said, giving Ian a nudge. “You could use some joie de vivre.”
“Not in hurricane season,” he said grimly. “I’m not much for snow, but you can shovel it out of your way and it doesn’t destroy your house.”
“See what I mean?” Cin said in an undertone.
“You should go for Mardi Gras,” Zach said, always ready to convert another potential traveler. Jen, he noticed, was watching him warily. “That’s what I did and I ended up staying afterward. I just couldn’t get enough of it. You know, I’d probably still be there if I hadn’t gotten busted…”
This wasn’t strictly true. Zach had come home because his father had died and he’d been executor, but in his haste to keep that truth from ruining a social occasion, he made a blunder.
He knew as soon as he’d said the word.
“Busted?” Gran echoed sharply.
They all stared at him in silence.
“You mean, as in arrested?” Pluto asked.
“Well, yes,” Zach admitted.
Jen chewed vigorously but her expression was benign. Or controlled. Zach met her gaze and her eyes widened slightly. It was as if she was daring him to dig his way out of this.
And there was a hard light in her eyes, as if she disapproved more than anyone else.
Zach was suddenly aware that he’d made a tactical error.
“You were arrested in New Orleans, man?” Pluto asked with a laugh. “Is there anything illegal in that place?”
“Busted in the Big Easy,” Gerry said with relish. “Now, there’s a story.”
To Zach’s surprise, they were interested, and not particularly condemning. He glanced to Jen who had developed a fascination with her stuffing and gravy. She looked grim and he understood that he was on his own. “Well, it was different from being arrested here, that’s for sure…” he acknowledged.
“You’ve been arrested more than once?” Natalie demanded.
“Well, several times over the years…” he acknowledged but got no further before Jen put down her cutlery with purpose.
“Excuse us, please?” she said, interrupting Zach’s story.
She didn’t give anyone a chance to argue, just seized Zach by the elbow and hauled him from the table. She was stronger than she looked and her eyes were flashing with fury. Jen pulled him into the kitchen and slammed the swing door behind them.
One look at her face and Zach knew he’d made a mistake so big that there might not be a way to fix it.
* * *
“What are you doing?” Jen demanded. She gestured in the direction of the dining room. “What was that? How is it that you forgot to mention to me that you were in jail? More than once?”
Zach tried to talk his way out of a corner. “Well, it’s not exactly something that comes up in everyday conversation, you know…”
“Bull! You knew I was asking you here to meet my family. It wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to either guess that jail time served might be an important detail to share beforehand. You could have at least shut up about it at the dinner table.”
“Sorry, it kind of slipped out.”
“I guess that can happen, when you routinely spend time in the slammer. It just crops up, like all the other routine details of your life…”
Zach snapped his fingers. “Wait a minute. The guys were giving me a hard time about it at Mulligan’s on the day we met. You must have heard them.”
“I thought they were just teasing you,” Jen’s expression didn’t soften. “I thought they’d played a joke on you. I didn’t think that you were a career felon.”
“I’m not.”
“You just get busted all the time?” She folded her arms across her chest. “There’s a credential.”
“Look, I’m sorry. I just got talking and forgot myself.” Zach was not going to tell her the real reason he messed up. He was not going to think about his father, not now. “It’ll blow over. This kind of stuff does…”
“Not in my family.”
“We’ll go back in there and the conversation will have moved on…”
“I don’t think so.” Jen pinched the bridge of her nose, looking suddenly a lot more like her grandmother. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“I think it will be okay,” Zach said, trying to console her. “I think I can talk my way through it. They seem to be pretty understanding about it all.”
She gave him a cold look. “That’s exactly what I’m worried about.” It wasn’t the first thing someone had said since his arrival here today that Zach hadn’t understood, so he let it go. Jen was leaving anyway, her hand already on the swing door.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Let me ask you a couple of things so I don’t mess up again.”
She paused, her expression wary. “Things like what?”
“Is Gerry your father?”
Something that might have been a smile touched Jen’s lips then was banished forevermore. “If ever I needed proof that there is a God and She loves me, the fact that Gerry is not my father would be it.”
“Then where is your father?”
“I forget.
Baja California or Alaska. Maybe Bali.”
Zach couldn’t believe that she was as indifferent as she appeared. “Don’t you see him?”
“No. The last time was in 1987, I think.”
“But…”
“It doesn’t matter, Zach. He might technically be my father, but he’s never done much beyond that initial burst of enthusiasm.”
Zach could see that it really didn’t matter to her, even though he had a hard time understanding that. “Then he’s not the father of all of you?”
“No. And—” she held up a finger “—I’ll anticipate your next question here. Gerry is not the father of any of us. He’s a recent addition. In fact, we all have different fathers.”
Zach decided to guess. “None of whom are present and accounted for?”
“Exactly.” Jen leaned in the door frame. “That’s why we have different surnames.”
“And your mother…”
“Decided to stick with her maiden name after her second divorce.”
“That sounds as if she had more than two.”
“A third, from my father.” There was a definite twinkle in Jen’s eyes. “She liked to be married when she was pregnant, although she calls it a concession to paternalism.”
Zach tried to fold his mind around this family history without turning his brain into origami and failed. At least he managed to keep his expression neutral. “One last question. Did I hear your brother’s name right? It’s Pluto?”
“That’s right.”
“And that was his given name? Pluto?” Zach asked. The corner of Jen’s lips was tugging upward, although she was fighting the impulse to smile. “I’ll guess not Pluto after the Disney character.”
“Nope.” Jen looked at the ceiling and put one hand on her hip. She was losing the battle against that smile, although Zach was enjoying the show. “If I remember correctly, it was a reference to an orgasmic sensation, a kind of celestial journey.” She looked at him, her eyes dancing.
“Astral travel during orgasm,” Zach said.
Jen nodded as the smile curved her mouth. She looked like a spoonful of mischief. There was nothing Mona Lisa about this smile. It threatened to break free at any moment.
All or Nothing Page 13