“Aren't they lovely?” Gran enthused. “How thoughtful of you, Zach.”
Before the moment could pass, Gerry stepped forward to finger a petal. “Oh, look,” he said. “Would these be Asiatic lilies and roses?”
Zach glanced at the bouquet. “I guess. I don't know much about flowers...”
“Lilies and roses!” Gerry exclaimed. “In Massachusetts in November.” He turned a narrowed gaze on Zach. “They must have come from a hothouse.”
Zach smiled, still apparently at ease. “Actually, they came from the Dash-In market around the corner from my apartment.”
Gran snickered and Jen saw her life passing before her eyes. Cin was grinning, however, triumphant that her scheme was proceeding as if she'd scripted it.
“Here we go,” M. B. muttered and rolled his eyes.
Zach had time to look puzzled. Jen had time to want to intervene, then to remember that she shouldn't.
“Then they're from Ecuador!” Gerry cried.
“I guess.” Zach was clearly confused, a normal reaction for a normal person confronted with Gerry on a rampage.
Jen might have intervened, but Cin gave her a covert thumbs-up, reminding her that this was all part of the plan.
“I thought you were going to be nice,” Natalie muttered, but Gerry couldn't leave this one alone.
Gerry raised his hands, the usual precursor to a lecture. “Do you know that Ecuador exports over 26 thousand tonnes of fresh flowers every year?”
This was Gerry's sole talent as far as Jen could seeâthe man could remember copious quantities of trivia and could stop any conversation dead in its tracks by dissecting the GNP of a country no one else had ever heard of.
Although, of course, she'd heard of Ecuador. The guy at the health food store was going to walk through there on his way to Chile.
“No, I, uh, didn't know that.” Zach looked at Jen, who fought her urge to help him out. She returned his glance benignly.
“Twenty-six thousand tonnes,” Gerry intoned, “of the biggest, most vivid flowers. How do you think they do that?”
“Airplanes, I'd guess,” Zach said.
Pluto snickered. “Good one, man.”
Gerry wasn't having any of it. “I mean, how do they make them so big and vivid?”
Zach shrugged. “T.L.C.?” Pluto chuckled again.
“No! Pesticides,” Gerry hissed. “Lots of them.”
“And virtual slave labor, it must be said,” Natalie contributed, being drawn into one of her favorite arguments against western capitalism and its effects on the third world, and this despite her admonition to Gerry in the car.
Did Jen's family have to be so weird so quickly?
She reminded herself that this wasn't a serious date.
Mercifully.
Natalie took a deep breath. “The wages for the workers are outrageously low and they work long hours to earn them. Never mind the exposure to fungicides after the flowers are picked...”
“Here we go,” M.B. muttered. “And we're not even out of the foyer. Come on, people, can we at least shut the door?”
Gerry raised a finger, ignoring M.B.'s voice of reason “Pesticides and slave labor, all to fill jets with roses and lilies, to export them to the western democracies to please housewives and lovers...”
M.B. intervened with resolve. “...thereby poisoning the planet and diminishing ozone and creating greenhouse gases for the sake of a wasteful, non-sustainable lifestyle, and when exactly are we going to eat?” He delivered this soliloquy with his usual deadpan manner, then reached past Zach and flicked the door closed with his fingertips.
Zach looked briefly as if he wished he'd made a run for it while he could. Jen sympathized completely, although it was a bit disconcerting to find that they had something else in common.
“We'll eat soon,” Gran promised, carrying the bouquet toward the kitchen with a flourish. “And thank you. I think they're pretty. Always liked red. Good choice. There's something to be said for a man who thinks to bring flowers.” She cast Jen a proud smile and gave Gerry a dirty look en route.
“I don't suppose we'll catch you making that kind of a careless blunder again,” Gerry said, so superior in manner that Jen despised him all over again.
Zach was undaunted. In fact, he straightened and looked Gerry in the eye. “Well, I don't know. My mother always said to bring a gift that pleases the hostess. If I'm lucky enough to be invited back, I'd have to consider red flowers, whether they're from Ecuador or not.”
Natalie looked upon Jen's date with narrowed eyes, then turned away, apparently biting her tongue. Jen felt admiration for Zach, for standing up for his beliefs regardless of the regional response to it.
Come to think of it, wasn't that the kind of strength of character her mother always said she admired?
Zach watched Natalie, then glanced at Jen. Was he aware of his faux-pas? Or didn't he care? Or were his manners just so good that his thoughts couldn't be read? Jen couldn't tell. He certainly didn't appear to be ruffled by rudeness.
That might stand him in good stead on this day.
He trailed after Gran and the others, after offering Jen his hand. “That turkey smells really good, Mrs. Sommerset.”
“Does it?” Natalie murmured.
Gran beamed, Natalie glowered from the threshold to the living room. “I bought an organically raised one this year, and although the price was outrageous, I must say that I was very pleased with the bird itself...”
Gerry whispered to Natalie. “I'm sure we could find some more statistics on the Internet about flower production...”
Cin winked at Jen. “Good job,” she whispered.
Jen followed, very aware of Zach's gentle touch on her elbow, unable to quickly sort out her mixed feelings. His hand was strong, warm and he was comparatively sane. She felt an overwhelming urge to apologize to Zach for her family's rudeness.
But that wasn't how Cin's plan was supposed to work, was it?
* * *
Something weird was going on.
Zach could smell it. Having been raised in a family with its own brand of weird, in which nothing was ever expressed verbally, Zach had learned young to sense emotional undertowâand avoid it for his own well-being.
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 pin tucks 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 could 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.