Authors: Lauren Gilley
**
The interior of the house was the sort of magazine cutout that would have left his mother’s face flushed with embarrassed shame over her own everyday clutter and outdated fixtures. The foyer Jordan stepped into had a high, cathedral ceiling and travertine floors. A decorative coat rack that looked unused, a sideboard arranged with the kind of artsy knick-knacks no one was permitted to touch. An open concept floor plan gave him a view straight back through a great football field of a family room stacked floor to ceiling with windows, the granite and chrome edges of a kitchen lingering just on the other side of the staircase.
None of it reminded him of Ellie. Nothing about the muted beige tones and impressionist art prints on the walls said that she’d grown up here: a daydreaming little girl sitting in light puddles full of dust motes, making up stories she told to herself. It was so jarring to imagine her in this environment that all he could do was watch as she traded stiff, awkward hugs with the woman who’d let them in.
“Hi, Mom.” Ellie’s voice sounded like it came through clenched teeth. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
Her mother pushed her back at arm’s length, knobby fingers curled around her shoulders, and the look she shot Jordan was nothing short of panic-stricken. “You didn’t tell me you were
bringing someone
, Noelle.”
So this was the mother.
Jordan went to her eyes first, because those were gray like her daughter’s, but the rest of her was alien. Long, thin face and brittle, bottle blonde hair full of too much hairspray. She was part of Kelsey’s beauty cult: the French tip nails and orange sprayed-on tan, the glitter lipstick and too much eyeliner. She looked like she hadn’t eaten since the nineties, rail thin, all sharp angles beneath the floor-length white cashmere sweater that revealed a thin stripe of pink cashmere dress between its halves. There was nothing warm or maternal about her; Jordan felt like she sucked in all the ambient warmth around him, like he might see his breath plume as smoke if he exhaled.
“Mom,” Ellie said, again in a voice he didn’t recognize. She took a step back and her mother’s fingers slipped off her arms. A hand groped backward and Jordan looked at it a long moment before he reached forward and put his palm against hers. She was shaking. “This is Jordan.”
He hadn’t thought he’d ever meet someone who cast Delta’s mother in a forgiving light, but as Mrs. Grayson pegged him with a big-eyed, disdainful look of blended shock and horror, he would have given his right arm for a little of Louise Brooks’ haughty disapproval. “Isn’t that a girl’s name?” she asked, and it sounded like a legitimate question and not just a dig.
Ellie’s hand was cold and clammy as a dead fish inside his.
“Lucky me,” he said with a shrug, “it’s unisex.”
She blinked – big, slow blinks that made him wonder if she was on some sort of medication. “How old are you?” Again, she seemed dumbstruck, asking instead of insulting. “You look too old.
How old are you
?”
If this wasn’t the most fucked up encounter of his life, he didn’t know what was. He wanted to be defensive, but felt so struck alongside the head by whatever…
this
….was, that all he could do was say, “Twenty-five,” in a flat, dead monotone.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, bony hand cupping around her mouth. “You’re…you’re a
man
. Ellie.” Her unblinking, headlamp eyes swept to her daughter. “You can’t go out with a
grown man
.”
“Mom.” Ellie’s shoulders had curled forward and her face had pinched up. She was no longer the knock-out who’d climbed into his Jeep, but a frightened, scolded child. “Please, don’t - ”
“Mom,” another voice called. The quick
rap-rap
of stilettos echoed beneath the cavernous ceilings. “What’s taking so long?” A blonde in stripper spiked boots came around the end of the bannister. “I…” She trailed off when her gaze landed on him, and then a smile plucked at the corners of her red lipstick.
The sister
, Jordan knew. She had the eyes, and she thought she had something going on with the black miniskirt and little padded bra under her red turtleneck, but she didn’t have her sister’s shape. Or Ellie’s more refined, delicate bone structure. Her nose was just a touch wider, her eyes just a tad too far apart. And like their mother, she’d ruined her dark chocolate hair with peroxide and dye.
“Oh, El,” she said, “is this your little boyfriend?”
Bitch
, Jordan thought before the worst surprise of all stepped around the corner and shot him a grin. Kyle had a grease stain down the front of his long-sleeved polo, and his khakis were rumpled, eyes bloodshot. But he was
here
. In this Stepford house of horrors, the most despicable was this loser.
He grinned. “Hey, Coach.”
**
“You’re starting to get fat.”
Jo dropped the slice of cheese back on the hors d'oeuvre tray and shot her brother a flat glance across the breakfast bar. “You do realize your wife is ‘fat’ like this too, right?”
Mike grinned. “But she’s taller than you. She carries it better.”
“Go tell that to Tam how about it.”
He snorted.
Their uncles Ed and Dave were scavenging at the chips and salsa just down the bar from them, Tam was suffering through a conversation with their cousin Eli at the table, and there was a constant revolving crowd of bodies in and out of the kitchen; but the thing about such large groups was that pockets of quiet and privacy were created between the big, loud sound bubbles. Jo had slipped into one of those with Mike, by accident, but she could see that he intended to make use of it as he reached for a bundle of grapes and shot her a meaningful look that lacked all his usual asshole charm.
“Hey,” he said quietly, “how’s he doing? Tam, I mean.”
She didn’t have to ask him for clarification. It was easy to forget, but sometimes, all of her differences with Mike got shoved aside in the moments where they both acknowledged that, of the family, the two of them loved Tam the most, and both of them knew that there were special considerations that came with handling the snakes in his head.
“He had a little trouble at first,” she admitted. “But he’s doing better. I’m not worried about him or anything.”
Mike nodded. “I know how he gets. If he’s ever too cagey, you send him to me and I’ll straighten him out.”
Jo smiled, a warm, unexpected tide of emotion washing over her. “That sounded really brotherly there, Mikey. You gotta be careful – you might turn sweet.”
He leveled a finger at her. “I’m serious.”
“Thank you.” She couldn’t wipe away her smile.
Mike glanced over his shoulder toward Tam, who looked in danger of falling asleep as Eli prattled on about medical school. “He’s gonna make a good dad,” he told her. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”
The irony was never lost on her; Walt – the doting big brother who’d been her champion growing up – had abandoned her because he didn’t approve of Tam. “You look nice,” he’d told her that afternoon, and had avoided her like the plague since. And then there was Mike – the brother with the unpleasant nicknames, who’d spurned her company – who was committed to helping her take care of Tam.
“Oh, shit,” he murmured. “Gram.”
“Where?” Jo’s head did a wild swivel as she searched for her grandmother amid the crowd. “She can’t see me. She’s irate about the whole pregnant-before-having-a-house thing.”
“Too late. She’s closing in on the reason you’re pregnant before having a house.”
**
Ellie wanted to scream. She wanted to claw her fingernails down Nikki’s smirking face. Wanted to take her mother’s bony shoulders in her hands and shake her until that blank, panicked look shook right out of her eyes. She wanted to know, desperately, how Kyle knew Jordan was a coach, and how damning Jordan’s opinion of her was as he sat, still as a statue, beside her on the leather sofa in the living room.
The furniture here was more about aesthetics than comfort. The mocha leather with nail head trim was beautiful, but straight-backed and thinly padded. They were arranged around the yawning fireplace – all of them: Nikki and Kyle smushed together on the loveseat, her father in his chair, her mother perched on the edge of her ivory printed chaise, a hand held loosely around her throat, looking faint. The house did not smell of food – only of the Hawaiian Febreze that had been spritzed over the rug.
“You mean - ” Her father had one of those baritone voices that went well with his bottle brush mustache and the heavy layers of frown lines pressing down one on top of the other on his forehead. He was in shirt and tie, the hems of his slacks riding all the way up so his shoes, his argyle socks, and a wedge of leg were showing. “He’s your professor?”
She’d had this story all worked out in her mind, an elaborate tale full of chance meetings that had absolutely nothing to do with school. But Kyle had wrecked it, and now she was this trollop doing her professor.
“PE coach, really,” she said, stomach twisting into knots. “You could hardly call him a professor.”
Which, she realized, was probably an insult to Jordan. She darted a glance toward him; he was sitting with his forearms resting on his knees, hands linked, staring at them. If she’d offended him, she couldn’t tell.
“PE?” her father asked. “What are you, one of those creeps who watches the girls do jumping jacks?”
“I heard that happened to Terry and Paula’s daughter,” her mother added, voice high and thready. “Ellie, don’t make me tell them that happened to you too.”
Stephen and Natalie Grayson – the world’s most understanding parents.
“Guys,” she said through her teeth, her throat and eyes burning with checked tears. “Please, can’t we just have dinner?”
“I don’t know if I feel comfortable having dinner with a pervert,” Nikki said and Kyle chuckled.
“He’s not a pervert,” Ellie snapped, glaring holes through her sister. “He’s my boyfriend. And I expect you – all of you – to treat him with a little respect.”
“It’s fine,” Jordan said, startling her. He was still staring at his hands and shook his head. “They can say whatever.” His voice was totally flat and emotionless.
“Oh, I don’t like this,” Natalie said to herself. “Don’t like it at all.”
Most days, Ellie felt like she handled it well, but she knew her nervous streak and her emotional tremors could be sourced back to her mother. She harbored a secret worry that someday she might devolve into a big-eyed, mumbling, incoherent nightmare like her mom. But in the moment, her only worry was the welcome her psychotic family was giving Jordan.
“Dad.” She had a fleeting hope that appealing to the slightly more logical of the two would help. “Jordan’s a track coach at the school. He - ”
“Don’t,” Jordan interrupted her. “Just don’t talk about me.”
Her eyes clouded over with tears and she blinked them away.
“Stephen,” Natalie said, “I need my meds.”
**
Jo’s grandmother looked every inch the sweet little curly-headed, pocket sized granny, with her little
Driving Miss Daisy
hat and everything. But she was a viper. She’d loathed Tam ever since he’d spilled a Jell-o mold down the front of her dress when he was fourteen, and he’d joined Randy among the ranks of men she didn’t deem worthy to marry and procreate with her flesh and blood.
“Tameron,” she said as she settled down in the chair beside him and folded her papery little hands together over the table top. “Are you aware - ” she had this way of looking down her nose at him even though she sat a good head and a half shorter than him “ - that it’s customary for a husband to set up a home for his wife before having children?”