“And speaking of dinner—” Marissa sniffed the air. “Something smells good. What’re we having?”
“Spaghetti bolognaise,” Jay said, handing over the remote and pocketing her screwdriver.
“How did you—?” Tyler began.
Too late, she realized she’d done something out of the ordinary. A distraction was necessary. “It’s my favorite. Everyone knows what their favorite meal smells like. Try the remote now, Mrs. Davidson.”
Tyler’s mother jabbed viciously at the button and watched the garage door smoothly close without the usual jerking false starts. She blinked, pressed it again and watched it open back up in the same efficient manner. She turned to Jay with a delighted grin. “Gosh, thanks! I take it all back, you
are
an expert!”
“You’re welcome,” Jay said.
Tyler pried the remote from his mother’s hands and used it to close the garage door again before shoving it in her handbag. “C’mon you two. You can play with the remote and do the mutual admiration thing later. Inside and wash up! Pasta will be all gluggy if you don’t get a move on.”
“Hey, Tyler,” Caro screamed from the lounge. “Sounds like something’s boiling over!”
“Ah, crap! Not again.”
“Tyler!”
“Sorry, Mom,” he yelled over his shoulder as he raced off.
“Caro!” Jay heard him howl from the vicinity of the kitchen. “Couldn’t you have got off your sorry butt and turned the pasta down?”
“Not my turn to cook,” his sister yelled back. “Doing important stuff here.”
“Yeah. Sure. I know you’re watching music vids instead of doing your homework. Oooooh!” He wailed an impression of a popular singer. “Can you handle it? I don’t think you can handle it!”
Jay caught Marissa’s gaze. “Beyoncé Knowles.”
Marissa gave a full-body shudder. “I apologize in advance for my kids. Siblings. You know what it’s like.” Her gaze lingered on Jay’s shirt.
“I’m an only child,” Jay told her. “So this is…. This is a refreshing change.” She watched as Marissa seemed to shrug off her fascination with the borrowed shirt.
As a cop from a movie Jay had watched liked to say, “Dodged that bullet.” It could prove embarrassing for Tyler if his mother recognized the shirt and asked why Jay was wearing it. Jay didn’t believe Tyler would appreciate his mother knowing he’d vomited while watching a frog being dissected. She followed Marissa and the aroma of slightly overcooked spaghetti to the kitchen.
Caro made an appearance just as her brother was dishing up. “Oh, hi!” she said to Jay. “No one told me you’d arrived.”
“Here.” Tyler dumped a large serving bowl full of drained spaghetti into his sister’s arms. “Make yourself useful and take this out to the table. And,” he said to Jay, “would you mind taking the salad out, please?”
“Why does she get a ‘would you mind, please’ and I get a ‘make yourself useful’?” Caro whined.
“Because Jay’s a guest,” her mother said. “And besides, you weren’t exactly
being
useful, were you?” She assisted her daughter through into the dining room with a firm hand on the small of her back.
Jay followed Caro. “I’m sure you’re very useful when you want to be,” she ventured, in an attempt to build rapport.
“Typical.” Caro plunked her burden on the table. “Ever since Dad left, she always sides with Tyler and—” She broke off, fiddling with the serving spoons. “Anyway. Thanks for coming at such short notice.”
“Thank you for asking me.”
Caro pulled out a chair and indicated Jay do the same. Jay observed Caro carefully and mimicked her relaxed posture. She slumped forward with her elbows on the table, chin resting on her hands, and legs hooked around the chair’s front legs. “May I ask your advice?”
“Sure.” Caro assumed what she probably imagined was a worldly-wise expression.
“It’s about the behavior of one of the employees in the electronics store. He gave me his cell phone number.”
Caro smirked and waggled her eyebrows. “Ohhh! Best not mention that in Tyler’s hearing. He’ll pitch a fit if—”
“He’ll pitch a fit if what?” Tyler was juggling a serving dish brimful of bolognaise and a ceramic tray designed to hold three small bowls, each with its own tiny stainless steel ladle.
“Ooh, fancy!” Caro teased, shooting a conspiratorial glance at Jay. “How come you don’t just bring out the dressing bottles?”
“We have a guest,” he said, placing everything on the table and fiddling with their artful placement.
Caro rolled her eyes. “Sheesh. Next thing, we’ll be using the good linen napkins instead of—”
“Sorry about that, love.” Her mother walked into the dining room brandishing four linen napkins that obviously matched the tablecloth at Tyler. “We use them so infrequently I’d forgotten where I stashed them.”
Caro shut her mouth with an audible snap as Tyler carefully folded the napkins and placed one beside each place setting.
“Well, this is nice,” Marissa said, beaming first at Jay and then Caro. When her gaze got to Tyler, her smile faltered and became strained. “Thanks for going to so much effort, love.”
“No problem, Mom.” Tyler didn’t seem to notice his mother’s tension. He smiled sweetly at her, and then ruined the effect by casting an evil glare at his sister. “It all turned out pretty well, considering Caro only told me she’d invited a guest over for dinner like,
an hour
ago.”
Caro shrugged when her mother queried her with raised eyebrows. “I couldn’t help it if practice ran over time could I? Now, if I had a cell phone, I could’ve—”
Marissa buried her face in her hands and pressed her eyelids with her fingertips. When she’d regained her equilibrium she said, “Please, Caro, not now. We’ve already had this conversation. And no mentioning it to Grandma Davidson, either. I refuse to take any handouts from that old cow after what she said to me when your father—” She flushed when she noted Caro and Tyler’s poorly hidden misery. “Well. Anyway, same goes for her giving expensive gifts to you, too, Caro. You are not to so much as hint to her that you need a cell phone.”
Her daughter’s gaze dropped to the tablecloth. She pleated the edge with her fingers. “Sorry.”
Tyler let out the breath he’d been holding and passed the pasta bowl to Jay.
“This smells wonderful,” she said, because she’d been told by Father it was polite to compliment the cook. In truth, although she could separate out the aromas of every ingredient that had gone into the dish, she neither liked nor disliked the smell. It was fuel. She’d eaten far better meals—and far worse—to maintain her body’s optimum muscle tone and keep it functioning at its full capacity. Regardless of what she ate, her system would extract the nutrients required and expel the rest. She could eat things humans would not be able to stomach, things that would make them violently ill—such as the old takeout she’d mentioned to Tyler.
She helped herself to a large portion of his bolognaise.
The tips of Tyler’s ears turned pink.
Interesting. She wound spaghetti round her fork and took her first bite. As she chewed, she was hyper-aware of his eyes glued to her face, awaiting her reaction to the meal he’d cooked. For her.
She swallowed her mouthful and smiled at him. “This tastes fantastic.”
His blush deepened, creeping down his neckline “Th-thanks,” he managed.
“Amazing what you can do with a jar of pasta sauce and a bag of salad greens,” Caro said. Her tone was a beautiful example of what the kids termed
snark
.
Tyler’s eyes narrowed to slits. His mouth opened.
“I agree,” Jay said, before he could utter a word. “It
is
amazing. And I really appreciate the effort you’ve made, Tyler. It’s lovely to have someone cook for me, for a change.”
Marissa exhaled a huge breath which reeked of relief. She caught Jay’s eye.
Thanks!
she mouthed.
Jay smiled back. As she ate, she examined Caro and Tyler’s mother.
Marissa closely resembled her daughter. But where Caro’s face was as yet unlined, her mother’s showed strain. Fine lines bracketed her mouth and worry had etched two matching creases between her brows. To Jay’s enhanced vision, artfully applied cosmetics did little to disguise bluish smudges of too many sleepless nights beneath her eyes. Although she put on a good enough show to fool her children, it was obvious to Jay that Marissa was fatigued. And being the sole guardian of two teenagers had to be mentally stressful, too.
It was unnecessary for such an attractive woman to live alone with no male to support her, either financially
or
emotionally. She would endeavor to discover Marissa’s requirements and introduce her to a suitable man. And perhaps having an adult male in their life again might assist Caro and Tyler, also. In Father’s opinion, children benefited greatly by having two parents involved in their raising.
“So, Tyler.” Marissa pushed aside her plate. She’d barely eaten anything. Although she made a conscious effort to keep her breathing deep and even—unnaturally so—her pulse rate was elevated. She spoke slowly, choosing her words with the utmost care. “Tell me about those scrapes and bruises.”
Tyler’s gaze lit briefly on Jay before he discovered something extremely fascinating about one of the arugula leaves on his plate. “’S nothing. Things got a bit rough during Phys Ed.”
“Really.” Marissa’s gaze never left her son’s face as she broke off a minute corner of her bread roll, popped it into her mouth and chewed far longer than necessary. “Looks more like a close encounter with a fist caused them, if you ask me.”
Tyler’s head shot up. His gaze skittered from his mother’s impassive face to Jay’s.
To Jay, his face read like an open book.
“Would you care to enlighten me?” However politely couched, Marissa’s request was an order. Her breathing had now quickened to a pant. Hectic spots of crimson painted her cheekbones.
Her son contemplated his food, his mouth set in a defeated grimace. “What’s the point? It’s obvious someone’s already ratted me out.” He darted an accusing gaze at his sister, but she shook her head, pleading her ignorance with wide eyes and a mouthed,
Wasn’t me!
Jay accessed the Net and performed a specific search. When her suspicions were confirmed, her requirement for sustenance vanished. She arranged her cutlery neatly on her plate and pushed it aside. She had been foolish to provoke Shawn. She had been especially foolish to overreact during the confrontation. The consequences of that foolishness had been exacerbated now that Matt had captured her “stunt” on video and uploaded it to a social networking site.
“Who spilled about the fight?” Tyler wondered aloud.
“I believe Matt videoed a certain incident on his mobile phone and the clip has been forwarded to your mother,” Jay informed him.
Marissa shifted her stony gaze from her son to her son’s guest. “Smart girl. Someone stuck it on some dating site and—”
“You mean social networking site,” Caro corrected.
“I don’t care what I mean!” Marissa flared. “What I
do
care about, is Vanessa Harris emailed me a link at work with the subject line: You need to see this. And when I clicked on it, I had the dubious pleasure of watching my son beating on the mayor’s precious offspring. I’m sure the good folks of Snapperton will be thoroughly entertained when this gets around.”
Her expression darkened to something resembling thunderous, and Jay deemed it prudent not to inform her that if the clip was now online, the entire world could be entertained—provided the jaded masses were even entertained by such things anymore. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the jaded masses who concerned Jay, but a select group who would be trolling the Internet for just such evidence of her whereabouts.
“Hey, you make it sound like I was winning, Mom,” Tyler said, brightening somewhat.
“It’s debatable whether you would have won the fight had I not intervened,” Jay told him. “You are more agile, but once Shawn pinned you, his superior weight made it unlikely you would prevail.”
“That’s not the point!” Marissa said, her voice rising in direct proportion to her blood pressure. Then her face crumpled. Tears brightened her eyes. “God, Tyler. I-I didn’t want to do this in front of Jay but I couldn’t keep it in any longer. I just don’t need this right now—not on top of work and worrying about money and… and…. Everything! The last straw will be your grandmother ringing me to imply I’m a useless mother who can’t properly parent my kids, and she should have custody. You shouldn’t have been fighting. And especially not with Shawn Evans. His father’s not only the mayor, he’s on the school board, for heaven’s sake. What were you thinking?”
Tyler seemed to physically shrink in on himself. Caro had stilled and was holding her breath.
Jay had heard the expression “you could cut the atmosphere with a knife” used before. She’d never thought it anything more than a fanciful metaphor until now. She decided to diffuse the tense situation by telling the truth—or rather, what small portion of the truth she could safely divulge to these people.