Falling for Sir (22 page)

"Excellent." He beamed, looking too
handsome with the addition of a refreshed tan.

Oh god, why was she doing this? He was going to
meet her family. She was going to sit in a car with him for eight hours round
trip and he would meet the dysfunctional woman responsible for spitting her out
into his world. Well, if she really wanted to scare him off, she mused, this
was the best way to do it.

"I have to stop at my apartment first to
feed Pebbles and Bam Bam," she added.

"Aaand... I'm not even going to ask what
that is."

* * * *

Fortunately it wasn't snowing. Yet. The leaves
had turned beyond their prettiest peak and a lot had fallen, leaving the tree
branches bare, rattling in the stiff wind. The clouds were grey and slung low
over the horizon, but despite the dull day she felt cheerful, energized.

Even the prospect of dinner with Veronica was
less ghastly with Jack beside her, but really it should have been worse. She
was taking her boss—and her Dom—to Thanksgiving dinner. It had to be the
weirdest thing she'd ever done.

Marianne kept glancing sideways without moving
her head, not wanting him to know she looked. The fabulous Jack Marchetti. Who,
in their right mind, would offer to drive an oddball like her all the way to
Vermont and back? Surely he had other things to do? But he'd chosen this one
thing. With her.
 

Just the way he once chose her at an auction,
picking her out when he could have had anyone else. But that was sex with
Claudia.

This was something more. This was Marianne
letting him in to her real life.

She picked at her belt with nervous fingers.
"I can't imagine what you'll think of my mother. She's not like me at
all."

He briefly turned to look at her and then back
at the road, flexing his fingers on the wheel. "You mean she's sane,
charming and friendly?"

"She's none of those things, I assure
you."

"Oh," he laughed, "not like you
at all then."

Marianne scowled, tugging her hat down further
over her cold ears. "Absolutely not."

He kept laughing, trying to hold it in and
failing. Her scowl deepened. Scrabbling in her pocket she located a stick of
gum and hastily unwrapped it. He shouldn't have kissed her like that, she
thought, and she should never have let him bring her home. It was breaking down
her rules and her barriers.

"I hope there will be pie," he said
with fake solemnity.

"Yes," she replied stiffly. "That
is what normal people have for Thanksgiving dinner. What did you have? Shoeless
orphans poached in wine?"

"How did you guess, Ms. Miller?"

She stuffed the gum into her mouth and stared
morosely through her window.

* * * *

Jack felt his phone vibrating away in his pocket
and slyly slid a hand in to turn it off. She was already out of the car,
slamming one door and opening another to grab the wine from the back seat. Her
boots trudged over the frosty ground, her expression set in grim, weary
acceptance of something in her fate. He took the wine from her before she
dropped it.

"You'd better go in first and introduce
me." He grinned.

She looked him up and down, tongue tucked in her
cheek.

"I might be a shock to them," he
added.

Glowering up at him from under that ugly hat she
looked like a vengeful pixie thrown out of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory for
giving the finger to little children.

"Onward Ms. Miller. I'm hungry."

She stormed ahead.

It was a Victorian-style farmhouse with broken
shutters and peeling paintwork. Once it must have been a pretty building, but
no one bothered to maintain it, evidently. A greenhouse standing nearby had
only a handful of glass panes intact and it looked as if the plants inside,
although dead and brown, had taken over, zombie-like.

Marianne marched up the crooked steps and swung
open a dirty screen door. "Just don't ask to see any pictures of my
childhood," she warned fiercely.

"Why? What will you do to me?" He
walked by her with a confident stride, not waiting to be introduced after all.
There was a small, cluttered mudroom inside the door and then an over-heated
kitchen from which the odor of burned food floated in a thick cloud, along with
arguing voices. Jack held his breath and moved bravely forward.

As the screen door clattered shut, the people in
the kitchen all turned to see him standing there with the wine in his hand.

"Who's that?" demanded a small child
with a runny nose.

"Hello. I'm Jack."

Before he could say anything more, Marianne
squeezed around him, snatched the wine out of his grip and handed it to a trim,
curly-haired woman with a paisley scarf tied around her head, a pierced
eyebrow, and a cigarette balanced precariously between her long, paint-spattered
fingers. "Here you go. My contribution to dinner. How are you,
Veronica?"

The two young men seated at the kitchen table
both stood to greet the new arrivals.

"I thought you weren't coming," one of
them muttered, casting Jack a wary glance. "I thought that horrible boss
of yours needed you to work."

"I did," said Jack calmly.

There was a short, awkward silence and then
Marianne explained sulkily, "This is Mr. Marchetti. He gave me a
ride."

Immediately her mother put the wine down,
stubbed out a cigarette, and offered her hand. "Mr. Marchetti? Of course,
she wouldn't bother warning us to expect a guest." She nudged the young
man near to her. "Mikey, open the wine."

"I don't want to be an inconvenience.
Please don't worry about feeding me. I just gave your daughter a ride. Not a
problem. Pretend I'm not here." He tried not to stare at the eyebrow
piercing, but he'd never seen a woman over forty wearing one. Not that there
weren't other things equally interesting about her appearance.

Marianne's mother wore a South Park t-shirt
split open at the neck, and a pair of paint-dotted, denim cut-offs frayed
around her knees. She padded around the kitchen barefoot, with painted
toenails, and an ankle chain. He waited, expecting mother and daughter to
embrace, but instead Veronica lit another cigarette and greeted his companion
with, "I thought you'd find an excuse not to be here. Not a phone call in
three months."

"I did phone and there was no answer. And
the phone line works both ways."

Veronica drew hard on her cigarette and the end
burned bright orange. As she exhaled a lung of smoke, she croaked out, "I
suppose you can't put the cookies down long enough to think about anyone
else," and broke into a hoarse chuckle.

Jack pointed to the stove. "I think
something's boiling over."

"Fuck!" Veronica dashed back to her
cooking.

"This is my brother, Mike," Marianne,
apparently unfazed by her mother's comment, introduced him to the faces as they
appeared through breaks in the steam. "My eldest brother Ben and his wife,
Julie. My nephews and nieces..." The kids ran around the kitchen emitting
eardrum-piercing squeals and then disappeared through the screen door letting
it bang shut just as she'd done.
 

"I'm pleased to meet you all," he
said, smiling.

Her brothers just stared, completely nonplussed
it seemed. The sister-in-law was the only one who smiled back and her mother
simply blew a smoke ring before shouting across the kitchen, "How did
Wednesday Addams bribe you into bringing her all the way up here then?"

He would have laughed at that name, for it so
perfectly suited her, but he could tell from Marianne's face that this was not
a good time. So he replied, "She promised me pie."

Her mother coughed, her eyes watering. "I
hope you won't be disappointed."

"I'm sure I won't."

Marianne suddenly grabbed his sleeve. "Come
on. I'll show you around," she muttered, tugging him out of the steamy
kitchen and away from the curious stares.

The house was quite dark and stifling inside,
the layout cut up into lots of rooms, which suggested it had never been
renovated since it was built. If yuppies had moved in, it would be open-plan by
now, the damask wallpaper torn down and heavy, dark woodwork painted over. But
the house was clearly not her mother's concern.

The only relatively modern item in view was a
large oil painting of wild horses, ridden by muscular, naked men, and racing
dramatically across a grey landscape.

"Veronica's work," she said dully.

Suddenly the penny dropped. "Your mother is
Veronica Shelton, the artist." He'd seen her work in exhibitions and
although he didn't know a lot about art he remembered Alana saying it was very
avant-garde. He had no idea there was any connection with Marianne. "So
that's where you get your creative streak."

"Sadly yes. Except my mother's specialty is
wild beasts—men and horses. Mine is the strategic placement of furniture."

"Of course. There's nothing wild about
you." Nothing he wouldn't have fun trying to tame.

"If you look closely, you'll see they all
have very tiny, malformed penises."

"The horses or the men?"

Marianne unpursed her lips long enough to snap,
"The men."

He studied the painting. "Well, they do all
look as if they're on steroids, which could account for the
shrunken...members."

"That's my mother's view of the world.
That's what I grew up looking at."

Jack gave an arch smile. "Must have been
quite a shock when you saw mine, Ms. Miller."

"Oh, it was." Briefly her cool
fingertips reached up and brushed along his jaw.

He wanted to kiss her in that over-stuffed,
moldy, stagnant living room. Wanted to carry her away on one of those horses,
take her where the air was fresh and clean.

She took his sleeve again and led him into
another room, lined with books. A chessboard sat by a tall narrow window
overlooking the back yard. "This is—was—my father's study. I spent a lot
of my childhood in here."

"Hiding from the tiny, crooked
penises?"

"Maybe."

Hmmm, that explained a lot, he thought, looking
around the dark, gloomy room. There were two wingback chairs placed near the
chess table. One had a thick cushion placed on the seat to boost someone higher
and he could imagine a young Marianne somberly sitting there, feet dangling,
waiting for her turn. The sadness in that stuffy room was palpable.

"I bet you're sorry you came already,"
she mumbled so quietly he barely caught the sound.

But he wasn't sorry in the least. She had let
him in. Seeing where she grew up, and how, helped Jack get a lot of confused
thoughts straight in his head. It helped him make up his mind.

* * * *

Her brothers, although cautious at first,
eventually warmed up to Jack. His hearty, over-the-top enjoyment of Veronica's
badly cooked offerings was certainly amusing in a morbid way, as were
Veronica's attempts to flirt across the chipped tureens. Once or twice Marianne
felt his hand under the table, laid over her thigh, stroking slyly.

"We can't stay long," she'd said,
almost as soon as they got there. "He has to be back in the city
tonight."

Although she used Jack as their excuse, he
hadn't actually told her any such thing. Marianne simply had no intention of
letting her mother suggest they use the spare attic room. She was going back to
civilization tonight, thank you very much.

It was the first time they'd spent the entire
day together, she realized and it wasn't too stressful, so far. But she daren't
risk more than that. Dare she?

Ben, who, at the urging of his wife, had
undertaken a religious reformation, decided they ought to say a prayer before
eating. Mike and Marianne exchanged glances. "I think the prayers have
come too late for this turkey," Mike whispered from the corner of his
mouth.

Marianne lifted her knife and fork.
"Plastic? What happened to the real cutlery?"

"It's her new thing," Mike explained
under his breath. "She's making sculptures out of metal and recyclables. It's
very....green."

At the far end of the dining table, Veronica
coughed up half a lung and brushed her eldest son's desire for prayers brutally
aside. "I'm an atheist, you know." She looked smug "What are
you, Jack?" Naturally she had no qualm calling him by his first name
already. Marianne noted the tear on Veronica's shirt seemed to have got longer.
The lack of a bra was evident, as always. When Marianne was eleven and wanted
her first bra she'd had to get advice from a magazine filched from the beauty salon
in town, and she went by herself to make the purchase with her allowance.
Religion was only one of many things in which Veronica didn't believe.