Page 57 of Between Brothers

Chapter 22

Hayley

I was nervous. Glad that it was Thursday, glad that any moment Blue and Cell would be riding up to my back door, but terribly, terribly nervous. What if dinner didn’t turn out? What if my dad caught on I was seeing the both of them and not just Blue? What if Cell was a raging dill weed? My mind just kept on with what if, what if, what if, as I moved around the kitchen, fixing appetizers to set on the table.

Thanksgiving was the one day a year that my dad was barred from the kitchen. It was his day to relax, watch his football to his heart’s content and for me to get my hands dirty. It’d been my mom’s day to cook, and for the three years between fifteen and eighteen, we’d had Thanksgiving in a restaurant. The Thanksgiving after my eighteenth birthday, though, I insisted on doing it all myself from my mother’s recipes with no help from my dad.

I set a tray onto the dining room table with carrot sticks, baby corn, celery, marinated mushrooms, and two kinds of olives. She used to always have trays of good stuff to munch on while we waited on the bird. I smiled at the back of my dad’s head as he lounged in his recliner and cried ‘come on!’ at the TV.

That first Thanksgiving I’d cooked without help had pretty much been a disaster. I hadn’t pulled the bag of innards out of the bird and the stuffing? We just won’t talk about how big of a train wreck it all ended up being. We ended up in a restaurant that year too, and my dad? The next year it had been a team effort; he had trained me right and it’d been my show ever since.

I went back into the kitchen and washed up some of the things that I had used so far. The house was old, without a dishwasher, and with no real way to put a dishwasher in it, so in this house we were the dishwashers. I put the pots and utensils in the drain board and just as I finished drying my hands and went to pick the first thing up to dry it, I heard motorcycles rumbling down the street in front of the house.

“That yer friends, pumpkin?” My dad called from the recliner.

“I think so,” I called back. I listened to them rumble down the drive and smiled. “I know so,” I called and my dad huffed a laugh without turning around.

I went to the back door after the bikes were turned off and opened it up to Blue coming up the back steps, a light of excitement in his eyes.

“Hey, little one,” he murmured and bent down to give me a kiss. A quick, chaste press of lips. I stepped aside and he went into the house and Cell stopped in front of me.

“Hey, darlin’,” he said and winked, bending to give me a friendly peck on the cheek. His eyes, however, told a different story. One that made me blush.

He handed me a bottle of wine and said, “We didn’t want to come empty handed.”

“Oh, thank you!”

He slipped past me into the house and I shut the door on the cold swirling into the house. Blue was shaking my dad’s hand who was up out of the recliner. Cell stepped up and shook his hand after Blue and I went and set the bottle on the table.

“Sure appreciate you letting me come along with Blue.”

“Aw, well, no one should spend Thanksgiving alone,” my dad said. I smiled over at them and let them talk, wandering back into the kitchen to finish what I started. Keeping an ear out and shamelessly eavesdropping.

“You boys like football?” my dad asked.

“I’m more pro ball than college ball, myself.” Cell answered.

“Aw yeah?”

“Yeah, favorite team is the Pats.”

“Oh, well, we can’t all be perfect,” my dad said dryly.

A light touch at my lower back startled me and I looked up into Blue’s smiling eyes. He asked me, “Can I help?” and I wasn’t about to turn down his offer.

“Sure, dry these and I’ll get started on the salad.”

He plucked the dishtowel from my hands and picked up the next plate while I went to the fridge and pulled out the ingredients I would need and for a time it was the picture of domestic bliss. Blue helped me in the kitchen while Cell and my dad watched football and everything was perfect.

When dinner was ready, we all sat down at the table. Grace was said as was custom at my mother’s table, and even though she was gone my father and I had carried that particular tradition on. It wasn’t until about five or six bites of food that my father lobbed a grenade into the conversation.

“So, Joe… Paul… just curious, but have either of you done any time?”

I nearly choked on my bite of turkey. “Oh, my god, Dad! Who asks that!?”

“A man should know just who’s keeping his daughter’s company,” my dad said defensively.

“Yes,” Blue answered quietly and didn’t look proud, Cell on the other hand…

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