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I see red—and not just in his bloodshot eyes. “For what? To pay your bills? Have you found a new job yet? Have you spent everything you have getting high?” I see him flinch slightly at that. “Why don’t you get your best buddy Randy to pitch in since he never leaves your side these days? I want nothing to do with either of you. I made that clear when I moved out months ago! And don’t call me by that stupid nickname. How did you find me here anyway?”
Looking sheepish, Ben answers, “Well you’ve blocked my calls, and your old roommate wouldn’t give me your address…”
“She doesn’t know it,” I snap at him.
“She refused in any case, so when I saw you all at Market District, I figured it was fate. I followed you back to this house. I didn’t try to talk to you then because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say yet.” He hangs his head.
“Yeah, that isn’t creepy at all, Ben.”
Everyone is glaring at him until Grammy finally stands and removes the flowers from Ben’s hands saying, “We’ll just give this florist a call and let them know one of their arrangementsended up in the wrong hands. It’s time for you to run along, young man. Try your best to stop telling lies and stealing things and maybe one day you’ll find a lovely girl who can trust you with her heart. If you keep this up, however, you’re likely headed for jail time. No decent woman wants to marry a con.” She turns to Callum’s dad and brother and orders them, “Escort this poor, confused man to the door, and lock it.”
Before they can leave, I have to add, “Ben, don’t you everdaretell Randy where I live. That guy is a total sleazeball.”
“He’s okay,” Ben protests. “What did he ever do that was so bad?”
“He was creepy and abusive to me, and you know it. You’re just too stoned most of the time to see it. Nowget outof here!”
As they take him firmly by his elbows and propel him toward the door, I sink to my seat. “Thank you, everyone. He’s bad news. Did anyone else think he looked high?”
“Yeah, now that I think of it, he might have been,” Gracie says. “Sorry I let him in.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Grammy demurs.
Callum’s mom just looks at me skeptically and asks, “Were you ever actually engaged to that… person?”
I’m so freaking embarrassed right now, I want to cry, but I force myself to sit up straight and explain, “He wasn’t always such a loser. It was only when an old friend of his, Randy, started coming around that he started getting high. I even wondered if Randy purposefully got Ben hooked on something so he could control him. It was really weird. Before that, he had a good job and acted responsibly. I left when Randy horned in and wrecked what we had, and then everything fell apart. Leaving was the best decision I’ve ever made, obviously. I am so sorry you all had to see that. I’ve never been so ashamed.”
Grammy speaks up in a gentle tone, “You have nothing to be ashamed of. He’s a handsome young man, and you wereprobably attracted to him at one point. It’s when they stop being on their best behavior and their true personalities finally show up that things get bad. I’ve been divorced for over forty years from a man I never should have married in the first place. The only worthwhile thing he ever did was get me pregnant with Liv, and then he made my life miserable until he took off for good. Our lives were vastly improved by his absence. Be happy you dodged a bullet, sweetheart.”
“Your story sounds a bit like my mom’s—or at least what I think she may have gone through.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
The faces around the table are all as somber as can be when Callum breaks the mood finally. “Who’s ready for dessert?”
A little while later,we all hear the doorbell ring, so this time Weston rushes off to answer it. He grabs the floral arrangement on his way. When he returns, he explains to us, “The poor delivery guy was beside himself. He was dropping off a bunch of flowers at a house around the corner, and he left the truck open in the driveway so he could make a several trips to the door easily. When he got back to the truck to grab more of the flowers, he saw that the calla lilies were gone. To say he was grateful is putting it mildly. He just kept asking me, ‘What kind of a jerk steals flowers meant for a wake?’”
“Good question,” Callum answers. He looks at me and his eyes show nothing but understanding, so he gives me a quick hug and a little snicker. “That wasn’t a very great gift, but I guess you could have had worse. We actually have a really awful—and hilarious—running contest in our family to see who can win the worst gift award.”
“Oh yeah?” I ask. “What are some of them?” I need to be cheered up by something funny after Ben showed up and put a huge damper on the party.
Dylan and Liv start laughing, and Dylan explains, “I have a brother who’s a little eccentric, and one Christmas he went to Costco and bought a bunch of packages of bar soap. Then he divided up the bars and gave them all to everyone in the family according to how important we were to him. I only got two bars, but he gave our mom six. So then we all got into a competition to see how many everyone got. It was so dumb and at the same time comical. Who gives stupid discount bars of soap as a Christmas gift?”
I can’t help but get the giggles over that story.
It’s obvious that everyone is eyeing Liv as if waiting for her response, but she looks at me and asks, “Have you ever been given anything odd, Petra? I mean other than purloined funeral flowers to try to win you over?”
I wrack my brain, and all I can come up with is, “My mom travels a lot, and sometimes she sends me weird stuff from other countries. One time she sent me a candle that was supposed to ward off vampires. I’m not sure what she was thinking.” That gets me some laughs and strange looks. “What about you, Weston?”
“My grandmother used to knit me a sweater every Christmas. I would never wear them to school though. They could have won any ugly sweater contest ever.” He looks down. “I wish I still had them actually—even though I was just a little kid at the time.”
I reach over and give his hand a squeeze.
Callum breaks the tension by saying, “Okay Mom, tell your story.” He has a look of suppressed mirth on his face.
Liv seems to agree that it’s time to let us know the all-time winner. She clears her throat and says, “My grandmother was a piece of work. A true original. We never knew if she was asthick as a post or as dumb as a fox because she never seemed to react the way everyone else did about anything. She was famous for cheating at cards and giving us all strange things that we never knew if she was serious about or meant as a joke. She often passed around things like chopped-up Jerusalem artichokes from her garden. She’d put pieces in a jar—not canned or preserved in any way, just stuck in something like an old mayonnaise jar, so that by the time she’d hand them to you, the contents would be all moldy.” Liv laughs. “It was gross and hilarious at the same time, but she seemed oblivious. I never knew who ate those awful-looking things anyway, but someone must—just not the ones she gave out from her garden.
“Anyway, one Christmas she gave my cousin a box of old plastic dishes. That wouldn’t have been that bad, but there was dried-up food stuck to the plates.” Everyone makes faces and disparaging noises, but Liv is finally ready to deliver the worst part. She suddenly can’t stop laughing.
