tain look to be taken serious.
“So, I can’t take any part in this?” Sherry asked, raising her eyebrows.
Darren had gotten so carried away. He paused and looked down at the vegetables. He’d been waiting on the gas grill to warm up. Sherry cooked for herself as well as small things for Gabriel; however, Darren really hadn’t seen her do anything major.
“Do you grill?” Darren asked, playfully squinting his eyes.
Sherry walked back into the kitchen and stepped up to the other side of the kitchen island. “Did it all the time growing up,” she said. The words came out so naturally – effortlessly – however, it came with a bit of a sting. As the days had gone on and she was more and more used to caring for a baby, she found her family on the line. “I was the princess of barbecue in my family. People would come to family events at our house because they knew I was going to be grilling.”
Darren’s head leaned back as a playful gesture of disbelief. He then looked at Sherry for a good, long moment, up and down. This chick looks like she’s telling the truth. “Oh, yeah?”
Sherry nodded and came around to the other side of the island. “Yeah, seriously. I always liked my meat grilled, so my dad would do it for me all the time. Then, when we started having hard times when I was a teenager, he had to work a lot more. Well, he was a trucker, so he gone at a lot longer times than usual. So, I learned how to do it and liked doing it. The men in my family hated my guts.”
Darren nodded his head, trying to not smile. “Okay.” He set one steak in front of her then pulled grilling supplies out of the cabinets. “Let’s see whose steak comes out better.”
Sherry giggled. This job became more and more interesting everyday. She took the steak, looked up into Darren’s eyes then smiled. “Okay, time for me to show you how to do it.”
Darren and Sherry went on with preparing their steaks, each using their own techniques for pre-cooking, tenderizing, and marinating. When Darren offered Sherry some vegetables to make her own creation, Sherry playfully scuffed as if she were insulted. “Grilling vegetables is for lightweights.”
Darren laughed out loud. Once he and Sherry went on about preparing their food, the silence was too loud for either of them. Darren poured a glass of wine to accompany the warm wind rushing into the house from the opened french doors. He quickly made his way around the kitchen and dining area and opened every window – every French door. Breezes at time pulled curtains up into the air. Darren looked over at Sherry. With every passing day since her arrival, he wanted to know her story. So many times, he chose to bite his tongue rather than open up a wound. He watched Sherry take a sip of her wine then put it down.
“Do you miss your family?” Darren asked.
“Uhh,” Sherry said, collecting her thoughts. “At times, I do. At times.”
“Oh, I see,” Darren said.
“You?” Sherry asked.,
Darren shrugged his shoulders, going on about getting his vegetable skewers prepared as he explained. “Sometimes, I do, but not often.”
Sherry chuckled. “Wow.” She imagined his family to be the kind of people someone would want their family to be. This guy sure didn’t come from a shabby background. “Why do you say it like that? What could be wrong with your family?”
Darren looked up at Sherry with serious eyes then smiled, breaking his mean stare. “My family….my family.” He clicked the back of his teeth with the tip of his tongue. “They’re a bunch of snobby people who only want to be friends with people because of what they can do for them. Some of it is okay, but sometimes it just seems wrong. It’s hard to explain. I was always the one out, I guess you could say. There were just certain words I didn’t want to be in.”
Sherry nodded, translating Darren’s explanation in her mind. “Oh, okay.” Badly she wanted to ask specific questions about this guy’s background. Still, even after three weeks, Sherry noticed Darren’s word choices and how he was never too revealing. “Well, my family are...are...conservative, let’s say.”
Darren nodded, but wasn’t surprised to hear Sherry’s response. Growing up in Chicago and going with his parents to political events and meetings over in Indiana at times, he was very aware of the cultural and social differences between Chicago and a place like rural Indiana. “Yeah, I can see that.”
“No, it’s a little worse than you probably would imagine, actually,” Sherry said. “They’re like conservative to the max. On steroids. They’re not bad people or anything like that, but they can be kind of controlling.”
Darren nodded. He picked up on how Sherry looked for a moment as she explained. Obviously, her relationship with her family brought about a bit of anguish to think about. Darren’s relationship with his family wasn’t so tense, per se. Now that he adopted a child without getting married, his name certainly came up more. On top of that, Darren didn’t go for being mom’s pawn in Chicago’s corrupt, political world. He rarely made an event like his other cousins or his brother John.
“Okay, so when people say conservative, what do you really mean?” Darren asked. “Like are they super religious.”
Sherry giggled – a giggle which disrupted the flow of the conversation by turning into an outright laugh. “That’s funny.” You can tell this guy is from a place like Chicago. “Well, that’s one thing. They do go to church every Sunday, but it’s not like they go around knocking on peoples’ doors early on a Saturday morning.” She chuckled. “It’s more like they believe you should live a certain way...by a certain formula. Daughter should be married and settled by thirty. Having baby’s out of wedlock? They will smile in your face, but just know it’s not all smiles when they’re back at the house, congregated in the living room, talking about you with a cold drink in their hand.”
“I see,” Darren said then chuckled. “Mine is kind of the same way, but they just pay the way out of it.”
Sherry nodded then looked down, reminiscing about some of the hard times they had growing up. “How you figure that then?” she asked, smiling.
Sherry listened to Darren talk about his family wanting to rule the world and do anything to get to that point. His mother kissed any important ass she could; has worked for twenty years as a kick-ass attorney who Darren believed probably took kickbacks. His father was basically a slumlord, even though that “enterprise” wasn’t his only source of income. He owned more than a hundred low-income properties around Chicago and in Northern Indiana. Fixing stuff for people? The man shrugged and said, “Whatever the law says and work down the list by how much their rent is.”
“Oh, wow,” Sherry said, getting a mental image of a top heavy guy in a trench coat with a devious look on his face. “That’s intense.”
Sherry and Darren continued on finishing up their talk about their families. Much to the others surprise, they each were the “black sheep,” so to speak, of the family. Sherry had become virtually estranged because she didn’t want to play by her family’s rules. Darren was “in touch,” but it was certainly easy of to not keep in contact for years at a time with anyone outside of his brother, mother, and father. He missed three cousins’ wedding, an uncle’s funeral as well as an aunt’s, and several family functions and trips. When he did come around, his family often bombarded him about his “adventures” – travels, incidents in bars, as well as questionable women that sent his mother straight to the phone so she could call somebody and get a background report.
Sherry laughed out-loud imagining a tall, stern woman on the phone waiting for information. “Your mother sounds like...like...like a real character.”