“Sounds good. We‘ll eat dinner with your parents, and then we‘ll check out Scanlon‘s apartment.”
History was repeating itself. As always with Diesel, I was going down as the big loser in the power struggle.
Stephanie Plum 14.5 - Plum Spooky
FIVE
POT ROAST, SPAGHETTI with red sauce, roast chicken, kiel-?basa and sauerkraut, meat loaf, minestrone, stuffed manicotti, baked ham, pork chops with applesauce, lasagna, chicken paprikash, and stuffed cabbage stretch in a time line from my birth to this afternoon, pulling together my Hungarian and Italian genes, forever binding together food and parental love.
Dinner at my parents‘ house is always at six, it‘s always served at the dining room table, and it‘s always good. To my mother‘s dismay, my current lifestyle isn‘t nearly so civilized. Left to my own devices, I eat standing over my kitchen sink when I get hungry, and my culinary expertise relies heavily on peanut butter and white bread.
My parents live in the Chambersburg section of Trenton. Their house is small and narrow, cojoined on one side with an identical twin differing only in paint color. There‘s a minuscule front yard, a slightly longer backyard, and in between is a small foyer off the front door, living room, dining room, and kitchen, with three tiny bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. The bath is far from luxurious, but it has a window that opens to the roof over the kitchen. This window was my escape route all through high school whenever I was grounded. And I was grounded a lot.
We were all seated at the dining room table—Diesel, Carl, my mother, my father, and my Grandma Mazur. My Grandma Mazur moved in with my parents when Grandpa Mazur bought a one-?way ticket to God‘s big theme park in the sky. Grandma buys her clothes at the Gap, her sneakers at Payless, and her Metamucil at the supermarket. She has short gray hair, and more skin than she needs.
“Isn‘t this nice,” Grandma Mazur said, setting the green bean casserole in the middle of the table, taking her place opposite me. “This feels just like a party. Can‘t hardly remember the last time Diesel was here. It feels like ag
es. And anyway, it‘s always a treat to have a handsome man in the house.”
My father stopped shoveling slabs of pot roast onto his plate, his lips compressed, and his eyes fixed on his knife as if he was contemplating carving something other than cow. He mumbled a few unintelligible words, his color returned to normal, and he moved on to the mashed potatoes. This happened at least five times during a normal eve ning meal with my father and grandmother. He thought my grandmother was a trial.
I was sitting to my father‘s left, and Diesel was next to me. My grandmother was to my father‘s right and Carl was next to her. My mother was at the other end of the table. My father looked up in search of gravy and for the first time spotted Carl.
My sister, Valerie, has a flock of kids who regularly visit with my parents, and as it turns out, size-?wise it‘s a fairly easy transition to go from kids to a monkey. Carl was sitting in my niece‘s booster chair with a white napkin tied around his neck.
“There‘s a monkey at the table,” my father said.
My mother looked at my father and looked at Carl, and then she belted back something I suspected was straight whiskey cleverly disguised as ice tea.
Grandma spooned some green beans and applesauce onto Carl‘s plate. “Stephanie‘s babysitting the little guy,” she told my father. “His name is Carl.”
Carl‘s attention was fixed on his beans. He picked one up, smelled it, and ate it.
“Do you want pot roast?” Grandma asked Carl.
Carl shrugged.
Grandma put a slice of pot roast on Carl‘s plate and added mashed potatoes. Carl‘s eyes lit up at the sight of the mashed potatoes. He grabbed a handful and shoved them into his mouth.
“We don‘t eat mashed potatoes with our hands,” Grandma said to Carl.
Carl stopped eating and looked around. Confused. He rolled his lips back and did a forced monkey smile at Grandma.
“We use our fork,” Grandma said, holding her fork for Carl to see.
Carl picked his fork up and looked at it. He smelled it and touched a prong with his boney monkey finger.
Grandma scooped some potatoes up with her fork and ate them. “Yum,” Grandma said to Carl. “Good potatoes.”
Carl stuck his fork into his potatoes, raised a glob to his mouth, and the potatoes slid off the fork onto the floor. “Eeee!” Carl said.
“Don‘t worry about it,” Grandma said to Carl. “It happens to me all the time.”
Carl took a second shot at it with the same result.
“Maybe you want to skip the potatoes,” Grandma said. Carl‘s mouth dropped open, and his eyes went wide with horror. He shook his head no. He wanted his potatoes. He very carefully, very deliberately raised a forkful of potatoes to his mouth and at the last minute… disaster. The potatoes dropped onto the floor. Carl threw the fork across the room, jumped onto the table, and ran off with the bowl of mashed potatoes.
There was a collective gasp from everyone but Diesel, who obviously required more than a monkey stealing potatoes to make him suck air.