know, sweetheart,” he said while his gaze wandered suggestively down to her mouth. “That depends on what you’re asking me to consider.”
“I’m asking you to consider leaving.”
“I already considered it. I decided not to.”
Hannah groaned. This was ridiculous. The Walkers were her ideal family. She couldn’t show up at their front door with this lunatic—albeit very attractive lunatic—at her side.
“Aren’t you going to ring the bell?” he asked. Before she could stop him he reached past her and rang it himself.
Hannah was trying to decide if she could manage to disappear before anyone came to the door, when it opened.
“Hi, Ma,” the beefcake said. “What’s for lunch? I’m starved.”
2
BY THE TIME HANNAH HAD met Kate Walker, her husband Henry, and Henry’s older brother, Tuffy, who lived with the Walkers, she was starting to recover from the shock of finding out that her beefcake hood ornament, aka Danny Walker, was a member of Granny’s Grains Great American Family. It helped that he’d disappeared right after introductions. She knew it was probably very un-Great American Family of her, but Hannah fervently hoped Danny was having lunch elsewhere.
Mrs. Walker led her through a bright, charming living room and a dining room with crystal candlesticks and real flowers on the table to the kitchen at the back of the house.
It couldn’t have been better if Hannah had dreamed it up herself. The cupboards were painted white and the walls were papered in tiny blue flowers. There were blue gingham curtains at the windows and needlepoint on the walls of a spacious alcove that held a big oak table already set for lunch. Something was bubbling merrily in a pot on the stove and the aroma was enticing enough to make her mouth water.
“This place is for you, Miss Ross,” Uncle Tuffy said as he pulled out a chair for her then bowed in a courtly fashion.
“Thank you, Mr. Walker,” she said as she took it.
Tuffy chuckled delightedly. “I’m not Mr. Walker,” he said. “Henry there—he’s Mr. Walker. I’m Uncle Tuffy.”
“Then, thank you, Uncle Tuffy,” she said.
He grinned and Hannah tried not to think of lawn ornaments. He was short, slightly built and wiry, except for a rather large potbelly that strained the buttons of his red plaid shirt. With round cheeks above a whiskered chin and white hair that stood out in wispy tufts from his pink scalp, he looked like a gnome. All he needed was a stocking cap.
From her seat Hannah could see out the windows to the backyard where a lilac bush was in full bloom and a swing hung from an old oak tree.
“I see you have a greenhouse.”
“Kate raises her babies out there,” Uncle Tuffy said.
“Her babies?”
“That’s what I call my plants, dear,” Kate Walker answered from the stove where she was dishing out plates of food.
How sweet, Hannah thought. Calling her plants her babies. Kate came over and put a plate of food down in front of Hannah. Creamed chicken on popovers. How classic was that? Served on china that was edged with blue forget-me-nots, it looked like a picture from the pages of a woman’s magazine. Hannah raised a forkful to her mouth. Heaven.
“Mrs. Walker, this is delicious. But I hope you didn’t go to all this trouble because of me. We do want you to just be yourselves, you know. I mean, that’s the point, isn’t it?”
“Why, I didn’t go through any trouble at all, dear. Just creamed Sunday’s leftover chicken, as usual,” she said as she sat down to join them. “And please call me Kate.”
Leftovers. The word brought back memories. Until she’d started hanging around at Lissa’s house, the only leftovers Hannah had been familiar with were cold pizza or congealed Chinese. But at Lissa’s the leftovers morphed into what Mr. Hamilton called surprise pie. He loved to joke that you never knew what would be under the crust. Hannah had made it a point to eat at Lissa’s house whenever they had leftovers.
She took another forkful of food. It was so yummy that she wondered why the Walker family would want to eat the bland, oversugared cereal they would soon be representing. But eat it they did, and, according to Hannah’s data, they ate it in very large quantities.
“How long has your family been eating Super Korny Krunchies, Kate?”
“Well—um—let me see.” Kate seemed a little flustered suddenly.
Uncle Tuffy beamed. “I been eatin’ it since they been makin’ it,” he said proudly.
“And how long have you been hawking it?” Danny Walker asked as he came into the room and started to fill his plate at the stove.
“I do not hawk cereal,” she answered. “I am a research sociologist, working as an independent consultant.” It wasn’t Hannah’s style to sound so haughty, but Danny Walker seemed to bring it out in her.
“What’s a consultant?” Uncle Tuffy asked.
“That’s what some people do, Uncle Tuffy,” Danny said as he slid into a chair right across from her, “when they can’t find a real job.”
Kate looked up from her plate. “Oh, you poor dear. Have you been out of work long?”
Hannah gave Danny a look she hoped would freeze his mouth shut. “I am not out of work, Kate. I feel very privileged to be working with a company modern enough to hire a sociologist for this project.”
“Contest, you mean,” Danny said as he poured himself iced tea from the glass pitcher on the table.
Hannah preferred to think of it as a project. “As I was saying—this project—”
“But, Miss Ross, it was a contest, wasn’t it?” Tuffy asked, worry puckering his forehead. “We won, didn’t we? We get the year’s supply of cereal, don’t we? I’m gonna be on the box, aren’t I?”
“Yes, of course, you won—”
“Then it was a contest,” Danny said, his blue eyes mocking her like the devil. “So what did we have to do to win? Send in the most box tops?” he asked as he raised a glass of iced tea to his mouth.
“No, Danny,” Tuffy answered enthusiastically. “We won for being normal.”
Danny nearly spit out his iced tea. “Normal? Sweetheart, do you have any idea what normal is?”
Why couldn’t the man have an addiction to fast food, thought Hannah with a sigh. Why couldn’t he be out somewhere supersizing instead of sitting across from her, being super-irritating? “Your family was chosen, Mr. Walker, because they embody standards and values that Granny’s Grains wants to project.”
“So basically, sweetheart, this is just an advertising gimmick.”
“No.
