imagine you’ll be wanting lunch. You should eat first because Myles and Alice are still in his old room. Everyone slept in after the party, the drunken hooligans.”
“Who you calling a hooligan?”
It was Danny, coming down the stairs, looking like a madman with his hair sticking out all over the place, unshaven, wearing some god-awful zombie T-shirt.
“Ah, I see why,” Danny said. “We’re in for it now.”
“You two can set the dining room table.” Mrs. Fitz headed toward her kitchen, but she made sure they heard. “My God, there’s nine of us. You’ll need to bring in chairs.”
“So the whole crew stayed over?”
“To be fair,” Danny said, scratching his belly as if he was alone in his bedroom, “Shannon and Brady live here. But Tim and me and the married ones, we had to stay. Nobody was taking a train at three in the morning.”
Nate slipped off his coat and hung it on one of the wooden pegs that lined the entry hall. “Whatever happened to Gayle?”
Danny’s brow furrowed. “Boston Gayle?”
Nate nodded.
“She kicked me out while I was in my boxers. Thought I’d slept with her best friend. Truth was, I had, but we didn’t do anything but sleep. Completely innocent.
Gayle didn’t care, though.” He started walking to the kitchen, now scratching his jean-covered butt. “She called me an evil bastard who had no class.”
“Go figure.” Nate trailed after his buddy, and everywhere his gaze rested he found another piece of his past. He’d fallen against the edge of the massive wooden dining room table, running when there’d been a very strict rule against it. In his defense, Myles had been chasing him, and Myles was six years older and mean.
Nate walked through the kitchen to the pantry door and swung it open. Ignoring the massive amounts of stores Mrs. Fitz kept on hand, enough to feed an army, instead he checked out the marks on the height chart etched on the wall. There was his name, alongside Tim and Myles and Brady and Danny. No Shannon, though. He hadn’t remembered that. Still didn’t know why.
“Please tell me there’s coffee made.”
Nate knew it was Shannon behind him, but her voice was as grown-up as the woman herself. Despite his complete and total awareness that she was no longer a child, his memories were in flux. He peeked out from the pantry to see her in her belted robe, her hair hanging over her right shoulder.
It shouldn’t have been real, that color, but it was. They’d gone to Coney Island or out to the seashore, and no one ever got lost because all they had to do was look for that firecracker hair in the crowd.
Of course, she’d always gotten sunburned, even after Mrs. Fitz slathered her with goop. Nothing could protect that white skin, not umbrellas, not T-shirts, not the awful zinc on her nose.
“Oh.” Her hand went to her hair, then just as quickly lowered. “You’re here.”
He came out of the pantry. “Just arrived. Currently on table-setting duty.”
“My mother’s a slave driver.”
“I heard that, missy. You’d best get your coffee and get dressed. We have a houseful to feed.”
Shannon turned to her mom standing by the stove. “There isn’t one person in this house who isn’t capable of fixing their own lunch. Not one.” She had her hands on her hips, and Nate was taken aback again that she’d developed so many curves. It didn’t seem possible. But then, he’d done some changing, too.
“You know your brothers. Left to their own devices, they’ll eat nothing but garbage.”
“Then that’s what they deserve. Garbage.” She turned back to Nate. “Don’t bother asking who buys the candy and chips and cookies and cake and every horrible, calorie- and fat-laden food in New York.”
“I wouldn’t think of it.”
“Then you learned something hanging around here all those years.”
“That your mother is generous and wants her sons to be happy? Yeah, I got that one.”
Mrs. Fitz nodded and kept on stirring what smelled like beef stew. Shannon smiled at him, patted his arm and went to the big coffee urn that took up half of the completely inadequate counter.
The house was huge, but that was mostly in height. Eight- and nine-foot ceilings, but small rooms. The old oak table where he’d eaten countless bowls of oatmeal dwarfed the breakfast nook. Even the living room barely fit the furniture. How many games he’d watched on those covered couches and chairs. He couldn’t begin to guess. Didn’t matter what season, if there was a game on anywhere on television, the Fitzgerald men were glued to it.
And there’d been snacks followed by huge dinners of meat and potatoes and enough cabbage to choke a horse. “That’s what’s missing,” he said.
Danny, who was now pouring his coffee, Shannon, who was drinking hers, and Mrs. Fitz were all staring.
“Cabbage,” he said, only then realizing he’d made a strategic error. He couldn’t very well announce that he’d missed the stink. “I’m looking forward to some nice corned beef and cabbage soon, Mrs. Fitz. I still think about it all these years later.”
“Well, you’ll have it as you’re staying more than a week,” she answered, turning back to the heavy pot. “And since we had the new exhaust put in, it doesn’t make the house smell to holy hell.”
He grinned and shook his head. This was so much better than a hotel. He should have thought of asking to stay before he’d left Indonesia.
“Danny tells me you work with refugees,” Mrs. Fitz said as she wiped her hands on a tea towel.
“Most of the time, yeah.” Large white plates were put in his hands, and Danny led him to the table carrying a bunch of silverware. “I work for The International Rescue Committee. They set my agenda.”
“Well, don’t stop.” Mrs. Fitz waved impatiently for him to continue. “Tell us what that means.”
“I show up after a natural disaster and help plan and implement redevelopment. We try to recreate villages and towns as much as we can, even if a new design would be better. It’s disorienting having everything you know ripped away in a tsunami or an earthquake. So we study old pictures, drawings and blueprints and figure out how to give people back their equilibrium first, then we add a few extras.”
Shannon wasn’t drinking even though her cup was at her mouth, and she wasn’t even standing near her mom and yet he was watching her. He found Mrs. Fitz again. “It’s challenging work, but very satisfying.”
“I can’t imagine.”
She couldn’t, Nate was sure of it. Not the conditions, not the sweat, the devastation, the utter anguish in every breath.
It was suddenly quiet, a rare thing in the Fitzgerald household, and he wished he hadn’t
