“Thanks, Grandma,” Dennis replied through a mouthful of meatball.
“He won’t do anything rash?” Emily asked in exaggerated disbelief. “Mom, if you knew what I’ve had to deal with this past year…”
Thomas didn’t bother to hide his grin. Judging from what little he’d seen so far, she’d had to deal with quite a bit.
“Like what, dear?” Jean asked.
“First, there was that fight…”
“It wasn’t a fight,” Dennis said, as if he were explaining a vocabulary word to a hopelessly dense child. “I punched a kid and he fell down, and he didn’t feel like getting up and getting punched again.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a strong punch,” Thomas said approvingly.
“Yeah, I guess — or the kid had a glass jaw.”
“Or both.”
“Thomas!” Emily snapped. “Don’t encourage my son to solve his problems with violence.”
“Since when have you been a pacifist?” Thomas said. “Now, I don’t know exactly what happened, but a kid’s gotta protect himself. And I remember you getting in a few scraps back in the day. In fact, I bet I know of a few instances that mom and dad never even heard about.”
Dennis and Dan leaned forward ever so slightly. Over the years, Emily had built up a mythology around her past. She had been the Golden Child, and had cruised through school with incomparable ease. Her peers loved her, and she loved them. She’d never been disciplined, and she never brought home a grade lower than a B+. Dennis and Dan both believed this was horseshit, but neither of them could call her on it; Dennis, of course, wasn’t yet born when all this was happening, and Dan hadn’t met Emily until they were both in college. They were both ignorant regarding her true past. But the members of the Copeland family weren’t, and their recollections were always listened to intently.
“Thomas, don’t bring up my past,” Emily warned, “or I’ll bring up yours.”
“That’s fine,” Thomas replied, shrugging. “I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”
“What do you mean, fights we never heard of?” Jean asked apprehensively.
“Oh, you know,” Thomas said wickedly, “like that one fight after school — believe Emily was in eighth grade — because so-and-so’s boyfriend had a crush on Emily, and so-and-so wanted to make Emily pay…”
“Thomas!” Emily snapped again.
“No, Mom, let him keep going,” Dennis said jauntily. “We love hearing these old family tales. Right, Dad?”
Dan Dowling was wise enough to remain silent.
“Your mother was a little sparkplug back then,” Thomas said. “Kind of like she is now, but imagine her personality in a teenage body.”
“That would be wicked,” Dennis said. “So she got in a lot of fights?”
“Not really,” Thomas admitted. “I’m just riling her up. But she was fierce, and she didn’t care who got in her way — teacher, student, parent, whoever. Again, like she is now.”
This was meant as a compliment, sort of, but, at this moment, Emily’s mind would not have registered a compliment had it been delivered to her by the President in a fawning speech. She tapped her knife against her plate and glared at her brother. Clink, clink, clink, clink-clink, clink… it seemed to be Morse code for “I’m going to murder you once you fall asleep.”
“What about boyfriends?” Dennis asked. “Did she ever date?”
This topic had been discussed a few times in previous years, but never in as much detail as Dan and Dennis would have liked, because Emily had nipped the conversation in the bud. Maybe this time they’d learn some new, juicy tidbits. Dan was especially interested; he suspected his wife had been promiscuous before she met him (and he suspected she had a few paramours now, but he had no proof), though she always maintained she’d only had a few “worthless” boyfriends. He watched his brother-in-law closely; even the slightest involuntarily tic might give something away.
“Well, I remember her first boyfriend,” Thomas said, playfully drawing a heart in the air with both hands. “His name was Brett Hickman…”
To everyone’s surprise, Emily stood up quickly, knocking her chair down. Her knife clattered against her plate, then fell onto the floor, taking a few morsels of food with it. She exited the dining room, stomped down the hall, and stomped up the stairs. When she slammed her bedroom door shut, it rattled the whole house.
Everyone sat motionless, as if a wrathful goddess had just sentenced them to torment and death.
“Oh dear,” Jean said sadly. “Something’s offended her.”
They all looked at Thomas, since his last statements had, it seemed, driven her away from the table. Thomas frowned, miffed at being made a scapegoat, but feeling powerless to counter so many denouncing stares.
Dan knew that, as a supportive husband, he would have to go up and check on his wife eventually. He might as well do it now, before Emily, alone in their bedroom, whipped her anger up to holiday-ruining levels. With a genial “Excuse me,” he left the table and headed upstairs.
“Maybe I should go up there, too,” Jean wondered aloud.
“What for?” Frank demanded. “Let Dan handle it. He’s her husband. And if he can’t handle it, I’ll get involved.”
“Well, I’m her mother. Mothers understand things husbands and fathers don’t.”
“Like what?”
“Well — things, Frank. Women things.”
“I’m sure Emily feels comfortable talking about ‘women things’ with her husband, who is, like her, a mature adult — as am I.”
“I don’t know about that. Not all husbands can talk about that stuff easily. Why, remember when I went through menopause. You were absolutely helpless. Couldn’t even talk about it without your face getting all scrunched up like it does sometimes.”
“Well, uh, that’s different…” Frank sputtered, his face scrunching up in exactly the manner his wife had just described.
Dennis sensed his freedom. His mother would be poring over her grievances for a while, and his father would be trying to comfort her in his meek way. Dennis didn’t understand either of them. His mother acted more childish than he did, and his father was “whipped,” as they said at school when a guy let his girlfriend wrap him around her finger. Still, he wasn’t really complaining. Moments like these allowed him to sneak back to his room, where Call of Duty was waiting.
He announced he was already full, and was going to “clean up,” which meant taking his dirty dishes and cutlery and putting them in the dishwasher. After he’d done this, he slipped out of the kitchen and returned to his room. He assumed, correctly, that his grandparents and uncle wouldn’t stop him. They probably thought he was actually cleaning something up, somewhere, and not blasting noobs with a shotgun.
Well, his grandparents probably thought this, but they’d always been gullible, and they seemed to get more gullible each year. His uncle, though — he probably wasn’t fooled. His mom had occasionally commented on her brother’s “laziness” and “lack of drive,” but Thomas seemed the most “self-actualized” among them. (Dennis had just been introduced to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which, in his opinion, was fairly obvious, and not worth studying.) Uncle Thomas didn’t seem to worry about much, while everyone else around him worried about everything.
Then again, this family was pretty fucked up (every teenager in history has thought this at some point) so maybe Uncle Thomas was fucked up in some way too. But then Dennis zoned into Call of Duty, and everything else fell away.