Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [32]
“I didn’t know you could make drinks in a Crockpot.” I said it to be good-natured, but Grandma shot me a warning look.
“Oh, you can make all sorts of goodies in those things,” she sang.
All through dinner, Mom chattered so incessantly Mr. Moore never got a word in edgewise. This seemed to suit him perfectly. He ate slowly, methodically working his way through his plate of food. This proved a difficult task, as Mom and Grandma alternately spooned a new heaping of mashed potatoes or beef or green beans onto his plate whenever its rose pattern became visible.
“Richard, we need your help,” Mom said. The dinner dishes had been cleared. We worked slowly on our banana cream pie. “Amy has a boardee we’re trying to talk her out of.”
“Boarder, not boardee,” I said.
“Boarder.” Mom winked at Richard as if sharing a private joke with him. As if I weren’t sitting directly opposite her. She rested her chin coquettishly on her hands. “Some man who knows her roommate. You’ve simply got to help us talk her out of it.”
He cleared his throat. Rumpled his napkin on the table. “Well, let’s see. I don’t know that I’d be much help with that.”
“But we need a man’s judgment!” Mom declared. “Look at us: three women with only Brian to serve as the voice of reason.”
Mr. Moore took advantage of this segue to defer to Brian, who managed to change the subject via some stealthy route. Soon he was telling the story of an ill-fated accident in the dissection room that involved a scalpel and Mr. Body’s testicle. Mr. Body was his cadaver. We’d heard the story before, but Mom and Grandma laughed riotously anyway, eager for Mr. Moore to find it funny.
The laughing set the conversation back on a harmless track. Mr. Moore only joined in when pressed. He was reserved to the point of timidity, polite and neat. He was, in every way, the direct opposite of my father.
When Mom stood to clear the dishes, Mr. Moore insisted on helping. The way she colored, you’d have thought he’d paid her the most extravagant compliment. As they walked to the kitchen, he placed his hand on the small of her back. The rest of the night I couldn’t help thinking of this tender gesture.
6
Christmas Eve we drove together to Grandma’s for the Karrow family Christmas. Mom’s older brother, Lynn, and younger sister, Patty, were already there when we arrived, along with their children and in some cases their children’s children. Now committed to join the madness, Marie was obliged to come. Mr. Moore was not and did not. He not only failed to be a Fundamentalist, he went so far as to be Catholic. While Grandma had accepted him, she suggested warming the family to him slowly. Grandma had always been faulted for her open-mindedness. She had liked Bill Clinton, thank you very much, and she did not think the New Ageism so vile. Really, meditation sounded very relaxing.
At dinner I was placed next to Aunt Patty, who spent the entire hour recounting to me her caloric intake for the previous day, meal by meal. She had been on a diet since the mid-nineties. She ate no more than 1,200 calories a day on weekdays, then ate whatever she wanted from five o’clock Friday to noon Sunday. On the Aunt Patty Diet, all holidays counted as Saturdays. A decade of this self-prescribed regimen had succeeded in making her the largest of the Karrow women.
“I’m happily satisfied,” she said at the end of dinner, “but not bloated.” She lifted her shirt to show me the elastic waistline of what appeared to be her oldest daughter’s recently retired maternity jeans.
This conversation was topped only by Uncle Lynn’s misconception that I was dating a college professor, as opposed to working as one.
“How’s the professor doing?” he asked.
Assuming he meant me, I replied, “Getting by.”
“You guys have any serious plans?”
“Plans?” I asked, bewildered. “With who?”
“This professor guy.”
“I’m not seeing anyone, Uncle Lynn,” I explained, thinking briefly and not without chagrin of Adam. “I’m just teaching