Spellbound - Cara Lynn Shultz [77]
“Aunt Christine, I’m home,” I called, letting my keys drop into the angel-shaped dish she kept on the coffee table and walking toward the kitchen.
“Did you have a good time, dear?” Christine asked, splashing some vermouth into the martini she held in her hand.
“Yep,” I said, smiling a little too widely.
“So funny, you and the Salinger boy,” Christine murmured, taking a critical sip of her martini and frowning.
“Why is it so funny?” I asked. Of course it’s funny. It’s hilarious that a guy like Brendan would be interested in me, right? Even Christine sees it.
“Not funny ha-ha, Emma.” Aunt Christine sighed, taking out a bottle of vodka and scrutinizing it as she poured it into her glass. “Just funny interesting.”
“You’ve lost me, Aunt Christine.” I dropped my purse and settled into the floral-covered kitchen chairs as she took another sip of her martini and frowned again, splashing more vermouth in it before pouring the entire glass down the drain.
“I could never make a martini as well as your uncle George,” she said, and began making a fresh martini from scratch. “Well, dear, where were we? Oh, yes—you probably don’t remember this, but when you were very young, your parents would take you into the city to stay the weekend with me anytime they went away.”
“I remember,” I said, thinking back to those happier times. They were times of seeing matinees of the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall and making fortresses out of Christine’s couch cushions with Ethan, all before my father decided to play absentee dad.
“Well, one weekend, we went to the playground in Central Park in the West Sixties. You were pretty adamant about going there instead of somewhere closer. I remembered the Salingers being there because his mother and I were working together on some charity thing for the school and she was being a bit of a pill about it. And you and Brendan played together that afternoon.” Christine punctuated her bombshell with a rather large gulp of her new martini.
“No way!” My jaw dropped and I clutched the seat of the chair, my nails scraping against the fabric. “How old could I have been?”
“Oh, dear, this was before your idiot father left,” she said, using the “pet name” she called my father any time he came up in conversation, which wasn’t too often. “You couldn’t have been more than three or four.” Christine took another swallow of her martini.
“So we played together,” I said nervously. “Well, I guess that’s not too weird. I mean, I knew Matt in kindergarten and we dated freshman year.”
“Oh, dear, that’s not the interesting part.” Christine chuckled. “When it was time to leave, you let out such a scream. You said that you knew Brendan would be there, and that’s why you wanted to go to that park. Both of you threw such tantrums about leaving each other.” She laughed, lost in the memory—and I was glad it was dark in the kitchen. There was no way she could see my face, which I would bet was drained of all color.
“Oh, well, I guess we liked each other at an early age,” I said, laughing nervously.
“You sure did.” She chuckled. “Your idiot father didn’t appreciate it, though, when I told him the story.”
“What do you mean?” Although part of me wanted to run into my room and hide to process all this new information, a bigger part of me realized I might never get Christine on a talking tear like this again. I wondered how many martinis she had sampled while trying to make the perfect drink.
“He never appreciated all your quirks,” Christine said with a dismissive wave of her hand.
“What quirks?”
“Emma, dear, you know those little twin things you and your brother would do, speak in your own language and things like that.”
“I remember him yelling at us to speak English.” I thought back to him scolding us in the middle of Kmart for babbling in what we were later told was our twin-speak,