Anne Tyler - Vinegar Girl

Kate was beginning to develop a certain grudging respect for Aunt Thelma. It was something like her second, grown-up viewing of Gone with the Wind , when Melanie had all at once struck her as the true heroine. In fact, she almost regretted not inviting her aunt to the wedding. Although probably that was just as well, in view of what a disaster it had been.

Pyotr and Kate were sitting close enough so that he could nudge her with his elbow anytime he wanted her to share his appreciation of something. And he found plenty to appreciate. He liked the vichyssoise that was served at the start — anything that featured potatoes or cabbage made him happy, Kate had learned — and the rack of lamb that came next. He liked the Bach partita that was playing over Uncle Barclay’s sound system, as well as the sound system itself, with its four discreet speakers positioned in the four corners of the crown molding. He especially liked it when Alice’s baby spit up just as Alice raised her high in the air to show her off. That made him actually laugh out loud, although Kate gave him a nudge then, to shut him up. And when Uncle Theron told Mrs. Gordon that his choir director had been “phoning it in” lately, Pyotr was ecstatic. “ ‘Phoning it in!’ ” he repeated to Kate, jostling her as she was slicing her lamb. The knob of his elbow against her bare arm felt warm and callused.

On her other side, her father suddenly bent over. He seemed to be trying to crawl underneath the table. “What are you doing ?” Kate asked him, and he said, “I’m looking for that bag of yours.”

“What do you want with it?”

“I just need to slip these papers in,” he said. Briefly, he displayed them — several sheets folded in thirds like a business letter. Then he ducked his head under the table again. “Papers for the immigration people,” he said in a muffled voice.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Kate snapped, and she stabbed a bite of meat more forcefully than she needed to.

“Louis? Have you lost something?” Aunt Thelma called.

“No, no,” he said. He sat up. His face was flushed from his effort, and his glasses had slipped down the bridge of his nose. “Just putting a little something in Kate’s bag,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” Aunt Thelma said approvingly. She probably thought he meant money; that was how little she knew him. “I must say, Louis: you’ve done comparatively well with these girls,” she told him. “All things considered.” And she inclined her wineglass toward him. “I’ll have to hand you that much. I know I told you at the time that you should give them to me to raise, but I see you might have been right to insist on keeping them with you.”

Kate stopped chewing.

“Yes, well,” Dr. Battista said. He turned to Kate and said, in a lower tone, “I suppose all the bureaucratese will seem a bit daunting at first, but I’ve included a business card with Morton Stanfield’s phone number on it. He’s an immigration lawyer and he’s going to help you through this.”

“Okay,” Kate said. Then she patted his hand and said, “Okay, Father.”

Alice was asking Bunny to cut her meat up for her, since she was nursing her baby now under cover of her draped cardigan. Jeannette was trying to catch Richard’s eye; he had just poured himself what must have been at least his third glass of wine. She kept leaning forward and holding up an index finger like someone wishing to propose an amendment, but he had his gaze trained studiously elsewhere. Mrs. Gordon was telling Pyotr how sorry she was to hear that the Mintz boy had kidnapped his mice. She was seated on the other side of the table from Pyotr and several places down, so she needed to raise her voice. “Jim and Sonia Mintz should really step up to the plate,” she called, and Kate flinched, because Bunny had to have overheard her.

“ ‘Step up to the plate,’ ” Pyotr repeated in a musing tone.

“Batter’s plate,” Uncle Barclay advised him. “As in baseball.”

“Ah! Nice. Very useful. I was thinking dinner plate.”

“No, no.”

“Even when Edward was little,” Mrs. Gordon was saying, “Jim and Sonia were so laissez-faire . He was a peculiar child from the outset, but did they notice?”

“It sounds they were phoning it in,” Pyotr told her.

He looked so happy as he said this, so obviously pleased with himself, that Uncle Barclay started laughing. “You really like our American expressions, Pyoder, don’t you,” he said, and Pyotr laughed too and said, “I love them!” His whole face was alight.

“Good man,” Uncle Barclay said affectionately. “Here’s to my man Pyoder!” he announced, holding up his wineglass. “Let’s welcome him into the family.”

There was a general stir around the table, with people chiming in and reaching for their own glasses, but before they could go any further, Bunny’s chair screeched across the parquet and she jumped to her feet. “Well, I don’t welcome him,” she said. “There’s no way on earth I’m going to welcome a guy who assaulted an innocent man.”

Kate said, “Innocent!” and then, in a kind of double-take, “Assaulted?”

“He told me what you did!” Bunny said, turning on Pyotr. “You couldn’t just ask him nicely to give you back your mice; oh, no. You had to go and sock him.”

All the guests were staring at her.

“You socked him?” Kate asked Pyotr.

“He was a small bit reluctant to let me into his house,” Pyotr said.

Bunny said, “You almost broke his jaw! Maybe you did break his jaw. His mother’s thinking now she should take him to the emergency room.”

“Good,” Pyotr said, buttering a slice of bread. “Maybe they wire his mouth shut.”

Bunny asked the others, “Did you hear that?” and Dr. Battista said, “Now, Bun-Buns. Now, dear one. Control yourself, dear.” And at the same time Kate was asking, “ What happened? Wait.”

“He practically batters the Mintzes’ door down,” Bunny told her, “yells at Edward right in his face and grabs him by his shirtfront; gives poor Mrs. Mintz a heart attack, just about, and then when Edward tries to block his path as of course he’d try — it’s his private house — Pyoder knocks him flat on his back and goes storming up the stairs barging in and out of the Mintzes’ personal bedrooms till finally he finds Edward’s room and he shouts, ‘Come up here! Come up this instant!’ and he forces Edward to help him carry all the cages down the stairs and out to the Mintzes’ minivan and when Mrs. Mintz says, ‘What is this? Stop this!’ he tells her, ‘Get out of the way!’ in this loud obnoxious voice. When she didn’t know! She thought Edward was just keeping the mice for a friend! And he was keeping them for a friend, this man he’d met on the Internet from an organization in Pennsylvania, who was going to come down next week and take the mice to this no-kill shelter where they could be adopted, he said—”

Dr. Battista groaned, no doubt picturing his precious mice in the hands of a bunch of germ-ridden Pennsylvanians.

“—and then after they drive to the lab, and Edward is very helpful about unloading them from the minivan and putting them back in the mouse room, which is no easy task, believe me, what thanks does he get? Pyoder calls the police. He calls the police on him, after Edward has totally undone the damage. Right this very minute Edward would be rotting in jail, I bet, if Mrs. Mintz hadn’t as it turned out called the police on Pyoder .”

Kate said, “What?”

“I told you it was complicated,” her father said.

The other diners looked spellbound. Even Alice’s baby was staring at Bunny open-mouthed.