Calamity Jena (Invertary 4)

“Great, sit down in the dining room and we’ll get the food. Jena, you can help.”

Feeling slightly bewildered as to why she’d been singled out, Jena watched everyone else leave the kitchen.

“I’ve been married thirty-five years,” Heather told her as she pulled the roast from the oven. “If you want a healthy relationship with my son, never forget three things. Food will always triumph over any other need. When confronted with a wall of testosterone, nod as though you agree, then do what you had planned anyway. And if all else fails, resort to guilt. The men in this family can’t stand the thought of their women losing out, even if they’re the cause of it.”

“You know I’m not dating your son, right?”

Heather grinned knowingly. “I know. And given your track record, I’m hoping it will stay like that. In the meantime, you two share that nice little house of yours and see what happens. I would really like grandkids while I’m still young.”

Jena shook her head as she took the dish of potatoes she was handed. They smelled heavenly. Part of her wanted to stay in the kitchen and snack. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to eat with the tension-laden atmosphere in the dining room.

“Hurry up, Jena,” Matt’s mother shouted.

With a sigh, Jena took the food to the other room.

The tension in the dining room was painful. It was almost enough to put Jena off her food. Almost. As a woman who was fast running out of money, she wasn’t about to pass up a home-cooked meal—no matter how much indigestion she’d have to suffer afterwards. As she dug into her meat and mash, she eyed the family photos that filled the walls. There were hundreds of them, all in different frames. Some sitting a little lopsided on the wall. Seeing the evidence of a happy family life, proudly displayed, made Jena’s heart ache. She was pretty sure her mother didn’t even own one photo of her, let alone the hundreds the Donaldsons had.

“That’s our old dog, Roger.” Matt pointed to the photo she’d been staring at, breaking the deathly silence in the room. “He had a thing for Dad’s shoes. Used to bury them all over the garden. Dad had to go to work in his slippers or gumboots a couple of times because we couldn’t find his shoes.”

“I remember that.” Megan’s eyes lit up. “He used to pay us to dig the garden for his shoes. Fifty pence a pair, wasn’t it?”

“Aye.” Matt’s eyes twinkled. “We were robbed. You’d work all afternoon, find one pair of shoes and didn’t even make enough money for a bag of crisps.”

The twins laughed as Heather pointed to another photo. It showed her husband tied to a chair in the garden. He was gagged and blindfolded and surrounded by a group of boys all dressed as pirates.

“That was the time Matt, along with his cousins and their friends, decided to play pirates and ‘kidnap’ Bruce. When I called them in for lunch, they ran into the house and left him there, trussed up behind a bush at the bottom of the garden. By the time they’d finished eating, the game of pirates, along with their captive, was completely forgotten. It was hours before I noticed Bruce was missing and went looking for him.”

The siblings were laughing

hard now.

“That one”—Claire pointed at photo of her dad shouting and pointing on the sideline of a soccer game—“is the time dad got banned from the pitch after he objected to a foul against Flynn.”

Matt grinned. “It wasn’t so much the objection. It was the language he used when he shouted at the referee.”

Megan laughed. “What did he call him? A wee, hairy, bowlegged Sassenach with more intelligence in his balls than in his brain?”

“Aye, only with a few more swear words thrown in for good measure,” Heather said.

“Oh, remember that?” Megan pointed at another picture of their dad buried up to his neck on a sandy beach. She grinned at Jena. “That was taken just before we dug a hole beside his feet and tickled his toes until he promised to buy us all ice cream.”

“And look.” Claire smiled. “That’s him dancing with me at my ballet recital. I was five, and my partner, a whiny wee boy, backed out at the last minute.”

“Yeah,” Megan said. “Mum wanted Matt to step in, but he refused. Locked himself in his bedroom shouting something about ‘real men don’t dance’. Dad was great, though. He made up the steps as he went along and we couldn’t get him off the stage at the end.”

“No,” Claire said, looking wistful, “he liked the attention.”

“Madman,” Heather mumbled with a loving smile. “Always loved being the centre of things.”

Silence fell over the group. Jena watched as Grunt stroked the back of Claire’s hair as she tugged her sister into a hug. Without thinking too much about it, Jena reached under the table and squeezed Matt’s knee. He gave her a grateful smile.

“So.” Claire’s mum took a deep breath. A signal she was about to change the subject. Claire’s heart sank when her mother turned to her. “Tell us how you two met then,” she said with a smile.

Claire felt panic skitter up her spine. She licked her suddenly dry lips. It had been too much to hope that she’d make it through the afternoon without a grilling. As usual, her mum’s cooking was delicious and her sister was entertaining. She wished she could just spend the afternoon relaxing in the home she’d grown up in, looking at the family photos covering the dining room wall and slowly eating herself into a comatose state. Instead she had to deal with the third degree—and this was before she’d gotten to the chocolate cake.

“Well”—she glanced at Samuel—“we kind of ran into each other one night.”

“More like we ran into him,” Megan added helpfully.