Silver Fox (Silver Shifters 2)

“If they’re the little superheroes, I heard someone luring them with hot chocolate.”

“Oh, good, Brad got ‘em.” Nicola slowed to a stop. “They discovered the mud room door. As for the costumes, Purim is new to them. I told them about the costumes, and they thought it was Halloween.”

“The small one is Pink? Or did I mishear?”

“No, it’s Pink. She picked it herself. Peppa Pig was her favorite toy when she was two, and Peppa is pink. So I guess she combined the two in her mind—she wasn’t Peppa or Pig, but Pink.”

“Does she have a name, in case someone refers to her by it?”

“Everybody calls her Pink, but her mom named her Paris.”

“Paris?”

“Yeah, and Lon—the boy, her brother—is London.”

Doris said, “And, if it’s not a bother, do you mind if I ask who they are, exactly?”

“Oh!” Nicola laughed. “I’m sorry. They’re my boyfriend Brad’s kids from his first marriage. The mom bailed right after Pink was born. Nobody’s heard from her since.” She looked angry, but then brightened. “Brad’s inside.”

Nicola leaned in conspiratorially, like a spy in a movie, and hissed, “Everyone’s set against him! For no reason! He’s not unemployed, he’s starting a landscaping business with my best friend Isidor! That’s how we met.”

Doris, hoping to avoid getting trapped in a family feud before she even set foot in the door, said, “I can’t wait to meet him.”

Together they entered the side door. Doris heard the clamor of voices coming from the den. Long practice at judging the tone of a room caused her to gauge what she heard as Faculty vs. Admin—when everyone is being polite, but no one is really comfortable.

She sighed, longing to take her stuff up to her room and disappear until she could scold herself out of her own bad mood. She’d brought three nice long novels, chosen to last for two lazy days without TV. But Nicola had already vanished into the kitchen with her groceries, causing a commotion.

Doris had a second to suck in a breath and assume her parental smile before her mother appeared, arms akimbo in a theatrical pose.

“You’re here at last!” Her mother hugged her tightly. Doris hugged her back, noticing her mother always smelled like flour and herbs, even when she hadn’t been cooking.

“You shouldn’t have brought all this, Doris—we’ve got both fridges and the cooler filled. Where are we going to put it all?”

“Mother,” her sister Sylvia said, exasperated, from right behind her, one arm waving in a huge circle. “It’s twenty-nine degrees outside, with night coming on. Some of it can go out in the mud room, which is just like a fridge. We’ll eat that first.” She flashed her wonderful smile at Doris. “Glad you made it, Doris. I don’t have to ask how the traffic was—"

“Sylvia,” Mom said, hands at her forehead. Definitely there had been flour. Mom left white prints above her eyebrows. “I had all the meals planned—”

Rather than deal with the Clash of the Titans, Doris yelled, “Glad we all made it safely. Smells great in here.” She marched into the den as her mother and Sylvia went on debating where to store the extra groceries.

Doris’s dad sat in the shabby old armchair, a stack of magazines he’d been saving up since New Year’s by his side. He always brought his magazines to the grandpa house so he could catch up on his reading.

“Aunt Doris!”

That genuine delight in the melodic tenor belonged to Isidor, Nicola’s bestie since grade school. Doris’s mother had been campaigning for Isidor and Nicola to make a match ever since Nicola turned sixteen, conveniently ignoring the fact that Isidor was gay.

A thin, shaggy-haired man sat stiffly between Isidor and Nicola. That had to be Nicola’s Brad. He would have reminded Doris of a jug-eared hound in any situation, but especially in comparison with Nicola’s first three husbands, who had all been quite handsome.

“Brad, this is my Aunt Doris,” Nicola said.

Doris’s impression of Brad improved when she saw the straightforward intelligence in his green-brown eyes. “Glad to meet you. I guess you already met my kids?” He indicated Batman and Wonder Woman, who were now playing with Legos by the fireplace.

“I did,” Doris said, and went to kiss her dad on the cheek. He looked up from the newspaper to murmur, “Doris. Glad you made it.”

“Hi, Dad.”

Doris looked around for the other person to complete their family portrait, and aha, there she was, hunched over her cell phone. Teenage Marrit, Nicola’s younger sister, would make the gloomiest cynic in history look like Mr. Rogers. She was a pretty girl, but she’d dyed her hair black, painted her nails black, and wore black clothes and even black lipstick. Most of her blended so well into the black leather couch she sat on that her white-powdered face leaped out like a head-only ghost.

Doris was hit with a vivid image from the dance the night before, how well Joey had dealt with a group of teenage boys about to light up cigarettes outside the fire exit. The boys had been loud and obnoxious in that way that barely hid uncertainty about themselves and the world. She still didn’t quite know how he’d managed it, except he’d gotten them to laugh, and then to talk, and then to go back inside—without the cigarettes . . .