“Well, I’m not. Good grief, I’m glad I stumbled on you. We didn’t know about the bad weather either. But luckily, Lebowitzes don’t believe in stirring an inch without packing for an army, and we’ve got tons of food.” At the hopeful look the twins couldn’t hide, Doris laughed. “And it’s good food, too. My parents will be delighted to rescue stranded campers. They’ll stuff you till your eyes pop.”
Vanessa broke into a grin. “This is so nice of you!”
Vic loped up on her other side. “It’s so weird to find you here!”
“If you like camping by lakes, there aren’t that many around here. So I suppose it isn’t as weird as it seems.” Doris felt absurdly happy, almost giddy. She liked all four of them. And best of all, with her family around, she could enjoy Joey Hu in perfect safety.
“Any chance we can drive the Jeep around to your family’s place?” Joey asked.
“Not unless you have snow chains,” Doris said. He shook his head. “It’ll be safe here. If the weather’s too bad to drive it out, no one can steal it.”
“True,” Joey said, and grinned at her. She found herself helplessly grinning back at him. Life took such strange turns sometimes.
And so, like a mama duck with a very strange string of ducklings behind her, she led them to the grandpa house.
“What a huge place,” Vic exclaimed.
“It’s not exactly a mansion,” Doris said. “More like a couple of small cabins joined together, then renovated, then added onto. You will see signs of different decades once the snow isn’t hiding it.”
“It’s awesome,” Vanessa said.
“It’s got character.” Joey’s voice warmed with admiration.
Doris thought of his charming ranch house, so unlike her box-on-a-lot in Playa del Encanto. She smiled. “Come on in. This is the mud room. You can leave your coats in here.”
Once they’d hung up their coats and brushed the snow out of their hair, Doris opened the door to the hallway. It had the kitchen to one side, and the pantry and laundry room on the other.
She led the way into the kitchen. Her mother and Sylvia stood on either side of the room in identical fighting postures, arms crossed, chins up. But when they saw that Doris was not alone, they dropped their arms and put on their polite faces.
“I’ve come to the rescue,” Doris said, hearing that she sounded a little too fast and airy. “Joey Hu is a professor at the university. This is Xi Yong, an exchange student, and Joey’s nephew and niece, Vic and Vanessa. They came up here to camp by the lake, and were driving around looking for shelter when they got stuck in the snow.”
Doris could see the words acting on her mother: professor—university—rescue. Her polite face broadened into a real smile. “Come in, come in already! What wonderful timing! W
e love rescuing strangers on Purim! I’m Elva Lebowitz, and this is my daughter Sylvia. You seem to know Doris. I hope you brought your appetites.”
“We don’t wish to put you out,” Joey said, the ring of sincerity in his voice. “We have our camp food. We can eat that if you’ve got a corner out of your way. We’re very grateful just to get out of the snow.”
Mom exclaimed in a voice of genuine horror, “Camp food,” throwing up her hands as if it had been scavenged from the bottom of a dumpster. “Not while I live and breathe! Look out that window! I can’t even see the big pine ten feet away!” A dramatic finger whipped toward the window. “Doris found you just in time!”
Doris was astounded to see that the snow had worsened in the time it had taken to take twenty steps—her attention had been entirely on trying not to stare at Joey. The view was obscured by a curtain of snow, beyond which the trees were vague shapes.
Doris didn’t argue, seeing how much enjoyment her mother was getting out of imagining the emergency was still going on. This was far preferable to ganging up on Nicola and Brad.
She led her guests out of the kitchen, saying, “I’ll give you a tour of the house. It can be confusing, as it’s, ah, oddly built.”
“It’s a fine house,” Joey said, admiring the worn banister of the back stair. “Look, you can see all the evidence of the different hands who made it.”
Doris was so used to the house that its component parts had become invisible to her. Until Joey spoke she’d been trying to see it through his eyes, hoping it wasn’t too shabby—unlike his lovely place. But his obvious appreciation and the way he focused on the hand-carved wood made her perspective alter. She imagined her father, her grandfather, all the way back to that distant grandfather, each enjoying the work of building, sanding, and hammering, more often than not inventing it all as they went.
Vanessa caught Doris’s arm and said with a nervous look, “Doris, may I ask why your mother said that thing about loving getting saddled with strangers? Was that sarcasm?”
“No—the opposite!” Doris laughed. “One of the Purim traditions is to give food baskets to friends and to the poor. Our synagogue will offer a big meal to the homeless and the guests will leave with baskets. But it’s just us up here, so we can’t carry on the tradition. But the storm has given us friends to rescue, so my mother is happy.”
“Oh. I’m glad we’re not a hassle,” Vanessa said, and glanced around. “This is a cool house. I like how it’s varnished, not painted that boring white you see everywhere.”
“The original house was a cabin,” Doris explained, eyeing Joey to see if he was bored. “The mud room back there used to be the kitchen—it had an iron stove, which was also the heating for the cabin. The pantry next to it was the main room. There was a loft above it, which is now a bedroom.”
She’d used that loft ever since she was a kid. The equally small room next to it—above the pantry—had once been Sylvia’s, but the Titans had declared that Nicola must sleep there. Meanwhile, Brad was ordered to take the downstairs bedroom at the far end of the added wing, with the kids on a futon.