I stand up, peering at her over the door. She's looking through cabinets, pushing boxes of dried pasta and lentils around, probably searching for something with the word “instant” stamped on the side.
“Since when are you a vegetarian?”
She shrugs her bony shoulders and keeps opening and closing cabinet doors.
“Oh, off and on… started again last week. I won’t be any trouble, I promise! I’ll just have a salad or whatever. Or some more chips. Chips are good. Where did you put those?”
“Salad, salad…” I mutter, peering into the depths of my refrigerator. “Actually, I think that will work. Here, start chopping these…”
I empty two produce drawers onto the counter including lettuce, peppers, zucchinis, and carrots. Bunny drags the wooden cutting board from its cubby and slides the ten inch knife from the block. She leers evilly.
“Yes, boss!”
This is good. I give her a giant salad bowl and figure we will just make a huge selection of greens, maybe with some walnuts or sunflower seeds or something. I whip up a vinaigrette with some olive oil and dried herbs and leave it on the counter to marinate.
“And steak!” I blurt out.
She stops, her knife paused in the air. “Um… Vegetarian?” she says again.
“Well, I'm not!” I snort. “And neither is my dad. We will have marinated steak salads and you can just have… regular old salad-salad.”
“Yuck, meat,” she mutters, but she continues slicing zucchini into little circles, then dumping them in the bowl. I rinse a can of chickpeas in the sink and then dump them in there for her also, before slicing up the steaks on another cutting board and dropping them into a gallon bag with a half cup of marinade in it.
I’m feeling sort of pumped about how I pulled this all together in less than fifteen minutes. I give myself a little mental high-five and pop open a bottle of Corona from the fridge.
“You want one of these?”
Bunny barely looks up from her chore of scraping ribbons of carrots into the bowl.
“That would be awesome,” she sighs, as though chopping vegetables is some huge exertion.
I hear the front door open again and then voices, looking up with alarm. Two voices? In moments, my dad walks into the kitchen, smiling and automatically pulling a couple slices of zucchini off the cutting board and popping them into his mouth.
“Hey, girls,” he smiles. “This looks fantastic. What's for dinner?”
I start to answer then startle when another figure appears in the doorway. It's August Berner, my dad’s BFF — or whatever the manlier word is for that. His eyes rake me from top to bottom and small smile curls the corner of his full mouth, before he seems to go suddenly ice cold and looks away. He practically pivots in the opposite direction, like somebody just called “about face.” I stand there like a deer in headlights, not sure what to do.
“Oh, I'm sorry,” my dad stammers. “Is it cool if August has dinner with us? I forgot to text you. The playoff game’s tonight, and —”
“— totally fine!” I blurt. “Fifteen minutes, no problem. Totally fine!”
He glances at me, his expression both startled and apologetic at the same time. Bunny casts her weight to one side and looks at everybody else in the room, one at a time like she's figuring something out.
“Really sorry I didn't mention it…” he continues.
Yanking the bag off the counter with the meat and marinade, I give it a hearty shake and smile confidently, a lot more confidently than I feel.
“No worries! Just go do your thing. Bunny and I will get everything on the table in just a few minutes.”
August and my dad exchange looks, squinting uneasily. Then my dad grabs a couple of beers out of the refrigerator before offering me another apologetic grimace and leaving the room. As soon as they're gone, I feel like the air trickles out of me, letting me collapse just a little bit on the inside. Like one of those inflatable figures you see at a used car lot, my whole body just goes slack for a moment or two.
“Oh my God, girl,” Bunny breathes. “You are certifiably insane.”
“I am not,” I insist. “We have got plenty of salad, I'm pretty sure. I think I have another couple of tomatoes or something. Don't worry about it.”
I grab the last two tomatoes from the produce bin and hand them to her, trying to avoid the squint she's giving me.
“You know that's not what I'm talking about,” she continues. Her eyes track me everywhere I'm going, like a searchlight outside of a prison tower.