Chapter 23

She had known this would happen.

It was inevitable, really.

In fact, it was downright strange that it had taken so long; they had been in this town for two and a half months already.

Of course, she couldn’t ask Mom why it had taken her so long—that would just encourage her. No, best just to accept it and then try to get through it.

Instead of practicing one of her instruments like she usually did, Mom had spent the entire afternoon after coming back from the woods trying to cook. Well, it was more of a joint effort, really. Papá was helping. Between the two of them, they probably made one passable chef. Aleda wandered into the kitchen for a snack.

“So… how is the baking coming?” she inquired.

“I’m making lasagna,” Mom said proudly, a smear of sauce on her cheek.

“Sounds good. What about you, Papá?”

“Your mother has decided that I should make a Caesar salad.”

Aleda leaned over his shoulder to see. “That does look like a salad,” she said.

“Aleda, sweetie, don’t eat anything. Dinner is in an hour.”

“I know. I’ll still be hungry then, I promise,” Aleda said, popping a cookie into her mouth. She walked back into the dining area. “Oh, and Papá?”

“Yes, little angel?”

“…You have lettuce in your hair.”

Mom giggled as Aleda went upstairs. It was amazing they found time to cook between their food fights.

 

 

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Forty minutes later, the doorbell rang. Nate’s parents had brought dessert; Nate himself had brought a pretty little bouquet of flowers for Aleda. She took them, smiling broadly, and put them in a vase in the center of the table.

“Hi! Matt, and Laurel, right? Come on in!” Mom exclaimed in greeting. She accepted the dessert—a plate of brownies—and motioned Nate’s parents into the living room. The three of them sat on the couch to chat while Papá went to work setting out the meal. Aleda and Nate remained in the foyer.

“Thanks for the flowers,” she said again. “They’re really pretty.”

“You’re welcome,” Nate replied. “I just wanted to make sure you knew how much I like you.”

“More than Lizzy?”

Nate frowned and hugged her awkwardly; their parents were, after all, just a few feet away.

“I told you. She was just somebody I dated a little bit over the summer. It was nothing. I swear.”

“She seemed pretty sure of herself to me,” Aleda muttered.

“And you’re going to listen to her instead of me?” he demanded. “I told you. She’s just jealous. She just knows I never liked her half as much as I like you.”

At this, Aleda finally smiled a little bit.

“Besides,” Nate joked. “Now I’m going out with a future hunter like me. Much better prospect, don’t you think?”

Oh yeah, about that…

“I guess so,” she admitted.

She was about to say something else when Papá announced that it was time to eat.

Her parents must have gotten their act together at some point in the past hour, because the lasagna turned out quite well, as did the Caesar salad—although it had, perhaps, a little bit too much dressing.

“So Laurel, what do you do?” Mom asked over the basket of store-bought rolls.

“I’m a waitress at a little diner in Porter,” Mrs. Burns said. She giggled. “They think I’m seventeen.”

“Closer to seventy,” Mr. Burns muttered. She shot him a look and turned back to Mom. “And yourself?”

“I teach lessons at the Wilmington Music School for a few hours every day.”

“She is a magnificent violinist,” Papá added.

“Oh, that sounds lovely!” Mrs. Burns cooed. “You’ll have to play for us some time.”

Mom smiled. “I’d be happy to. What about you, Matt?”

“I manage a small stationary store in Taylortown. Family-owned, of course. It’s not much, but it keeps the bills paid,” Mr. Burns said. “That’s actually why we moved down here when we did—the job was opening up so we came on in. We were due for a transfer anyway.”

“Well that sounds nice!” Mom said. “Especially to be the manager like that. Alejandro works at a family-owned temp agency, but he’s just another employee there.”

Papá frowned at her. “I would hardly say that I am ‘just another employee’, querida.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that,” Mom assured him. “But you don’t like that job any more than I do.”

“It is a good job,” he protested.

“With horrible hours,” she countered. She turned and smiled over-brightly at their guests. “Anyway, that’s what we do. And I’m sure Nate told you that we were in Spain before this…”

On the far end of the table, Aleda stabbed vaguely at her salad with a fork. Across from her, Nate was thoroughly enjoying her Mom’s lasagna. She glanced at their parents and back at Nate. Right now she was just hoping that he wasn’t getting horribly bored. He hadn’t said more than two words since he sat down at the table. At this point, him thinking something was wrong with her parents would be only slightly less horrible than him thinking something was wrong with her. Either way, he would never want to come back here again.

Dinner, meanwhile, continued as dinners normally do, with the usual array of food, drink, and forks getting left in the lasagna pan. This being the first time they’d had dinner with any cousins since moving to Delaware, Aleda’s parents had brought out a bottle of red wine to go with everything, although knowing what she did now about hunters’ alcohol tolerances she wasn’t sure why they bothered. They even gave Aleda and Nate a small glass each with the dinner. That definitely counted as a fancy dinner.

Nate looked up to help himself to more lasagna and she took the opportunity to smile apologetically at him.

“They’ll be at this for ages,” she whispered to him. “She always gets like this with cousins.”

“I know what you mean,” he whispered back. “My mom’s the same way. We’ll be lucky if we can get her to shut up any time today.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. You have no idea how long it’s been since Mom met a new hunter.”

“I can believe it. My parents did the same thing when we first moved down here.”

Aleda cocked her head at him. “There’s other cousins here?”

“Not in Keeney,” Nate said. “Dad met a few through his job from the area, though.”

“Now there’s a question for you,” Aleda mused.

“What’s that?”

“Do we tell my parents about the other hunters, or do we save ourselves from even more of these interminable dinners?”

“I’m not telling. They’ll find out for themselves soon enough, anyway. Besides, at the rate they’re going, they’ll probably end up talking all night, too.”

“You’d better hope not. We only have one spare bedroom, and that’s full of boxes we haven’t unpacked yet.”

“Oh, that’s not a problem,” Nate said with a silly grin. “I’ll just sleep in your room.”

Aleda just raised her eyebrows at him and went back to stabbing at her salad.