“Would you please answer the door, Thomas?” Maggie said.
Thomas did as he was asked.
Two
Thomas
Thomas opened the door to find a brick of a woman in a brightly hand-knit tam and matching knee socks on the front stoop. She was wearing massive clogs, practically the size of shipping crates.
“I’m Eugenia Banks,” she said. “Maggie McClair invited me for dinner.”
“Right, of course—Maggie is my grandmother. I’m Thomas.” As he held the door and ushered her inside, Thomas extended his hand, but the woman didn’t shake it. Instead, Eugenia stepped through and passed him her shoulder bag, also hand-knit. Two wooden needles poked out the top.
“So, it’s you and your twin who do the podcast, then?”
“My sister Savannah and I, yes.” Thomas hated when people substituted the generic twin for their names. “Are you familiar with podcasts?”
Eugenia grunted. “Does it matter?”
And that’s when Thomas knew. This was going to be one of those dinners.
It had been Savannah’s idea to start the McClair Dinner Salon podcast in the first place. It was last year when they were in tenth grade and she needed a project for her Modern Broadcasting class.
“Maggie’s always bringing interesting strangers home for dinner—what if we record the conversations and edit them down into a podcast?”
“What do you mean, ‘we’?” Thomas hadn’t looked up from his textbook. He was trying to finish his homework for World History, and he’d read the same boring paragraph about Hessian soldiers three times. If he looked busy, maybe she’d leave him alone.
Savannah kept up her pleading, anyway.
“I only need one episode, two at the very most. And you’re great at audio stuff. Every class presentation you do has some multimedia component.”
Thomas put his pencil down on the text to mark his place and turned. “But I don’t know anything about podcasting.”
“Neither do I.”
Typical Savannah. “So you want to fail your project, is that what you’re saying?”
“No, silly—”
Thomas braced for the coming charm offensive. His sister only ever called him by one of two nicknames—“dummy” when she was mad, and “silly” when she wanted something.
“I want to do something incredible, something no one else in the class can do. Think about the people Maggie brings over for dinner—remember the guy who invented Count Chocula cereal? She met him at the vet’s office.”
Thomas smirked. “True, but that’s also where she met the lady who talked about her cat who loved to eat lipstick, tube and all.”
Savannah flashed him her most inviting smile. Thomas was close to being convinced, and she knew it. “Don’t forget the woman who worked at the Sound 80 studio back in the seventies. Remember her? She told us all those stories about meeting Prince.”
That lady had been especially cool, regaling them with stories of meeting other celebrities like Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens. And that was enough to get Thomas to agree to help.
They still had to convince Maggie, though. “Why on earth would we do that?” she’d asked.
“Because,” Savannah said, “I need a final project. Plus, you’re always telling us to do something worthwhile. A podcast is the perfect match of our skills. Thomas can handle the audio and all the technical stuff, and I can do the writing and producing.”
“It’s pretty much just a few microphones and an audio file uplink,” he said.
Maggie stopped them. “I don’t even know what a podcast is, let alone a file updo—whatever you said.”
“Think of your favorite NPR program,” said Thomas. “Now imagine getting to listen to it on your iPod whenever you want.”
“Like a DVR for my ears?”
“Um—sort of.”
Maggie liked that idea, and she agreed to allow it in her home.
That was twenty-four episodes ago. Now the McClair Dinner Salon had three hundred-some loyal fans, and tonight’s dinner with Eugenia Banks was set to become episode twenty-five.
Once Eugenia was inside and her knitting bag was tucked away in the front hall closet, Thomas directed her on the proper placement of her clip-on microphone.
“After a few minutes, you won’t even remember it’s there.” He handed her the battery pack.
Eugenia examined the small black box. “I heard they wrap these in condoms before taping them to an actor’s skin,” she said. “I don’t want mine in a condom.”
Thomas did his best not to grimace. “Just...your pocket. That’ll be fine.”
Savannah joined them.
“Hi, I’m Maggie’s granddaughter, Savannah.” She extended a hand, but Eugenia recoiled like it was crawling with maggots.
“I don’t shake hands. Germs. It’s a perfectly logical concern, but pull out a bottle of Purell after meeting someone and they act as if you’ve slapped them across the face.”
Savannah smiled politely and dropped her arm. “Uh, sure. Anyway, I thought I’d give you the rundown for tonight. After everyone is seated, Maggie will open the show. I wrote her a script for that, but you don’t have to think about anything—just enjoy yourself and your dinner.”
Thomas gave his sister a look that said, Beware. We’ve got a strange one tonight. She shrugged, clearly eager to get the podcast recording started.
Savannah’s passions—writing, movies, podcasts, television—weren’t uncommon. It’s just that she was so weird about them. Obsessed, more like. While Thomas spent his free time with friends, she spent her weekends mostly alone, bingeing Netflix and writing down the names of every woman listed in the production credits. Then she’d hole up in her room clacking out letters to them on the ancient typewriter she insisted on using because it gave her correspondence a “brand.” If he complained about the noise, she’d reply, “Unlike you, Thomas, us regular people have to work to stand out. I wasn’t born with good-looking, white boy privilege.”
Thomas and his sister were opposites in almost every way. She was short—five foot even to his six foot one. But unlike him, she looked like she belonged in their family. Savannah and Maggie were so much alike with their dark hair and eyes, their mom used to call them “the Hershey’s Kisses twins.”
And who did Thomas look like? Who’d he get his strawberry-blond hair from or the gap in his front teeth that the orthodontist was charging Maggie a few thousand bucks to fix? How come he could look down on his entire family by the time he was in sixth grade? Their mother had never told them anything about their father, and now that it was too late to ask her, Thomas felt the question of his father’s identity burn brighter with each passing day. He had mentioned it casually in passing to Savannah the other day, like a test balloon to see how she’d respond. Which, of course, she hadn’t. She’d ignored him, like always.