Some days, Thomas wondered if the only things he and Savannah shared were the podcast, a last name and the upstairs bathroom.
And Maggie. They had her, too. But she was a whole other bunch of weird.
For starters, their grandmother was always bringing home strays—people she treated like old friends, even though she’d just met them twenty minutes ago. Not that everyone was annoying. How else would Thomas have gotten to eat dinner with the former ambassador to Uganda if his grandmother hadn’t met her shopping for fresh mung bean sprouts at the Vietnamese grocery? The problem was, Maggie thought almost everyone was fascinating, which meant they’d also had to spend an entire dinner listening to her podiatrist talk about foot fungus.
And now, here they were with another strange one, Eugenia Banks.
The four of them sat down at the red table and Thomas gave Maggie the thumbs-up to begin recording.
“Welcome to this week’s McClair Dinner Salon,” she read. Maggie sounded stilted with a script, but Savannah insisted on a written opening every week anyway. “Fix yourself a drink, find a comfortable chair and join us as we dig in to four courses of intellectual delight.
“With us at the table tonight is Ms. Eugenia Banks, who I met recently outside the architecturally renowned Purcell-Cutts house in Minneapolis. We chatted about everything from Eugenia’s interest in Icelandic knitting to our shared fascination with an odd little sleep disorder called idiopathic hypersomnia. Ms. Banks has lived a very full life, my friends. First as a stewardess and now, raising chickens in her backyard and selling the eggs out of her refurbished milk truck. Tonight, I sincerely hope she’ll tell us the story of the time she successfully negotiated with hijackers. Last, but certainly not least, our dinner, as always, has been prepared by our fearless Chef Bart.” She looked at Savannah. “Would you do the honors and introduce our family, love?”
Maggie and Savannah both knew that wasn’t actually a question. Every week, Savannah found a new metaphor to explain their atypical family, and Thomas braced for her newest description.
“Think of our McClair family like a BLT lettuce wrap,” Savannah began. “Thomas and I started out like your typical sandwich, a slice of bread for our two parents. But we never knew our dad, which made us an open-faced sandwich from the very beginning. Then, our mom died, and suddenly, we were like just bacon and tomato with nothing holding us together. So Maggie, the lettuce, wrapped Thomas and me up and she’s the one who holds the family together now. A BLT, but with a lot fewer carbs. And if you hear a dog bark, that’s our poodle, Katherine Mansfield.”
Maggie was visibly trying not to laugh. “Thank you, Savannah. The three of us make a BLT lettuce wrap—I like it. Chef Bart has just served our appetizer course, tofu steak crostini with shiitake mushroom glaze. Please, let’s dig in.”
With that, they were off.
“Ms. Banks, tell us,” Maggie said. “When did you start working for the airlines?”
“In 1969,” she said. “Braniff. The one with the airplanes painted like jelly beans.”
“Oh, 1969,” Maggie said. “That was quite a year, wasn’t it? I don’t think I’ll ever forget. Did you feel it on your flights? The social change? The simmering tensions?”
“Well, they made us stewardesses wear Pucci boots, if that’s what you mean. We looked like go-go dancers. Ridiculous.” Eugenia picked up her tofu steak with her fork and examined it. “Is this supposed to be gray?”
Thomas stifled a laugh. This was definitely one of those dinners. He heard Savannah’s phone buzz against the dining room table, and immediately knew who it was. Savannah and her best friend, Trigg, couldn’t go ten minutes without each other.
Shut it off, he mouthed.
She ignored him and thumbed out a text, laughing silently to herself.
These days, Thomas thought of Trigg as one of those girls you couldn’t escape. She was everywhere, even when she wasn’t. Like now, interrupting the Dinner Salon. Or in school. You might not see Trigg’s head poking above the chaos at passing time, but you couldn’t miss the sound of her.
Eugenia, meanwhile, brought her hand into the air and twisted it. “All this knitting lately has given me an issue with my wrist.”
“What sort of issue?” Maggie asked, and Thomas could tell her voice sounded just a little too excited. He felt a surge of panic and glanced at Maggie, trying to gauge how close she was to heading off on a gross-out tangent. There was nothing his grandmother loved more than a good medical mystery.
Eugenia, turns out, was the one he should have been worried about. “Probably just a Bible bump. Nothing more than fluid collecting at the joint,” she said.
Thomas frowned. This train was coming no matter what he did, and he couldn’t look away.
“I get them when I overdo it. Mostly painless,” she added. “Before modern medicine, people used to make the bump go away by hitting it with the heaviest book available. In most households, that was the Bible.”
Thomas winced. Chef Bart came in from the kitchen carrying the main course, and Savannah, thank god, changed the subject.
“So, fun fact,” she said. “In the original 1954 Godzilla they made the sound of his roar by running a mitt covered in pine tar over a double-stringed bass.”
Thomas glanced around the table to measure the interest in this new topic. If Savannah was successful, the bodily ailments portion of their evening might—hopefully—be over.
“And did you know,” Savannah went on, “that Alfred Hitchcock had his sound man audition different melon varieties for the stabbing sounds in the Psycho shower scene?”
Eugenia swallowed the last of her drink. “I once escorted Hitchcock to his flight.”
“Marvelous!” Maggie clapped her hands. “Tell us all about it.”
“He sat in first class.”
“Then what?”
Eugenia shrugged and helped herself to another chunk of crusty bread and took an enormous bite, saying nothing more.
“That’s not the flight that was hijacked, was it?” Maggie was obviously prompting. She really wanted to hear the hijacking story.
“No,” Eugenia said.
Thomas glanced at his watch. This woman was a lot of work for a dinner guest.
“I’d like to fly first class someday.” Savannah accepted the freshly assembled cheese plate from Chef Bart and took a wedge of whatever he’d marked for her with a toothpick flag. She was lactose intolerant but did all right with hard cheeses. Something about the aging process.
“Don’t bother,” Eugenia said. “An awful lot of money for a whole lot of nothin’.”