Food for Thought Read Free

and she kept hinting that she wanted a sleepover, but whenever she got too grabby, he just got her started about the sister who got married and how her other two sisters were planning their weddings and how her two brothers wanted kids and suddenly, she wasn’t interested in sexy times anymore, she was interested in babies , and he figured that they could manage the sexy times when there were babies at the end of it.
    Babies meant family , and yes, Emmett was a fan.
    Flora pursed her mouth. “So she wears cute cartoon character T-shirts. How big are her boobs?”
    Emmett could swear his eyes did the “A yooo ga!” thing, like the cartoon characters on Christine’s shirts. “I don’t know!” he floundered, moving his flour-coated hands a lot. “Standard size, I guess!” He thought about it. “Uhm, smaller than Angela’s.”
    Flora raised her thin, gray eyebrows. “All my daughters are smaller than Angela’s. Are they smaller than Cecily’s?”
    “I don’t know!” Emmett burst out, waving more flour around the Tomiche’s kitchen. “I don’t look at your daughters’ boobs!”
    “A ha !” Flora crowed, like she’d caught Vinnie stealing pies. (Vinnie had stolen a lot of food in Emmett’s name when they’d been kids. Flora had finally gotten wise and started asking Emmett if he’d gotten the pie or the cookies or, in one case, the half of a wedding cake. When Emmett gave her the blank stare before sputtering and trying to cover for Vinnie, Vinnie had gotten into a lot of trouble as well.)
    “Aha what? What’s aha?” Emmett looked around the kitchen wildly, taking in the old yellow wallpaper, the peeling veneer on the pasteboard cabinets, and battered tan tile. A showcase, this place was not, but Emmett felt like he’d been ambushed in his place of safety. “Why would you yell ‘Aha!’ at me? I thought you liked me!”
    Flora’s deep brown eyes—so much like Vinnie’s—were nothing but kind. “I love you, Emmett. That’s why I want you to be happy. Honey, you don’t have to be a chauvinist pig to look at a pretty girl’s boobs. The fact that you were surrounded with pretty girl’s boobs and you didn’t notice a little ? That makes me think that maybe pretty girls aren’t what you’re looking for.”
    Emmett swallowed, touched and, weirdly enough, near tears. But there were a hundred people gathering on Flora’s lawn, and he didn’t feel like talking about Jordyn and Christine and about his next-door neighbor who wasn’t like either of them.
    “I, uh, should wash my hands if I’m going to help Vinnie with the barbecue,” he said, hoping she’d just drop it.
    She sighed and shrugged. “You do that, Emmett, but I’ve got you until tomorrow, and this isn’t over, you hear me?”
    “Gotta go unbury the pig, Flora—catch you later!”
    He ran away then, retreated without shame. He’d been there the night Vinnie’s mom had cornered Vinnie in the living room about marrying Angela because the poor girl couldn’t see that he was an idiot and Flora wanted what was best for her idiot son, even if it was more than he deserved.
    But standing next to Vinnie and downing a beer while Vinnie prodded the ribs and dogs on the barbecue was not the haven Emmett thought it would be.
    “So, Christine,” Vinnie said, gingerly poking a rib and sticking out a full upper lip when it appeared to spring back. Emmett had spent a lot of his adolescence fantasizing about Vinnie’s lips, until he’d snapped out of it and grew up. You didn’t think about another guy’s lips. That was kid’s stuff.
    “What about her?”
    “She as cute as Jordyn?”
    Emmett grimaced. “You know, I was trying to forget that name.”
    “Is she?”
    “Christine?”
    “Yeah.”
    “She’s nice, you’d like her.”
    “Why would I like her?”
    “She likes action adventure movies.”
    “Yeah,” Vinnie said grimly, leaving the poor ribs alone for a minute. “But you like romances.”
    “I like action adventure