and the Celtic boundary sacrifice, or at least not theories that they liked enough to share, so everyone was putting a lot of energy into pretending the whole thing had never happened. To make sure there was never a second of tricky silence, my dad and all the uncles were laboriously dredging up childhood-escapade memories, and everyone else was laughing too hard. Leon sounded like something out of a monkey house; the reason I was doing cleanup was because I couldn’t stand being in the room with him any longer. “I thought you told Leon not to do drugs for a while,” I said, when another frenetic whoop filtered through from the living room.
“He’s not.” Susanna was covering leftovers, with one eye on Zach and Sallie, who were happily digging a trench in the battlefield out back.
“Then what’s his excuse?” I was rearranging the fridge, trying to make room. There were a lot of leftovers. No one except Oliver had eaten much.
“He’s just tense. And you’re not helping. Quit picking on him.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Come on. Rolling your eyes every time he opens his mouth—”
I shoved out-of-date cheddar to the back of a shelf. “He sounds like fucking Whatshername out of Friends. He’s giving me a headache.”
“Listen,” Susanna said, scooping potatoes into a smaller bowl. “You want to be careful with Leon. He’s scared enough of the cops already. You making snide comments about ‘I hope you keep it together better than this around Rafferty’ isn’t helping.”
I hadn’t thought anyone had overheard that. “I was joking, for God’s sake.”
“I’m not sure he’s really in a funny-ha-ha mood.”
“Well, that’s his problem.”
That got a flick of her eyebrow, but she said easily enough, “Sure. But when Leon gets too stressed . . . Remember that time, we were like nine, and he broke that weird old barometer thing my dad had on his desk? And you kept poking at him, Oh my God, you’re in so much trouble, Uncle Phil loves that thing, he’s gonna be sooo mad— Remember that?”
I wasn’t sure. “You make me sound like a total little shit. I wasn’t that bad.”
“Nah, not a little shit. You were only messing; you never worried about getting in trouble—you always talked your way out of it anyway—so I don’t think you got that Leon worried about it a lot. By the time my dad got home Leon was in a total panic, and he took one look at my dad and yelled, ‘Toby ate the mints out of your desk drawer!’ Do you seriously not remember?”
I thought I did, sort of, maybe. Leon’s open mouth and his hands uselessly scrabbling to piece broken edges together, Susanna picking fragments of glass out of the rug, me breathing clouds of extra-strong mint as I watched—except surely I had gone to find glue, I had tried to help, hadn’t I? “Sort of,” I said. “What happened in the end?”
“You talked your way out of that one, too.” Wry glance over her shoulder. “Of course. The adorable sheepish grin and ‘Oh, I was pretending I was you, Uncle Phil, I was going to sit at your desk and write a brief saying it was against the law for my teacher to give homework, but I know you always need to eat lots of mints when you write briefs . . .’ And Dad laughed, and then of course he couldn’t give out. I have to say, though, you put him in a good enough mood that he didn’t actually get too pissed off about the barometer. So it all worked out in the end.”
“So what’s your point?” Another screech from the living room, Jesus— “You think if Leon, if I wind him up, he’s going to, what? Sic the cops on me?”
Susanna shrugged, deftly ripping clingfilm. “Well, not on purpose. But he’s not thinking straight. If you get him scared and pissed off enough, who knows what he might come out with. So you probably want to bear that in mind, and lay off him. Because you might not be able to talk your way out of that one.”
“Oh come on.” I laughed; she didn’t react. “He wouldn’t. This isn’t kids with mints; this is real shit. Leon knows that.”
Susanna turned, a bowl in each hand, and gave me a straight look on her way to the fridge. She said, “You know, Leon doesn’t always like you that much.”
What? “Well,” I said, after a moment. “That’s not my problem, either.”