he said offering his hand.
She was taken aback by his manners but shook his hand in return. "I'm good thank you." She gave me a big smile and raised her eyebrows at me like I had a winner here. "It's so nice my children making dinner for me for once. Let me just get out of the way then..." she trailed off and headed back through the house.
"Lucy, do you think you can make the icing and frost the cake? I'm kind of out of time here."
"No problem."
She handed me the recipe and Jon helped me to measure everything and get it mixed up. Soon we had ourselves a mighty fine looking cake and Stazi was just about finished.
"Can someone slice the bread?" she asked as she was taking the pasta out of the boiling water. Malcolm grabbed the wrong kind of knife and proceeded to butcher her nice bread. She cringed at him but stifled herself from saying anything. We proceeded to bring everything out to the table and she cried out at the top of her lungs "DINNER!"
I found matches and lit the candles and pointed Jon to sit in a chair next to me. Mom and dad showed up from wherever they were in the house. Ryan also came down and sat in the empty chair reserved for Natalie and looked straight at Jon. I held my breath in anticipation of some kind of reaction from Jon but he didn't seem to notice. I gave a miniscule shrug at Ryan so no one else would notice.
"Why don't we say grace?" my mom said.
"Oh Christ," Ryan said.
"Come lord Jesus, be our guest..." my mom began. Everyone else except Ryan joined in with the prayer and soon we were digging in.
"Man, I love spaghetti," Ryan said depressed, looking over the table.
"Stazi, this is the best fettuccine Alfredo I've ever had," Jon said after finishing a mouthful.
"Alfredo, excuse me. Kiss up," Ryan sulked.
Jon looked down concentrating on his plate, until my dad interrupted him.
"So Jon, did you just graduate too?"
"Yes sir, I went to Northeast."
"Oh do you know Lucy's friends Alex and Ling?"
"Yes, I actually work with Alex."
"Nice, a working man. I like that. Where are you going to college?"
Uh-oh.
"I'm not going."
"Oh no you didn't!" Ryan looked absolutely delighted about this.
"You're not?" This was a sore subject in my house with both parents as teachers. I thought for all of 5 minutes I might not go to college and they were having none of that.
"No sir," he stammered. "I thought I needed to take a year off and figure out what I want to do with my life."
"And what do you want to do?"
"I don't know, that's why I'm not going just yet."
My dad looked at him like he was speaking Greek. Jon looked like he wanted to crawl under the table but I was wondering if it was more from my dad or Ryan laughing at him.
Thankfully, Stazi diverted attention by babbling about the drama club and the plays they were going to perform this year. Malcolm was also in the drama club, they had their first kiss on stage, which I thought would have been extremely awkward with all the other drama dorks watching during rehearsal, but they managed to hit it off.
I nudged Jon's foot under the table and whispered, "Sorry about that."
He looked over at me and gave me a look that cried, "Help!" but I just shrugged back at him. We were disrupted when mom noticed there was a guitar case on the stairs.
"Oh, that's mine," Jon said meekly. "Lucy seemed to take an interest so I thought I'd lend her my acoustic."
"You play?" she asked.
"Yeah, I have a few friends that I play with."
"They're actually very good, I went to watch them rehearse the other day."
"Really?" My mom seemed impressed. "Can you play something for us?"
Jon looked terrified as he asked, "Now?"
"Sure why not. You're done eating right?"
"Yeah. Okay." He stood up to get it and unzipped the case. He took out the guitar and slipped it over his head and started tuning it. He turned back to us and came back to sit in his chair. "Um, so this is just something I've been fooling around with lately." He wiggled his fingers nervously before he started playing an amazing finger picked Spanish guitar song. It was very fast paced with a lot of fingering and he played effortlessly. I was just so very impressed with him right then. I could tell the rest