Naughty Neighbor - By Janet Evanovich Page 0,40

his outstretched hand was short fingered and meaty. He was a Brannigan through and through.

Louisa’s mother was close behind her husband. “Kathy Brannigan,” she said, extending her hand. Her hair was short and feathered with gray, her face was friendly. She was wearing gray University of Maryland sweats and red high-top basketball shoes. “You’ll have to excuse the way I look,” she said. “I just got back from the library.”

Louisa shook her head. “June Cleaver never dressed like that.”

“Who?”

“June Cleaver. Beaver’s mother.”

Kathy Brannigan gave her daughter a wan smile. “When you were five and Susan Fielding’s mother knitted a ski hat, I took up knitting. When you were seven and Carolyn Chenko’s mother made homemade bread, I gave baking bread a shot. I decorated cakes better than Amy Butcher’s mother, went on more field trips than Jennifer O’Neil’s mother, and baked better chocolate chip cookies than any mother in the history of the world. I draw the line at dressing like June Cleaver.”

“Mom’s gone back to college,” Louisa explained to Pete. “She’s a sophomore.”

“I missed it the first time around,” Kathy said. “I was busy doing the mother thing.”

Pete handed over his jacket and checked the hearth for a sleeping dog. He wasn’t disappointed. The furniture was dark wood and freshly polished. The couch was overstuffed and homey. The house smelled like woodsmoke and apple pie. He wouldn’t have believed any of this if he hadn’t seen it firsthand, he thought.

Louisa’s mother tapped Pete on the arm. “Are you all right? Your eyes look a little glazed.”

“It’s the pie fumes,” he said.

She led him into the living room and seated him in a wingback. “Don’t get too choked up over it. It’s one of those frozen ones that you just put in the oven and bake.”

He didn’t care. A pie was a pie.

Mike brought him a beer and set a basket of chips at his elbow. “I hear you’re one of those Hollywood types.”

“I write screenplays.”

“You know James Garner?”

“Uh, no.”

Louisa caught a glimpse of the dining room table. It was set for five. She looked at her mother and the question silently passed between them.

“Grandma Brannigan,” Louisa’s mother said. “She’s visiting for a few days.”

“Oh boy.”

“I heard that,” Grandma Brannigan called from the kitchen. “You always did have a smart mouth.”

Everyone in the living room exchanged looks of suffering.

“She’s really very sweet,” Louisa’s mother whispered.

“I heard that too,” Grandma Brannigan yelled. “And God’s gonna get you for lying, Katherine.”

She shuffled into the living room. She was a forbidding chunk of a woman with a square Irish face and a square Irish body. She had an apron over her gray wool skirt and white blouse, and she held a wooden spoon in her hand as if it were a weapon. “I’m not sweet at all,” she said to Pete. “Who are you?”

He rose and offered his hand. “Pete Streeter. I’m Louisa’s friend.”

She took his hand and squinted at him. “You look like a womanizer.”

He turned to Louisa. “Help.”

“Are you crazy?” Louisa said. “I can barely hold my own with her. Don’t look for help here.”

“So,” Grandma Brannigan said, “are you sleeping with my granddaughter?”

“Uh, well…”

Everyone sat up a little straighter and leaned forward ever so slightly, waiting for his reply.

He eyeballed the spoon in her hand. “You gonna hit me with that if I say yes?”

“I might hit you with it, anyway, just on general principle.”

“Well hell,” Pete said, “then I might as well deserve it.”

Louisa was on her feet, pulling him into the dining room. “Time to eat.”

Pete smiled lazily. “Thought you weren’t coming to my rescue?”

“You were going to hang me out to dry!”

He smiled and shrugged, and Louisa kicked him hard in the ankle.

He squelched a shriek of pain into a grunt.

“I get my violent nature from Grandma Brannigan,” Louisa said.

“Maybe I’ll take you home to Hellertown for Easter. You’ll fit right in. You can sucker punch my sister-in-law for first dibs on the potato salad.”

“Gee, I’m really looking forward to it.”

Pete slung an arm around her and hugged her to him. “I bet you got smacked a lot with that wooden spoon.”

“Not once. She’s all bristly on the outside and soft as marshmallow on the inside.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say about a person,” her grandmother said. “And it’s a bald-faced lie. I’m hard as nails on the inside. Don’t you believe a word she tells you,” she said to Pete. “It’s from the Krueger side of the family.”

She slid a glance at Louisa’s mother and lowered