Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(30)

At the entrance to the store she snagged a cart and started inside, but Pyotr caught up with her to reach for the cart and take over. She was beginning to suspect that he had some kind of he-man complex. “What-ever,” she told him. He merely smiled and cruised along beside her with the empty cart.

For someone who talked so much about vitamins, he was remarkably uninterested in the vegetable section. He languidly tossed in a head of cabbage and then asked, gazing around him, “The cornmeal: where we would find that?”

“You really seem to go for those la-di-da kinds of dishes,” Kate said as she led the way. “Like that thing you ordered in the restaurant, with puréed celeriac.”

“I just echoed final item.”

“Excuse me?”

“The waiter, when he came to our table: he talked so complicated. He said, ‘Like to tell you guys about a few specials this evening…’?” Pyotr had the waiter’s Baltimore accent down pat; it was uncanny. “Then he said things very long and combined; he said the free-range and the stone-ground and the house-cured until I am vertiginous. So I just repeated what came last. ‘The veal cheeks on a bed of puréed celeriac,’ I repeated, because it was still in my ears.”

“Then maybe this evening we could go back to plain old mash,” Kate said.

But Pyotr said, “No, I think not.” And that was the end of that.

The computer-generated grocery list wasn’t much use today. For one thing, they still had a hefty supply of mash left over from last Saturday’s batch, which was why Kate had been hoping that she could serve it tonight. This past week had been so different from their usual week, as far as meals were concerned. Not only had her father arranged for that photo-op restaurant dinner with Pyotr, but then the next night Pyotr had insisted on taking them to a restaurant (all except Bunny, who had said that enough was enough), and on Tuesday, claiming the need to celebrate a brief, freakish spring snowfall, he had shown up unannounced with a tub of KFC chicken.

And this coming week, at some point, Kate would have to think up some kind of dinner for Aunt Thelma. Dr. Battista had been making noises about inviting her in to meet Pyotr, along with her husband and perhaps Uncle Theron too, if it didn’t conflict with his church obligations. They might as well grit their teeth and get it over with, Dr. Battista said. He and Aunt Thelma were not on the best of terms (Aunt Thelma blamed him for her sister’s depression), but “Immigration-wise,” he said, “I feel it would be smart to expose as many relatives as possible to your marriage plans. And since you’re not letting your aunt attend the wedding, this seems a strategic alternative.”

The reason Kate wasn’t letting her aunt attend the wedding was that she knew her too well. It would be just like her to show up with six bridesmaids and a full choir.

What to feed her, though? Certainly not meatless mash, although it would have been a convenient way to get rid of those damn leftovers. Maybe just plain chicken; Kate could manage that much, surely. She picked out a couple of roasters while Pyotr was browsing the pork selections, and then she doubled back to the vegetable department for asparagus and russet potatoes.

As she was returning to the meat department, she caught sight of Pyotr from a distance, deep in conversation with a black man in an apron. Pyotr’s stretched-out gray jersey and his vulnerable-looking bare neck struck her all at once as oddly touching. It wasn’t entirely his fault, she supposed, that he found himself in this peculiar position. And for a moment she tried to imagine how she herself would feel if she were alone in a foreign country, her visa about to expire, no clear notion of where she would go once it did expire or how she would support herself. Plus the language problem! She had been a middling-good language student, once upon a time, but she would have felt desolate if she’d had to actually live in another language. Yet here Pyotr stood, blithely engaged in a discussion of pork cuts and displaying his usual elfin good spirits. She had to smile, a little.

When she arrived next to him, though, he said, “Oh! Is my fiancée. This nice gentleman says maybe not loin but fresh ham,” and right away she felt annoyed again. “Fiancée”: ick. And she had always hated the mealy-mouthed sound of “gentleman.”

“Get what you want,” she told him. “It’s all the same to me.” Then she dumped her groceries into the cart and wandered off again.

Pyotr wasn’t entirely satisfied with the notion of serving Aunt Thelma roast chicken, it turned out. When Kate made the mistake of telling him her menu plan, after he had caught up with her in the syrup-and-molasses aisle, his first question was “The chickens can be cut into pieces?”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“I am thinking you could make fried, like KFC. You know how to make fried chicken?”

“No.”

He waited, looking hopeful.

“But you could learn?” he asked finally.

“I could if I wanted to, I guess.”

“And you would want to, maybe?”

“Well, Pyotr, if you like KFC so much, why don’t I just buy some?” Kate said. She would love to see the expression on Aunt Thelma’s face if she did.

“No, you should be cooking something,” Pyotr said. “Something with much labor. You are trying to make your aunt feel welcome.”

Kate said, “Once you meet Aunt Thelma, you’ll realize that the last thing we want to do is make her feel too welcome.”