Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(31)

“But she is family!” Pyotr said. He pronounced the word as if it were holy; he surrounded it with invisible cushions. “I want to know all of your family—your aunt and her husband and her son and also your uncle the pastor. I anticipate your uncle the pastor! He will try to convert me, maybe?”

“Are you kidding? Uncle Theron couldn’t convert a kitten.”

“Theron,” Pyotr repeated. He made it sound like “Seron.” “You are doing this to torture me?”

“Doing what?”

“So many th names!”

“Oh,” Kate said. “Yes, and my mother’s name was Thea.”

He groaned. “What is the surname of these people?” he asked.

After the briefest pause, she said, “Thwaite.”

“My God!” He clapped a hand to his forehead.

She laughed. “I’m pulling your leg,” she told him. He lowered his hand and looked at her. “I was just kidding,” she clarified. “Really their surname is Dell.”

“Ah,” he said. “You were joking. You made a joke. You were teasing me!” And he started capering around the cart. “Oh, Kate; oh, my comical Kate; oh, Katya mine…”

“Stop it!” she said. People were staring at them. “Quit that and tell me which syrup you want.”

He stopped capering and selected a bottle, seemingly at random, and dropped it into the cart. “That’s kind of small,” she said, peering down at it. “Are you sure it’ll be enough?”

“We do not want an excess of mapleness,” Pyotr said severely. “We want balance. We want subtlety. Oh! If it is very successful, we could serve a maple-syrup dish to your aunt! We could serve chicken on a bed of…some unusual substance, drizzled with maple syrup. Your aunt will say, ‘What a heavenly dish you are giving me!’?”

“That would be a very, very unlikely thing for Aunt Thelma to say,” Kate told him.

“I may call her ‘Aunt Selma’ too?”

“If you mean Aunt Thelma, I suggest you wait until she says you can. Anyhow, I don’t know why you’d want to claim her as your aunt if you didn’t have to.”

“But I have never had an aunt!” Pyotr said. “This will be my very first aunt.”

“Lucky you.”

“I will wait till she gives permission, though, I promise. I will be deeply respectful.”

“Don’t overdo it on my account,” Kate said.

—

Then Pyotr had to go and tell her father that they had had a “lovely time” grocery-shopping. This was later that afternoon, when the two men were cooking dinner in the kitchen. Kate stepped in from the backyard with her bucket of gardening tools, and her father beamed at her as if she’d just won a Nobel Prize. “You had a lovely time at the grocery store!” he said.

“I did?”

“I told you Pyoder was a good fellow! I knew you’d figure it out, eventually! He says you had a lovely, friendly grocery trip together.”

Kate sent Pyotr an evil glare. He was smiling modestly with his eyes lowered as he patted spices all over his fresh ham.

“Maybe after supper you two would like to go to a movie,” her father suggested.

Kate said, “I’m washing my hair after supper.”

“After supper? You’re washing your hair after supper? Why are you doing it then?”

Kate sighed and slung her bucket into the broom closet.

Pyotr said, “We are wondering if you can be explaining to us what braising is.”

“I have no idea what braising is,” Kate said. She went to the sink to wash her hands. There were bloody meat wrappers in the sink and a cabbage core, along with several outer leaves. Since her father was fanatic about the clean-as-you-go principle, she knew all too well whom to blame. “Don’t you dare leave the kitchen like this when you’re finished,” she told Pyotr as she dried her hands.

“I will take care of everything!” Pyotr said. “Eddie is staying to dinner?”

“Who’s Eddie?”

“Your sister’s boyfriend. In the living room.”

“Edward, you mean. No, he’s not. ‘Eddie’! Good grief!”

“Americans love to be called nicknames,” Pyotr said.

“No, they don’t.”

“Yes, they do.”

“No, they don’t.”

“Please!” Kate’s father said. “Enough.” He was stirring a pot on the stove. He looked toward them with a pained expression.

“Plus, he’s not her boyfriend,” Kate told Pyotr.

“Yes, he is.”

“No, he’s not. He’s too old to be her boyfriend. He’s her tutor.”

“Your sister is studying microorganisms?”

“What?”

“Book on her lap is Journal of Microbiological Methods.”

“It is?”

“Is that a fact!” Dr. Battista marveled. “I didn’t even know she was interested!”

“Oh, geez,” Kate muttered. She flung her towel onto the counter and turned to leave the kitchen.

“Is like a proverb I know,” Pyotr was telling her father as she walked out.