Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(56)

“?‘Step up to the plate,’?” Pyotr repeated in a musing tone.

“Batter’s plate,” Uncle Barclay advised him. “As in baseball.”

“Ah! Nice. Very useful. I was thinking dinner plate.”

“No, no.”

“Even when Edward was little,” Mrs. Gordon was saying, “Jim and Sonia were so laissez-faire. He was a peculiar child from the outset, but did they notice?”

“It sounds they were phoning it in,” Pyotr told her.

He looked so happy as he said this, so obviously pleased with himself, that Uncle Barclay started laughing. “You really like our American expressions, Pyoder, don’t you,” he said, and Pyotr laughed too and said, “I love them!” His whole face was alight.

“Good man,” Uncle Barclay said affectionately. “Here’s to my man Pyoder!” he announced, holding up his wineglass. “Let’s welcome him into the family.”

There was a general stir around the table, with people chiming in and reaching for their own glasses, but before they could go any further, Bunny’s chair screeched across the parquet and she jumped to her feet. “Well, I don’t welcome him,” she said. “There’s no way on earth I’m going to welcome a guy who assaulted an innocent man.”

Kate said, “Innocent!” and then, in a kind of double-take, “Assaulted?”

“He told me what you did!” Bunny said, turning on Pyotr. “You couldn’t just ask him nicely to give you back your mice; oh, no. You had to go and sock him.”

All the guests were staring at her.

“You socked him?” Kate asked Pyotr.

“He was a small bit reluctant to let me into his house,” Pyotr said.

Bunny said, “You almost broke his jaw! Maybe you did break his jaw. His mother’s thinking now she should take him to the emergency room.”

“Good,” Pyotr said, buttering a slice of bread. “Maybe they wire his mouth shut.”

Bunny asked the others, “Did you hear that?” and Dr. Battista said, “Now, Bun-Buns. Now, dear one. Control yourself, dear.” And at the same time Kate was asking, “What happened? Wait.”

“He practically batters the Mintzes’ door down,” Bunny told her, “yells at Edward right in his face and grabs him by his shirtfront; gives poor Mrs. Mintz a heart attack, just about, and then when Edward tries to block his path as of course he’d try—it’s his private house—Pyoder knocks him flat on his back and goes storming up the stairs barging in and out of the Mintzes’ personal bedrooms till finally he finds Edward’s room and he shouts, ‘Come up here! Come up this instant!’ and he forces Edward to help him carry all the cages down the stairs and out to the Mintzes’ minivan and when Mrs. Mintz says, ‘What is this? Stop this!’ he tells her, ‘Get out of the way!’ in this loud obnoxious voice. When she didn’t know! She thought Edward was just keeping the mice for a friend! And he was keeping them for a friend, this man he’d met on the Internet from an organization in Pennsylvania, who was going to come down next week and take the mice to this no-kill shelter where they could be adopted, he said—”

Dr. Battista groaned, no doubt picturing his precious mice in the hands of a bunch of germ-ridden Pennsylvanians.

“—and then after they drive to the lab, and Edward is very helpful about unloading them from the minivan and putting them back in the mouse room, which is no easy task, believe me, what thanks does he get? Pyoder calls the police. He calls the police on him, after Edward has totally undone the damage. Right this very minute Edward would be rotting in jail, I bet, if Mrs. Mintz hadn’t as it turned out called the police on Pyoder.”

Kate said, “What?”

“I told you it was complicated,” her father said.

The other diners looked spellbound. Even Alice’s baby was staring at Bunny open-mouthed.

“There is poor Edward,” Bunny said, “severely injured; one whole side of his face is swelled up like a pumpkin, so of course his mother called the police. Which means Father here”—and Bunny turned to Dr. Battista; it was the first time in years that Kate had heard her call him “Father”—“Father had to drop the charges, thank heaven, or else the Mintzes said they would press charges on Pyoder. It was a plea bargain.”

Uncle Barclay said, “Well, I don’t think that’s exactly what they call a—”

“That’s why you didn’t press charges?” Kate asked her father.

“It seemed expedient,” he said.

“But Pyotr was provoked!” Kate said. “It wasn’t his fault he had to hit Edward.”

“Is true,” Pyotr said, nodding.

Aunt Thelma said, “In any event—”

“Naturally you would say that,” Bunny told Kate. “Naturally you would think Pyoder can do no wrong. It’s like you’ve turned into some kind of zombie. ‘Yes, Pyoder; no, Pyoder,’ following him around all moony. ‘Whatever you say, Pyoder; I’ll do anything you like, Pyoder; certainly I’ll marry you, Pyoder, even if all you’re after is any old U.S. citizen,’ you tell him. Then you show up super-late for your own wedding reception and the two of you are not even dressed, looking all mussed and rumpled like you’ve spent the afternoon making out. It’s disgusting, is what it is. You’ll never see me backing down like that when I have a husband.”