ALL THOSE YEARS IN THE SHADOWS...

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Is this woman for real, with her tour guide persona? This place looks more like Downton Abbey than like somewhere real people live. 

This is bizarre. Would everyone hate me if I took an Uber to the train station?

T.M. was apparently getting shown to her room first because she was the “girl”... Sienna actually said that out loud and with a straight face. Swatch caught her eye and gave her a look that was just short of an eye-roll… it was good that someone else thought there was something off with Spamton’s sister.

So much for women’s lib… 

Once she was alone, T.M. unslung the garment bag from her shoulder, making sure the pocket with her hat was on the outside and not getting crushed.  Her suitcase had been placed on a wooden rack that looked like it actually belonged on ANTIQUES ROADSHOW. The rest of the furniture seemed to be a little more modern, but it was made of more solid-looking wood than she had ever seen in her life.  “IKEA this ain’t,” she muttered to herself as she laid the garment bag on the bed and unzipped it.

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I’ll see if I can find the kitchen, Swatch thought to themself. That seems like a logical place for people to hang out.

I’ll see if I can find the kitchen, T.M. thought to herself. That seems like a good place to dig up some dirt.

Let me see if anyone’s in the kitchen, Spamton thought to himself. That makes sense that they’d both head there.

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Blinding white light reflected off surfaces of marble and chrome.  Two people were there, neither of whom were T.M., Spamton, or any of the Addison siblings. And they didn’t look like Addison relatives… neither of them had the long pointy Addison nose.

The two women both wore white chef uniforms. One was unpacking containers of meat and vegetables and pasta from a trolley onto counters, while the other was unzipping a suitcase that held cooking utensils that were obviously from one very expensive manufacturer.

Swatch tried to back out so they would not be in the way, but the taller woman with the dark braids noticed them and said with a smile, “Come on in, we don’t bite. Not hard, anyway.” 

“As long as I won’t be in the way,” Swatch replied, and sat in the chair that she pointed to, part of the set for the table in the corner. “My cousins are going into the hospitality industry when they graduate, so I’m always interested in watching professionals work.”

“Well, it’s more than our jobs are worth to tell houseguests where they can and can’t go,” said the other woman, a thin freckled redhead who had just finished offloading the last insulated food box. “You ARE one of the houseguests, right? One of Stanton’s friends?”

“Yes, that’s me. I’m Swatch Paletta.” They weren’t sure whether to identify themself as Spamton’s partner; there already seemed to be a layer of reserve by being identified as a “houseguest”. The use of the name “Stanton” also hadn’t escaped their notice.

The redhead nodded and commented, “Please don’t be insulted if we don’t shake hands. Again, more than our jobs are worth, damaging the tools of our trade, so to speak, and you look like you’ve got a powerful handshake.”

That was a subtle way to bring up Swatch’s size, they surmised. “I take your point,” they replied. “And the appetite to go with it. That all looks like some wonderful possibilities for meals.”

“Oh, you flatterer,” the dark-haired woman chuckled. “Anyway, I’m Bonita and that’s Jen. Of Bonita and Jen’s Household Meals. You can make yourself useful by telling us some of your preferences, as well as what the other guests like to eat.  Usually we deliver premade meals for the two guys here, but this weekend we’re cooking fresh for a house party, and that changes everything up.”

“Other guests?”

“Well, yeah. The sister and her wife, and the other one of Stanton’s friends.”

“Oh!”  For some odd reason Swatch had made the assumption that Sienna and Saffron lived here too. The house was certainly large enough.  Spamton had mentioned that there were ten bedrooms and seven bathrooms.

They collected themself, realizing Bonita was waiting for an answer.

“Well, T.M. - that’s my and Spam- I mean, Stanton’s friend - she’s pretty much a fan of anything except shrimp. I don’t know much about the other two other than they’re both vegetarians.”

“Yeah, we did get that memo,” interjected Jen. “What about you, big guy?”

“Me? Well, I guess if I’m getting asked, something I can’t cook myself? At home, I tend to do Italian or stir-fry, so I don't know… maybe fish?”

Swatch was delighted to actually be asked for their preferences.  They wondered whether Spamton still got the same thrill at the possibility of choice, or whether he took it for granted.

And if the thought of Spamton summoned him from the ether, their partner’s voice could be heard from the door that led to the outside. “D-Did someone say fish?  That sounds d-d-delicious!”

T.M. stood in the doorway on the opposite side of the room, her expression carefully blank.

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Spamton wasn’t sure why, once he’d made up his mind to head to the kitchen, he ended up detouring to the greenhouse instead. It wasn’t that there was NO greenery in Mrs. Anselmo’s backyard; she had rambling wild roses, a butterfly bush, and a dogwood tree.  But something in him was calling for the pots of violets, primroses, begonias, and kalanchoe that Kip the gardener set up every year and brought out to the stone-flagged patio each summer.

He’d hoped for a few minutes of solitude before he had to be sociable. But there were already people there, by the sound of raised voices.

He took his hand off the glass door and turned away, not wanting to interrupt.  

Back to the kitchen it would be, then.

As he crossed the lawn to get to the rear of the house, Spamton noticed that the van for Bonita and Jen's Household Meals was parked there. He wasn’t surprised, when he walked through the French doors, to see Swatch sitting and comfortably chatting with the two chefs. He caught the tail end of what Swatch was saying and added, “D-Did someone say fish?  That sounds d-d-d-delicious!”

Across the room, he could see T.M. standing in the main doorway, a peculiar expression on her face, as though she’d stopped herself from saying something she’d regret.

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T.M. looked back up at the curving gallery from where she stood in the foyer, trying to count the number of closed doors. She took a rough stab at guessing this place must have a dozen bedrooms and probably just as many bathrooms. Her room, and presumably Swatch’s, were in what Sienna had called the east wing, whereas the family’s rooms were at the other end. T.M. assumed that meant she’d get sunlight in the morning.  That would have been her preference anyway. If only the house itself had not been creeping her out so much.

Oh well.  Best not to linger here as if she were casing the joint.  Logically in a place like this the kitchens were probably tucked away out of sight. “Further on and further in,” she muttered to herself as she picked a likely direction.

At least the doors down here were open and she could see inside. A room with a fireplace, big overstuffed leather chairs, and walls full of books looked friendly. A big open space with a grand piano and an entertainment center with very expensive-looking stereo equipment also seemed promising, and not as intimidating as the VERY formal dining room. That room had built-in hutches with a terrifying amount of china, plus a sideboard with enormous platters stacked on it.

Again T.M. was struck by the excess of it all. How had Spamton grown up in this house and come out even vaguely well-adjusted?

She heard voices in the next room down from the dining room, including the blessed familiarity of her bestie. They were talking about food with two people she couldn’t yet see, but could hear, and were being asked about… her?

“Well, T.M. - that’s my and Spam- I mean, Stanton’s friend - she’s pretty much a fan of anything except shrimp. I don’t know much about the other two other than they’re both vegetarians.”

“Yeah, we did get that memo,” said a sharp female voice, continuing after a miniscule pause, “What about you, big guy?”

“Me? Well, I guess if I’m getting asked, something I can’t cook myself? At home, I tend to do Italian or stir-fry, so I don't know… maybe fish?”

T.M. inched into the doorway, ready to jump to Swatch’s defense, but stopped herself when she saw the smile on the speaker’s face, The thin redhead apparently just had one of those dry voices.

She saw Spamton step into the room from a glass door that led onto a patio and caught his eye, trying to look normal.

She came all the way into the kitchen then, and blurted out, “Shit, this place is HUGE, Short Stuff!”

Great. 

She wanted to die of embarrassment.

But it seemed to be the perfect icebreaker, and T.M. found herself sitting down with Swatch, Spamton, and the other two, who introduced themselves as Jen and Bonita, sampling a dish of what the chefs called Brown Butter Almond Salmon.

She didn’t want to get too used to this… she still thought it was ridiculous to have catered meals rather than takeout.

But damn, this tasted awfully good.  

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The rest of the night turned out to be much less formal and more fun than T.M. expected. 

Although there was one bit of unexplained tension.

After the chefs had chased the three of them out of the kitchen once they’d finished their “tasting”, Spamton had unerringly led T.M. and Swatch to where the rest of the family were… a living room that T.M. had missed.  The couches had plastic slipcovers and the coffee table had a wooden bowl in the middle, filled with bead-encrusted velvet fruit. Carved wooden cherubs flanked several mirrors on the walls, catching the light from the Tiffany lamps on the various end tables.

The enormous flatscreen TV made quite a contrast with the rest of the kitschy decor, and reminded T.M. that yes, the Addison family was made of money.

Spamton had introduced Saffron, his sister-in-law, a toned, tanned, and athletic-looking blonde, and re-introduced Eos, who had a sweet and welcoming smile for them all.

Once he heard where they’d been, Ballew made a snarky comment about children spoiling their dinners, to which Spamton snarked back about Ballew and Eos keeping Bonita and Jen’s cooking all to themselves for long enough.

Almost apologetically, Eos seemed to feel the need to explain that, due to the hours he and Ballew pulled at work, it was just easier to have prepped meals during the week. “But it’s all healthy stuff!”

Sienna patted him on the arm. “Hey, I checked in on them earlier, and their vegetarian stuff looks divine. Thank you for thinking of us.”

She seemed a lot more relaxed than she had earlier. Until her wife spoke up, at any rate.

“Anyway,” Ballew said, and all heads turned to him. “This weekend we’ll all be eating together. Do we want to have a quick hand of cards, and then a movie after dinner?”

“That sounds great!” Swatch started to reply, whereas, almost at the same time Saffron said, "My God, not Nutdealer again. Can't we do something else?"

"But we always—" Sienna interjected before she got cut off by Saffron saying, "Sweetheart, if I hear one more 'but we always', I'll scream. Just like I did in the greenhouse."

"And we can't have that now, can we?" Sienna's mouth was smiling, but her eyes were not.

“Let’s not bicker in front of the company,” Eos said mildly.

“Awwww, you’re no fun anymore,” Spamton interjected in a silly, Monty Python-esque voice.  

T.M. couldn’t help but giggle. Swatch smiled, and that gave her the courage to break the ice with her suggestion. “Maybe rummy? We don’t have to worry about how many people we’ve got, and it’s less bloodthirsty, from what I hear about you all.”

“Now that I can get behind,” Saffron replied with a grateful look. “Although I don’t know about the ‘less bloodthirsty’ bit. These guys are sharks.”

“So am I,” T.M. grinned back.

Ballew got up and pulled a card table and folding chairs out of a rack that leaned against a wall. There were multiple sealed decks of cards that he fetched from a built-in drawer in the table. “Glad to have that settled,” he commented drily. “C’mon, gather ‘round, cats and kittens. The birthday boy gets to be the dealer for the first hand.”

“You don’t trust me?” Sienna asked, good humor apparently having been restored.  

“Not as far as I can throw you.”

The game went smoothly through three hands of cards before dinner was announced by Bonita.  Dinner, as T.M. had expected, was served in the formal dining room, but it was set up in a buffet style on the sideboard, which relieved some of the stuffiness. In addition to the salmon dish she’d gotten to nibble on earlier, there was a beef dish in a creamy pasta, an absolutely kicking chicken curry, something that looked like a shepherd’s pie made with just cheddar and mushroom, and a coleslaw dish made with avocado, mango and coconut. There were side dishes of plain rice and noodles, as well as chopped butternut squash and steamed green beans, with separate serving utensils for everything to avoid cross-contamination between vegetarian and not-vegetarian dishes.

Spamton’s style of eating seemed to be accounted for here… everyone had divided dishes rather than flat plates, and no one raised an eyebrow when he took little portions of everything, rather loading his plate with one of the meal choices.  T.M. privately thought that was rather sweet, and wondered whether the family had started to do that after his homeless stretch, or whether he’d adapted later in life to something that had always been there. 

She wasn’t sure what to expect for choices for the after-dinner movie, but when RISE OF THE GUARDIANS was suggested, she gladly put in a “yes” vote.  It was by the same director as Swatch’s and her beloved SPIDER-VERSE movie, done more than a half-decade earlier, and the sheer love for beautiful detail shone through.  T.M. 's favorite character was Sandy, not just for his silent sass and subtle badassery, but because every bit of animation of his dream-sand was a work of art. She’d found out from a Google research rabbit hole that the movie company had actually commissioned NASA to get some of the textures right.  

Eos and Ballew disappeared into the kitchen and came back juggling several massive bowls of popcorn. T.M. happily plopped herself on the living room floor, leaning against Swatch’s legs as Swatch sat cuddled up with Spamton on a loveseat, same way she would have done back at the Tibbetts Avenue townhouse.  

She did notice that the two married folks weren’t sitting together, but she put it out of her head and lost herself in the movie.

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When it came time for the party to break up and the various family members headed to bed for the night, Spamton led the way to his own bedroom [after making sure that he knew where the rooms for the other room were]. “I m-may not have had the chance to - to play the p-piano for you tonight, b-but I’m not going to miss out on our b-b-bedtime reading.”

“Damn straight,” Trez said. Swatch stuck their tongue out at her.

Spamton’s childhood bed was a full-sized one, nowhere near as big nor as long as the king the three of them had gotten used to at Mrs. Anselmo’s. He felt the need to apologize for it, but Swatch waved it off. “This is fine, my dear, at least for tonight’s reading. I am going to commandeer the backrest, though.” And they suited action to words, crawling onto the bed and propping themselves up. Trez positioned herself between Swatch’s legs and laid her head on their chest, while Spamton slotted himself on Swatch’s other side.

The old-fashioned language of L.M. Boston’s GREEN KNOWE book flowed off Swatch’s lips like raindrops, and Spamton let the words he could quote from memory relax his body and mind.

“I'm glad this house is stone,’ said Tolly. "It smells of stone. When you come back to any house that you know, it has such a special smell. Do you think when they built this they put in some magic somewhere to make it last? Because it has lasted so much longer than houses do."

"I am sure they did—or something magic. It was a custom going right back to the first house ever made. Generally it was something under the threshold, or on the roof, or perhaps under the hearth—the three most important places."

"Have you looked?" Tolly was patting and stroking the walls as if they were alive.

"No," the old lady said. "I haven't disturbed anything. Whatever is there is working very well." 

The entrance hall was delightfully enclosing and reassuring, full as always of flowers and birds' nests, the lights relayed from mirror to mirror all down its length, and all the scatter of happy living—secateurs, baskets, books, letters, and anything-to-hand lying on the tables. The coloured stairs led up invitingly, but to get to the attic you had to pass through the Knights' Hall, which, if it had been alone for some hours, had a habit of slipping back to its own century. However much you loved it, Tolly thought, it always needed a little resolution to break away into its privacy at night. 

Just as Swatch was going to end the chapter, there was a knock at the door.  Spamton raised his head and looked at the other two for confirmation before calling out, “It’s open!”

Saffron was the last person he expected to see poking a head around his bedroom door. But there she was.

“Hi, I know it’s getting late, but I’m glad I can catch all three of you at once,” she said, hovering on the threshold. “Can we talk?”

“Sure, c-come on in,” Spamton replied. He sat up and waved his hand towards the wing chair off to the side of his desk.  The other two rearranged themselves so that they were sitting up, as well.  

His sister’s wife came in and sat down, crossing her legs and clasping her arms around her knees. “Well,” she started, “I was going to ask if any of you wanted to come on a run with me tomorrow morning.”

That, too, was unexpected. Spamton couldn’t remember ever being invited anywhere by Saffron, let alone on what was usually sacrosanct time between her and Sienna.

Blessedly, Swatch stepped in. “I most certainly would be interested. A three-mile circuit?”

“Yeah, how’d you guess? Down that ridiculous driveway and around what passes for a block in these fancypants parts. And I’m happy to do a shorter distance or a jog if that will tempt you other folks.”

Spamton’s curiosity was even more piqued. “Why d-do I get the f-feeling you’re angling for something, Saffron? Are you - and Sienna g-going to g-gang up on us? I’m n-not the athlete in - in the house.”

Now Saffron looked awkward. “Hardly ganging up, Stanton. In fact, Sienna probably won’t even be there.  I don’t know if you noticed at dinner, but things are a bit, shall we say, uncomfortable with us right now.”

Trez had been watching the exchange in silence, but spoke up. “It’s not like I have a yardstick, but yeah, I was picking up some hinky vibes. Is it because of us?”

“Not directly. But maybe, kinda. I don’t think so?” Saffron ran her hands through her short hair in frustration. “I don’t know. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea—”

“Hey,” Spamton interrupted. “I c-can only sp-speak for myself, but that f-fact that you’re t-t-talking to me at all is a big fat m-m-m-m-miracle.  I’m actually kinda - kinda honored, for a change.  Sure, we’ll all g-go for a walk tomorrow morning… and have a t-t-talk too.”

That seemed to ease Saffron’s mind. “Good. I’ll look for you all around back at seven o’clock then, before breakfast?”

Trez groaned. “I’ll be there, early but not bright.”

“Oh, it’ll be good for you, Moggy,” Swatch soothed.

“Says you, Birdman.”

Saffron got up, looking as though she wanted to say more, but then just left the room, closing the door behind her.

All three of them looked at each other with varying shades of alarm, not knowing what they'd let themselves in for.  Finally Swatch said what all of them were thinking. “What was that about?  She didn’t call you ‘Gainsboro’, she was practically friendly…”

Spamton chewed that over before answering, “I’m n-not sure. B-But it won’t surprise me if Sienna tries to g-get us alone for a t-talk, too, some t-time this weekend.  I d-d-don't turn 25 every day.”

Trez stretched and swung her legs off the bed. “Well, I’m going to head to my guest quarters before anyone starts doing bed checks. I assume that’s a thing here.”  Her tone was light, but it sounded like she meant it.  She leaned over and gave Spamton a goodnight kiss.

Swatch got up as well. “I’ll walk you there, Moggy. At least my room has a queen-size bed. I love you, Spamton, but if I slept here I’d be a pretzel by daylight.”  They kissed Spamton as well before heading out with T.M.