"Don't hand it in. I'll handle it," said Jack abruptly, shocking the children at the table, but none more so than Tristan. While Tristan looked displeased, Tommy, Shane and Blake applauded.
"Yeah, Uncle J! You tell him!" blurted out Shane, while Tommy and Blake cheered along.
Jack laughed at his excitable nephew and delivered a swift undesired response, “I am not getting you off the hook, kid. Sorry. Or you, or you,” Jack said, as he pointed at Blake and Tommy. Seeing that Tristan still appeared to be upset he asked, “Why did he assign you your mother when he knows that she is not around?” Tristan braced herself to speak, her chest searing with pain.
"I asked him that and he said that is where my inner investigator would need to come into play. I confronted him after class to ask why I couldn’t select someone else, and he told me to ask my father. Dad… What is he talking about?”
The surprise was apparent on Jack’s face, and under his breath he began muttering profanities.
“That son of a bitch…” Jack whispered, just loud enough for Adam and Liam to hear.
“Our mother left when I was born, and I am supposed to write about a person whom I don’t know? You do realize that he is setting me up for failure, right?”
"Don't speak poorly about your mother in front of me. I know he's an intolerable, insufferable pain, but please have respect."
Looking defeated, Tristan crossed her arms over her chest as she stared at her father, feeling massively misunderstood.
"You three,” continued Jack as he pointed at his nephew and two youngest sons, "Will do the assignment. I will talk to that teacher of yours, and see if maybe Tristan can write her essay on a different family member.”
The trio stared at their father with a look of sheer confusion. Jack then put his most dashing smile and said, "Like me... I'm handsome, rugged, and loveable."
All the members of the table showed their disagreement in some form, between groans and eye rolling, to a boisterous declaration of, "You wish!" "Someone is already doing their report on you, so it would have to be someone else," explained Tristan. “I wouldn’t mind interviewing Gus,” Tristan said, referring to her cranky but lovable grandfather.
“Oh, please let it be someone other than Tommy... I cannot handle another year of interviews.”
Tommy smirked, “You better get ready, I have lots of questions lined up, and since I must hand it in, I'll be sure that it will be extra special.”
Jack began to roll his eyes as a loud crash came from the kitchen followed by an outburst of swears.
A woman cried out, “God damn it! I hate this oven it burns everything!”
Jack whispered to the teenagers that surrounded the table with a sarcastic voice, “It’s not the oven’s fault that she can’t cook…”
“I heard that!” Bridgette yelled out of the kitchen without opening the door.
In an attempt to diffuse the negative energy and confusion in the room, Jack blurted out with a smile, “Aunt Bridgette is cooking so naturally, we’re having pizza again.”
Shane blurted out to his buddy Cole, “Yeah, my mom can’t cook.”
Cole laughed and agreed with the consensus of the crowd, “Pizza sounds great.”
The kitchen door swung open and a pretty red-haired woman with long, frizzy curls and a perturbed look appeared. Abruptly, she yelled out, “Pizza’s on its way! Uncle Frank offered to bring it home.”
As quickly as she appeared, she disappeared, as she began to clean up the destroyed pot roast that lay charred in the oven. As the rest of his siblings celebrated over the news of pizza, Adam stared into his father’s green eyes and didn’t mince his words.
"You tell them the truth or I will. You know what he is trying to do and I don’t like it one bit. It’s about damn time they know what happened to our mother."
Jack swallowed nervously as he broke eye contact with his eldest son. Swiftly, Adam rose from his chair, grabbing his leather jacket off the back of Shane’s chair and hastily departed the dining room, leaving his father looking nervous and dumbfounded. The smell of pepperoni filled the foyer, as Frank Kilpatrick strolled into the house with five large pizza boxes from Monte’s restaurant. A faint Scottish brogue boomed from his lungs.
“Oy! Who wants pizza?!”