All those grandchildren she was about to meet, Sean thought, resisting the urge to beat his head against the steering wheel. He wasn’t too worried about Steph, Joey and Danny, but Brian and Bobby were loose cannons. To say nothing of Aunt Mary.
The introductions didn’t go too badly. His uncle’s gruff humor put Cat at ease and his aunt was warm and welcoming, even though Sean knew she had serious reservations about the whole thing.
“I’m Bobby,” a young voice piped up and it seemed like everybody but Cat sucked in a breath at the same time. “Guess what?”
“What?” Cat said, seemingly oblivious to the frantic hand gestures being waved in Bobby’s direction.
“Sean’s my cousin. He got out of the army a long time ago and he lives with Emma and he’s going to marry her.”
Joey, Mike’s oldest boy, laughed and put his arm around his little brother to not-so-subtly start dragging him away. “They have telephones in Florida, dummy. Mrs. Shaw already knows that.”
Lisa stepped forward before Bobby could argue. “Now that you kids have all said hello to Mrs. Shaw, you can go to the basement and play your game.”
Bobby jumped up and down. “Sean bought us Rock Band for the Wii and all the instruments, so we’re going to have a Rock Band Tournament of Doom.”
Sean hadn’t known he bought the kids a bunch of video game crap, but he couldn’t very well argue the point. No doubt Mike and the rest would just put it on his tab.
Luckily, Cat and Aunt Mary seemed to hit it off pretty easily and—since Cat didn’t seem in imminent danger of asking Mary outright if his and Emma’s engagement was real—Sean started to relax.
They all went out to the backyard, where the women took over the chairs on the deck and the men gathered around the grill. It wasn’t time to start cooking yet, but gathering around the cold grill was better than sitting with the women.
“Mary’s been a wreck about this for days,” Leo said, for once managing to lower his voice so the whole neighborhood wouldn’t hear him.
“I know she didn’t want to do this.” Sean watched the women laugh at something Cat said. Or, more specifically, he watched Emma laugh. “I’ll make it up to her somehow.”
They talked about the usual stuff. The Red Sox. How deep into summer vacation they’d get before Lisa’s grip on her sanity started slipping. Evan’s new truck, which he’d bought in white because Terry said not to buy a white one because they were impossible to keep clean. How Evan and Terry’s marriage counseling was going.
Joe nudged Sean’s arm. “I swear, I could tell time by how often Emma looks at you just by counting off the seconds.”
Sean resisted the urge to turn and look. “She’s nervous, that’s all.”
“That’s not nerves.”
“I think I know her better than you do.”
Joe laughed. “You’ve known her a week.”
“Ten days.”
“Hate to burst your bubble, but I’ve known her longer than ten days. Not well, but I’ve run into her at Mike and Lisa’s. Not that it matters. That look on a woman’s face is pretty universal.”
“There’s no look.”
“Oh, there’s a look,” Kevin said.
“There might be a look,” Leo added.
“Mike and I can’t see,” Evan added. “We’re facing the wrong way. We could turn around, but she might wonder why we’re all staring at her.”
Even though he figured his cousins were pulling his leg, Sean angled his body a little so he could see her in his peripheral vision.
Okay, so she was looking at him. A lot. But Joe and Kevin were still full of crap because there was no look. The glances were too quick to read anything into, never mind the kind of message they were implying she was sending.
He watched her watching him for a while, and then Aunt Mary told them to get the meat ready so they could fire the grill. Since his cousins made for more than enough chefs stirring the soup and he needed a break from the visual game of tag he and Emma were playing, he grabbed a beer and made his way to the big tool shed. It was the unofficial Kowalski man cave, where females feared to tread. Even Aunt Mary would just stand outside and bellow rather than cross the threshold.
It smelled of the old motor oil dripped onto and soaked into the wooden floor and the stack of wood next to the old woodstove meant to ensure that, even in the cold months, there was a place a man could go for a few minutes of peace and quiet. The walls were lined with shelves of old mason jars containing nuts and bolts and screws and washers and all the other debris a good tool shed collected over time.
Sean cracked open his beer, flipped on the ancient radio and perched on one of the bar stools somebody had probably lifted from Jasper’s. He was too wound up to sit still, though, so he set down his beer and got up to investigate the current project, which appeared to be rebuilding the snowblower’s engine.