He laughed and shook his head. “You know my specialty is ordering pizza.”
“Still can’t cook, huh, Mitch?” One of Mitch’s cousins laughed from across the table. I couldn’t remember his name, but he was one of the ones playing touch football in the backyard.
“Nope,” Mitch said cheerfully, his attention still on his plate. “But I still do okay.” He draped an arm around my shoulders. “You should try April’s shepherd’s pie sometime. It’s amazing.” His hand on my shoulder felt a little heavy, and his grip was tighter than it needed to be. I looked up at him, and when he met my eyes, his smile was tight before he let go. I didn’t like that.
“I have to say, April, I’m glad to see you here.” His cousin kept talking. “We were starting to worry that Mitch might not meet anyone worthwhile. It’s not like he’s that much of a catch, you know?”
“Bryce, stop.” The woman next to him—Cousin Douchebag’s wife maybe?—batted him on the arm, but her giggle was insipid, belying any kind of rebuke she was making.
I blinked. “What do you mean?”
Cousin Douche looked abashed for a moment. “Oh, I’m not belittling your taste or anything. But you know . . .” He shrugged. “It’s not like he’s applied himself, ever. I told him he should go for an advanced degree, but . . .”
“But I didn’t want to,” Mitch said. He didn’t sound angry. His voice was almost aggressively cheerful. This was an old argument, and he didn’t want to be having it again, so he was going to grin his way out of it.
“So what do you do?” I put down my fork and leaned forward, elaborately interested in what Bryce was about to say. I wouldn’t normally be so bold in front of people I’d just met, but that sense of belonging had fooled me. That, and I was pretty pissed off.
“Oh, I’m a hedge fund manager. I got my MBA from Cornell, and I’ve spent the past ten years building a massive portfolio of clients.” He pointed with his fork down the table. “Craig is a child psychologist, and Lulu is about to make partner at her law firm.”
“Oh.” I looked down the length of the table. Craig had been one of the quarterbacks in the touch football game, and despite the rules Mitch had tackled him to the ground more than once. And if Lulu was working to make partner then her “who has time” comment about relationships suddenly made more sense. “Good for them.”
Mitch snorted. “Yeah, good for them. I still say I came out ahead. Do they get to play dodgeball at work? I don’t think so.” He took a swig of beer and set the bottle down a little too hard on the table. “I win.”
“I’m just saying, you could have gone into sports medicine, like we talked about. You—”
“Like you talked about,” Mitch interrupted firmly. “You talked about it, I told you it’s not my thing. I’m good.”
“Good,” Bryce repeated. “Come on, dude, you’re a gym teacher.” Those last two words came out with a derision that made me clench my teeth.
“Now, wait a second.” I threw down my napkin. “What’s wrong with being a gym teacher?” Oh, no. What the hell was I doing? This wasn’t like me at all. But my blood had hit the boiling point, and it was either launch myself across the table at the guy or talk back. Talking back seemed like the lesser of two confrontations.
Mitch covered my hand—and half of my wrist—with his. “April, it’s okay.”
If he’d sounded convincing, I would have backed off. I really would have. But he didn’t. He sounded defeated. Mitch Malone, the most confident person I’d ever met, a guy who’d happily spend an evening failing to pick up a woman at Jackson’s, shrugging good-naturedly without a wound to his ego, was now reduced to someone with resignation in his eyes. Brought low by his own family.
Nope. Not on my watch. “Do you know what being a gym teacher involves? Do you have any clue what your cousin does all day?” My hand shook under Mitch’s, and my voice shook even more, but I didn’t back down. “You think all he does is run around in shorts and a whistle, playing dodgeball with a bunch of kids?” It was a good visual, but I didn’t let myself focus on that right now.
“Pretty much.” But Cousin Douche’s chuckle was thin; he obviously wasn’t used to being challenged. He looked around the table for backup, but none was coming. A few family members, Mitch’s mom included, had their attention trained on me, their expressions blank, almost stunned. Lulu met my eyes, but then turned her attention to her plate. Was I the first person to ever stick up for Mitch? What the hell?
“Then you don’t know him at all,” I said. “He coaches football in the fall and baseball in the spring. Do you know how much organization that takes?” Personally, I had no idea, but it seemed like a lot of work. And Mitch never complained about it. “He took the baseball team to State last year, you know, and—”
“This year too,” Mitch said in a low murmur beside me.
“—this year too,” I said without missing a beat.
“Yeah, but our football team sucks.” Mitch shrugged when I turned incredulous eyes on him. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have a single kid who can throw. It’s hopeless.”
“Not the point,” I said. We were getting off topic. “And I haven’t even brought up all the stuff he does with the Renaissance Faire.”
“The what?” Grandma said from the other end of the table, a puzzled expression on her face.
“The Renaissance Faire,” I repeated, a little louder and clearer, but a beat later I realized she hadn’t had any trouble hearing me. She just didn’t know what I was talking about. I turned back to Mitch. “They don’t know about the Ren Faire?”
“Well, Mom and Dad do.” He gestured toward them, and they nodded.
“Of course we do,” Mrs. Malone snapped. “I volunteered with them for two summers myself.”
“You did?” I tried to imagine her in medieval garb and failed miserably.
“Mom sold tickets,” Mitch supplied.
“Ah.” So she wore the red volunteer T-shirt, not a tavern wench outfit. That made a lot more sense. “Well, do they know what all you do for it?”
“Probably,” he said, while his mother answered over him.
“We know he’s still involved with it, dressing up and all that, is that what you’re getting at?” She pursed her lips into a frown. “We live in Willow Creek too, of course we know what our son is up to.”
“Dressing up . . . You don’t . . .” I turned in my chair to Mitch. “They don’t know . . .” His eyes were wide as he met mine, and he shrugged. If he’d told me to hush at any moment I probably would have, but otherwise I was too far into my rant now.
I turned back to his family, ready to deliver a TED talk on Mitch’s kilted assets. “Y’all don’t know what he does. Okay. He’s been involved in the school’s major annual fundraiser every year since it started.”
“Second year,” he corrected in a mutter beside me, but was I listening? I was not.