“Italian food,” Molly said decisively. “Except there’s always that mob carryover. Like saying you’re eating rigatoni would sound funny, unless your stupid brother has just made you watch a Martin Scorsese marathon, and suddenly you think of eating rigatoni while someone’s carrying out a hit in front of you, and it’s all bad.”
“Next time, you pick the shotgun,” Stirling said mildly, and then, with a moment of thought, added, “And why aren’t potato chips funny? The ones in the can? You’d think that would be a funny food, but nobody ever uses it as a funny food.”
“It can’t be funny if you physically need them after a bad breakup,” Tabby said, and Molly, who was sitting across the table from her, offered her fist up for some validation. Tabby didn’t leave her hanging.
“Sauerkraut!” Danny said suddenly, and at any other table, Hunter would have thought that was an odd thing to say, but the rest of the table started to nod.
“Yeah,” Josh said. “Definitely. Sauerkraut is up there.”
“It doesn’t taste as good as a sandwich,” Grace mused.
“Why do they have to be mutually exclusive?” Josh demanded. “A pastrami Reuben is the perfect sandwich.”
“Bull,” Chuck cut in. “Pastrami extra pickles on sourdough.”
“Heathen!” Lucius protested. “That sandwich demands rye!” and the banter zoomed on.
Hunter followed it, amused. He’d had brothers, but while his parents had been kind, their dinner table discussion had often been prosaic—if there’d been much at all. The verbal free-for-all at the Salinger table was something special, but he wasn’t going to risk stopping the momentum to contribute.
And then Grace—who was sitting right next to him—leaned over and said, “You don’t think food is funny?”
“I think sushi is hilarious,” Hunter corrected under the cover of all that chatter. “Raw fish and rice, and it tastes delicious, but seriously, who thought that would be a good idea?”
Grace’s mouth opened, like he was trying to formulate an answer. It was Josh who said, “The Japanese, Grace. The Japanese thought sushi was a good idea.”
“I knew that,” Grace said quickly. “I just… I mean, he’s right. Who slices open a tuna and goes, ‘You know, if we chilled this a little and added this green shit that’s hotter than balls, that wouldn’t be a bad thing’?”
“Yeah, but that goes for any spice that’s hotter than balls,” Molly said from across the table. “I mean, hot sauce is in joules of heat. Who tasted a ghost pepper, burst into tears, threw up, and said, ‘Hey, add some vinegar and some tomatoes and we might have something here’!”
“Technically,” Stirling said, “pretty much all spice evolved from the need to keep meat from spoiling, or to mask the taste of it when it did spoil. So if someone’s got half a cow that’s not going to get eaten in the next week, the reasoning would go, ‘But if we hang it over a fire and put something hotter than balls on that, it might not turn green.’”
And at that point, Julia looked beseechingly at Felix and said, “Darling, if you have the dynamite to derail this juggernaut, I would love to be able to eat the food on my plate without thinking of spoiled beef, ghost peppers, or the word ‘balls.’”
Felix gave Danny a look that seemed to imply he was responsible for the complete chaos and tried to impose order. “So now that we know why wasabi was invented, what do we know about Vancouver?”
There was a reason Felix was considered one of the best network CEOs in the business.
The table talk turned to the shopping—which Molly and Julia mostly participated in—and then moved on to Grouse Mountain and Capilano Park, although they had to take a sharp detour when Grace tried to bring up vulture vomit.
“You guys are no fun,” Grace muttered, and Hunter cleared his throat and fixed Grace with a stern look.
Grace did a slow blink, and something seemed to shift in his head. He cast a look toward the head of the table, where Felix, Julia, and Danny seemed to be chewing over some of the details that revolved around the actual job.
“I’m stupid,” he said, looking embarrassed.
“Your mind goes places,” Hunter corrected. “But sometimes we like it when you stay here with us.”
Grace brightened. “I can live with that,” he declared, and Hunter felt like they’d made an important inroad.
Phyllis—the housekeeper who ate with them when she felt like it—came in from the kitchen with a couple of college students she’d hired as helpers, and they did the clearing up. And that was their cue to move downstairs, to a dessert spread of cookies, fruit, and cheese laid out on the coffee table and the big screen television already booted up and attached to Danny’s laptop.
“Are we good here, my darlings?” Danny asked pleasantly. “Have we gotten the weird food thing out of our system? Can we concentrate? Because class is about to start, and your Uncle Danny would like very much to know he has everybody’s attention.”
Hunter assumed his usual position, arms folded, leaning against the far corner of the room so he could take in the entrance from upstairs and make sure everybody in his venue was safe and accounted for. He missed sitting on the couch with everyone else—he really missed dessert—but he couldn’t resist the urge to watch over his people. He wasn’t being paid, although the Salingers had given him room and board and let him know that anything he needed was at his command, but that wasn’t it. He wasn’t even officially anybody’s bodyguard, either.
It was just with this group of people—even with Chuck, who was standing, arms crossed, leaning against the far wall with the same view for the same reasons—he felt protective. If a sudden horde of bad guys swept through the upscale Chicago suburbs and down the staircase, bent on mayhem, Hunter and Chuck would take as many of them out as they could, doing their damnedest to protect his family.
But dessert, though…. Phyllis had been baking while they were gone. There were pecan tarts and shortbread and snickerdoodles and oatmeal raisin. Yeah, some people preferred chocolate chip, but Hunter loved that chewy sweet oatmeal raisin action. Only he didn’t want to—
Grace brought him a napkin full of cookies. Full of cookies. Three of them were oatmeal raisin, and Grace snagged one of those and a snickerdoodle for himself and then collapsed bonelessly at Hunter’s feet, nibbling experimentally.
“These brown things are not chocolate,” he accused.
Hunter took a full bite and chewed blissfully, eyes half-closed. “You have to chew it all together,” he said, trying to keep his eyes from rolling back in his head. “People try to eat the raisins by themselves, and they’re super disappointed.”
Grace glared at him suspiciously while Danny finished setting up his presentation, and then bit boldly.
Hunter counted in his head. One, two, three—
“Oh my God.” Grace’s voice had that guttural sound of complete fulfillment, and that sound kept rumbling as he chewed and then took another bite.
“Good, right?”
Grace nodded and continued to sing to his food as Danny asked for the lights to dim.