High C

9. Bread and Butter

Natasha popped the trunk filled with a dozen giant gift bags and waited for Bob to help her with them.

"It'd be funnier if I made you carry them."

"Funnier?"

"You know. Worse."

"I guess," Natasha grumbled. Bob at least offered to close the trunk, loudly, in case anyone could hear. He let her struggle to raise her weighted arm high enough to reach the door handle before he offered to do that too.

In they went.

"Hey guys! We made it!" Natasha shouted and then laughed to see everyone was already near the doorway waiting. She let the bags fall to the floor clumsily and then latched onto Bob's arm. "And by we, I mean... this is Bob."

Bob gave a confident smile, briefly sizing up his audience of three before introductions. Alvin Loy, about five-foot-eight, silver haired with the jowls and bit of extra middle weight of a man in his late seventies stood poker-faced save for a slip of a smirk, both intimidating and understandable.

"This is Daddy," Natasha said.

"A real pleasure! Shall I call you Daddy?"

"Not if you – "

"Too informal for me anyhow," Bob chided. "How about I just call you Mr. Loy?"

Before Alvin could respond, Bob grabbed his hand, tipped it over sideways and shook it in an awkward tug-of-war motion like two men at a saw on either side of a redwood.

"That's some handshake you got there," Alvin said archly.

"That's how we do it at the Lodge," Bob chuckled without elaborating. "But don't worry, my hands are insured."

"That's right, you're a doctor," Alexis said, as if she only sort of remembered it and hadn't been trying to search the internet for weeks for both 'Bob' and 'doctor' with neither a last name or a specific field of medicine. Bob dropped Alvin's hand so that Natasha could introduce her mother properly.

They looked little alike, Bob thought. Perhaps more similar in the cheekbones than what he'd briefly noted of her sister. Alexis was fair while her daughters had dark eyes and hair. She was also quite petite, but through the excited smile she had for the moment, Bob could see her upper canine teeth were quite pronounced. A lesson to anyone thinking her a harmless little thing.

"Are you a surgeon?" Alexis asked.

"A podiatrist, and I pretty much stopped at my DPM. I sit in on the odd shaving of a bunion but I never could stomach joint chiselling." He demonstrated the action to Alexis' forced, faint laugh. Bob laughed too and gripped both of Alexis' arms to shake her in lieu of a hug. "Aww, was that too much? Nobody ever likes to hear me talk about work, but I'm sure if you got an ingrown toenail, I'd never hear the end of it."

"I can imagine," Alexis said nervously.

"You might say they're my bread and butter, along with warts and corns," he said, staring a moment too long down at Alexis' feet.

Natasha's eyes met DeeDee's, brows wiggling as if to say, 'Did I do good or what?'

Now Bob moved to stand in front of DeeDee. He looked down at her feet too.

"I can't believe why I'm saying it," she said, "but my eyes are up here."

"So they are," Bob said, and so they were, like a pair of shiny headlights above a beaming smile that could cut through fog. Maybe not brain fog. He forgot his next line,

DeeDee let him off the hook. "Welcome to the family, Bob," she said, leaning in for a hug. It was too late to give her the shakey-arms routine too, so he figured he might as well hug her a little too long to be comfortable.