The Third Sister

14

The Third Sister

    Pete came into the kitchen grinning. “Hey, guess what! I found— Thought you were down the Rimu Tr— Shit!” he gasped as the plumpish, dark-haired figure at the kitchen table turned its head and it wasn’t Libby after all.

    Patty swallowed hard and stumbled to her feet. “Hi,” she said miserably. “I—I guess you’re Mr McLeod? I’m Patty. I’m real sorry to give you such a shock.”

    “Uh—yeah,” said Pete dazedly. “Ya came, eh? Boy, you’re like Libby.”

    “Yes,” said Patty uncertainly, trying to smile. “Juh-Jan said to just stay here, she—uh, well, I didn’t understand, but I think she meant she’s in the garden, Muh-Mr McLeod.”

    Pete groped for a chair and sat down. “Think ya better call me Dad and get it over with, lovey, you’re as like Libby as two peas in a pod—and a dead ringer for me sister Jean at your age, too!”

    “I guess,” said Patty uncertainly, subsiding onto her chair again. “Jan couldn’t find your family album but she said that, too.”

    “Uh—no. Space is at a bit of premium round here,” he said dazedly. “Shoved it in the attic above our rooms, I think. Haven’t looked at it for years… Ya don’t look American, neither.”

    Patty Eisenblatt-MacDermott swallowed again. “I—uh—I guess we don’t all look like something off of the TV.”

    “No. ‘Off of’—Namrita used to say that,” Pete recalled dazedly. “Um, ya mum. She was into the Flower Power stuff. Never even let on what her real name was until she hadda put it on the marriage certificate. Um, if ya worried about being legitimate, ya gotta be, the divorce didn’t come through for ages after she went off with that Le—uh, went off to Wellington.”

    “No, I—I hadn’t really thought about that. I just—I just wanted to find you,” said Patty in a tiny voice, her full lower lip quivering.

    Pete got up and patted her shoulder. “’Course ya did, lovey! Shit, I’d of found you if the bitch had let on about y— Now, don’t bawl, for God’s sake!”

    “No,” said Patty, sniffing valiantly and groping for a handkerchief. She blew her nose hard. “I guess the divorce was real acrimonious, huh?”

    “Uh—well, actually I was pretty glad to get shut of her by then,” admitted Pete on a feeble note, trying to remember if he’d ever heard a living human being say “acrimonious” before. He inspected the innards of the jug, refilled it, and plugged it in. “She never did a hand’s turn round the house and expected to be waited on hand and foot. Not to say shouting about, um, bourgeois values, would it ’a’ been? Think so. At the same time wanting to know where the dishwasher and the clothes drier were, if ya get me drift.”

    “Uh—yeah, that does sound like Mom,” said Patty dazedly, staring at what must be a large dishwashing machine right there, set into the bank of kitchen cupboards, though the brand wasn’t familiar.

    “No-one in New Zealand had ’em, back then. Not everyone has ’em these days, either, by any means: we only got one because of the ecolodge guests,” he explained. “The bathroom was all wrong, too. Not poncy enough.”

    “I’m sorry?” she replied doubtfully.

    “Not fancy enough,” he explained. “Looked just like a bathroom, to me. I did say if she wanted them crocheted toilet-roll holders and matching towel sets what Alison, me ex, used to favour, go right ahead, but that was wrong, too.”

    “I guess it woulda been, yes,” said Patty dazedly. “That doesn’t sound like Mom’s taste.”

    “Nope, wasn’t. Wanted this old-fashioned washstand arrangement with a fancy new plastic handbasin set in, all plumbed in, if ya get me drift,” he said reminiscently, leaning a hand on the bench.

    “Gee, that’s real Seventies,” said Patty in awe.

    “Too right. Made me rip the bathroom window out and put in this bloody stained-glass thing, too: musta come out of an old bungalow, sorta thing people used to have in their front halls. It wasn’t exactly a selling point when I hadda get rid of the joint. Taupo wasn’t into the Flower Power bit, by and large.”

    Patty bit her lip. “I guess not, no. The small towns in America wouldn’t have been, either. I, uh, I guess I hadn’t thought about it from your point of view, before…”

    Pete looked at her tolerantly. “No, well, woulda had ya mum’s version, eh?”

    “Yeah. She— I guess only the two people involved can really know,” she said weakly.

    “Uh-huh.” He made them each a mug of instant coffee. “Take sugar?”

    “Yes, please. Cream and sug— I’m sorry, I mean white with one sugar.”

    “That’s okay, love, we’re used to Yanks round here. Jan tell ya to say that, did she?”

    “Yes. And Jayne said that if I said cream and sugar in the cafés here, people would tell me there wasn’t any cream.”

    “That’d be about right,” said Pete thoughtfully, sitting down with his mug. “We get American tourists every year and of course they’d hear it on the TV shows, too, but the cloth-eared locals won’t of wised up to that one!” He watched as she sipped her coffee. “Maybe ya better tell me just what ya mum did say, so’s we can get it straight, eh? If she claimed I belted her, it’s a lie. Not that I didn’t wanna belt the cow, by the end,” he admitted calmly.

    “Yes,” said Patty faintly. “I guess you were just incompatible. Uh, well, for years she didn’t let on who you were. Well, she didn’t say all that much. It was mainly psychological incompatibility,” she admitted unhappily. “One time she said the life you expected her to lead cramped her soul. That was a day that her and Poppa Josh had had a big row, mind.”

    “Yeah, uh, who?” said Pete feebly.

    “Sorry: Poppa Josh is what I call my stepfather, Josh MacDermott. His daughter-in-law, Suzy, called him that and I was already ten when Mom married him so they said I better copy her.”

    “His daughter-in-law? So how old was ’e?”

    “Uh—I dunno! Um, well, he’s sixty-nine now. Jack and Suzy were both twenty-two when they married, I do know that. I guess, uh, late forties?”

    Shit, the bloke was almost his age: he’d been imagining something miles younger, God knew why. “So when did ya mum marry him, Patty?” he said limply.

    “1985,” replied Patty promptly. “Like I say, I was ten.”

    “Right. So what the Hell did she get up to in the interval? Uh, sorry, lovey: after she dumped the girlfriend in Wellington—uh, shit, she did tell you about that, did she?”

    “Sure: Aunty Ella. She was real bitter when Mom decided she’d made a mistake about her sexual preferences,”—Pete winced but nodded—“but the year I turned sixteen Mom wrote her and sent her some photos and now they’re on real good terms. I dunno why sixteen, exactly—well, Gramma Lou, she was Poppa Josh’s Mom, she was real sweet to me, she insisted on giving me a traditional sweet sixteen party, that coulda had something to do with it!” she ended with a little laugh.

    Pete was very glad to hear this little laugh. For some time, there, he’d been wondering frantically where the Hell bloody Jan was and why she wasn’t coming to his rescue. Now he felt much better and said: “Sweet sixteen, eh? Don’t think we got them. So what was it like?”

    “Dreadful! Just imagine frills on everything, little hearts stuck on everything, pink balloons covering the ceiling, pink heart-shaped cookies, and all the girls from my class that I most loathed invited and outdoing one another in the sweet sixteen sickening pink gift stakes!”

    “Jesus. That sounds dreadful, all right, lovey! And Namrita let her?”

    “Oh, sure, she was glad to have the responsibility taken off of her hands. But I was telling you about what she did before she met Poppa Josh. She went back to school—um, college, Dad,” said Patty, going very pink and smiling shyly at him. “She majored in sociology, you see, and that was how she met Poppa Josh. Not that she took up with him back then, he was a professor and still married.”—That wouldn’t have stopped the Namrita he’d known, but Pete just nodded.—“She was in Sacramento for a while doing social work but then she decided to go back to college and get her Ph.D., and that was when her and Poppa Josh got together.”

    “Right. Who the Hell paid for it all, Patty?” asked Pete dazedly. “Thought American degrees cost megabucks?”

    “Sure, and people start college funds for their kids when they’re born—or even before they’re born, in some cases. No, well, by that time my Grandfather Eisenblatt had died and she’d come into her share of his estate, you see.”

    “Uh-huh. This’d be the dad that gave her that lovely gold wristwatch she never wore because it was square, huh?”

    “I guess,” said Patty, biting her lip. “And her pearls.”

    She’d never had any of those when she was out here, to Pete’s knowledge, but maybe she’d left them back in America along with all the other junk she used to moan about. “I geddit. So you and her weren’t on yer uppers when you were a kiddie, then, love?”

    “Um… I’m sorry, I don’t quite get that,” she said, going very red.

    “On yer uppers. Don’t ya say that in America? Well, skint, lovey. Broke. Short of a few bucks.”

    “Oh! Why, no, there was Mom’s trust fund, of course,” she said numbly, staring at him.

    Pete took a deep breath. “Just tell me one thing, Patty, and then we’ll drop the subject forever. How long has your mother had this trust fund?”

    “Well, uh, all her life, I guess. The terms let her draw the income once she was legally of age. Didn’t she tell you about it?” she gulped.

    Pete shrugged. “Nope.”

    “Pete,” said Jan’s voice warningly from the doorway, “recriminations won’t butter no parsnips.”

    “No, it’s all right, love, just told Patty that we’re gonna drop the subject forever. She got here, see?” he said proudly.

    “So she did!” agreed Jan, smiling at her. “Talking of parsnips, Bob’s just dug up those monsters of yours, so—”

    “I was leaving them!” he cried.

    “Precisely. So we’re gonna spend most of the afternoon blanching and freezing them, unless you can think of a lunch dish incorporating huge parsnips.”

    “They’re nice with a roast dinner,” he produced feebly.

    “Precisely.”

    “Well, uh—well, what about that Jane lady?” he groped. “Has she got a recipe?”

    Jan eyed him drily. “Several, but it’s glaringly evident even she’s struggling. Slathered in cream and cheese, mostly.”

    Pete blenched. “Ugh! Cheese with parsnips?”

    “Yeah. There’s one unspeakable one with sausages as well, which we won’t go into this close to lunchtime, ta.”

    “Well, um, that soup ya done for Jake that time, that was okay,” he offered feebly.

    “Yes, but it had a veal stock in it. And cream. Neither of which are on tap.”

    “Aw. Um, didn’tcha do a nice soup with bacon, love?”

    “That’s more of a winter dish, given that it’s in winter that sensible people’s parsnips have matured. I could do it, but it’s a bit heavy, Pete.”

    “Yeah. Tell ya what, let’s have a nice big roast later in the week, since Patty’s here, and do some of them with that!”

    “Okay, and some of the kumaras as well, I suppose. If you do eat meat, Patty?” said Jan, smiling at the unfortunate girl, who was looking stunned. Had she expected them to come to blows over the parsnips, perhaps? Well, given Pete’s feeling description of her mother, that wasn’t all that surprising.

    “Yes, I do,” she said faintly. “That sounds great, Jan. Um, Gramma Lou—that was Poppa Josh’s mom, Gramma MacDermott—she had a real nice recipe for candied parsnips. The same as you’d do candied sweet potatoes.”

    “Glazed, to youse yobs from Downunder,” said Jan cordially to her helpmeet.

    “I know! Strewth, ya’d think good ole Goldie Doole never done a candied kumara in our kitchen in ’er life!”

    “An American guest who’s become a good friend,” said Jan limply to Patty. “She was staying at the time of the Boxing Day tsunami and—well, it’s a long story, but just let’s say she was a tower of strength.”

    “Good cook, too,” said Pete, grinning at Patty. “So what’s your grandma’s recipe like?”

    It apparently included honey and a little molasses and Gramma Lou’s secret ingredient: just a sprinkling of sesame oil mixed in with the cooking oil. The oven not too hot. And sometimes for Thanksgiving she did the dish with a topping of marshmallows but Patty preferred it without.

    Pete rubbed his hands. “Yum! Go nice with bit of roast pork, eh? Or ham, maybe? Saw ole Paul Masters down the recycling yard and he was saying that his sister-in-law’s rung to say there’s a nice pair of juicy hams going begging, if anyone’s interested.”

    “It is nominally illegal to slaughter your own animals here, Patty,” said Jan on a grim note. “Paul Masters’ sister-in-law is married to a pig farmer. It’s about a four-hour drive.”

    “Nah! Do it easy in two an’ a half!” he scoffed.

    “There’ll still be holiday-makers on the road,” she warned.

    “Okay, three,” said Pete. “You wanna come over there this arvo, Patty, love?”

    “Uh—this afternoon? Why, yes, I guess,” she faltered, looking in a lost way from him to Jan. “I—I thought we were going to blanch and freeze vegetables this afternoon, Jan?”

    “Jayne’ll give me a hand with some of them and the rest can wait, if you’d like to spend some time with Pete. Though admittedly rushing all round the country in quest of fresh pork and anything else he can pick up isn’t a restful way to spend your first afternoon.”

    “Balls!” he said robustly. “Nip up there, grab the hams before any other bugger can get ’is mitts on them, come straight—uh, maybe just nip over to a couple of tips up that way, but that’s nothing, and then come straight back. –Hey, that reminds me, love, I found a lovely slab of marble over at Miser Ron Reilly’s!”

    “At the recycling yard?” said Jan dazedly. “And he hasn’t sold it for megabucks?”

    “No, well, maybe it’s the colour. And one corner’s a bit chipped. And it isn’t big enough for the top of a sideboard. Might of been a washstand top, maybe. But it’s good and thick, and see, what I thought, split it: then it’d give you your mirror-image effect!” he said proudly. “Have to smooth the edges off real good, line ’em up proper, but that’d be okay!”

    “All right, Michelangelo, if you say so. What colour is it?”

    “Greenish. Bit dark. Could look real impressive, though,” he said on a hopeful note.

    “Well, I suppose the restaurant’s got a view of greenish stuff, and at least it won’t clash with anything else in there. –He’s gonna make a sideboard, Patty. Fake antique,” she explained.

    “I see,” she said faintly.

    “See, we might pick up a bit of nice wood for it this arvo,” said Pete, looking at her hopefully.

    “From the tips up the King Country?” croaked Jan.

    “Yeah. They dunno what it is they’re chucking out.”

    “Right: you’ll find loads of antique kauri in amongst the old stoves, old tractor tyres, and bits of warped plywood and scratched brown woodgrain Formica.”

    “Ya never know till ya look!” replied Pete jauntily, winking at Patty. “You up for it, then, Patty?”

    Patty looked uncertainly at Jan and found she was smiling and nodding at her. “I guess I am, Dad,” she said shakily.

    “Well!” said Jan with feeling some twenty minutes later, when Jayne had taken Patty under her wing and gone off to install her in the loft and Janet had proposed and seconded herself to get some cream for lunch from the permaculture place and rushed off to do so. “Can you pick them!”

    “Eh?” he said uneasily.

    “What has the woman done to that lovely girl? She’s even more insecure than Libby is!”

    “Aw. Yeah, s’pose she is. Namrita always was a bossy cow. S’pose a girl that took after her more woulda stood up to her or ignored her.”

    “Quite. Does she even enjoy this administrative job of hers with these diet weirdos?”

    “Um, didn’t she say it was a health farm, love? Well, weirdos, yeah. Um, well, she seems to be on top of all the science side of it.” He picked up the pot of “Chaparra Homestead Natural Moisturizing Cream” that Patty had presented to Jan and eyed it dubiously. The label featured a leafy twig and a lot of small print, the less scientific parts of which included the information that “chaparra” was the Spanish for “scrub oak”, which didn’t strike him as too appealing.

    Jan retorted strongly: “Because the woman made her do some potty plant biochemistry degree before she forced her to do that office administration course, yeah!”

    “Yeah. Well, lot of weird does in California, eh? Seems to pay okay, from what she was saying.”

    “She does seem to have been able to afford to hop on a plane,” agreed Jan.

    “Wonder if her mum knows?” he croaked.

    Their eyes met. Suddenly they both broke down in roars of laughter.

    Jan wiped her eyes feebly. “Serve her right for forcing that bloody writing paper on the poor girl!”

    “Excruciating, eh?” Pete agreed with relish. “Namrita always was the sort that went over the top about anything she took up.”

    “Yes, well, she seems to have gone over the top about the ultra-nayce, well-off professional class shit, that’s for sure!”

    “Yeah, sounds like that house she made him buy when he retired’s a bloody great mansion,” agreed Pete without interest. “Just a pity she hadda force it all on Patty, eh?”

    “I’ll say. But at least the snob stuff doesn’t seem to have rubbed off on her.”

    “No, thank Christ. Seems really interested in cooking, eh?”

    “Mm,” agreed Jan, “I think that must’ve been the famous Gramma Lou.”

    “That’d be right, Namrita never could cook. Think this Rosa she mentioned must be a maid, whaddaya reckon?”

    “Uh-huh; Mexican, probably. I’d say Rosa and Gramma Lou probably brought her up between them, Pete: sounds as if Namrita was pretty much absorbed in this sociology career of hers on the one hand, and the social shit on the other.”

    “Just as bloody well!” retorted Pete with feeling. “She’s squashed enough as it is!”

    Quite. Jan was in no doubt whatsoever that the reason Patty hadn’t let them know she was coming was that she knew she’d have lost her nerve if she didn’t just rush off and do it without thinking too much about it. And heck: thirty-one, lived on her own with a pet bird that a gay neighbour was looking after while she was away, and no boyfriend in a country where you were expected to have a boyfriend from about the moment your curls were long enough for the proud parents to attach a pink bow up until, and including, the old folks’ home? She’d shown them a snap of the MacDermott mansion and another snap had fallen out of her wallet and Pete of course had picked it up and asked her who it was. The answer was “Ektor”, which it had dawned must be Spanish, Hector, who’d been her boyfriend when she was in college, but Mom hadn’t thought that there was any decent career in opening a Mexican restaurant with him and hadn’t let her have the money that Grandfather Eisenblatt had left her in trust. So Hector had had to find a job elsewhere and eventually took a position on a cruise ship and met someone else. He was short, podgy, and as far as one could tell from a smudged Polaroid, about twice her age, and possibly, reading between the lines, her mother had been right in assuming he was an opportunist, but Jesus! Couldn’t she at least have let the poor girl try it? God knew she herself had done exactly what she wanted all her life. There hadn’t been anyone serious since Hector, apparently: poor Patty.

    Tamsin and Neil turned up looking hungry at around twelve and a pair of hungry tourists from the Southern Stars Motel rang five minutes after that, so Jan gave in and, with some minor assistance and a lot of interested reading of the recipe book by Jayne and Patty, made Jane Grigson’s tomato tart number 2, the really yummy one that needed to be eaten straight from the oven. The original required a lot of butter, but she'd discovered that it was equally delicious, if slightly different, if after dipping the tomato slices in cornmeal you fried them in a good olive oil instead, so she did that. Since Jayne had picked about twenty kilos of green beans they had warm green beans vinaigrette on the side. And, since there was no lack of peaches, her old stand-by of a starter: peach halves with ricotta (or fresh goats’ cheese) and prosciutto (or ham).

    Since Patty and Jayne had both been very keen to sample the batatada she let them have some for pudding, with the fresh cream Janet had fetched. Tamsin and Neil wouldn’t touch it, Neil in particular rejecting it with: “Kumaras? Ugh!” so that was their loss, wasn’t it? Instead they lapped up some of Kristel’s plums, unpeeled, and a quantity of goats’ yoghurt—without sugar. Okay, whatever turned you on. Surprisingly enough Bob get very brave and tried the batatada—Jan would have lost a hundred dollars if she’d made that bet aloud, so it was just as well she hadn’t, eh?—and informed her earnestly that it was the best pudding he’d ever had, even better than her Christmas pud, and his son, more energetically, that he was a tit. Pete was more cautious, voting it miles better just as itself than as a pie, though the pie was good, and putting it, to Jan’s surprise, second to her “squashy lime pie”.

    She only made the latter when Polly Carrano had brought her down a load of limes: they were just too bloody dear in the shops, never mind what Fern Gully might be serving. It was completely different from all the lime pie recipes she’d read, most of them being variations on lemon meringue, which Jan quite often made because the middle-aged punters liked it, but which both she and Pete considered sicky. The so-called “squashy lime pie” was a recipe she’d made up, based on Polly’s ecstatic description of a pie she and Jake had had at a Cajun restaurant. How genuine the original had been Jan had no idea. The squashy filling was rather like that for a pecan pie: very, very sweet and thick, but as it included a lot of lime juice and considerable grated zest—the latter added at the end of the cooking so as it preserved its flavour and didn’t go bitter—it was at the same time very, very sour. A really astounding combination: no wonder the Carranos had been so struck by it. It had taken ages to get it right but now she was quite pleased with it. Usually she made it with an ordinary sweet shortcrust pastry but it was also very nice with an oatmeal pastry. And absolutely no whipped egg whites or sicky custard which screamed at the citrus need apply, ta!

    “Um sorry, blahing on,” she said feebly as the attentive silence at the big table registered.

    “No, Jan, dear, we love hearing you talk about your cooking!” cried Janet loyally.

    “Ta, Janet,” said Jan weakly. She was aware Janet found the squashy lime pie too sour—though, astoundingly enough, she was a fan of the batatada.

    “It does sound like a genuine Cajun recipe, Jan: Mom and Poppa Josh and me had a pie just like that in New Orleans, once,” contributed Patty eagerly.

    Right: this would have been on a joint holiday during her adult years, would it? Jan probed tactfully and got the expected but not desired reply. Jesus, hadn’t the woman ever let her have a life of her own?—Don’t answer that.—Oh, right: probably would have been Key limes, eh? That’d be why the sourness came through.

    “Jane Grigson says they’re wild limes,” reported Jayne, beaming at her new-found sister. “Very sour.”

    “Sure, that’s it, Jayne! Isn’t that a great book?”

    “Uh, before you two get carried away, that does tend to be one’s first reaction, but as you read through it you find that a very large percentage of the recipes are full of butter and cream and eggs,” warned Jan. “Likewise her vegetable book.”

    “There’s a vegetable book as well?” gasped Patty, her face lighting up.

    Jayne’s face had also lit up. Okay, they could read ’em, then perhaps it’d sink in.

    “They’re usually good, mind you,” allowed Pete fairly. “Not when she’s gone overboard with the cheese on the parsn— Sorry, love, forget I spoke. No, well, most of the ones Jan does are really great.”

    “And really fattening,” said Jan heavily. “She’d be the generation that suffered as kiddies during the War from a complete lack of eggs, cream and butter: all the English cookbooks from that era are stuffed with them. Predating the nouvelle idea, not to say the cholesterol idea, geddit? I saw a photo of her once,” she said, smiling at Patty. “Something of the Julia Child type, but even more mountainous!”

    “Julia Child’s recipes are lovely,” said Jayne on wistful note. “We did get her programme on TV at one stage, ages ago, it was, only then it seemed to disappear. And I couldn’t find any of her books in the shops.”

    Brightening, Patty explained how she could infallibly get her one through the Internet…

    “Gee, Patty and Jayne’ve hit it off, eh?” concluded Pete as, family, guests and Janet having all been banished firmly to the lounge, he and Jan got the coffee.

    “Well, you’d have to have something seriously wrong with you not to hit it off with Jayne, but yeah!” agreed Jan with a laugh.

    “Yeah…” Pete leaned on the bench, looking wistful. “Ya know, she could afford to settle here, buy a nice house.”

    “Uh—Jayne? It’s a wee bit soon to start thinking of that sort of thing, Pete.”

    Not discouraged at all, he plunged into the full bit. The two leading contenders were that dark brick and tinted glass mausoleum next to Wal and Livia, or the embryo Turpin house. Sarcastically Jan suggested a third runner, the half-finished and abandoned bottle house on their side of the lake that had been part of the architect Max Throgmorton’s inspiration for Fem Gully, but unfortunately this didn’t give him pause for an instant, oh, dear.

    “See, if Tamsin does take up permanent with Neil there’ll be nothing to keep Jayne over in Brizzie!” he finished eagerly.

    Well, her bloody mother, but Jan didn’t mention her. “No, that’s right, but don’t start counting your chickens, Pete.”

    He was not only counting them, he was launching into a full-blown scheme where, ensconced in either the McLintock mansion or the Turpin abortion, the former having better road access but the latter a site with more scope, Jayne and Patty would start a health farm together, sharing the cooking and stuff, ya see, and Libby could help out! Look after their goats for them, too!

    “Less than one percent of the population wants a health farm, Pete. Even fewer than want a so-called ecolodge,” said Jan without hope, not pointing out that the fact that they both seemed keen on Jane Grigson’s recipes didn’t indicate they’d want to run anything together, or that she couldn’t think of a single Jane Grigson recipe that was slimming enough to be given house-room in a health farm.

    Not listening, he grabbed the tray of coffee cups and forged off eagerly to the lounge with the remark: “Can’t help to suggest it!”

    “And what happens,” said Jan crossly to the coffee-pot, “when poor Jayne’s lost all of bloody Dahlenburg’s insurance money and the flaming health farm’s gone broke? Flaming Namrita comes to their rescue? We bail them out with Monopoly money?” The one seemed as likely as the other, especially given that last winter they’d discovered, the evening the Carranos were down here and Jake fancied a game, that Someone had lost all the Monopoly money and they had to play with real notes from their rich friend’s wallet, which could have been quite embarrassing, if Pete hadn’t known him for going on fifty years.

    Funnily enough the coffee-pot didn’t respond to this enquiry, in fact it didn’t do anything: just sat there looking smug while out there in the lounge Pete was saying God knew what…

    “Ooh, heck!” concluded Libby with a horrified laugh. “I’m afraid Dad is the type that tends to get, um, manias, Patty.”

    “I guess,” agreed Patty on a rueful note. “Gee, I’d have to give three months’ notice at work, and I don’t think Mom’d ever let me have the money Grandfather Eisenblatt left in trust for—well, for anything out here, to be honest,” she admitted, going red, “and—and, well, gee, I have only just got here, after all.”

    “Yes: ignore him, Patty,” said Jayne kindly. “He took the poor thing all over the North Island looking for stupid bits of wood to build a sideboard with this afternoon, too, Libby,” she added sympathetically.

    “Yeah,” said Patty with a feeble smile.  “Not to mention the wildlife!”

    “Um, wildlife?” croaked Libby.

    Patty licked her lips. “Uh, yeah. Well, the thing was, Libby, we drove to this guy’s farm to buy, um, some farm-slaughtered hams. Well, strictly speaking pork legs, because they haven’t been cured.”

    “Was this miles away, Patty?”

    “Yes. I’m not sure of the names, but would King Country be right?”

    “Well, I think so! We’re foreigners, too, you know!” said Libby with a laugh.

    “Yes, sure you are: I was forgetting,” agreed Patty gratefully. “It seemed a terrible long ways… Farming country, I guess, and it was pretty lush, but, um… I would say, it didn’t seem in real good condition,” she added, looking at them awkwardly.

    Her half-sisters exchanged glances.

    “Scruffy,” said Libby with a certain relish. “We’ve decided that most of New Zealand is, haven’t we, Jayne?”

    Jayne nodded hard. “We really like it!” she assured Patty gaily. “There’s something cosy about it, really. It’s a bit like Dad himself!”

    “That’s it: real down-home, that’s just what I thought!” she cried.

    The three sisters beamed at one another.

    “Well, anyroad, we drove for what seemed like hours: the road surface was pretty bad and there were just so many bends and twists— I guess I was unconsciously expecting something like our interstates, y’know?”—Libby and Jayne had also expected decent highways. There was no such thing, here: even the motorway surfaces were so rough, heavy gravel sitting in insufficient tar, that the noise of your car tyres was deafening, even with the windows closed. They nodded feelingly.—“Yeah,” said Patty gratefully. “But we got there okay, and collected the hams, and the farmer’s wife insisted on giving us some afternoon tea: real delicious, she made, uh, we call them biscuits, but I guess maybe you’d call them scones, like she did.”

    As she’d pronounced the word “scohnes” there was a short silence. Then Jayne said kindly: “‘Sconns”, I think you mean. I think some people in Australia do say ‘scohnes’, but we’ve always said ‘sconns’, like the Kiwis.”

    “Sure: ‘sconns’,” said Patty on a weak note. “You don’t call them biscuits, then?”

    “No; our biscuits are what you’d call cookies,” said Libby briskly.

    Patty’s jaw sagged.

    “‘Biscuits’ is the English usage,” explained Libby helpfully. “I can’t think where the American usage could have come from. Dialectal, I suppose.”

    “Jane Grigson might know!” said Jayne eagerly. “Not in her fruit or vegetable books, but Jan’s got another one, on English food!”

    “Great, we’ll look it up,” decided Patty. “Uh—where was I?”

    “You’d had afternoon tea,” prompted Jayne, smiling at her.

    “Oh—sure,” she said limply. “Real homemade jelly—I mean jam. Then Dad and the farmer and his son got talking about hunting wild boars and deer. I guess there’s a lot of that in New Zealand, huh?”

    Libby and Jayne exchanged glances. “Not all that much, I don’t think,” said Jayne weakly.

    “No, I think it’s mainly Dad’s generation, and not all that many of them,” agreed Libby. “Did the farmer’s wife try to stop them?”

    “No, but the son’s wife was real annoyed with him. So then they switched to rabbits. Would they be a native species?”

    “No, introduced: there are no native New Zealand mammals, only birds and lizards,” said Libby kindly. “They are the sort of rabbits that are wild in Europe and England, though.”

    “I see,” she said in a puzzled voice. “Well, it seemed to be too early in the day to find them, so Dad and I drove off to some, uh, he called them tips.” She tried to smile.

    “Tips or dumps, yes,” agreed Jayne. “Did you find any nice wood?”

    “No, it was real awful stuff, Jayne! Only he kept saying that he could use stuff for, uh, stuff, I guess, and loaded up the, uh, he called it the trailer.”

    “That’d be right!” said Libby with a smothered snicker. “He’s got all sorts of useless junk that he swears might come in useful for something some day! Every so often Jan makes him take some to the nearest dump.”

    “I get it,” said Patty weakly. “So after that we went back to the farm and collected up the farmer and his son and drove out to near where they said the rabbits would be. Then Dad produced this hunting rifle from the back of the SUV! I have to admit, I near to died, Mom’s always been so opposed to guns, you don’t dare to mention the NRA in our house!” It dawned that Jayne was looking blank. “Uh, that’s—”

    “We know,” interrupted Libby kindly.

    “I don’t, Libby.” said Jayne mildly. “Is it something to do with American guns, Patty?”

    Patty nodded, shuddering, and explained.

    “Right. As advocated by Charlton Heston,” said Libby drily.

    “I’ve always rather liked him,” replied Jayne weakly.

    “Yeah, the same type of macho idiot as Dad!” she conceded with a sudden loud laugh. “They’re less common here, I think, Patty, but there’s still a fair few around in Australia, especially in the rural areas.”

    “You need a gun on a farm,” said Jayne firmly.

    “Yes, but Dad doesn’t actually live on one, does he?” rejoined Libby, grinning. “Sorry, Patty: go on. The macho idiots got out and slaughtered defenceless rabbits, did they?”

    “He did tell us the King Country’s where you get lots of rabbits, ’member?” recalled Jayne suddenly.

    “If you say so!”

    Patty looked at them expectantly but found they were now looking at her expectantly. “Uh, well, yeah, they did. They made me stay in the car, they said I might scare them. Not that I wanted to see them kill them,” she admitted.

    “No, though they are pests,” said Jayne seriously.

    Patty looked weakly at her half-sister’s serene oval face. “Uh, yeah; I guess, Jayne,” she said limply.

    “So how many did Dad shoot?” asked Libby.

    Patty swallowed. “Four. Two lots of two. They ran for their burrows at the first shot but—but he was too quick for them: he got two. Then—then they all waited until the poor things came out again and shot some more!”

    This report was going on in the loft: they were all sitting on the big bed. Jayne patted her hand kindly. “You don’t have to eat them if you don’t fancy them, Patty.”

    “No, it’s silly,” she said in a small voice. “I’ve seen a chicken killed in Mexico, the woman plucked it right away and did it on the spit for us. And I’m not a vegetarian. It’d be hypocritical of me to refuse to eat them.”

    “Understandable, though.”

    “Absolutely,” agreed Libby, smiling at her. “And Jan won’t mind if you don’t fancy them. Hey, tell ya what: you could tell her that you and Jayne are gonna run a vegetarian health farm!” She collapsed in awful sniggers.

    “Ignore her, Patty,” said Jayne in a weak voice.

    “No, that’s okay.” Their eyes met. Jayne gave a muffled snort. Suddenly Patty clapped a hand over her mouth and collapsed in gales of helpless giggles, whereupon Jayne also gave way entirely.

    “I’m real sorry,” said Patty lamely at last.

    “Heck, don’t apologise to us!” replied Libby gaily. “We’ve all got the same mad father, after all!”

    Jayne thought that might be a bit much for a nice American on her very first day: she looked at her a trifle fearfully, but to her huge relief Patty grinned like anything and said: “I guess we have, at that!”

    Jan’s guess was of course perfectly correct—indeed, both of her guesses—and Patty Eisenblatt-MacDermott had just rushed out to New Zealand without pausing to give herself the time to contact Taupo Shores Ecolodge and warn them she was coming and without letting her mother know she was doing it. The more so since Dean Blake, her friendly gay neighbour, had been extremely sympathetic and urged her to go. Dean, whose real name was Donald Bogdanovich, you couldn’t really blame him for changing it, especially since his father had thrown him out of the house and one of his cousins on that side had threatened to cut his balls off when he came out of the closet, was about the only person that could have been considered a close friend of Patty’s, and that was only because he himself had made the first overtures on discovering her struggling with her garbage bin the week she’d moved into their apartment block. They were wheeled bins and not that hard to move once you got them going but the trick was, he explained, overcoming the initial inertia. Patty had immediately seen he must be gay, but she didn’t mind at all, in fact it was much better than having a creep of a hetero neighbour that might make a pass at you, but what she would have minded was if he’d been really dumb and foisted himself on her with endless chat, like in the past a middle-aged Mrs Hannah Stevenson, an elderly Mr Scott Niemeyer and a youngish Sherree McIntyre all had. At Dean’s “overcoming the initial inertia” she’d looked at him with a surprised interest that Dean, who didn’t kid himself the world wasn’t full of homophobic dummies, recognised as that of a fellow sufferer, and they pretty much had taken it from there.

    Dean was a civil servant with a very ordinary office job in one of the many government departments in Sacramento, and he was most intrigued to find that Patty worked for Chaparra Homestead, just out of the city a ways, especially as he’d always fancied running a health farm himself! Not a kind lie, as Patty discovered: he and his partner, Rowan Crosby (real name Crosby but he’d changed to Rowan from Roger), were terribly keen on everything to do with health: they worked out at the gym and usually ran a couple of miles in the morning before breakfast as well, and Rowan into the bargain actually used Chaparra Homestead Natural Moisturizing Cream and Chaparra Homestead Natural Herbal Shampoo, having been introduced to them by an aunt who’d had a lovely session at the health farm. –Rowan’s family hadn’t rejected him when he came out of the closet, in fact he’d never really been in the closet, and he saw them all regularly, though it was true he had more on common with his Aunt Cecy than he did with his parents, his father being a grade school teacher, Little League baseball coach and ex-almost-Olympic discus thrower and his mother being a realtor, grade school soccer coach, and ex-almost-Olympic hurdler—how they’d met, right. Rowan actually worked at the gym, not as an instructor, though he did fill in with the aerobics classes in an emergency, but as a counter person, in the combined rôles of products advisor, receptionist and bar person (health products only, of course). He’d arranged to sell the Chaparra Homestead line there, both the gym and the health farm being quite agreeable, but as the products were very expensive didn’t usually make many sales except around Christmas.

    When she first got to know Dean and Rowan, about three years back, Patty had secretly thought it was a pity that Rowan wasn’t brighter, because Dean was very intelligent indeed. Gradually, however, it began to dawn that although Rowan had no tertiary qualifications at all and had only just managed to graduate high school—his hopes of one day working for Chaparra Homestead being pretty much doomed to disappointment, all their staff except the cleaners being required to have paper qualifications as well as good working experience, the kitchen staff in particular all being qualified dieticians or official apprentices—he was not only very sweet-natured, he had the sort of intelligence that was very different from book learning. He was extremely shrewd about people, declaring that Jillyan Rodgers’s new boyfriend was a no-good at the time everyone else in the apartment block had completely fallen for his blond, smiling charm, six months to the day before the cops took him away for insurance fraud. And he was the only one in the block who said that Tim Weissman was a sadistic bully and there were other forms of abuse than the physical and if Heather Weissman didn’t take Baby Jasmina and leave him there’d be trouble. True, neither Dean nor Patty liked Mr Weissman, but they wouldn’t have gone that far. So they were proven wrong on the tragic day that Heather took Baby Jasmina and drove her and herself—in Tim Weissman’s sports car, which he’d never let her drive—over a cliff down near Monterey. It was true her parents lived just south of Monterey, and the cops very kindly let it go as an accident, but as Rowan just blew his nose and shook his head sadly nether Dean nor Patty could believe that.

    Luckily for herself Patty didn’t make the mistake of seeing either Rowan or Dean through rose-coloured spectacles, her mother’s exasperated claims to the contrary. Sweet, kind and shrewd though Rowan was, he wasn’t very reliable and you couldn't count on him doing anything he might have promised to, ranging from picking up a carton of yoghurt for you on his way home through collecting you from the airport. And Dean’s sharp intelligence meant that he didn’t suffer fools gladly and had made a lot of enemies, especially at work but also at the apartments, Mrs Horton from Number 3A in particular waxing very bitter over his failure to appreciate the news produced by such facilities as Entertainment Tonight and The National Enquirer. She tried to tell Patty that he was a spiteful gay and she shouldn’t have anything more to do with him, but Patty, going very red, retorted that he wasn’t spiteful, he was merely intelligent and clear-sighted, and marched off leaving the poor lady to make what she could of that.

    Patty was happy enough at work: Chaparra Homestead was intensely up-market and relentlessly nice, but she was used to that sort of thing after growing up under the influence of a Susan Eisenblatt MacDermott who had completely reverted to the ultra-nice, professional-class mores with which she’d grown up herself. The administrative job wasn’t all that interesting but the health farm itself was, especially the dietary aspects of it. And they grew a lot of their own herbs, that was real interesting. All the staff were expected to conform to the health farm’s high standards of appearance and dress, even the gardeners being issued with coveralls in a charming shade of sage green embroidered with Chaparra Homestead’s sprig of scrub oak. They got one pair free but additional pairs had to be paid for out of their wages and although the health farm did provide laundry service they had to pay for that, too. Likewise the indoor staff had to wear the appropriate uniforms, all with the logo: the kitchen staff in white, but the masseurs and masseuses in palest sage green, and reception and administration staff in sage green suits and shirts, the women being allowed to wear either pants or skirts with their jackets and everyone being allowed a choice of palest pink, pale avocado, silvery-grey or white shirts in a range of approved styles. The men also had to wear the Chaparra Homestead silk tie: real tasteful, wide diagonal stripes of soft sage green, interspersed with narrow stripes of dark forest green and silvery-grey. Rowan also wore a uniform for work so he hadn’t commented on the fact that Patty had to wear one, but Dean had expressed the thought that it must become rather confining after a while. To which Patty had replied happily that she didn’t mind, it saved having to think what to wear and since it was all the health farm’s choice, not hers, you could rely on the suits not shrinking and dry-cleaning real well and the blouses not fading and being genuinely washable. Which if he hadn’t already had a very shrewd idea of her character would have given Dean a certain insight into Patty Eisenblatt-MacDermott—yes.

    Neat hair in an approved style was also a sine qua non at Chaparra Homestead, and as Patty’s thick, dark curly hair was as unruly as Libby’s it could have posed a real problem, had not Susan Eisenblatt MacDermott in person taken her to her own hairdresser, explained the look that was required, and made a firm appointment for Patty to have it restyled once a week. She stayed and supervised the first session, and the result of that, as Dean pointed out on an acid note, was exactly what one might have expected: the style, which was an excruciatingly neat French roll, lasted one day, was almost reasonable for a day after that, and then Patty had to fall back on just scraping it back into a clip for the rest of the week. However, on her next visit the sympathetic hairdresser’s assistant on whom the cunning hairdresser had shoved her off, seeing that Mrs Eisenblatt MacDermott hadn’t turned up this time, explained that if she couldn’t manage the style she could keep her hair neat by using gel, explained how to use it and sold her the gel, incidentally doubling her appointments to twice weekly and moving them to very early in the morning. The result of this manoeuvre being that Patty looked extremely acceptable on Mondays and Wednesdays, reasonable on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and only usually had to fall back on scraping the hair into a clip at the neck with lashings of gel on Fridays. Rowan was quite good with hair, so if he had time he sometimes came over and helped her on her non-appointment days, but he didn’t always have time or remember about it. True, at one point Dean worked out how much she was spending on the hairdresser per month (including tips and gel) and was duly horrified by it, but as Patty pointed out, it was better than being out of a job.

    Take it for all in all, working for Chaparra Homestead was much less stressful then a job in an ordinary office that expected equal neatness but didn’t have a uniform for you would have been, so Patty settled into it contentedly, lapsing back into her natural scruffiness in the weekends, the more so as once she’d seen she was sticking at the job, Mom had ceased to bother her.

    After some time it dawned on Dean with a horrid thud that whereas in her youth she’d let herself be managed by Gramma Lou and Rosa with top-level supervision from her mother, Patty was now letting her life be managed by the goddamned health farm! He wasn’t much consoled by Rowan’s saying that she was happy with it. So when she found out that P.M. McLeod of this weird-sounding place in New Zealand was probably her father he encouraged her to go see him: God knew she needed something to shake her out of her rut!

    They had a near-disaster at the last minute: she burst into tears over leaving Whistler’s Brother, her cockatiel, but Dean reminded her that the times her mother and stepfather had dragged her off on vacation to, variously, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Acapulco, he had been perfectly okay with them, assured her that he’d look to him himself, not leave it up to Rowan, and pushed her bodily up to the security check, repeating loudly: “Your boarding pass is in your hand, Patty, honey, don’t leave go of it!” and that was that.

    Patty would just have bought a plane ticket on the Internet but Dean in person had taken her to a travel agent and made sure she was ticketed all the way through to the place with the weird name. Very likely she wouldn’t have managed all that well once she got to Auckland and found herself dumped in the international terminal building, but luckily for her she was seated on the plane next to a Mrs Helen Lyall from Brown’s Bay, just north of Auckland, who knew Taupo very well: her brother-in-a-law had had a bach there for years. Mrs Lyall explained that the next plane would go from a different terminal, and it would only be a little one, dear, the big planes didn’t fly to Taupo. After the journey across the Pacific you might have expected the widowed Mrs Lyall, who wasn’t young, to be out of it with jet-lag, but, no: she competently captured Patty after she’d been through Customs, and she and her son took her to the correct internal terminal building. Then—since none of them was sure what time zone Patty’s complicated ticket had on it—making quite sure she got to the right counter and the plane was going to take off today. And did she have money for a taxi once she got there? Competently Mrs Lyall made her son give Patty the appropriate amount in New Zealand money in exchange for her American dollars. Now she’d be all right! No, don’t thank her, dear, she was glad to help, and good luck with finding her father!

Next chapter:

https://summerseason-anovel.blogspot.com/2022/09/strategic-planning.html