Host Family by Mameve Medwed

Author:Mameve Medwed [MEDWED, MAMEVE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC008000
ISBN: 9780759520868
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2001-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Sammy, Phoebe, Truman arrive all at once at the front door. Truman carries the focaccia. Sammy totes his laundry bag. Phoebe extends a wilted, straggly bouquet. “These were the last ones at the supermarket,” she apologizes.

“A little water and they’ll perk right up,” Daisy says. “Did you get them at the Evergood?”

Phoebe nods.

“Remember, Sammy?” Daisy asks.

“Mom . . .” Sammy warns.

“My lips are sealed,” Daisy promises. It was the seventh-grade dance. By the time Sammy had got around to asking his number one and two choices, they had already accepted the more prompt invitations of other admirers. At the eleventh hour, a classmate looking for better offers and finding none agreed to go with him. She wouldn’t ordinarily have accepted so late an invitation, she had explained, except for her mother’s financial sacrifice to transform a duckling into a swan. While his friends bore beribboned florists’ boxes nestling corsages of tea roses, Sammy had stopped at the Ever-good for the last wilted bouquet of orphaned flowers. These he had fastened with rubber bands, tin foil, a few garden chives as greenery. When he tried to attach this creation onto his date’s shoulder, he stabbed her with a safety pin. Blood spotted the pink taffeta. “Cheapskate!” she had exclaimed and refused even one dance with him. Later she sent the cleaning bill.

“I think Sammy told me this story once,” Phoebe admits.

“Never on my life,” Sammy protests.

“You probably had too much to drink,” Phoebe suggests.

Sammy looks at Daisy. “Not I,” he says. “It was junior high!”

“My very point. You should have seen my junior high.”

Truman knits his brows. “What about your junior high, Phoebe?” he asks.

“You know,” Daisy says. “I went to junior high myself. I wouldn’t live through that again for anything.”

“Me neither,” agrees Truman, “though I was essentially out of it.”

“Why does this not surprise me, Dad?” Phoebe asks. She turns to Daisy. “I think she should have appreciated Sammy’s originality,” Phoebe adds. And Daisy is touched by her loyalty.

In the kitchen, Daisy puts the flowers in a vase. She pours in water. The flowers don’t perk up but droop dispiritedly over the rim like a yellowing fringe. Daisy sets them in the center of the table anyway. She’s the kind of mother who frames her child’s fingerpainted squibbles, who places his kindergarten twisted lumps of clay next to her Staffordshire.

Phoebe sits between Sammy and Truman. She and Sammy lean into each other the way lovers do. He brushes a strand of hair away from her eye. She straightens his collar. Daisy’s heart bursts. If Sammy made a wilted corsage for Phoebe, Daisy is sure that Phoebe would wear it with absolute pride. Will this be a lasting love? she wonders.

The lasagna is only slightly overcooked, the cheese burned only in the little circles where it started to bubble. She cuts the lasagna in large squares for Sammy and Phoebe—after all she did go not just to junior high but to college once—smaller ones for her and Truman. She tosses the salad, slices the focaccia.

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