Page 23 of Second Alarm
"Shut up."
"You shut up."
"Eat the roast," Mom Larsen says, and we eat the roast.
The trouble starts, as it always does, with Cal, somewhere around the second helping, somewhere around the point where he's cut into the third roll and slathered it with butter in a fashion that would've gotten him slapped by his mother in 1998, but Mom Larsen has aged into permissiveness with her son on minor issues, and the roll carnage is now allowed.
"So." Cal sets down his knife. "We have to find Hanna a boyfriend."
The entire dining room, internally, in my head, stops.
Hanna, externally, doesn't react.
Mom Larsen passes the butter.
"Cal."
"The crew is on it," Cal says.
"The crew is on what."
"It. Finding you a boyfriend. They have candidates."
"Cal, I just moved back."
"You've been home four weeks."
"Yes."
"Long enough."
"Cal." Hanna sets her fork down. "I'm going to stab you with this fork."
"I'm looking out for you."
"You're looking out for me to my active detriment."
I chew. I don't speak. I don't speak because if I speak I'll say something I'm not allowed to say, and I have three phrases available to me at any Sunday dinner, and those areyes, ma'am,good pot roast, andsure, Cal. I'm in thesure, Calposition currently, so I wait.
"Okay, well, fine," Cal says, through his roll. "But I'm just saying. The crew has been making suggestions. Some of them are actually okay. There's this guy from Station 3, a paramedic, he's — "
"I don't want to hear about him."
" — tall. You like tall."
"Calvin — "
"He's employed — "
"Calvin, my god — "
" — stable — she likes stable, right, Mom — "
"Don't bring me into this," Mom Larsen says, without looking up.
" — she needs somebody stable, is what I'm saying, not somebody — " Cal waves a hand. " — flighty, like those guys she dated in Portland. Remember the guy with the bicycle?"
"I dated a man who owned a bicycle, Cal. That isn't a personality trait."
