Another high whine from outside made them both turn their heads again. This time it was one that Maj immediately recognized — her dad’s car.
Maj stretched and got up to put the kettle on the stove for a cup of tea. Shortly she heard the front door open, and the sound of keys and briefcases being dropped here and there, away up in the front hall — Maj’s house was a long one, built in stages over some decades, and it straggled somewhat, so that the distance between the front hall and the kitchen was not really long enough to require you to take a packed lunch with you but seemed close (especially when the kitchen phone went off and you had to run for it). After a little while Maj’s dad came through the kitchen door and paused there, looking at what his wife was doing at the counter.
“You’ll never have that done in time,” he said while the Muffin screeched “Daddy! Daddy!” down the hallway, and abruptly impacted into his legs from behind, making him wobble.
“Wanna bet?” Maj’s mother said, not looking up. “We’re due there at eight-thirty. The question is, will you have done the laundry so you have a clean shirt?”
“Was it my turn? Sorry, I forgot. Things got hectic.” He picked up the Muffin in one arm. “Yes, I know. The park,” Maj’s father said to her, and leaned against the doorpost. From there he looked at Maj, the overhead light shining off his bald spot. “Well, guess what.”
There was something odd about the way he looked as he said this, though his face was cheerful enough, and Maj watched him carefully as she said, “What?”
“We’ve got company coming.”
“How are they at house-tidying?” said Maj’s mother, wrestling with the next piece of sugar plate. “Because I’m not going to have time.”
“No, it’s not right now. And I don’t think we need to do anything special. It’s family.”
Her mother turned with a surprised look. “Oh? Who?”
“Not close family,” Maj’s father said, putting the Muffin down again. “Go get your park toy, honey,” he said, “just one.”
“Okay. Who’s coming?” Muffin said. “Are you getting me a little brother finally?”
Maj grinned and turned to get the kettle off the stove. This had been a recurrent theme of late, since Muffin’s preschool classes had started a “family life” unit. “Muffy, don’t give them ideas,” Maj said. “You don’t know how lucky we are to have just one brother. We’ve got him outnumbered…let’s keep it that way. But, Dad, who is it?”
“A third cousin…I think.”
“Mom’s side of the family?” It was the usual assumption. Her mother was the youngest of seven kids now scattered all over the planet, and one attempt some years back to count all the resulting cousins and second cousins had been the only reason Maj got to stay up late enough at one of her aunt’s weddings to see her uncle Mike dance something he called the “Funky Chicken” on the head table. They had finally stopped counting at something like eighty cousins, and after hitting a hundred in the second-cousin count, everyone had given up and gone back to watching Uncle Mike.
“That’s right,” her father said. He looked over at her mother and said, “Elenya called me today — she couldn’t reach you, apparently.”
Elenya was one of Maj’s mom’s cousins, a cartographer who now lived in Austria with her formerly Hungarian husband and worked for the Austrian national cartographic service.
“Oh, gosh,” Maj’s mother said, “I’ve been in and out all day…. She didn’t leave a message in the system, though.”
“No, I guess when she couldn’t reach you, she figured she would catch me at work. Anyway, the visitor in question is one of her second cousins, a youngster named Niko. Apparently his father is having to get ready for a relocation from Hungary to the States, and their apartment is having to be closed up before the new one here is ready. School’s done there already, and there’s nowhere for the youngster to go. Elenya wanted to know if we had room and inclination to put him up for a few weeks until his father arrives to take charge of him.”
“Of course we do,” Maj’s mother said. “That’s what spare rooms are for.” She glanced up. “Is he English-speaking?”
“Fairly fluent, apparently.”
Maj was trying to make an image in her mind of exactly how the newcomer’s relationship to her own family would look if set up as a “family tree” diagram, and failing. “So if he’s Mom’s cousin’s second cousin…that makes him a…third cousin…twice removed?”
“Something like that,” Maj’s father said, looking bemused. “The ‘removal’ thing always confuses me. Anyway, his father will come and pick him up after he’s finished tying up some loose ends of his business back in Hungary.”
“Wow, Hungary, that’s exotic,” Maj said. She grinned. “This Niko kid…is he cute?”
Her father cleared his throat and gave her one of Those Looks. “A little young for you, Maj. He’s thirteen.”
“Will he play with me?” the Muffin demanded at the top of her lungs.
“How could anybody not play with you, you curly thing?” Maj’s father said, holding the Muffin out at arm’s length and shaking her around. The Muffin squealed with delight. He put her down and said, “Now, go on, get the park toy! We won’t have a lot of time, I have to get back…”
“…and do the laundry,” Maj’s mother said as the Muffin ran off for her toy.
“Rub it in, you slave driver,” Maj’s father said, a little wearily, and ran one hand over where his hair wasn’t anymore.
The Muffin’s yells of excitement receded down the hall. “Is this going to be okay for you, Maj?” her father said. “He’ll need some attention — I don’t want him to feel left out.”
“Dad,” Maj said, “don’t worry about it. Thirteen’s kind of young, but just because he’s young doesn’t by itself make him a nuisance. And besides, there’s the Net. He’ll either bring stuff with him that he’s interested in, or he’ll get at his home server through ours.”
Her father nodded. Again Maj caught that faintly worried look. Once might have been accidental, or caused by something else, but twice?
There’s something about this he’s not telling me, Maj thought. Telling us—
“When’s he getting in, hon?” Maj’s mother said, not turning around, still wrestling with the sugar plate.
“Tomorrow, around noon,” her father said. “It’s an AA flight into Baltimore-Washington. No point in making him take the train down. He’ll be wrecked as it is — he’ll have had a long trip. I thought I’d go up and get him.”
“You’re an angel,” Maj’s mother said, and turned around to kiss him soundly, holding her sticky-gloved hands up and away like a surgeon avoiding becoming nonsterile.
“I’ll go with you,” Maj said.
Her father smiled slightly, but there was just a little something missing about the smile. “Going to lay down the law early, huh?”
“I might not need to,” Maj said, and smiled. “But if he starts acting up, well, better get the corrective measures started right away.”
Her father chuckled and turned to head back down the hall to the bedroom end of the house. “Let me change out of this shirt,” he said. “If there’s anything else that needs to be washed, make a pile in the hall. Muffin, you ready…?”
Maj went to get herself a mug for her tea, and went fishing in the canister on the window for a teabag, while for the moment keeping her face turned away from her mother’s. What’s going on…? she wondered. It wasn’t that sudden guests from strange places were unusual. In this house, they weren’t.
What wasn’t usual was her father looking afraid….