Fair Play by Deirdre Martin Page B

Her father’s eyes, huge and distorted behind his thick glasses, were glued to the TV set. “Your mother and I invited him,” he replied distractedly.
    â€œWhat?” Theresa spluttered. “Why?”
    Her brother shook his head disapprovingly. “Whatever happened to ‘Hello, how ya doin’,’ maybe taking your coat off?”
    â€œButt out,” said Theresa.
    Phil nudged Michael in the ribs. “Nice girl, huh? Talks to her brother like that.”
    Michael’s hands went up in a gesture of surrender. “Hey, I don’t want to get in the middle of anything here.”
    â€œToo late,” Theresa mumbled. Grim, she slipped out of her coat and hung it on the coat rack by the front door. Then she sidled over to her father’s chair. “I bought you some nougat,” she cooed.
    Her father glanced up into her face appreciatively. “ Cara mia. How sweet.”
    Her voice dropped down to a whisper. “But you’re not getting it until you tell me what he’s doing here.” She jerked a thumb in Michael’s direction.
    Her father looked back and forth between her and Michael in bewilderment. “You two know each other?”
    Oh, that was rich. That was good. She turned to Michael with what she hoped was a storm brewing in her eyes. You are going to rue the day you ever cooked up this little scheme, Puckhead.
    Michael obviously had no trouble reading her expression, because he volunteered to answer the question—fearful, Theresa assumed, that if he didn’t come clean she would soon divest him of more than his teeth.
    â€œTheresa’s agency is putting together the PR campaign for Dante’s.”
    Theresa’s father nodded, impressed. “Is that so?”
    â€œYes, it is,” Theresa replied. “Now tell me why you invited him.”
    â€œBecause he’s a very nice boy,” her father declared. “He stopped over here at the beginning of the week with some food from the restaurant for us and wanted to know all about how I was feeling. They noticed we hadn’t been to Dante’s for a while.”
    â€œSo—?”
    Her father shrugged. “It was your mother’s idea. Ask her.”
    â€œFine. I will.”
    She spun on her heels and was heading toward the kitchen when Phil called out her name. “What?” Theresa snapped, stopping dead in her tracks in the dining room, where the table was all set and ready to go.
    â€œHand over the nougat.”
    Doubling back to the living room, she fetched the bag of nougat from her purse and hurled it at her brother like a baseball. “She’s got some temper on her, that one,” she heard him say to Michael as she disappeared into the kitchen.
    The tableau greeting her was one she’d seen a hundred times before: her mother standing at the counter, arranging the ingredients for the antipasto on a platter with the precision of an artist, while her sister-in-law, Debbie, stood at the kitchen table, putting together a salad. Farther down the table, Theresa’s niece, Vicki, and nephew, Philly Junior, ages seven and nine respectively, sat coloring. Baby Carmen, three months old, sat gurgling in a baby seat on the floor. When the two older children spotted Theresa, they jumped up and ran to embrace her.
    â€œAunt Theresa! You’re here!”
    â€œAunt Theresa, you look beautiful!”
    â€œHey, rugrats.” She leaned over to kiss both of them and without prompting, slipped off the phalanx of silver bracelets encircling her left wrist and handed them to Vicki. This was their own little tradition: Whenever Theresa came to Sunday dinner, she would give her bracelets to Vicki to wear for the duration of her visit. The little girl loved slipping them on and off and playing with them.
    â€œHey, Ma.” Theresa gave her mother a kiss on the cheek, doing the same with her sister-in-law.
    â€œDid you meet Michael?” her mother