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Margaret Quilliam tucked a sprig of holly under the pig's ear and stepped back to regard her work.
'Guy I knew in the old neighborhood looked a lot like that after he welshed on a bet,' said Alphonse Santini. He flung both hands up and cowered behind them in mock self-defense. Quill, who'd fled into the kitchen in search of respite, hadn't been pleased to find him there. 'Hands out' was a gesture she was becoming all too familiar with, since Al had spent a large portion of the last three days harassing Quill and her sister Meg, when he wasn't aggravating the citizens of Hemlock Falls. The gesture always accompanied his notions of what was funny. Al considered himself quite a humorist.
'I'm sorry,' she said, 'about the fund-raiser. You've arrived at Hemlock Falls at sort of a peculiar time in the town's political history.'
'That bitch Cahill,' he said without rancor. 'The press. Go figure.'
'I don't think...' Quill paused. For all she knew, Nora may have prompted the H. O. W. revolt at breakfast, although to be fair, she couldn't see how.
'So. This roast pig's for a special occasion? Or what? Kinda early for Christmas.'
The pig contemplated the ceiling. Meg contemplated the pig. Quill, whose testiness was increasing as the time for her lunch with Myles drew nearer, drummed her fingers on the butcher block counter. She stopped, not wanting to be rude. Ex-Senator Santini hacked into a well-used handkerchief, wiped his nose, and repeated his question about the roast pig. One of Meg's sneaker-shod feet began to beat an irritable tattoo on the flagstone kitchen floor. Quill held on to her own temper firmly and said in as diplomatic a tone as she could manage, 'It's a special order for a men's organization in the village. Now, to get back to your wedding reception, Mr. Santini.'
His eyes slid sideways at Quill. 'I keep the title Senator, you get my drift? Even though I lost this time around. Most of my compadres call me Senator AI.'
Quill, who'd been refusing Mr. Santini the honorific out of nothing more than perversity, decided to relent. For one thing, Senator Santini did have a miserable sloppy cold - or allergies - and he wasn't complaining about it. In Quill's opinion, far too many people with colds made their misery yours. For another, he was short for a man, about her own height, which made his frequent demands for attention more understandable, at least to Quill.
Quill had never gotten used to the fact that celebrities in person looked smaller than they did on television. This shrinkage made her sympathetic. Or maybe, she thought, they weren't smaller than they appeared. Maybe she'd only met celebrities who were smaller than the average person. The alternative was that her subconscious enlarged public figures based on the size of their reputations, which still didn't explain why she'd expected Senator Al to be bigger than he actually was, since his politics were so awful.
He certainly wasn't conventionally good-looking. He was balding, with lank brown hair that flopped over his ears. He had small, rather watery blue eyes and a pot-belly. None of this explained his undoubted appeal. Despite his height and rather flabby appearance, ex-Senator Al Santini definitely had charisma. The charisma might have been due to his voice, which was deep and resonant. Since he had a heavy Long Island accent, Quill didn't think so. It'd be a challenge to paint his portrait. She'd have to capture the charm and still get across the greed, vulgarity, and boys-in-the-back-room politics that had - finally, after three terms - lost him the race for the Senate.
'Quill?' Santini rapped his knuckles on the butcher block counter. 'I got snot on my face or what?'
'Sorry, Senator,' Quill said. 'You were saying?'
'We got a few more people coming than we'd planned on.'
Meg clutched her forehead, groaned, and said mildly, 'Your mother-in-law-prospective mother-in-law, I should say - has been taking care of everything just fine. Senator. Did you check this new number with her?'
Senator Al waved largely. 'She's busy with the other stuff. My guys've been on the horn. I'm telling you, we've gotta be prepared for a crush.' Meg and Quill carefully avoided looking at one another. Senator Al had been unseated in a rash of very bad publicity six weeks ago; Newsweek's editorial on the demise - of his career had been scathingly final. Earlier in the week, they'd wondered if anyone would show up at all.
Meg said patiently, 'Your fianc‚e Claire booked our Inn in April for a December wedding. In May you gave us the count for the reception - small, you said, since you didn't want a media circus. Forty, you said. Twenty of the immediate family, and twenty of your nearest and dearest friends. In the last few days you've gone from twenty to forty to seventy. Now, four days before the wedding, you want to bounce it to two hundred!?'
Meg's face got pink, which made her gray eyes almost blue. Her voice, however, remained soft, although emphatic. 'Our dining room won't take two hundred. I can't cook for two hundred. Not in four days.'
Al Santini waved expansively. 'Hire all the help you need. Money's no object.'
This blithe disregard for the fiscal gave Quill a clue as to a possible reason why the senator's campaign finances had occasioned such investigative furor from the national media.
Meg stared at him expressionlessly. 'If I could hire somebody else to do what I do, do you think I'd be doing it?'
'Say what?'
Quill, grateful for Meg's unusual equanimity, and not too sure how long it would last, interrupted, 'My sister's a great chef, Mr. Santini. A three-star chef. There aren't a lot of people who can cook with her style. I know that's one of the reasons your fianc‚e and her family wanted to have the wedding here. And, honestly, this last-minute change just isn't possible. You can't expect Meg to do a five-course dinner for two hundred. Not with this kind of notice. And not in our dining room. We don't have the space.' Especially, she added to herself, for a guest list that was unlikely to materialize.
Senator Al put a large hand on Meg's shoulder and bent down to look her earnestly in the eye. 'Five-course dinner? Am I asking you for a five-course dinner? Absolutely not. No question. But I got a problem here, you understand that? I got a hundred, maybe two hundred people that are going to be coming to my wedding.'
'Which is it?' Meg asked patiently.
Santini shrugged. 'Who knows? All I'm saying is we gotta prepare for the contingency.'
'Contingency,' Meg said. 'Right.'
