Whatever.
“How about you?” she asked him. “How did you and Harvey meet?”
“The woman I was seeing at the time was best friends with the woman Harvey was seeing at the time. Neither of those relationships lasted, but Harvey and I did.” He grinned. “I moved to Portland for the job and Harvey was the guy who invited me into his pick-up basketball league. We hung out a lot when we were both single. We were out together the night he met Theresa.” He snapped his fingers and pulled out his phone once again. “Also at a bar. I’ll add that to the list.”
“The Hedgeman?”
“On your list, too?”
“Great minds.”
He leaned in and put his hands on the table. Sent her a Gary Cooper at High Noon glance. “My shooting range is going to be way cooler than yours.”
She laughed. Genuinely amused. “I can’t imagine going to a shooting gallery with Theresa. I’d be in fear for my life.”
Theresa was a fun and spontaneous woman, but she was also the kind of person who forgot what she was doing when she had a thought she wanted to share. Rose pictured her with the trigger half depressed suddenly turning to Rose to tell her something important she’d just thought of.
Matt obviously knew Theresa well enough to get the joke. “I definitely don’t want you to go to a hen party and end up on my operating table.”
Their gazes connected and she felt a strange jolt of awareness. Not that there was anything sexy about an operating table, but, well, sizzle was sizzle. And strangely, the two of them had it tonight. Most likely this absurd attraction was the result of the emotional highs of delivering a healthy baby and getting Belinda Tate through the ordeal safely.
Not that she had any interest in Matt women-fall-at-my-feet Vasilopolous, tonight or any night. She took a sip of beer.
He did the same. “Is your brother really a cop?”
“Yes, he really is.”
“I figured you were from a family of bluebloods. I guess, if I thought about it all, I’d have imagined your brother would run his own hedge fund or something.”
She was amused, but not surprised. Rose had consciously set herself apart from her family when she was young and everything about them embarrassed her. Now she’d been doing it unconsciously for so many years that she supposed she projected the background she wished she’d had rather than the one she grew up in. She never lied about her past, though.
“My family is about as far from high-class as, say, Paris, France is from Paris, Texas. My parents are truly amazing people. Loving, giving, the kind of folks public television makes documentaries about.” And at least that was one horror she had been spared.
“Seriously?”
She nodded. “My 19-year-old mom was already pregnant when she met my dad.” She smiled. “Jack is the kind of man who is all heart and no practical sense. They got married, had the kid and then sort of collected more children.”
She could feel his attention on her. His focus grew more intense. “Collected children?”
“Yes. In rural Oregon in the 70s and 80s there were communes and loads of alternative people going around in bare feet wearing hemp clothes and living off the land with no skills. Naturally, they started having children.” Mostly she had contempt for these people; contempt for anyone who brought children into the world without being ready. She’d long ago realized that her parents were much nicer than she was. “Word got around that if you had a kid you didn’t know what to do with, maybe didn’t want anymore, Jack and Daphne were your people. It was like a no-kill dog shelter for kids. And meanwhile, they were having their own babies, so we ended up with a family of eleven kids.”
“Wow. You sound pretty hostile.”
“More frustrated. Of course, I think they’re wonderful people and what they did was amazing and generous. But growing up as one of eleven children wasn’t easy. We always had plenty to eat and lots of love but I hated feeling poor.” She made a face. “Wearing hand-me-down clothes that were awful to start with.”
He was nodding as though he knew what she was talking about. “Not enough attention, right? Not enough money for field trips, or the new sneakers everybody had, but the discount store brand was good enough for you.”
It was her turn to be surprised. “Wow, you’ve been there.”
He grinned. “And have the emotional scars to prove it.” He pushed back his chair, also pushing back from the statement he’d just made. “Not really. My folks emigrated from Greece with nothing. Barely any English, next to no money, all they had on their side was youth and a naïve belief that everyone in America could be rich. Luckily they were also willing to work hard.”
The easy response was to say that it must’ve worked out pretty well for them since their son was a surgeon. But one thing Rose’s background had taught her was that the easy response was so often the wrong one. She asked, “How many in your family?”
He laughed. “Compared to your folks, mine were rank amateurs. Only five kids. But when you grow up hearing how your parents struggled to give their children all the advantages of growing up American, how they sacrificed so you could have the opportunities and education they were denied—and don’t forget that old chestnut that everybody in America can be rich—well, you end up pretty driven to succeed.”
“Are all the kids in your family successful?”
“Yeah, pretty much. One brother’s a lawyer, one sister’s an engineer, my other sister designs websites. My younger brother worked in a Greek restaurant. Well, we all did. We speak Greek and we know how to work hard. I put myself through school thanks to the Greek place and student loans, but my youngest brother, Alexei, he started his own food truck.”
