DeeDee couldn't believe it. She accepted it was not some sort of joke, but she still couldn't believe it. Natasha engaged to some guy named Bob? And bringing him home for Christmas no less?

She had a thousand questions when Natasha phoned with the news, but her sister seemed to be taking some sneaky pleasure in not answering them in any great detail. She said she wanted everything to be a surprise. She said once the family met him, they'd understand instantly why Bob was the only possible man for her. DeeDee tried suggesting drinks before the big visit so that Bob might not feel so overwhelmed. It was partly at their mother's desperate urging for some crumb of information about the whirlwind romance, but even more so because DeeDee could not imagine a man erasing Rodney so completely from Natasha's mind when she was still so upset about Kurt that she'd sworn men off completely. At least until the New Year, or so she estimated.

Now, with four more sleeps till Christmas, she kept watch at the large front window of their parents' home, waiting for lights of a strange car to pull up, or, to hear Natasha vaguely speak of how much money Bob came from, for the wind of a private helicopter to blow all the snow from the driveway onto the neighbour's lawns. She so wanted to be happy for her sister. She just needed to be convinced she should be.

"Let me know when you see anything," her mother reminded her for the ninetieth time as she popped in and out of the kitchen where she was preparing a welcome dinner.

"They'll get here when they get here," her father said. "Why's it such a big deal?"

"I'd say getting you two to approve of a fiancé is humongous deal," DeeDee said.

"Yeah, well it's your mother who wants you to get married. I'd be fine if you two wanted to stay single forever, but since neither of you is the spinsterly type, I'll be damned if some lazy smooth-talker's gonna luck into what I've worked my whole life for. Can you imagine that guy she was dating running the family business? Looked like a shaved horse."

"You can't mean Rodney," DeeDee laughed.

"No, he wasn't too bad. The other one. Never trust a man who can't pull his lips over his teeth."

"Or pointy women!" Alexis yelled from the dining room.

"It's true," Alvin concurred.

"Pointy women," DeeDee snorted. "What shape am I, Dad?"

"You and your sister are both my sweethearts."

"And me?" her mother asked.

"You're a diamond, my dove. Now both of you stop yakking and come watch Scrooge. It's almost at the part where you can see the cameraman in the mirror."

DeeDee instead went back to her post. Finally, two spotlights hit the street, slowly leading the way for a dark car which stopped for a moment before turning onto the immense driveway. For the excitement it caused, it might as well have been Santa in his sleigh having missed the roof.

"They're here!" DeeDee called out, feeling strangely nervous. Her mother came flying out of the dining room hurrying to put on her house heels. Her father got up reluctantly, with the ejection lever on his recliner only willing to help so much. Rather than open the door, they all just sort of stood near the entrance as though waiting to greet a dignitary. That way, later, no one in particular could be held responsible for letting whatever might be approaching to enter.

Sure they would be watched from the window, Natasha told Bob to be in character the moment they stepped foot out of the car. He'd tried on many annoying personas for size, but he had to pretend to be someone Natasha could believably claim to have fallen for. That meant no bigots or hygienically challenged mountain men. He leaned towards a charming chauvinist for a while, then leaned into a barely sufferable know-it-all for a bit. He toyed with being a mama's boy, the world's biggest bore, and a tragic sort of sad sack. After a couple of weeks of talking to himself wherever he went, sometimes in accents, he'd decided to put several of his best bits in a cartoon car salesman's cocktail shaker and go with whatever flow poured out. "As long as he's the wealthiest guy on the lot," Natasha had said, "go for it."

Natasha popped the trunk filled with a dozen giant gift bags and waited for Bob to help her with them.

"It'd be funnier if I made you carry them."

"Funnier?"

"You know. Worse."

"I guess," Natasha grumbled. Bob at least offered to close the trunk, loudly, in case anyone could hear. He let her struggle to raise her weighted arm high enough to reach the door handle before he offered to do that too.

In they went.

"Hey guys! We made it!" Natasha shouted and then laughed to see everyone was already near the doorway waiting. She let the bags fall to the floor clumsily and then latched onto Bob's arm. "And by we, I mean... this is Bob."

Bob gave a confident smile, briefly sizing up his audience of three before introductions. Alvin Loy, about five-foot-eight, silver haired with the jowls and bit of extra middle weight of a man in his late seventies stood poker-faced save for a slip of a smirk, both intimidating and understandable.

"This is Daddy," Natasha said.

"A real pleasure! Shall I call you Daddy?"

"Not if you – "

"Too informal for me anyhow," Bob chided. "How about I just call you Mr. Loy?"

Before Alvin could respond, Bob grabbed his hand, tipped it over sideways and shook it in an awkward tug-of-war motion like two men at a saw on either side of a redwood.

"That's some handshake you got there," Alvin said archly.

"That's how we do it at the Lodge," Bob chuckled without elaborating. "But don't worry, my hands are insured."

"That's right, you're a doctor," Alexis said, as if she only sort of remembered it and hadn't been trying to search the internet for weeks for both 'Bob' and 'doctor' with neither a last name or a specific field of medicine. Bob dropped Alvin's hand so that Natasha could introduce her mother properly.

They looked little alike, Bob thought. Perhaps more similar in the cheekbones than what he'd briefly noted of her sister. Alexis was fair while her daughters had dark eyes and hair. She was also quite petite, but through the excited smile she had for the moment, Bob could see her upper canine teeth were quite pronounced. A lesson to anyone thinking her a harmless little thing.

"Are you a surgeon?" Alexis asked.

"A podiatrist, and I pretty much stopped at my DPM. I sit in on the odd shaving of a bunion but I never could stomach joint chiselling." He demonstrated the action to Alexis' forced, faint laugh. Bob laughed too and gripped both of Alexis' arms to shake her in lieu of a hug. "Aww, was that too much? Nobody ever likes to hear me talk about work, but I'm sure if you got an ingrown toenail, I'd never hear the end of it."

"I can imagine," Alexis said nervously.

"You might say they're my bread and butter, along with warts and corns," he said, staring a moment too long down at Alexis' feet.

Natasha's eyes met DeeDee's, brows wiggling as if to say, 'Did I do good or what?'

Now Bob moved to stand in front of DeeDee. He looked down at her feet too.

"I can't believe why I'm saying it," she said, "but my eyes are up here."

"So they are," Bob said, and so they were, like a pair of shiny headlights above a beaming smile that could cut through fog. Maybe not brain fog. He forgot his next line,

DeeDee let him off the hook. "Welcome to the family, Bob," she said, leaning in for a hug. It was too late to give her the shakey-arms routine too, so he figured he might as well hug her a little too long to be comfortable.

"Okay, I'm going to have to start charging you soon," DeeDee said, tapping him out. He released his grip with a grin on his face.

"Well!" Alexis said with a loud, break-it-ip clap. "You're just in time for dinner. Nat, if you want to take Bob upstairs and throw your things in your room, you can wash up and I'll start serving."

"Lead the way," Bob said cheerfully and once again followed Natasha through without offering to help her with any of the bags.

When they were out of sight, Alvin's face pulled up in pre-sneeze-like grimace. "Great, now there's a rooster loose in the house."

"Did you take your blood pressure medication today?" Alexis asked.

"You better toss a few more in the salad," he grumbled.

Alexis nodded for DeeDee to follow her into the kitchen to help plate resting steaks, but first, she handed her a butter dish to bring to the table with a basket of rolls.

"His bread and butter are ingrowns," DeeDee teased.

Her mother rolled her eyes. "Someone's got to do it."

Ten minutes or so passed before Natasha joined them. As she checked the wine glasses for spots, Alexis drummed her fingernails on the kitchen counter. "I know you're not doing what I think you're doing."

"He's just fussy about things like that," Natasha said dreamily.

"The caterer's don't come until tomorrow night for the party so I'm afraid what we have will have to do."

Natasha just smiled and opened the floor for questioning. "So, what do you guys think? Isn't he great?"

"I like his face," said DeeDee, and it was true. It was a non-descript, nice-guy face. She sensed there was goodness and gentleness in it. But as far as the rest of him, it was too early to call. "You seem happy," she said.

"Oh, I am!" Natasha said, hugging two glasses to her chest.

"What about his parents?" Alexis asked. "What do they think?"

"His father passed away six years ago. We haven't told his mother yet."

"Why not?"

"We can never make the visiting hours," Natasha said and took the glasses out into the dining room.

Alexis stared at DeeDee. "What does that mean?"

"I don't know, but we've got her trapped now," DeeDee said. She grabbed a bowl of Brussels sprouts, hot on Natasha's trail.

"I was wondering why they let us have him for the whole holiday," Alexis mumbled.

Natasha had already abandoned her place-setting duties to take her seat at the table. She left a chair between her and their father, who sat at the head.

"Is his mother in the hospital or something?" DeeDee asked.

"A gated retirement community. Super swanky. His parents used to own a massive real estate brokerage."

DeeDee went back into the kitchen, reported as much to her mother, and came back out with two steaks.  She served her father. "Where do you want Bob?"

"Next to Daddy."

Behind his cooling plate, Alvin was growing impatient. He looked at his watch. "Did he do a runner or what?"

"He's just freshening up," Natasha said as DeeDee settled into the seat across from her. "He can be a bit fastidious that way, but I figure it's because of his job."

"I would hope so," Alexis nodded, setting down the last dishes and taking her place at the other end of the table.

"Shaving off a bunion," DeeDee repeated in a playful, mocking tone.  Natasha leaned towards her.

"He shaves a lot worse."

"Like what?"

"Oh, calluses, fungus..."

"We are about to eat!" Alexis said, eyelashes fluttering in disgust.

"Are we?" Alvin asked, looking at his watch again.

"We should let him carve the turkey for Christmas," DeeDee suggested.

"Is it going to be Christmas by the time he gets down here? Your piggy wiggler has three minutes or we're starting without him."

Two minutes later, Bob appeared, his hair wet like he'd come from the shower. It's not what anyone understood 'wash up for dinner' to mean but there was no point starting off the meal with semantics. Alvin's knife slid through his steak before Bob had even taken his seat.

"So Bob," Alexis began, "Natasha's been very cagey. Would you please finally tell us how you two met?"

Bob smiled crookedly and lunged across the table for the peas excitedly. "Would you believe we just bumped into each other? I mean, literally, just like that," he snapped. He shoved a large chunk of steak in his mouth and then seemed to absent mindedly grab Alvin's water glass to wash down the barely chewed beef. It was a tough swallow before he continued. "All the world's on dating apps, but we slammed into each other just turning a corner. My briefcase flew open, my x-rays were sliding everywhere, and while she was down there picking them up, I noticed a few Tetromorium Caespitum on the sidewalk – those are pavement ants. They're usually dormant this time of year, but they were obsessed with what I'm pretty sure was a jawbreaker someone couldn't hack and spit out."

"Ants are a hobby of Bob's," Natasha chimed in. Alexis dropped her knife on her plate.

"I only have one farm. I'm not a nerd or anything. I'm just fascinated by how hard they work, by how important it is to them even though they couldn't be more insignificant. It's a reminder to stay humble."

"I don't think anyone can say that ants are insignificant to the ecology," Alvin said tersely, stabbing a roasted potato.

"The ones in my living room are. And you should see how they mobilize when there's an 'earthquake'." Bob winked and held his fists apart in a shaking motion lest anyone think he was speaking of natural disasters. "Anyway, there I was crouched over those ambitious little buggers, and Natasha thought I was having an attack of some kind and started yelling at me."

"Naturally," DeeDee said.

"And she sort of kicked me with her foot. That's when I said something about her wearing a very high arch for a day shoe. She said she had a high instep, as do a lot of dancers, and so we got to talking about the ballet. I hold season passes, and that led to our first date."

"Bugs and ballet," Natasha shrugged cutely.

"That could be your wedding theme," DeeDee said, poking fun.

"It could," Bob said. "Ants love a conga line."

Alexis looked at DeeDee in some kind of shock. Alvin's stare threatened to burn a hole through Bob's head. Natasha did her best to seem blissfully unaware.

Alexis cleared her throat. "Natasha also tells us you haven't told your mother about the engagement yet."

Bob lowered his eyes and pursed his lips. "Mother and I are not as close as I'd like us to be. If I'm being perfectly honest, she's always preferred by brother, Ivan."

"Maybe you were your father's favourite?" Alexis tried, for lack of any other response.

"No, that was my cousin Ken. His brother's stepson from a second marriage. And he vetted a few others before he settled on him."

"Are...are you close with your brother?"

"No, I'm not," Bob said petulantly. "To paint a picture, when I was twelve and an aspiring magician, he locked me in my escape trunk and took my place at a big talent show."

"Did he win?" asked DeeDee, and received a kick from her mother under the table.

"That hack? Please! His talent was reenacting a training scene from a Rocky movie. No, he didn't win, but if I let him, his life would always be the talent show, and mine would always be the trunk. I'm not introducing him to another fiancé. No way."

Natasha kissed his shoulder.

"Better to know you couldn't get out of that trunk before you went on stage, don't you think?" DeeDee said and hit him with another high beam smile.

"Well, I'm sure your mother will be thrilled with the news," Alexis said.

"We'll tell mother eventually, but she probably won't want to come to the wedding."

"Whyever not? That's ridiculous," Alexis tutted. "No mother wants to miss the most important day of her son's life."

"That's what I keep telling him," Natasha said supportively.

"Darling, you've only spoken to her twice, and once was through the intercom. She's always trying to get out of things with me. For example," he addressed the table, "after Dad died and I forced her to sell the brokerage and give up that big house for a more practical, modest bungalow she had problems with some street toughs tagging her fence..."

"Did you say forced?" Alvin asked, his mouth hanging open.

"Did I? I meant convinced. She was being very unreasonable. She couldn't get up those stairs anymore."

"What about a stairlift?"

"I thought about it, but what if she got stuck? Anyway, as I was saying, one day mom calls me, because Ivan is always conveniently out of town for these things, and says some street gang is targeting her and tagging her fence by spray painting penises all over it. I said, mother, you should call the police. She said, 'If I call the police those miscreants will know it was me and who knows how they'll retaliate'. Everyone else in the neighbourhood had dark fences. Mother was the only one with a white fence. I said, they're not after you personally. They just like the blank canvas, but she refused to let me paint it so – "

"You forced her to move out of there?" Alvin guessed with a tightening jaw.

"No. I said call the police. She said, 'I can't'. I said then just let it go. We'll have a service come by once a week and paint over the penises. She said it was unfair for her to have to pay and that the police should take care of it. I said, then call the police. She said she was afraid. I said, let's put up a camera. She said if the delinquents saw a camera, it would be full of real penises in no time. I said, then call the police."

At this point, Alvin sighed exasperatedly and didn't even try to cover it up.

"Well, we did this over the phone for weeks, and finally, like the good son I am, I said, if you're that scared you can move in with me and the ants. She said, 'Oh, no,  it'll be fine', and the next thing I knew, Ivan was telling me I needed to help mom move into her new gated retirement community."

"Never heard of one with visiting hours," DeeDee said.

"Ten a.m. to two! What is that? Anything rather than spend time with me, you get it?"

"I'm sure that's not true," Alexis said doubtfully.

"You think she made up the visiting hours?" Bob looked wounded.

"No, I think she made up the graffiti gang to get your attention."

"You think she tagged her own fence?" Bob asked as if the thought should have occurred to him and hadn't. "It's possible. I'm sure she remembers what a penis looks like, but she couldn't get up a ladder."

"Just the story in general!" Alexis said, stopping just short of shouting it.

"That's what I think," Natasha said. "You never actually saw the penises, sweetie. She probably made it all up or made it sound worse than it was because, in some backward way, she wanted to spend more time with you."

"Could be. It would be nice to think so. He shrugged and let a wistful look come over him. "You know, the zombie ant will climb to the top of the tallest blade of grass it can find and then stand up and wave its little arms around to get attention, until eventually a bird eats it. Maybe it's something like that." He dipped a piece of steak on his fork directly into the table's gravy boat. "Of course, it's because of a small parasitic fungus that crawls into the ant's brains and manipulates it in order to get inside a bigger host body, so maybe not. Unless mom's mind is going."

"Excuse me for a moment, everyone," Alvin said. On advice from his doctor, any time he felt his blood pressure surging he was to leave where he was to do some breathing exercises in another room. His nostrils started whistling before he even got up.

"Natasha," Alexis said, anxious to find something less concerning to talk about. "Where is your engagement ring? It's the first thing you should've shown us when you walked in the door."

"It's on my toe," Natasha beamed.

"Of course it is," said DeeDee beyond amused as she watched Bob pat her sister's head.