“Kate raises her babies out there,” Uncle Tuffy said.
“Her babies?”
“That’s what I call my plants, dear,” Kate Walker answered from the stove where she was dishing out plates of food.
How sweet, Hannah thought. Calling her plants her babies. Kate came over and put a plate of food down in front of Hannah. Creamed chicken on popovers. How classic was that? Served on china that was edged with blue forget-me-nots, it looked like a picture from the pages of a woman’s magazine. Hannah raised a forkful to her mouth. Heaven.
“Mrs. Walker, this is delicious. But I hope you didn’t go to all this trouble because of me. We do want you to just be yourselves, you know. I mean, that’s the point, isn’t it?”
“Why, I didn’t go through any trouble at all, dear. Just creamed Sunday’s leftover chicken, as usual,” she said as she sat down to join them. “And please call me Kate.”
Leftovers. The word brought back memories. Until she’d started hanging around at Lissa’s house, the only leftovers Hannah had been familiar with were cold pizza or congealed Chinese. But at Lissa’s the leftovers morphed into what Mr. Hamilton called surprise pie. He loved to joke that you never knew what would be under the crust. Hannah had made it a point to eat at Lissa’s house whenever they had leftovers.
She took another forkful of food. It was so yummy that she wondered why the Walker family would want to eat the bland, oversugared cereal they would soon be representing. But eat it they did, and, according to Hannah’s data, they ate it in very large quantities.
“How long has your family been eating Super Korny Krunchies, Kate?”
“Well—um—let me see.” Kate seemed a little flustered suddenly.
Uncle Tuffy beamed. “I been eatin’ it since they been makin’ it,” he said proudly.
“And how long have you been hawking it?” Danny Walker asked as he came into the room and started to fill his plate at the stove.
“I do not hawk cereal,” she answered. “I am a research sociologist, working as an independent consultant.” It wasn’t Hannah’s style to sound so haughty, but Danny Walker seemed to bring it out in her.
“What’s a consultant?” Uncle Tuffy asked.
“That’s what some people do, Uncle Tuffy,” Danny said as he slid into a chair right across from her, “when they can’t find a real job.”
Kate looked up from her plate. “Oh, you poor dear. Have you been out of work long?”
Hannah gave Danny a look she hoped would freeze his mouth shut. “I am not out of work, Kate. I feel very privileged to be working with a company modern enough to hire a sociologist for this project.”
“Contest, you mean,” Danny said as he poured himself iced tea from the glass pitcher on the table.
Hannah preferred to think of it as a project. “As I was saying—this project—”
“But, Miss Ross, it was a contest, wasn’t it?” Tuffy asked, worry puckering his forehead. “We won, didn’t we? We get the year’s supply of cereal, don’t we? I’m gonna be on the box, aren’t I?”
“Yes, of course, you won—”
“Then it was a contest,” Danny said, his blue eyes mocking her like the devil. “So what did we have to do to win? Send in the most box tops?” he asked as he raised a glass of iced tea to his mouth.
“No, Danny,” Tuffy answered enthusiastically. “We won for being normal.”
Danny nearly spit out his iced tea. “Normal? Sweetheart, do you have any idea what normal is?”
Why couldn’t the man have an addiction to fast food, thought Hannah with a sigh. Why couldn’t he be out somewhere supersizing instead of sitting across from her, being super-irritating? “Your family was chosen, Mr. Walker, because they embody standards and values that Granny’s Grains wants to project.”
“So basically, sweetheart, this is just an advertising gimmick.”
“No. Of course not. And I would thank you not to call me sweetheart. I have a master’s degree in sociology. This contest—I mean project—was conducted in the same manner a scientific study would be.”
He gave a short laugh. “Well, that explains it then, professor. I always knew those studies weren’t worth the price of a two-penny nail.”
Hannah wished she’d taken her suit jacket off. It was feeling a little tight what with all the bristling she was doing. “Exactly what does that mean?”
“It means, professor, that if you think you’re going to find normal around here you’ve definitely taken another wrong turn.”
Forget mocking like the devil. Danny Walker was the devil. Her own personal devil. Just what she needed. How on earth had he slipped through the cracks of the carefully prepared questionnaires the finalists had had to complete? He’d taunted and ridiculed her from the moment his blue eyes had first locked on hers. He was cocky and obviously irresponsible. Jumping on her car like he was some kind of teenager, Hannah scoffed inwardly.
According to her data, Danny Walker was thirty years old. He owned his own building company but still lived at home with his parents, which was one of the reasons she’d chosen the Walker family. Multiple generations of a family living together was a trait that Hannah’s research determined a large number of Americans approved of today and looked to as an ideal worth upholding—and one of the reasons Hannah had always envied Lissa’s hodgepodge of a family. So Danny had definitely been a deciding factor when she chose the Walkers as Granny’s Grains Great American Family. But Hannah was beginning to wonder if she should have looked more closely at the family in Boise, Idaho, that had four children under the age of five. The fact that only one of the children could talk was definitely beginning to look like a plus.
Hannah decided to ignore Danny’s last remark and turned pointedly to his father.
“Mr. Walker, I believe you always come home for lunch. Is that right?”
“Yup. Always do. Nothin’ better than the wife’s cookin’,” said Henry before shoving another forkful of food into his mouth.
Henry Walker was a man of few words, apparently. Still, compared to her own father, he was almost glib. He didn’t exactly look like what she’d envisioned a steel company owner would, but his flannel shirt might play well to their target group. They’d have to get rid of the coveralls, though. They were a little greasy and just a tad more blue collar than the image they were going for. Though Hannah could see that he had once been a handsome man. It was clear that Danny got his eyes from his mother because Mr. Walker’s were brown, but the interesting angles of Danny’s face he owed to his father.
A slurping noise from the other end of the table brought her attention to Uncle Tuffy, who was noisily enjoying his iced tea. Although Uncle Tuffy also figured in Hannah’s choice, he was somewhat problematic, as well. But maybe his childlike demeanor would be endearing to middle America. The old, simple bachelor uncle. And they could always do something with his hair before the photo shoot.
But Kate Walker was the real find. She was perfect just as she was. In a pale yellow cotton dress and a flowered apron tied around her waist, her champagne blond hair worn softly around her kind face, Hannah could easily see her picture making a box of cereal more attractive to a harried working mother. Betty Crocker come to life.
She couldn’t wait to meet Sissy, the married daughter who lived close enough to take a walk over for a cup of coffee in the afternoon, and her husband and two children. Sissy was a stay-at-home mom. A rarity these days. And the Walkers were very much “hands-on” grandparents.
Hannah loved the whole Walker family setup. Sort of like a buffet of all-you-can-eat relatives. So there was one questionable dish on the buffet