I led the way down to the kitchen and started pulling things out of the fridge while Bambi turned on the oven and Neeka got out the sauce and opened the crusts. Connie hunted through the cabinets and assembled a collection of spices. She seemed to be looking for something specific.
"I know you have some," she said, "you can't make a real pizza without them." She rooted in the back of the cupboard and pulled out a glass jar. "Here it is! Caraway seeds. The essential ingredient."
I looked at Bambi to see if she knew what a caraway seed was. She shrugged and shook her head.
Connie said, "I've made lots of pizzas. Please, let me do these. You tell me what you want and I'll make them."
There was a general agreement that we should let the expert among us build our pizzas. We decided on four pies — cheese, pepperoni, sausage, and a combination.
Connie showed us how to paint the sauce on the crust so it wouldn't be too soggy, how to add the spices to the sauce so the moisture would bring out the flavor, exactly how many caraway seeds to add, how much cheese, and what order to add the toppings so they wouldn't dry out or burn. I had no idea there was so much to know about making a pizza, but when they were finished and ready for the oven, they looked great.
We didn't have a stone to cook them on, so Connie made do with a flat-bottomed pan and some corn meal. She explained how the corn meal would char, but the crust would get crisp in the hot oven and the pizzas would be ready in just fifteen minutes.
When we were ready to cook them, Bambi asked, "Would you mind if Bud and Jim had some too? I know the smell of the pizza will drive them crazy and they've been very considerate and left us alone all afternoon. Besides, we have plenty of food."
No one objected, and Jolene and Neeka were very much in favor of inviting their guys to join us.
I think Bambi assumed that I would do the honors and run upstairs to fetch the boys. I surprised her when I turned to Jolene.
"Would you run upstairs and ask them to join us? Their rooms are the second and third doors on the right on the third floor. If you get lost, just open all the doors until you find them."
"OK!" she agreed with a smile. She had taken two steps toward the door when I stopped her.
"Jolene! Leave the shirt!"
The grin split her face from ear to ear. She shucked out of the nightshirt and skipped out of the kitchen toward the stairs.
"What was that all about?" Connie asked, after Jolene was out of earshot.
"Jolene has had this thing about streaking ever since a friend of ours tricked us into running around naked at school the other day," I explained. "She's discovered that she loves being naked and showing off. Now she's going to get to show off for two boys, one of whom is her boyfriend. Add to this that she has a fear of being alone with a boy. That's a long story, but she and Bud have been trying to work through it. I think she is going to be so distracted by being nude that she might forget to be scared."
"That's so sweet!" Connie exclaimed. "Jolene is just the cutest thing. And she seems so willing and eager to try new things. She must have been pretty repressed before she met you, Sam."
"Oh, she was," Janice said. "I met her the same time Sam did, but she and I have had more time to get to know each other. Whenever we get together with Sam, it's just sex, sex, sex." For some reason, everyone thought that was funny as all get-out.
"She's led a very sheltered life," Janice continued when the laughter died down. "But now she's decided she wants to make up for it by doing every wild thing she can. I think she has adopted Sam as her role model."
"Oh my God!" Neeka said. I gave her a very stern look and put my fists on my hips. "Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "It's just that she could have picked... I mean she really should have... well, uh, nevermind."
Apparently, whatever explanation she was about to put forth wasn't really necessary. Janice, Connie and Bambi all howled with laughter and no amount of cross looks and foot-stamping on my part could make them stop. While they laughed, I thought about it and it didn't seem that funny to me. It seemed terribly sweet and touching that Jolene would want to try to emulate me. I thought that I needed to take her aside and explain how much time I spent studying and keeping in shape and going out on the back of an incredibly overpowered motorcycle driven by a lunatic to strip the jeans off purse snatchers. Hmmm. Maybe it was pretty funny after all. Maybe I was just a little too, ah, eccentric to be a good role model. All the same, I promised myself that I would talk to her about the studying.
The first pair of pizzas were just out of the oven when Jolene came back with Jim and Bud. She and Bud walked in with their arms around each other and I was again struck by her childlike personality and how her smile made her so radiant.
I was so aware of Jolene that I almost missed Bud's reaction to seeing Bambi in her new persona. He stopped short and his eyes almost fell out of their sockets. Jolene noticed and squeezed his waist. Jim was less subtle and thumped him on the back of the head with a flicked finger.
"Guys," I said, thinking that we might as well do some unnecessary introductions so that we could establish that everyone knew everyone else and give Bud a chance to get over finding out that his mother was not only beautiful and sexy but was also a hot teen fox. "Jolene, Neeka, Janice, Connie, Bambi — this is Bud and this is Jim. Bud, you remember Connie? Good. I'm sure you remember Bambi? She decided to join us at the last minute."
Bud swallowed hard and valiantly tried to be casual about the situation. At first, I was afraid he was going to give the game away. But then I realized that his staring and stammering would probably be seen as just a normal amount of shock at suddenly finding himself in a roomful of attractive girls.
"Bud was telling me just the other day how he thought Bambi and I looked more alike than most sisters," I said, giving Bud his cue.
"Well, he's certainly right about that," Janice said. "Anyone could tell you two were sisters without being told. You may not see it, but it's obvious to the rest of us."
Bud smiled at me and then at Bambi. Now that he knew the game and he had got over the initial shock of meeting my sister, he wanted to play, too.
"I said that you two 'acted' more like sisters than most," he corrected. "You two think so much alike, it's almost scary. Now, the Hendersons look alike, but they don't think or act that much alike. Are we going to eat that pizza, or just let it lie there and get cold?"
"Trust a boy to let his stomach do the talking," I said. "OK, let's hand out the plates."
"Isn't Mrs. Reynolds going to be joining us?" Connie asked. I hadn't thought of a good reason why we hadn't invited the woman of the house to join us and the question caught me off guard. I looked at Bambi to see if she had any idea how to answer the question, but she couldn't think of anything either. It was Jim who came to our rescue.
"I think Mom's very involved in something right now and just can't get away. I know she would like some of that pizza though. You might save her a piece so she can eat it later, when she's not so tied up."
I thought that was a good answer and an excellent suggestion. It would be a lot like leaving cookies for Santa Claus, though. I wondered who would actually get to eat the pizza.
Since there wasn't enough table space in the breakfast room for all of us to eat together, we took our plates and our sodas and went down to the family room where we could spread out. This was one of those occasions when the huge room looked less like a furniture showroom than usual. Small groups of people split off into different seating areas to eat and talk. Jolene and Bud went as far from everyone else as they could get and not trigger Jolene's phobia. Janice and Connie split off as well. Jim, Bambi, Neeka and I went to the couch to eat.