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Bianca should know who her collaborator’s husband was. But Mama was absorbed in pushing her salad croutons into an arrangement of eyes, nose, and mouth, creating a Green Man.
    Claude came alive at that. “Does he have to patent his archeological finds to keep other people from claiming them?”
    “Well, he publishes his findings, but everyone knows which archeologist is working where. You can’t just go in and start digging. He can’t keep his finds anyway. Most countries have preservation acts and they own what you excavate.”
    He looked disbelieving. “Then why bother?”
    “For the same reason you invent things, sweetie,” Lynn said, rolling her hazel eyes at me. Men, ya gotta love ’em. “You want to be the first to make a discovery and get recognition for it.”
    “Screw recognition. Show me the money. I’m not inventing stuff for the good of mankind.”
    “That’s for sure,” Puck said.
    Claude slammed down his fork. “Don’t patronize me, you little weasel. That company in Japan is giving Paper Pusher very serious consideration.”
    Paper Pusher? It sounded like an overworked clerk. “What’s Paper Pusher?”
    “Well . . .” He gave me an appraising look, then decided I was too dumb to steal the idea. “The Japanese are far in advance of us in many areas. They have toilets that not only take your temperature, they can analyze your blood sugar. My device senses when you are finished and automatically releases five squares of bathroom tissue right into your hand. At a certain content weight, it will give you ten. There’s no having to fish around for a loose end and touch toilet paper that someone else has touched. The Japanese are extremely fastidious.”
    “The Japanese are bad ,” Eve cried, back in the conversation. “Your father hated the Japanese, and so should you.”
    “That war’s over, Mama,” Puck said easily. “After they surrendered, Dad didn’t hold a grudge. My grandfather died in the South Pacific, trying to take Chichi-Jima Island when Dad was a baby,” he explained to me in a lower voice. “There may have been torture involved.”
    So Nate Erikson’s father had died in World War II and Nate himself had fought in Vietnam. I couldn’t imagine either Claude or Puck holding a gun.
    We were finishing our salads when there was a clatter from the archway and a woman pushed a food cart into the room. She had on a white apron over a black turtleneck sweater and pants, and looked to be in her late sixties. The golden braids twisted across her head made her look like a merry hausfrau. They also showed she was no stranger to L’Oreal hair coloring.
    When she placed a platter of bluefish and bowls of mashed potatoes and zucchini on the sideboard, my appetite spiked.
    I could get used to this.
    But Puck looked over at the food and groaned. “Oh, Gretchen, not fish again! Don’t you know how to make anything else?”
    “Get a life,” Bianca scolded him. “You aren’t a cute little boy anymore.”
    “And you like fish because?”
    “It’s good for me.”
    The woman turned and looked at him, head cocked. “No dessert for you, Master Puckie.”
    It was so unexpected that I started to laugh. “I love bluefish,” I assured her. “Any fish that has a real flavor. Especially with mashed potatoes.”
    Puck rolled his eyes at me. “Suck-up.”
    And I worried that the conversation would be too sophisticated. That the family would be too bereaved to want to talk.
    I felt as if I had been dropped into the middle of a Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall or Radio Days. I tried to think of a literary analogy, but the best I could do was the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Yet except for the toast to the urn, it seemed to be business as usual. Bianca had mentioned another sister. Perhaps she was the one who had lost her child along with her father. Perhaps the mood was more serious when she was present.
    “Thank you, Aunt Gretchen,” Claude called as she left, giving Puck a disgusted shake