Irresistible? by Stephanie Bond

nodded agreeably. She was earning her pay, wasn’t she?
    She spied several shelters within walking distance, but a sign bearing the name “Blackwell” led them to one off to the right and up a small incline.
    â€œI thought this was your mother’s family,” Ellie said to Mark as they unpacked the food.
    He smiled. “It’s both, really. Without getting too complicated, my dad and four of his brothers married mom and four of her sisters.”
    â€œIs that legal?” Ellie asked.
    This time he laughed. “It’s legal, but sometimes I don’t think it was very smart. All of their children are double first cousins. It makes for a pretty tight-knit group.” He pulled a huge cooler from the trunk of his car, and led the way up the path. Gloria hurried ahead, visibly crestfallen that one of her sisters had beaten her to the punch and, having arrived first, was already spreading vinyl tablecloths over the ten or so picnic tables in the shelter.
    Within a few minutes, several carloads had arrived, and Ellie’s head spun from the names and faces she’d tried to commit to memory. Everyone, including Gloria, seemed impressed with the chocolate cake she’d made. “It’s low-fat, too,” she said to Gloria.
    â€œWell,” harrumphed Mark’s mother, giving Ellie a sweeping glance, “not everyone was meant to look like a stick.” The cake was thereby relegated to the lowly salad table, to occupy a spot beside a plate of unpopular celery and carrot sticks.
    After an hour, Ellie decided to take a break from the adults and mix with Mark’s young cousins. Delighted to discover several of them had brought in-line skates, she retrieved hers from her bag and joined them on the paved parking lot, ignoring disparaging looks from Mark’s mother. She taught the more experienced skaters a few moves and was soon enjoying herself very much, laughing in spite of the sick feeling building in her stomach. She felt like a fraud, but it was equally disheartening to know that even when she was being herself, Mark’s mother disapproved.
    As unobtrusively as possible, Ellie watched Mark mix with the odd collection of relatives. The fussy aunts, the crying babies, the joke-telling men were so different from the stoic manner he put on. Ellie wondered how he’d metamorphosed into the polished, articulate executive he’d become. He was obviously everyone’s favorite. It was gratifying to see he’d originated from homespun people—good, decent people with simple wants and needs whom he seemed to care about. This was a side of him she hadn’t expected to discover, and it caused an unsettling shift in the characteristics she’d assigned to him.
    It bothered her, too, that his family was so different from hers. He’d mentioned he was an only child, like Ellie, but Mark’s extended family was large and varied, warm and comfortable around each other. She tried to conjure up images of long-forgotten aunts and uncles from faded photographs she’d seen in family albums. Both sets of grandparents had died before she was a toddler. Ellie’s mother had been the youngest of her three siblings by nearly a generation—she wasn’t close to them at all. Her father had one brother left, living somewhere on the West Coast, she recalled. She wondered how many unknown cousins she had all over the country, and made a mental note to pump her mother for more information the next time they talked on the phone.
    She stole a glance at Mark, and felt a zing go through her at the sight of him, his head thrown back, laughing. She envied Mark Blackwell and his rowdy relatives. Ellie sighed. A big, close, loving family was all she’d ever wanted, and all she’d never gotten.
    Mark slapped his cousin Mickey on the back, enjoying a shared joke. His gaze slid to Ellie, an annoying habit he’d adopted in the last hour, along with every male