Super Series (Book 4): Supervised Read Online Free Page A

Sometimes I felt like the black sheep of the family and that made me keep some distance between us. But I came back regularly for family dinners. It’s amazing what the promise of leftovers can do.
    “All my life,” I quipped as I followed my mother through the apartment and into the kitchen, throwing my coat on the couch as we passed through the living room. “Thank you for reminding me.”
    My mother was still wearing the frown she had opened the door with. It went perfectly with her apron, dark slacks, and mint colored turtleneck. Her hair was dark, shoulder length, and elegantly coiffed. She put her free hand on her hip and started stirring the sauce on the stove top. “No. I mean, I thought you would bring him .”
    “No, you didn’t.” I didn’t need to ask who “him” was. But I’d already told her that I wasn’t bringing Mike. What more did she want from me?
    Unlike me, Mom knew what to do in the kitchen. She nimbly went from chopping to stirring to grinding, while keeping everything in check. Mom’s super power was being a brainiac but her real talent was the way she made Martha Stewart look like a raggedy slob. Even when she was still assigned the New York Public Library, Mom was always the type of person to come home and spend three hours scrapbooking our precious moments after making us a four course gourmet meal. That kind of stuff made her feel alive the same way eating raw cookie dough at 10PM made me feel. Different strokes for different folks and all that.
    Even though she was retired now and my sister and I were out of the house, Mom still made it a point to cook like a four-star chef. And yet, it seemed like she was outdoing her normally high bar on that night. “Why are you making so much food?” I asked, dipping my finger in the sauce.
    Mom swatted my hand away. “I thought we would be having guests so I wanted to make an impression. But since that isn’t going to happen, I guess I just wasted a few hours of cooking on you.”
    I was about to throw up with the guilt of disappointing my mother yet again when I heard the front door open. Moments later my dad appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. He was a big hulk of a man in his youth but he had gotten a little rounder with age. He was still wearing his winter coat and his reddish brown curls were covered with a knit cap. He was holding a bag with a liquor store logo on the front. “Hey, Junior,” he said, using his childhood nickname for me. He’d been hoping for a boy but he made due with what he got. We had the same reddish brown hair and the same Super power, except it was a lot more respectable on him.
    “Hey, Dad. Whatcha got there?”
    He pulled a bottle of wine out of the bag and showed it to me proudly. “We only have beer in the house and your mother wanted to make sure we had something fancy just in case your new boyfriend wasn’t a hobo or a DJ or something.”
    *****
    “I can’t believe you beat me here. That has to be a first.”
    By the time my sister Ella had arrived and we got dinner started, I had already drunk three beers and had opened my fourth. I was going to drink my way through the night. Ella looked like a younger version of my mother—petite and put together. She was never late. She spent just as much time making things just-so as I did messing them up. In fact, I was just as surprised that I hadn’t been late as she was.
    Mom passed me a dish of stuffed asparagus. “I told her the wrong start time so she would get here on time.”
    “Figures,” I said, passing the dish on to Dad without taking anything. “You know, if people keep doing that to me, I’m going to start factoring it in and be even later than usual.”
    “You’re right,” Dad said. “We just thought it might be worth it if you were bringing a guest.”
    Ella took the asparagus from Dad. “Yeah, what happened with that anyway?”
    “I told Mom I wasn’t bringing him. I don’t know why she didn’t relay that to everyone