Dinner Time

Dinner Time
Chapter	65 of 129 (list of chapters)
Published	September 16, 2011 (2011-09-16)
Page count	19
Major characters	Carol, Lucy, Jordan
Minor characters	Yashy, Chirpy, Lily, Blur, Sam, Mike, Daisy, Harvey
Locations	Lucy’s house
Collected in	Volume Three, Omnibus 1
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Lucy’s mother, Carol, has dinner on the table for her “three shining stars”, minus the one away at college. Between Jordan’s party plans, a full inquest into Paulo’s reputation, and one badly timed bird, it does not go down easily.

Synopsis

Dinner at Lucy’s house begins with Carol calling the kids down. Lucy’s door takes a little more knocking. Yashy and Chirpy sit locked out in the hallway, and the Lucy who finally emerges from her dark room has bags under her eyes. When Carol asks if something’s wrong, a memory of Mike looking down at her coldly flashes by before Lucy waves the question away.

Once everyone is seated, Jordan lays the charm on thick, which Lucy pegs as a play for a longer Friday curfew. Carol urges Lucy not to be scared of inviting Michael over, and asks whether he’s the reason she’s been so upset. Cornered, Lucy throws her brother under the bus: “Jordan’s trying to go all the way with some tenth grader at a party on Friday.”

Jordan hits back with the night Carol let Lucy sleep over at Paulo’s house. Carol remembers Paulo being very courteous that evening, but Jordan’s claim that he’s a manwhore who slept with two of Lucy’s friends thoroughly alarms her, and Lucy has to shout that she isn’t dating anyone. Both siblings end up grounded, Jordan “until he’s thirty”. A brief truce to roast the absent Sam lasts until Jordan teases Lucy about Mikie and gets slapped across the face.

Carol keeps pressing Lucy about Mike, insisting Michael is a very nice boy who respects Lucy, while Jordan wonders whether guys like him don’t fool around too. Lucy answers quietly: “So what if he does.” Carol tries reminiscing instead about a young Mike fretting over Lucy after a tumble, and tells her not to take a boy like that for granted. Lucy slams her glass on the table.

She stalks off for more soda, tears starting. Right then Blur squeezes in through the dining room window, mid-complaint about how “he” comes up with “all that mushy baby talk”. Lucy stares, then slams her glass down a second time. “I’ve lost my appetite.” Once she’s gone, Carol hangs her head and admits to herself that this really is getting worse.

That night, Carol knocks at Lucy’s silent door and offers her a spot on the couch, since Dad’s on TV. Harvey duly beams from the screen after a photo finish in the racing qualifiers, and Jordan sidles up to his lovestruck mother for one more run at the party question. He gets a flat “The answer is NO.”

Character dynamics

One “Mikie” tease too many.

• Lucy and Carol: This is the first chapter to spend real time on the mother-daughter relationship. Carol can tell her daughter is fading, but she has no idea the boy she keeps praising is the cause, so every kind word lands on the bruise. In her commentary, Veronica says Carol “was certainly aware something was up” but “felt a bit powerless”, as she didn’t want to smother her. By the end of the night, she stops pushing and, from the other side of Lucy’s closed door, offers her a spot on the couch.
• Jordan and Carol: Jordan is the indulged youngest, and Carol dotes on him right up until she doesn’t. He spends the whole evening angling for his Friday party and finishes it grounded indefinitely, a verdict Carol calmly repeats on the couch to close out the chapter.
• Lucy and Jordan: The siblings are at each other’s throats for most of the meal. They snitch on each other and trade insults all through dinner, and Lucy slaps Jordan outright over a “Mikie” tease. Even so, the two click into a seamless double act the moment absent Sam becomes the target.
• Lucy and Mike: Their friendship broke well before this chapter, but little of that has reached home. The family knows only that the two don’t hang around together anymore. Their last meeting, in Carry Me, ended with Mike staring down in irritation at a sobbing Lucy, and the cold look Lucy remembers at the table recalls that reception. When Jordan suggests Mike fools around like any other guy, she doesn’t even try to defend him.

Trivia & observations

One offhand line from Blur, and dinner is over.

• Dinner Time began life as a Bittersweet Club International member exclusive set in the middle of Volume Three, and was only posted publicly during the BCB Omnibus Kickstarter before being slotted into its chronological spot in the archive. Veronica’s commentary says she “always regretted Dinner Time being trapped behind a paywall, because there’s a lot of Lucy’s mother here, a character who’s not often depicted.”
• Most BCI exclusives are alternate-timeline stories, but Veronica confirmed on Tumblr that Dinner Time is “just plain canonical.”
• Jordan’s charge that Paulo slept with two of Lucy’s friends became a continuity wrinkle when the girls in question, Jessica and Rachel, were later established as Jordan’s own friends. Veronica has said on Tumblr that she simply hadn’t conceived of that friendship yet when she wrote this chapter.
• Harvey makes his first appearance in the entire comic here, and only on a TV screen. Lucy’s dad turns out to be a racer, fresh through the qualifiers in a driving jacket covered in sponsors, and nobody actually speaks his name on the page.
• For a chapter that spends half its dinner conversation on him, Mike is never present at the dinner. He appears only in Lucy’s brief memory and two sepia flashbacks.
• Per Veronica’s commentary, Jordan’s headphones are blasting “something super noisy like Rammstein.”
• The chapter opens with Carol confiscating Jordan’s lollipop so he won’t spoil his appetite, and closes with Lucy leaving the table because she’s lost hers.

Related chapters

• Another Shoulder: The sleepover Jordan drags up happened here. Paulo phoned Lucy’s house that night to say she was safe and offer to have her picked up, which is exactly the courtesy Carol cites in his defense.
• Back and Forth: Paulo’s flings with Jessica and Rachel both happen in this chapter, and they are the whole of the manwhore reputation Jordan throws around at the dinner table.
• On Our Own: Lucy is off on her own in the very next chapter, telling Augustus she has “nowhere else to go”. When he asks whether it’s family trouble, her face falls and she dodges the question, much as she did at this dinner.
• Piece of Cake: The family finally meets Paulo in person there. Jordan greets him with this dinner’s insult, upgraded to “self-centered manwhore”, while Carol has come all the way around, cooing that she’s “always wanted a little Somali in the family”.