Mallitzfest – that was what my dad and Max’s dad called our annual get together. It was a mix of our family names. They were the Malloys, Irish as you like, red hair, freckles, big personalities. We were the Spitzes, German to the core, serious, precise, well-ironed. There was a lot of beer and a lot of sausages.
Max and I had been good friends when we were little. Same elementary school, same high school, but we had gone our own ways to college. I hadn’t been to a Mallitzfest for a couple of years. Max and her sister had grown up. Max was slender with her hair straitened and cut into a short bob. Her sister, Mary, was a year or two younger, a carbon copy of her big sister but a little curvier and with a mane of long flame curls.
‘Hi Joe,’ said Max. She was carrying a couple of boxes of beers towards a huge tub of iced water. Her sister, unloading another box into the bucket, blushed furiously and said nothing. ‘You going to stand there like a potato or are you going to help?’