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Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: PG
Pairing: Alton Brown/Chuck the Neighbor
Feedback: Good lines, typos, etc.
Disclaimer: These characters are not my creations and I have no legal claim to them.
Notes: This concerns only Alton’s Good Eats series, in which Chuck and Marsha Brady-Brown are recurring characters.
Summary: Geeks of a feather tinker together.
***
Marsha had always had a feeling—she was sensitive to this sort of thing, had been ever since she was a little girl—that that man was going to be trouble. With his questionable fashion taste and his even more questionable odd-job lifestyle, he was just the sort of weirdo who would fascinate her poor, well-meaning but extremely deluded baby brother.
That absurd mini-golf course of Chuck’s alone, which in any other neighborhood would’ve earned a call to the local zoning board and a swift date with the bulldozer, had drawn Alton like a moth to a flame. He’d not only tolerated the monstrosity, but several times Marsha had even caught him poking about its hideous plastic turkey markers. Once she had even run into him at the Black Friday sales and, too shocked to see him doing something culturally normal instead of, oh, God knows, turning leftover cranberry sauce into some strange soup, she’d failed to realize till later that Alton didn’t have the lawn ornaments that could don little silver space-suits. All right, she’d never seen them on the plastic turkeys, but then, she’d never dared to venture beyond the first hole of…of…“Gobble Golf,” they called it. One didn’t need to see weirdness to know it existed. And anyway, Alton’s explanation about ”breast protection demonstrations” and “white not automatically meaning dry” had been, as usual, wholly unconvincing.
But up till the pot roast episode, Marsha had assumed that it was only like any other fixation of Alton’s: irritating, highly antisocial but thankfully brief. He’d never managed to stick with one thing for very long—unlike her, and his finger-pointing at her four divorces completely missed the point of her four very nice settlements—forever tinkering around, trying to reinvent the wheel with…with cheese rinds, or something absurd like that. However bizarre it was, Alton inevitably found something even more bizarre and moved on. Hard on his social skills, and on his long-suffering family, but at least reliable.
Except with Chuck and chuck, he didn’t move on.
According to Alton, it’d just been a chance meeting at the grocery store, a brotherly act of generosity towards another human being in culinary need. Right. And Marsha was a harpy. Oh, no, she could see through Chuck’s doofy little act to the cold, calculating, patient schemer inside. For that matter, Alton could see it, and yet, it somehow didn’t register inside that abnormally swollen head of his. Talking him into a cozy midnight beachwatch for a legendary squid man. Kidnapping his grill (and Lordy, but male attachment issues and outdoor cooking equipment was an entirely different cocktail-therapy session) to make him buy that chrome-plated gas-spewing behemoth. Recreating every single damn recipe that Chuck’s alleged mother had ever dreamed of, let alone actually gotten the dishes into a burnt mess over. Oh, yes, friends helped out friends in trouble. That was it, all right. Nothing more.
Well, Marsha had found it all very sketchy, and when she’d started digging, she’d only found her suspicions confirmed. Supposedly Chuck was her brother’s butcher, but what kind of butcher had to go around the neighborhood in a truck with a turkey head on it to drum up business? Any businessman of good repute had business come to them, everyone knew that.
And then there was his strange lack of knowledge of butchering basics that even she knew, and as far as Marsha was concerned, those cute happy cows and talking pigs on TV existed in a completely different universe than the neatly-packaged steaks and loins stacked up in the coolers of the local grocery. Meat just came cut and wrapped in plastic, and it all just stopped there. But Chuck? Chuck called himself a butcher and would throw a hissy-fit good enough for daytime television if someone called a turkey “frozen” when it was really “refrigerated” (they were both cold and slimy, so who cared?), but he couldn’t even tell what was stew beef and what was steak beef. Something was rotten, all right, and Marsha had a perfectly good nose with which to smell it.
Supposedly he’d had a girlfriend, but being a liberated modern woman, Marsha had a hard time believing that any girl with half a brain would allow that mop-haired loser to coo “Pattycake” at her. Anyway, after that so-called squid watch, Patty had never been seen again, though Chuck had been all too eager to show up on Alton’s doorstep with a sad puppy face, a so-called broken heart and a story about yet another recipe of his mother’s that Alton, of course, ended up making. And no, Marsha didn’t have refrigerator coolant in her veins—she simply was justifiably suspicious of a man who believed that old nursery tale about Jack and the Beanstalk was actually a primer on exploiting aerial agribusiness niches. Aerial agribusiness niches! Who honestly talked like that at home?
Well, her brother, and so Marsha sadly had to admit that Chuck certainly knew how to get his foot in the door. For such an ill-informed trailer-dwelling oddball, he could pick up fancy phrases like “mise en place” quicker than a dog would a dropped bone. Then he’d go around repeating them to people with that snooty look on his face, as if Alton hadn’t only taught him what they meant a couple minutes before. And he seemed to watch Alton’s quaint little cooking show religiously, given the way he was always pulling out funny old charts and turkey models with pull-out bits to illustrate what he was blathering on about, just like Alton. In fact, Marsha was almost positive that Chuck was snitching some of Alton’s leftover props.
It just wasn’t right. Alton on his own was perfectly capable of completely ruining any chance he had at being a well-adjusted member of society. He didn’t need any more bad influences, and he definitely didn’t need any misguided encouragement. So the day Marsha happened to call her brother to set a baby-sitting time for Elton and instead overheard Chuck sleepily telling Alton that he’d finished testing oil viscosities, she’d had enough. She got right in her car and drove over, ready to give Alton a lecture he wouldn’t forget on the dangers of letting unsavory characters get too close to you.
And…well. That had been—when she’d followed the trail of empty olive oil bottles upstairs, she’d—it wasn’t that Marsha was closed-minded. No, thank you, she had her little pin-on red ribbon and got along just peachy with the lesbian in her reading group. It’s just that…she’d never thought. Her baby brother, on top of—of anything, really. It always seemed Alton was too busy fussing with some little detail to really take hold of things.
“Well,” Marsha had said once they’d convened in the kitchen, olive-oil-less. “I suppose—”
“Marsha, I know you won’t understand but I am not letting you interfere with this, so you might as well give up. I’m happy and I like being happy,” Alton had said firmly. He’d gripped the kitchen counter so hard his knuckles had turned white as bleach. “You can grip and peck and criticize all you want, but I’m not changing a thing.”
“—that he’s not corrupting you into buying a nice little olive grove in Tuscany,” Marsha had primly finished. “It’s a new scam that I heard on the news just last night.”
Alton had looked oddly at her. “No. No, Marsha. I’m just doing the next episode about olive oil and Chuck, er, volunteered to help with the research, and things…kind of got out of hand.”
“I thought they looked very in hand to me, but then, I only saw your half of it,” Marsha had said tartly.
Alton had blushed.
“Mr. B? Is she…oh, never mind, I’ll just be…upstairs. Bye.”
Chuck’s head had popped in and out of the room faster than a Tupperware queen like Marsha could snap off a lid. But not before Alton had looked over, and his face had…fine, damn it all, he was her baby brother and she did love him, exasperating as he could be. And anyway, she had always dreaded the idea that he’d end up just like their bachelor Uncle Tommy, who stayed holed up in a cabin in the woods with poor gutted bunny rabbits hanging on the front porch. Of course Chuck hadn’t been anything like what Marsha would consider a preventative agent, but…after that many years of fretting over Alton’s social life, she really couldn’t afford to be choosy.
So Marsha had sighed and resigned herself to a lifetime of enduring a fully geeked-out household at Thanksgiving, since Alton still was the only member of the family who could cook a decent turkey. But she’d warned Chuck—if he called her “Sister B” one more time, he was going to wake up the next day to find his stupid plastic turkeys melted down and recycled into lovely pastel patio chairs.
***