Families and Other Enemies

by Christina Dodd

  More of a stickler than Kellen, it appeared.

  Their daughter was a Di Luca descendant.

  Max did not appreciate their daughter being dismissed for whatever reason. “What happened to Nevada?”

  “I went to Nevada. My aunt didn’t know me so I drove north and—”

  “Didn’t stop here.”

  “I should have, but I... Max, I didn’t know what to say. I don’t know what Rae needs from me.”

  In a crisp tone she had never before heard from Max, he said, “Maybe you should ask Rae what she wants.”

  Uh-oh. “No! Listen!”

  His hand over the phone, he bellowed, “Rae! Your mama wants to talk to you.”

  In the background, she heard a little girl’s seven-year-old voice shrieking, “Yayyyyy!” The phone was dropped, picked up, then there she was, Rae Di Luca, the person Kellen most feared in the whole world. “Mommy! Where are you? I can’t wait for you to come home.”

  “Well, I—”

  “I’m going to show you my princess dolls and my dollhouse and my slimeball and my secret tree house—”

  Max’s voice sounded in the background. “You have a tree house?”

  “No.” A pause, then Rae continued in a more subdued voice. “Grandma made cookies and burned the bottoms. Do you make burned cookies? I’ve got three weeks of school and then it’s summer vacation. Can you come in time for my class party? My friends could see you and that would be awesome! Roxy Birtle says I don’t really have a mommy. You could be my show-and-tell!”

  Kellen realized Rae had stopped talking. Kellen took a breath, trying to think of the right answer. “I hope I can come to your class party. Right now, I’m in Virtue Falls, and I have responsibilities and duties I’ve committed to perform.” Oh, no. She sounded so stultified, using big words no seven-year-old would understand.

  But Rae asked, “Are these solemn responsibilities and duties?”

  Kellen thought of her promise to appear at the food pantry. “I’m going to prepare soup at the Catholic shelter so the homeless will not starve. Yes, my responsibilities and duties are solemn.”

  “Okay!” Rae’s cheerful note was back. “When you come home, we’ll have a good time.” She lowered her voice. “Don’t tell Daddy about the tree house.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I love you, Mommy.”

  Kellen found herself caught on a hook through her throat. Rae meant it; she put all her youthful enthusiasm into those words. Yet how could Rae love Kellen? They had barely met.

  But Max had kept Kellen alive in Rae’s mind as the mommy she had never known—kind, generous, loving... “I am so happy to know you’re my daughter.” Kellen didn’t say I love you; she had trouble saying that. For her, love had never turned out well. But she was happy Rae was her daughter. Kellen might not remember giving birth, might not remember Rae as a baby, as a toddler, as a little girl, but if she had gone through her whole life without knowing about Rae, that would be a tragedy, and right now, she truly understood its weight. “Rae, I will see you soon.”

  “Okay! Yay! Bye!”

  Abruptly, Rae was gone and no one picked up the phone, so Kellen held on, feeling like a fool, until it was clear no one was going to officially end the call, and she hung up.

  * * *

  IN THE KITCHEN at the Oregon winery, Verona Di Luca turned away from the food processor. “Ceecee, or Kellen, whatever her name is—she doesn’t care enough about our little girl to visit?”

  “She’s happy that I’m her daughter.” Rae picked an oatmeal butterscotch cookie up off the cooling rack and frowned at the blackened bottom.

  “Then why doesn’t she come home?” Verona demanded.

  “Mom.” Max loved his mother, but he would do anything to keep Rae innocent of the tensions that marred these tentative relationships.

  Yet Rae had heard the critical note in her grandmother’s voice, and put the cookie firmly on the plate. “Grandma. My mommy has solemn responsibilities and duties.”

  “Oh, really?” Verona slapped basil, garlic and olive oil into the feeding tube.

  In a matter-of-fact tone, Rae said, “She’s making soup for the homeless people at the Catholic church. That’s solemn, isn’t it?”

  Max struggled not to grin as he watched his very Catholic mother deal with Kellen’s new mission.

  Verona gathered herself enough to say, “That’s very solemn. Your mommy is doing a good thing.”

  “I know!” Rae picked up another cookie, sighed heavily and put it down. “I hope she cooks good. Homeless people deserve good food, too, don’t they?”

  Verona turned on her smirking son and snarled, “From now on you can make the cookies!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “COULD YOU CHOP them finer, Kellen? We serve the soup in cups, without spoons, so we try to keep everything bite-size.” Sandra’s eyes behind her aqua metal-frame glasses were firm, but sympathetic.

  SANDRA YOUNG:

  FEMALE, 50S, CAUCASIAN/LATIN ANCESTRY, KITCHEN COORDINATOR, EFFICIENT, GIVING. WORKS EVERY DAY.

  Kellen wiped the tears from her own eyes, and started cutting the onions into a smaller chop. “Mince, not chop. Got it. On the upside you won’t have to put salt in the soup what with all my tears.” Kellen glanced up, saw Sandra’s horror and added, “Kidding! I’m not crying directly on the onions. I promise.”

  Sandra sighed in relief, then sighed again as she went to answer a summons from an adjoining room that held the walk-in fridge and apparently a small leak. “It’s always something...” she said to no one in particular as she disappeared into the hallway.

  The prep kitchen was all sinks and white Formica countertops above, storage shelves below filled with whatever the grocery store or local farmers had donated that day. In the prep kitchen, eggs, tuna and chicken were fixed into sandwiches, and chips and pretzels and dried fruit were tossed together for snack mix. Next door, in the actual kitchen, prepared ingredients like winter squash, yesterday’s rotisserie chicken and Kellen’s onions were tossed into a giant pot and made into a soup, recipe to be decided by the cook’s ingenuity and that day’s ingredients.

  In the few hours she’d been here, Kellen was impressed by the operation, and the volunteers who made it work. Someone manned the kitchens five days a week.

  Dorothy handed Kellen a wet paper towel. “Here you go. If you put it over your eyes for a moment, it helps.”

  DOROTHY TANAKA:

  FEMALE, ELDERLY, JAPANESE ANCESTRY, THIN, ECCENTRIC. (PURPLE HAIR, RED GLASSES, TWINKLING DARK EYES.) WICKED SENSE OF HUMOR. MOTHER, GRANDMOTHER AND GREAT-GRANDMOTHER. DEVOUT CATHOLIC.

  Kellen put her knife down, wiped her hands on her faded cotton apron with Merry Christmas written across it in large letters and put the towel to her eyes. “Wow! This really does work,” Kellen said with genuine relief. “Thank you.”

  Nodding sagely, the older woman said, “The summer onions are terrible to chop. If you survive until winter, they’re milder.” She winked as she walked back to her station, hoisted herself onto the wooden bar stool and returned to what seemed to Kellen to be the most difficult job in the food bank—peeling hard-boiled eggs with gloves on.

  “Having me chop onions on my first day is part of some kind of food bank hazing ritual, isn’t it?” Kellen spoke to the kitchen in general. She heard a couple of muffled coughs in response.

  Ralph, who hadn’t yet looked at her directly, gave her a half-humorous glance over his shoulder.

  RALPH BELLINGAR:

  MALE, 60, 5'10", 140 LBS, CAUCASIAN ANCESTRY (LAST NAME NORMAN/FRENCH). BALD WITH A FRINGE OF BLACK HAIR, DARK EYES. WATCHFUL/OBSERVANT. TACITURN. SEEMS A PREP KITCHEN FIXTURE. MILITARY VETERAN (UNCONFIRMED). DESERT STORM/KUWAIT?

  “What about a food processor?” Kellen asked. “Isn’t there one here?”

  “Of course! We have
the one that Mrs. Estabrook donated. All the attachments are cracked and when we used it plastic shards blended into the soup and we had to throw out the whole pot. But sure, we have a food processor!” Dorothy was savagely sarcastic.

  Kellen assumed Mrs. Estabrook was nobody’s favorite parishioner.

  Sandra rushed in from the hallway.

  “Ralph!” He turned from the produce sink where he was washing grapes. “A new girl just went through the soup line. She’s maybe sixteen.” With emphasis, Sandra said, “She doesn’t look good.”

  Ralph methodically removed his denim apron, hung it on a hook by the door, took a threadbare blue baseball cap and pulled it on his head, then left the prep kitchen with Sandra in his wake.

  Kellen was fascinated by how unruffled everyone appeared. Lena, the other woman in the kitchen—

  LENA HANSEN:

  FEMALE, LATE 20S, 5'10", CAUCASIAN ANCESTRY (ASSUMED SCANDINAVIAN), BLONDE, BLUE EYES. PRETTY. SOFT-SPOKEN. FRIENDLY. WARY.

  —moved from bagging snack mix to washing the grapes, and Dorothy kept peeling eggs as if nothing had happened.

  Kellen couldn’t contain her interest. “Dorothy, what’s the story with Ralph? Why does he get called if there’s a new girl in line?”

  Dorothy pushed her glasses up with her wrist and narrowly avoided getting eggshells on her face. “Ralph’s a jack-of-all-trades. He works here, he cooks. He makes the best soups. He can find any usable produce in a box that’s been smashed during the delivery run. Best of all, he is, well, how would you describe it, Lena?”

  Lena looked thoughtful and said quietly, “You know how horse whisperers can calm down horses that are crazy or have been hurt badly?”

  Kellen nodded.

  Lena concluded, “That’s what Ralph is for people who live on the street.”

  Dorothy smiled slowly. “Very apt! Yes, Ralph is a people whisperer.” She wiggled to get more comfortable on the no-doubt-donated bar stool. “He is, well, I suppose I’d say he’s one of the good guys. Sandra lets him know whenever someone new comes in. Often it’s kids, living on the street because they ran away from a horrible situation. Ralph can find out what’s troubling them, and he is amazing at taking what he knows from a few short conversations and translating it into a job.”

  Kellen was shocked. She was impressed enough by all the volunteers she had met and the donors she had seen bring food and toiletries and socks to the food bank. After last winter at Yearning Sands Resort, and her encounter with Aunt Cora, Kellen had begun to doubt the kindness of humanity. Now she was glad she’d been coerced into volunteering at the food bank. “Does Ralph work here?”

  “If you’re asking if he gets paid—no, he doesn’t,” Dorothy said. “Though I bet he’d tell you he gets paid in a million tiny ways. We all do.”

  Kellen insisted, “If he’s here every day and he doesn’t get paid, how does he live?”

  “On the street. I didn’t say he had no problems to speak of.” Dorothy counted off on her fingers. “He doesn’t talk much, he scavenges in garbage cans, he keeps clean because we insist. Sometimes I see him on the street corner with a sign asking for money. He helps everyone else, but he refuses to help himself.”

  Kellen thought about that; he worked at an assistance shelter, but preferred to live on the street in lieu of asking for and getting aid. PTSD had awful ways of taking its toll. “What does he do about kids with drug problems or mental illness issues?”

  Lena’s broad face lit up. “I can answer that! The first time I came to the food bank, Ralph sat me down and listened to my problems. I told him about my baby’s recurrent sicknesses and my struggle to find work because I couldn’t get a babysitter on the cheap, especially when I was asking them to take care of a croupy baby. Ralph drilled down to the fact that I was suffering from depression, helped me to find day care through the church next door and got me into a trial for a new antidepressant.”

  “That’s amazing,” Kellen said.

  Dorothy cracked another dozen eggs. “He even trains new volunteers who come in with no culinary skills. You’d be surprised what some kids don’t know in the kitchen.”

  “Like what?” Kellen could imagine.

  Lena started ticking off her fingers one by one. “How to slice a tomato, how to properly wash dishes, how to use a can opener.”

  Dorothy started chuckling. “Some of them aren’t kids, either. I had a woman with two grandchildren act like I was an encyclopedia of produce. She would go through the produce boxes, and bring in fruits and vegetables for me to identify. She always asked for a good recipe using that piece of produce, too. But you would have thought I had given birth to a cow based on the look she gave me that time I explained that what she was holding was turmeric root.”

  Lena giggled. “But Ralph—he has built up a lot of goodwill around here. In all the time I’ve known him, I’ve never heard him get angry with anyone for relapsing into addiction or getting in fights, which happens a lot. People without a home can get very territorial when they find a tiny space where they can relax for a moment.”

  Dorothy agreed. “He also protects the new kids from predators, which has the unfortunate effect of making him a prime target. But he takes it all in stride.”

  Kellen nodded. “He’s a veteran,” she said, voicing her earlier hunch.

  “I think he’s been here a long time,” Lena agreed.

  “No,” Kellen said, “I meant a veteran of the armed forces. Which conflict? Do you know?”

  “No conflict. He says he’s not a veteran,” Lena said.

  Kellen didn’t believe it. “Come on. What you were talking about, his behavior, that’s PTSD.”

  “You can get PTSD from other situations besides war,” Dorothy said.

  “Yes,” Kellen said, “but I was in the military, and he has that way of carrying himself...”

  “Once you’ve worked around homeless folks for a while, you don’t believe when they say they’re a veteran.” Dorothy smiled at Kellen’s expression. “In the end, it’s often a ploy to beg more money off the tourists. Boy, does it work!”

  “The sad thing is that a number of the people who come through the soup line are veterans. It’s an injustice that we can’t believe everyone who says so. But either way, Ralph tells us he worked in transportation prior to...this.” Lena waved a hand around at the kitchen.

  “Hmm.” Kellen turned back to her onion chopping. When she had entered the food bank, Ralph had looked her over and called her “Captain.” He didn’t know she had been a captain, of course—and she had—but he had recognized her as a veteran and an officer. Only other veterans seemed to have that ability, that gift for taking in a person’s posture and demeanor and determining that they were of the same ilk.

  Out of the corner of her watery eye, Kellen saw Ralph reenter the prep kitchen and head toward her.

  Lena and Dorothy turned to listen to the exchange, a small bit of drama to brighten the dreary, rainy morning.

  “Captain, could you come with me?” Ralph spoke so quietly Kellen had to strain to hear. “I can’t get Sophia—she’s the new girl—to trust me. She’s frightened of everyone, but won’t tell me why.”

  Sure, I’ll come out. Sure, I’m so confident of myself I can talk to some kid who has problems so horrible she lives on the streets. Don’t you know I’m the loser who’s afraid of her seven-year-old daughter? “Why me?”

  “Someone has hurt her physically. She needs someone who can relate and has moved beyond.”

  How did he know that Kellen had once been abused?

  He must have seen the shock on her face, for he lowered his gaze and bowed his head. “Excuse me. I made intrusive assumptions. You keep everyone at a distance until you know them very well, and on the street that’s a sign of—”

  “Abuse. Yes, you’re right. Once someone has lived on the street, one can always tell
. Of course I’ll come.” Kellen laid her knife down, took her gloves off, washed her hands at the sink and followed Ralph into the street.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IMMEDIATELY, KELLEN PICKED out who she was expected to help.

  SOPHIA:

  FEMALE, 16? YO, CAUCASIAN-HISPANIC.

  Sophia sat on the curb off to one side of the larger group—mostly men—carefully sipping her soup. She was beautiful, with long brown hair pulled into a hasty bun and wide green eyes, one of which was marred by a black bruise. She was also sporting a split lip and bruises on her arms, some older than others. Kellen would bet those were defensive marks.

  As Ralph and Kellen approached Sophia, the girl began to crumple in on herself, clutching her soup with white knuckles, clearly in the middle of a fight or flight situation.

  Ralph said softly, “Sophia, this is Kellen. Is it okay if she talks to you for a bit?”

  Sophia nodded.

  Kellen sat down next to Sophia, taking care not to make sudden moves.

  Ralph left them alone, wandering over to the other group and asking if anyone needed any toiletries or warm socks for the night ahead.

  Kellen decided to start with a neutral topic. “What’s the soup today?”

  Sophia glanced over at Kellen, and whispered, “Chicken chili.”

  “Is it any good?”

  “Yeah.”

  Kellen kept her voice very calm, almost nonchalant. “When I lived on the street in Philadelphia, the food bank tried to make good soups, but they kept getting donations of canned chicken. It didn’t make the best tasting chicken chowder.”

  “There’s canned chicken?” Sophia screwed up her nose like she smelled something terrible.

  “Apparently the occasional chicken wanders into a cannery.”

  Sophia laughed off-key, as though she had forgotten how.