by Kelly Harms
“I’ve got the dry ingredients here. Now what?”
“Now Cuisinart,” she says, and gestures like Vanna to the food processor. “Everything goes in there, then the yeasty warm water, then the ice water through the tube. Run the machine the whole time, until it starts to come together.”
Sounds easy enough. I get to work. “So. Is there something going on between you and Noah?” I ask her, right after adding the yeast-water to the bowl of the processor.
“What?” she says, all aghast, and I know she’s about to go into full denial mode. “Why would you—”
Annoyed by her resistance to spill, I hit the pulse button and drown her out with the whirr of the food processor’s motor.
“What’s that?” I ask when she’s done talking and I’m done pulsing. “Sorry—the Cuisinart’s so loud that I didn’t hear you explain what’s going on between you and Noah.”
She grimaces. “I said, nothing is going—”
I hit pulse again. I’ve discovered a new interrogation technique!
I take my finger off the button. “Nope, no, didn’t catch that. You’ll have to speak up.”
“I said,” Janey is yelling now. “There is nothing happen—”
Pulse.
She screams. I stop pulsing. “God, you are annoying,” she says. “He told me I was beautiful.”
I turn away from the Cuisinart, impressed. “Really?”
“Is that so hard to believe?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say enthusiastically, and she sneers at me. “But what a cute thing to say.”
She sighs. “I know. But weird, right? I mean, I’ve said next to nothing to the guy to make him think I’m interested—which I’m not. And every time he comes around I start sweating and choking, so it’s not like he should be getting the wrong idea.”
“Maybe he’s into that sort of thing,” I say with a shrug. “Different strokes, and all that.”
“That would be a pretty unusual stroke, if you ask me.”
I think things over. “So, are you going to hit that?”
“Excuse me?”
“Noah. Are you going to hook up with him?”
“No, I am not going to hook up with him,” she says, all indignant. “I hardly know him. And I don’t expect I’ll have the occasion to see him again anyway.”
I roll my eyes. “Please. That’s the biggest bullshit excuse I’ve ever heard. Call him up. Just because we are in the middle of the woods doesn’t mean you have to live like a nun.”
“I’m not living like a nun,” she says, and throws the kitchen towel she’s been twisting down to the counter. “You and Aunt Midge. Powerless to mind your own business. I’m so glad there are two of you to pester me now.” She’s getting huffy all of a sudden. What’s the big whoop?
“Jeez, calm down, why don’t you. You really do need to get laid. How long’s it been?”
“None of your business! Christ!” she says, and she’s visibly upset now. “Why do you find my sex life so interesting? I don’t try to meddle in yours.”
“You don’t have to—I was just getting to that.”
She sucks in a big gasp of air at that and her face turns bright red. “This is my kitchen,” she cries, and I realize that this is about the five jillionth time she’s said something like that since she got here. “No one can bother me in here.” Waving her arms, she makes a circle around her body like a force field, like there is some sacred space around her that no one can penetrate. She looks frantic, maybe a little manic even.
“No one is trying to bother you, crazy lady.” I’m not sure if I’m mad or not, but I can tell she is, and I don’t understand why.
“You may not be trying to, but you are driving me nuts!” she exclaims. “I just want to come in here and cook a duck, okay? But you can’t leave me alone. You have to ask me what’s going on with Ned, and why am I not having sex, and—”
“Ned?” I ask. “Who’s Ned?”
“GAH!” she screams, clutching her hair in her hands. “Ned is NOBODY!” Her eyes look wild and glassy like she’s about to burst into tears, but for some reason I can’t leave it alone.
“No, I want to know who this Ned person is. Is he some dreamboat you left behind in Iowa? Did you try to get him to come with you to the house but he wouldn’t propose and make an honest woman of you? Or maybe he ditched you for someone else—some brat who can’t cook at all?”
Janey’s face is a color of fuchsia that isn’t seen in nature. She is taking great gulps of breath like a dying person. “Do NOT say another word about Ned, do you hear me,” she says, in a scary low voice.
“Or what?” I ask. “Are you going to throw up on me?”
Janey screams. She screams, and then she moves so fast I can’t tell what she’s doing until she’s grabbed that dripping wet frozen duck by the neck and hauled it behind her like a tomahawk. Next thing I know, the duck is whizzing through the kitchen, missing my head by about a foot, thank God, and crashing into the blue-tile backsplash behind me with a shattering thud. I look at the tile, cracked and broken in hundreds of places, and then Janey, who is standing there with her eyes wide open staring in amazement. She looks like she is the one who almost got hit in the head with a frozen duck. No, she looks like she did get hit in the head with a frozen duck.
“Holy shit,” I say into the stunned silence. “You almost hit me with a waterfowl.”
For a while she doesn’t say anything. She just looks at me, and at the place where the tile is shattered, and then at the duck, which bounced onto the floor and is lying there looking much the worse for its little posthumous attempt at flight. At last she speaks. “Yeah, I did,” she says, and not with any kind of real remorse, either. “Sorry about that.” She moves over to scoop the bird up and place it lovingly back in the sink, and I realize she was apologizing not to me, but to the duck.
* * *
After the flying duck incident, Janey retreats upstairs and slams the door of her bedroom like a lovelorn sixteen-year-old girl. I stand there torn between being impressed with her and writing her off as a total nutso. The whole thing makes me wonder why I couldn’t have shared a name with someone stable, and normal, and perhaps way more fun. Why can’t the other Janine Brown be more like Cameron Diaz, for example? She and I would find the nearest dance club and work it all night, wearing satin tank tops with sequins and drinking champagne. Then maybe the next day she would buy a boat for us to hang out on. We would put on string bikinis and cruise for guys, literally. Furthermore, I bet Cameron Diaz buys bread at the store just like everyone else in the entire universe. Except for the other Janine Brown.
In the end I decide to clean up the shards of broken tile and finish making the bread. Cleaning up is actually relaxing, and I think with a little glue the broken tiles will look, if not brand new, at least mostly unnoticeable. But without instruction, I’m kind of hopeless when it comes to the baking. I try to figure out where I am in the process from a recipe in The Bread Bible, but there’s no mention of a food processor there, so I just dump the wet dough on a floured countertop and start banging away at it, imitating the illustrated pictures of hands pushing tight, neat dough around. But my dough is incredibly sticky, and my hands are covered in edible putty within about two seconds. I wash them off and flour them up again but end up right back where I started, two hands covered in bread taffy that refuses to come off. In the end I get as much of the dough as I can into a greased bowl and cover it up and hope for the best. Easily a third of the dough is stuck to me or the counter and it takes a good twenty minutes to clean everything up. Flour and water, I’m discovering, act a lot like glue.
Exasperated, I leave the dough on the counter to rise and beat it outside for a much-needed cigarette. But I’ve only just fished out a cigarette from the pack when I see the unmistakable sight of J.J. coming up the driveway, pushing a wheelbarrow full of gardening supplies. He lets go of one handle to wave, causing his load to veer dangerously off to the right. I stash the pack out of sight between the r
ungs of the porch fence and then wave back. When he gets close enough for me to see his smile, I get a little melty and then bound down the stairs like a puppy to greet him.
“Hey,” I call. “How’s it going?” As soon as I’ve spoken I cringe. I saw him this morning, after all. It’s probably “going” similarly.
“Good!” he calls back. “It’s finally getting cool enough to mow the lawn. Is that okay?”
“Of course,” I say enthusiastically, not wanting him to treat me like I’m his boss. I couldn’t be less in charge of anything around here, and anyway it’s not sexy. “I mean, I’m sure it’s fine for you to do whatever. You’re the expert.”
He raises his eyebrows and gives me a puzzled look and I realize just how giddy I’m acting. “Okay. Well, then,” he gestures toward the garden shed.
“Actually,” I say, trying to think of some reason J.J. should hang out and keep me entertained until the bread is done rising, “everyone else is in the house doing their own thing right now. Want to go for a walk?” Lame, I know, but there’s not a lot to offer by way of entertainment out here with no car.
J.J. considers this with that puzzled look still on his face, and I’m starting to wonder if it’s always there. Then he shrugs. “Okay.”
We walk around to the shed and he stashes his stuff in there and then turns to me. “What about the lawn?” he asks.
“Mow it tomorrow,” I helpfully suggest. He shrugs at this, as if it doesn’t matter one way or the other, and I’m pleased to find at least one person on this cove with a work ethic similar to mine. “I have to be back here in an hour. Where can we go from here?”
“How about to the farm,” he says. And though the idea of visiting a farm sounds no more exciting than watching the dough rise, I will follow anyone as adorable as J.J. anywhere. I fall into step beside him as we walk down the driveway and take a left, walking away from the little specklets of civilization that are down the road aways to the right.
“This is where we get our chickens,” he says.
“You raise chickens?”
“Nope—but we eat them,” he says with a smile. “They sell their eggs here too.”
“Cool,” I say. Maybe I can bring home some fresh eggs for Janey and make her forget her previous attempt at murder by Ducksicle. “Can I just pick up eggs whenever? How much do they cost?”
J.J. scratches his chin, where a beard would be, if he didn’t have such a baby face. “Normally you could just swing by and meet the owners, but they’re up at the farmers market today, I’ll bet. My parents see them there every week. If you need eggs, we can always pop in and leave a few bucks on the table. It’s not like the house is ever locked.”
“What is this, Mayberry?”
“Pretty much,” J.J. says, smiling. “By the time you get this far out on the cove things are pretty darn quiet. Just wait until September, when the summer people go home.”
“Wait—it gets more boring? I’m going to lose consciousness,” I say. “Just slip into a coma and never wake up. Maybe I should make a living will.”
“Oh come on, you’re from Iowa. How much more exciting can that be?”
“I had a little more mobility in Iowa,” I say, though thinking it through makes me realize how much better life has been since I got here. Regular meals, someone to talk to, less shouting, and zero hitting. But I stick with my story, as always. “Plus, I didn’t live in the middle of nowhere like this. They have real cities in Iowa, you know.” Even as I say this I realize we’ve been walking right smack dab in the middle of the road for ten minutes, and haven’t had to get out of the way for a car once yet.
“Then why’d you come here?” he asks. It’s not a confrontational question, but it’s not rhetorical either.
I consider the proper answer. “Well, for the house, mostly,” I say at last. That seems accurate without spilling any meaningful details.
But J.J. is the curious sort. “What do you mean, for the house? I thought you said it belonged to your cousin.”
Cousin. Right. “It does,” I say, haltingly. “But I needed to get away,” sort of, “and she has all this space…” I really am going to have to start writing down all my various lies and vagaries if I’m going to keep living in Maine. “And I’m helping take care of Aunt Midge.”
Note to self: Start helping take care of Aunt Midge.
Luckily J.J. leaves it alone at that so I don’t have to dig myself in any deeper. He’s not exactly the disclosing kind himself, I discovered this morning when we went down to the water. We talked about all kinds of stuff, the neighbors, the cove, the ocean, and he had encyclopedic knowledge about all those things. But I didn’t get, for example, such intimate details as his last name.
Or whether he has a girlfriend.
I will not be coy here; I’m hoping he doesn’t. He is cute and nice and has a truck. In short, he is everything I am looking for in a friend right now. That’s right: friend. Remember how I said two seconds ago that life had been better in Maine? I think that is because my exes are in Iowa. I don’t need to go there again, at least not while I have a nice place to stay.
But it doesn’t matter what my intentions are toward J.J. If it turns out he’s taken there’s no way his girlfriend will let him hang out with someone like me (I wouldn’t let my boyfriend hang out with someone like me either), and my life will only get more boring.
“Are you going to stay a while?” he asks me, kind of out of the blue. “Or go back to Iowa at some point?”
Good question. “Stay awhile,” I say, hoping that, by saying it, it will become true.
“Then you’ll get used to things and start to know your way around. And plus, I can drive you into town on some weekend and I’ll show you the sights. I’ll even take you to Reds for a lobster roll.”
Um, squeal. “Sounds good,” I say nonchalantly. “What’s a lobster roll?”
J.J. stops in his tracks. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“I have so much to teach you,” he says, then takes my hand and pulls me into a driveway on the right side of the road and for a split second I think he’s taking me into the woods for a little afternoon delight. Then I see the farm. “We’re here.”
“I see that.”
The farm is a long stretch of gravel road dividing a large clearing with a house on one side and assorted animal housing on the other. On the side of a big red hen house are painted in block lettering the words THE FARM Just like that, capital t, capital f. I guess that differentiates it somehow from other farms? The chickens are having a high old time in the yard, pooping and pecking and flapping their little hearts out. I notice with some surprise that behind them seems to be another pen with what I’m guessing are turkeys. Looks like we’re covered for Thanksgiving.
“Wanna see the llamas?” J.J. asks, like it’s his big pickup line. Lucky for him, I do want to see the llamas.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a llama before,” I admit, nodding vigorously. “Honestly, I have a little trouble even spelling llama.”
“Well, then, you’re in for a treat.” He leads me to another outbuilding, a shed that looks like it’s made out of the same stuff as Tupperware, with a skylight and a big garage-style door, surrounded by high mesh fencing.
Once we’re standing by the fence right outside the door of the shed, J.J. whistles. Two furry beasts come loping out bobbing their heads as they walk. I know in an instant that these are llamas, not just because J.J. just told me they were, but also because they look like the word “llama.” They have long necks and a sheep’s face set into the hairiest mane and big long eyelashes that seem skeptical. I expect one to open his mouth and sarcastically ask, “Can I help you?”
“This is Nana,” he says, gesturing to the smaller llama in the rear, “and this is Boo Boo.” Boo Boo is fatter and looks more cantankerous. I instantly love him. “Go dig in that garbage can for some treats,” J.J. says to me. Honest to God. He gestures to a metal trash can like it’s noth
ing, like he thinks I go rummaging through other people’s trash every day. Flies are investigating the area, which means I should not be. I put my hands on my hips but don’t budge, and he shrugs and says, “Don’t you want them to like you?”
“I bet they would like me better if I gave them something from the nice, clean refrigerator.”
“Not likely,” J.J. says. “Go on.” I lower him a look but go over to the garbage and try to wrench off the tight-fitting lid. I mean, it’s that or lose the llama popularity contest.
I yank on the lid for a while without success. “Bears,” J.J. says as he watches me struggle with getting it open.
“Yeah, right,” I grumble to myself. “Bears.” I finally get the lid off and am hit with the strong smell of onions. Inside are stems full of bushy leaves of various shapes and sizes. “What do I take?”
“Anything,” J.J. answers. “They’re mostly onion tops. Some leeks, I think. Smells, doesn’t it?”
Wow, this guy really knows how to win over a woman. But then, he doesn’t exactly have to try with his adorableness brimming over as it is. “A little,” I say, trying not to appear squeamish. I grab a big handful of greens and walk back to the fence.
“Here, buddy,” I say to the fatter llama, my left hand outstretched, holding one plant toward him on my open palm.
“Might want to toss that in and let him get it himself. He does spit a little.”
“He won’t spit on me,” I say. Sure enough, the llama purses his lips like he’s about to give my hand a big smooch and then slurps up the greens and uses his tongue to smush the whole plant inside his mouth. It’s not pretty, but he looks happy enough, and I am un-spit-upon. I move around and share the wealth with the other llama, who does get my hand a little wet, but nothing dramatic. I wipe it off on my jeans and then put my hand back slowly to her face and give it a little pat.
Her fur feels like kittens and puppies and baby chicks all at the same time. “Whoa, that’s soft!” I say.
“Right?” says J.J. “I basically just come around and feed them so they’ll let me touch their fur. It feels like Care Bear clouds.”