Trace

by Pat Cummings

  “Theo, my good sir!” a voice called out.

  Trace spun around. He had reached Myrtle Avenue. From beneath the dark-green awning of his store window, Roman Cervantes was waving to him.

  “Come, come,” Roman called out.

  Trace blinked and the otherworldly sensation began to melt. Blowing on his hands to warm them, he stumbled into Roman’s Hardware. He was greeted by rows of wooden shelves stacked with a patchwork of boxes; a wall of drawers, some open and overflowing with spools of twine or string; and tall bins crammed with rolls of patterned paper, rods, and dowels. The air blanketing the store was warm and golden and soft and Trace instantly felt relieved.

  As Angélica had promised, a shelf running high along the walls displayed her father’s metal collection. Trace looked around, hoping she was there. Hadn’t he dreamed about her last night?

  “Do me a favor,” Roman said, breaking into Trace’s thoughts. With a long stick that ended in a pincer, the man airlifted an object from the overhead shelf and handed it to Trace. “Will you give this to your lovely aunt and tell her thanks for dinner?”

  Trace studied the little metal box he had been handed.

  “Angel and I usually just have takeout for dinner now that her mom’s gone,” Roman continued. “Last night reminded me how nice it felt to cook and sit down to a real meal.” The man beamed, clearly remembering happier times.

  What do you say at times like this? Trace wondered. He really wanted to know when and how Mrs. Cervantes had died. She couldn’t have been that old. But he was pretty sure it would be rude to ask. He turned the box over in his hands. Something was inside it. Trace resisted an urge to pop open the lid. That, too, might be rude, since it was meant for Auntie Lea.

  So, maybe Angel was older, and maybe she lived all the way in the Bronx, but maybe they had more in common than she realized. Was it possible that losing one parent felt as painful as losing both? He should find out when she would be in the store again, when they might come over again. It was cool the way she and her dad were so close. He smiled to himself.

  “Thanks, Mr. Cervantes,” Trace said. “I’ll give it to her.

  “Whoa! Lose the Mister, son. Mr. Cervantes is my dad, okay? Just call me Roman—everyone else does.” Grinning like the Cheshire cat, Roman put a hand on Trace’s shoulder and steered him toward the door.

  Trace felt he had to say something. It was weird to just let it hang in the air and not say anything. “I . . . I’m sorry for your loss, Roman. Yours and Angel’s, I mean. Your . . . your wife. Sorry that she’s—” Trace found he couldn’t bring himself to say the word.

  “Dead?” Roman burst out laughing. “Thanks, Theo, but she lives on West Eighty-Third . . . with her boyfriend.”

  Trace shoved the box into his pocket and yanked open the door. So much for trying to be polite. Even after the door had closed behind him and he had reached the corner, he was pretty sure he could still hear Roman’s laughter.

  13

  Coming home to a kitchen filled with guests for dinner was normal. But it was the middle of the day and, somehow, Trace had expected silence, that he would have the place to himself. He really wanted to regroup and figure out a plan B.

  But the nanosecond he opened the door he heard his aunt sing out, “Perfecto! Get in here subito, signore!” over the opera music that was playing in the kitchen. No psychic abilities were needed to guess that Auntie’s Lea’s Italian 101 phrases could only mean they were having pasta for dinner.

  Trace was surprised to see that nothing was on the stove. A massive piece of white oaktag leaned against the wall of shelves in the kitchen where his aunt kept her collection of unopened cookbooks. On matching stools before it sat Auntie Lea and her friend Vesper. The kitchen table at their back was covered with photo albums and the basket of dusty stuff that had once belonged to Aunt Frenchy.

  “Hey, Theo,” Vesper said. “Aren’t you home early?”

  “Teachers’ meeting,” he answered absently, studying the board. A dozen Post-it notes were stuck on it in a pattern that resembled a pyramid; each bore a name and a set of dates. “And this is . . . ?” He turned to Auntie Lea.

  Her eyes were glowing. “It’s our family tree, kiddo. Vesper’s helping me get this together. Pretty cool, huh?” Auntie Lea rocked on her stool, hands on hips as she admired the board. She was wearing faded jeans and a paint-stained denim shirt. There was dust in her hair. But she was positively bubbling. He had witnessed a lot of her moods, but bubbly was a new one. Trace liked history and the idea of tracing their ancestors—to an extent. But clearly not as much as Auntie Lea did.

  “Eeeeeeek!” Auntie Lea jumped. So did Trace. Vesper did not budge. “I gotta change. Vesper, hold down the fort! Theo, um, you, um . . . You’re in charge. Just help Vesper with whatever she needs and I’ll be right back.” Auntie Lea raced from the kitchen and ran up the stairs to her room.

  Trace looked at Vesper.

  “Hmmmmm,” Vesper said.

  “Hmmmmmm?” Trace asked.

  This day really could not get weirder. He took the metal box from his pocket and set it on the table so he would remember to give it to his aunt. The aunt who had no clue that his coming home early was unusual. The aunt who had no idea that these projects of hers might seem a bit strange to a normal person. And the aunt who clearly did not have the slightest notion that he was the last person to put in charge of anything.

  “We probably should clear off the table,” Vesper said, rising from her stool and stretching. “I’ll help and then I’m outa here, okay?” She smiled warmly at Trace. Together, they slid loose pictures back into photo albums, loaded the albums into the basket, and balanced it on one of the stools. Vesper was sneaking weird glances his way, twisting her lips occasionally as though she was screwing the lid down on a jar full of words. Weird. But Trace just wanted to go upstairs, drop his books, climb onto his bed, and figure out exactly when and how this day had slipped off the leash. He was in charge. Right. So he would wait for Auntie Lea, give her the box, and then escape to his room.

  An aria he actually recognized poured out of the speakers. Luciano Pavarotti was singing “Nessun Dorma.” Opera had been one notch above polka music in his opinion, but he had grown to like certain pieces since he had come to live in Brooklyn. This was one of them. After about the sixtieth time she played it, Auntie Lea had read him a translation of the lyrics and one line had caught him off guard. Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me: “But my secret lies hidden within me.” It was just some Italian guy crooning about not having the guts to tell a woman he loved her, but the melody got to him. And that line stung every time Trace heard it.

  “Where d’you keep the place mats, Theo?” Vesper asked. Trace pulled himself out of the music. He found two place mats and laid them out as Vesper pulled glasses from the cabinet.

  “You may have noticed that your aunt’s a little, uh . . . ,” Vesper said over her shoulder.

  “Bubbly?” Trace offered.

  Vesper chuckled. “Yep, bubbly. Perfect.” She rinsed out a couple of wineglasses, grabbed a towel, and slowly dried them as she studied Trace.

  “Here’s the thing,” she continued. “I haven’t seen her like this in quite a while.” Vesper paused and screwed up her face again as though trying to decide if she should continue. “Okay. Well, this guy came over this morning to fix the bed. That awful creak? So, he’s a carpenter-slash-handyman kinda guy, you know?”

  Trace nodded, unsure where this was headed.

  “Well, I was here helping her get started on this family tree and he stays for lunch even though, if you ask me, the creak in that bed had been done been fixed.” Vesper raised her eyebrows meaningfully, but Trace wasn’t sure what that meant.

  “So, I’m getting ready to go, but your aunt invites this total stranger to stay for dinner . . . and the man skips outa here to go get ‘provisions.’ That’s what he said, ‘provisions.’ Says he’s gonna cook up a ‘mean cacciatore’ for her.” Vesper began rifling t
hrough the silverware drawer, pulling out more forks and knives than they would ever need.

  “All right . . . ,” Trace began. “So, he’s coming back and you’re not staying, and what? Are you telling me that you think he’s dangerous or something?”

  “Ha!” Vesper dropped a handful of utensils on the table. “You got cloth napkins somewhere?”

  That was not exactly an answer. Trace pulled napkins from a drawer near the sink and slapped them onto the table. What was she saying?

  “All men are dangerous,” Vesper huffed. “No offense, kid.” So she was a lesbian. At least one thing has been cleared up today, Trace thought.

  “Including and starting with my husband.”

  Trace took a seat at the table.

  “Look, Vesper,” he said. Apparently, nothing was really what it seemed to be. He felt like he had fallen through a wormhole today, beginning with Presley talking about seeing that kid with him. Trace suddenly felt exhausted. Okay, Vesper wasn’t a lesbian. Angel’s mom wasn’t dead. And he wasn’t really the team leader. Fine. “What exactly are you telling me?”

  But before she could answer, the doorbell rang and Auntie Lea shouted down the stairs, “Get that, will you, Theo? I’m coming right down.”

  Vesper motioned for him to stay right where he was.

  “I’ll get it,” she said. “I’m leaving anyway.” Coming over to him, she kissed Trace smack on the forehead. “I think your auntie has a bit of a crush, that’s all I’m sayin’.” Vesper put a chubby finger to her lips. “You didn’t hear this from me, okay? But she was acting all girly around him. And, darlin’, I don’t blame her one bit, ’cause the man is fi-i-i-i-ine!” Vesper danced toward the door, grabbing her coat from the rack in the hall as she passed it.

  Just as Vesper opened the front door, his aunt came sailing down the stairs. A blast of cold air rushed in from the hall, carrying with it the scent of the musk oil that Auntie Lea wore on special occasions. Trace heard a man’s voice but, from where he sat, he could only see his aunt’s back, covered now in a soft velvet tunic that she wore over what she called her palazzo pants. Auntie Lea had a crush. Trace grinned to himself.

  Then in walked Dallas Houston.

  One of the weirdest things Trace had ever heard was about white. Red plus yellow makes orange. Okay. Mix blue and red and you get purple. Fine. Yellow and blue make green . . . he could see that. But Miss Ledbetter, the art teacher at his old school, insisted not only that white was a color, but that it was what you got when every color was present. That was just nuts. She had called black the absence of all colors, but white, she claimed, was every color combined. Maybe it was a racial thing. Maybe she was speaking symbolically or ironically or metaphorically—one of those English Lit ways where what you say is not necessarily what you mean. But one day Miss Ledbetter had also proudly showed off a sweater she had knitted out of dog’s hair that she had plucked off her couch. Miss Ledbetter’s sweater smelled like a hamster cage. Miss Ledbetter was not someone Trace believed.

  But when Dallas Houston walked into the kitchen at 810 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn, planet Earth, Trace’s brain exploded. And every color really was in the white light that filled his head. Up popped the red-faced library guard, Ms. Levy in her dark-blue bike helmet, Ty’s yellow backpack as he walked away in the subway station, Dr. Proctor’s cool green hushed office, the dark-brown face of the little boy, the splatter of colors on Auntie Lea’s jewelry table—and the small orange card. That card he had folded into a projectile. The little airplane he had sent flying and forgotten about. Auntie Lea had found Dallas Houston’s card, unfolded it, and actually called the guy. His aunt probably considered it Fate. She would have read it as a sign from the cosmos. But what it was was messed up. This was not supposed to happen.

  “This is Theo,” Auntie Lea was saying as the man’s hand came his way. Trace watched his own hand float up to shake it. Definitely not good. “And Theo, this is Dallas Houston. He managed to fix that squeaky leg on my bed, and now, he’s offered to fix us a gourmet dinner.” Auntie Lea was sort of chirping as she talked, and she never stopped smiling at Dallas.

  Trace heard himself say something like, “Mrrphhff.” He was so busted.

  “What’s this?” Auntie Lea asked, picking up the box on the table.

  Trace blinked. “Oh, Mr., uh, Roman sent you this. I . . . I saw him on my way home and he wanted me to give it to you,” Trace heard himself say. And then he waited. He stopped breathing and just waited. Waited for Dallas Houston to rat him out to Auntie Lea.

  14

  Cacciatore in Italian means “hunter.” According to Dallas Houston, hunters would make this dish with any kind of meat they could catch or trap or sneak up on or just burst through the front door and ambush. Trace was feeling a lot of sympathy for the chicken that was being hacked into chunks on a cutting board.

  Dallas had insisted that Auntie Lea “go relax” while the men did the cooking. And his aunt, thrilled to find that Roman’s box held a handful of antique metal beads, had danced happily off to her worktable, lugging Aunt Frenchy’s basket of junk. Unbelievable. On the one hand, Trace was glad she had left before Dallas could start babbling about ghosts. On the other hand, the man was a complete weirdo, a total stranger she had handed a meat cleaver to and left with her only nephew.

  “Small planet, huh?” Dallas said now, over his shoulder.

  Trace said nothing. Maybe he could cut a deal. This guy had no idea what talk about ghosts would do to Auntie Lea. He really, really, realllllly did not want to think about, describe, or endlessly revisit every minute detail that she would quiz him about.

  “I’m guessing you didn’t give your aunt my card?” the man tried again. He handed Trace a bag of mushrooms, a knife, and another cutting board. Before he could answer, Dallas added, “Because she said something about the cosmos just dropping it in her lap.”

  “I, uh . . . ,” Trace began. As angrily as he had folded that card into a plane, he had not cared less about where it might have landed. Until now. “I must’ve left your card out somewhere. And, well, my room is her, uh, Auntie Lea makes jewelry and . . .”

  Dallas turned, leaned against the sink, and crossed his arms over his chest. On the stove, the chicken sizzled noisily in onions and peppers and olive oil. Trace wanted to escape to his room and avoid dinner altogether. But he was getting pretty hungry. They needed to have this out now. Why did Dallas Houston shake his hand and act like they had never met? Why had he not told Auntie Lea how that business card just happened to appear? Taking a deep breath, Trace gave the man the hardest don’t-mess-with-me look he could muster. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want?”

  The salad that Trace had pulled together looked a lot more cheerful than he felt. Dallas had agreed to keep quiet about ghosts. And Trace had agreed to go back to the library on Saturday, back to the stacks to help Dallas look for the kid.

  “I believe there’s a reason you got a good look at him like you did. All these years I’ve been down there, most I get is a feeling, a flicker at the edge of my eyesight. Once, I thought I saw him kinda wandering between the stacks, like he was lookin’ for something.” Dallas paused, shook his head, and turned toward the stove. “Always make me sad when that little guy shows up,” he added. Pouring a boiling pot of bow-tie pasta into a colander, the man’s face reddened as a cloud of steam enveloped it.

  The air in the kitchen was warm and damp now. Trace felt his mind pulling him down, down into the shadowy underground stacks, down where ghosts walked, down, he was afraid, into the river. If anyone dead wanted to contact him, he thought he knew who it would be.

  “Hey, Signore!” Auntie Lea sang, gliding into the kitchen and interrupting his descent. “Grab a glass.” She uncorked a bottle of wine just as Dallas pulled a loaf of crusty bread from the oven. “Ooooooh,” she sighed. “I can resist anything except the smell of butter . . . or garlic . . . or bread.” She giggled like a little girl. “Or buttered garlic bread.” Placing a pair of
candlesticks on the table, she lit two new candles and then, all smiles, filled two glasses. With a wink at Trace, she poured him a little as well.

  The thought of ghost hunting should have ruined his appetite, but Trace was starving. And the smell of the wine only seemed to make him hungrier. Unlike when the Cuties came to dinner and made a point of quizzing or teasing him, it was easy to keep a low profile with Dallas around. Trace dug into the pasta and chicken and let the adults chatter, happy to steer his mind away from the shadows. The wine did not taste as good as he had thought it would, but when Auntie Lea poured another round, she gave him a bit more. Watching her and Dallas, it occurred to him that the game never got easier. They were dancing around each other with words, inching closer, comparing likes and dislikes, testing their fit. Maybe it was the wine that made this so clear. Trace turned the bottle around and blinked at the label. This glass tasted better than the first, but it looked like it was the same stuff.

  Dallas began talking about where to find the freshest ingredients. Auntie Lea talked about the vegetable garden she intended to plant in the backyard. That was news. Dallas worried that the cacciatore needed more pepper. Auntie Lea, who Trace had never seen eat meat, oohed and aahed her way through two bowlfuls. By the time they had moved on to wines and Italy and which regions produced the best olive oil, mozzarella, leather, and stained glass, Trace had polished off his salad. The conversation veered off into sculpture and tapestries while the candles flickered between Dallas and his aunt. Trace watched them smile easily at each other, lean in, and grow misty-eyed as they nodded in sad agreement that wood carving was, tragically, a lost art. That made them both sigh so loudly that Trace had to bite the rim of his glass to stifle a laugh.