God is in the Pancakes

by Robin Epstein

  “What’s up?” Lolly asks. She doesn’t sound terribly interested in my response.

  “Mom wants us to meet her at the restaurant for dinner.”

  “I’m not really up for that.”

  “Cute, Lol.” I lean into the mirror to check on the arch of my brow.

  “I’m serious, Grace, I’m not going to go. It’s Friday night. Jake and I are going out.”

  “Well”—I wince as I pluck a few remaining stray hairs—“then you can call Mom and tell her you’re not coming yourself.”

  “Oh, come on, it’s no big deal, Grace. Just tell her when you get there.”

  “She’s mad enough at me already.”

  “You owe me, little sister.” Lolly’s tone gets singsongy, a reminder that it’s time to pay up.

  You Say Potato . . . is situated in a small strip mall on Lancaster Avenue, next to a dry cleaner’s and a gourmet cheese shop. It takes about fifteen minutes to bike over, so I leave the house at 6:15 on the dot, not wanting to piss Mom off further. I walk through the restaurant toward the door marked “Private” at the back. This is the entrance to the room also known as “YSP Corporate HQ.” There are three other desks in the room, but Mom’s the only one still here, and her area is covered in paper, foam cups, and stacks of those oversized green and white computer printouts with the holes on the side, the ones that come from printers made in the dinosaur era.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “Hi, Grace, ready for dinner?” She looks like she’s ready for a drink.

  “Yeah, we eating here?” This is not quite as dumb a question as it sounds since Mom usually can’t wait to get as far away from this place as possible.

  “Unfortunately yes,” Mom says with a nod, “because I still have a lot left to do tonight before I can come home.”

  “Ugh, sorry to hear that.”

  “Thanks,” she replies. “But there is at least a little good news.”

  “What’s that?”

  Mom pulls her hair around to her nose and inhales. “Smells like today’s special entrée is our favorite: fried chicken and mashed potatoes!”

  It isn’t until we take our seats in the booth that Mom eyes Lolly’s empty seat next to me. “She with Jake?” When I nod, she shakes her head. “Be honest with me, Grace. Do you like him?” This time I shake my head and she nods. “I always get the feeling that he’s trying to put something over on me, which is not exactly the most reassuring feeling for the mother of a teenage daughter. Thank goodness you’re not dating too.”

  “Yeah,” I say, making a face, “thank goodness.”

  The waitress walks over with menus and smiles when she sees Mom. “Hey, Sheryl,” she says, “good to see you!”

  “Trina, hi.” Mom smiles back. “I didn’t realize you’d come back from maternity yet.”

  “Well,” she says, leaning in, “I hadn’t planned to be back so soon, but Tim lost his job and I figured if I was going to be spending my whole day doing feedings anyway, I might as well do it in a place where I’d get paid for it.”

  Mom nods. “I hear you. Believe me, I know what the juggling act you’re doing is like. I remember all too well when I had to manage kids, job, home, and an unemployed husband who needed coddling yet didn’t quite get that being out of work didn’t mean he was on vacation from household responsibilities too.” Mom blinks and looks back up at Trina. “But I’m sure Tim’s not like that,” she adds, as if apologizing for the comparison to my dad. “And I’ll make sure they don’t work you too hard here.”

  Trina exhales and shakes her head back and forth. “God bless ya, Sheryl.”

  “Leave God out of this,” Mom replies, smiling. “This is between you and me.”

  Trina laughs. “Okay, well then, I’ll just leave these for you ladies,” she says, extending menus to us.

  Mom waves her off. “Don’t need them. You know what you want, Grace?”

  “Yep.”

  Trina takes out her pen and pad. “Let me just tell you about today’s special then.” I eye Mom and we share a smile. “Let’s see.” Trina flips through her pad for the special of the day cheat-sheet. “Today we’ve got the chef’s Southern specialty: fried chicken, buttermilk mashed potatoes, and creamed corn.”

  “Two of those.” Mom nods with a smile. “Thanks.”

  When I get home after dinner, I head for my room and my eyes go right to my book bag that still contains Mr. Sands’s envelope. I kneel again at the foot of my bed.

  “Hi, I’m sure you didn’t forget about my request,” I say, my eyes flicking to the ceiling, “but I thought I’d check back in because Mr. Sands doesn’t seem to be getting better yet. And I just wanted to remind you that time is sort of ‘of the essence’ here . . .”

  The noise of a car pulling into the driveway below my window distracts me, and I wonder if Lolly will get in trouble later. I also wonder if I’d ditch out on dinner to eat with my boyfriend. Not that it’s an issue . . .

  I look back to the ceiling and refocus. “Anyway, you know my mom doesn’t really buy into this, but I really, really want to believe you’re going to help Mr. Sands. I can’t help him like he wants me to, but you, you could fix it so he wouldn’t even have to think about that . . . And then I wouldn’t have to think about it either . . . So just please make him well again, okay? Please.” I close my eyes as if trying to seal up the wish and send it out to the universe.

  Chapter Five

  When I get to the volunteers’ office on Tuesday I see I’ve been assigned to magazine duty on the new weekly schedule, so I load the mags in my book bag and start walking the corridors. Celebrity magazines get a bad rap in my opinion. I understand that they’re not particularly intellectual or enlightening, but sometimes I think they’re better than that. Sometimes they provide even what a “great book” can’t: instantaneous escape. True, I’ve always had a weakness for celebrity gossip, but I only realized how important it could be when I started working at Hanover House. One of the candy striper’s jobs is “magazine detail,” and armed with stories of teen idols, baby bumps, reality show scandals, starlet diets, and divorces, we hand out the latest editions to residents and their families. Sometimes people turn their noses up when I offer them, but mostly folks seem to be happy to be provided with something new to talk about and something mindless to focus on—particularly when it’s someone else’s problems. So if these magazines help them laugh at someone rich and famous, someone who seems to have it all when they themselves are losing it, I think that’s worth far more than the subscription price.

  I purposefully leave Mr. Sands’s room for last since I still haven’t gotten the chance to tell him what I’d decided and to make him agree to hang on and fight. And this way, once I finish handing out the magazines, I can spend the rest of my shift with him.

  I run through the rounds as quickly as I can, practically throwing copies of Us Weekly, Life and Style, and Star at people paperboy style. When I finally exhaust my supply, I head for Mr. Sands’s room. “Hey!” I say, striding into the Sands Castle. But when I see him, I stop short: Mr. Sands is lying in bed with tubes sticking in and out of his arms and around his nose and neck.

  “Grace, look at what they’ve done to me,” he says softly, his voice sounding nasal. Then he laughs a bit and I can tell he’s trying to keep things light.

  “Who’s responsible for this?” I point to the clear-colored tubing encircling him. “Because it looks like the work of Spider-Man!”

  “Just the nurses,” he says. “I think they were trying to teach me a lesson.”

  Smiling, I lean in conspiratorially. “You’ve really got to stop harassing them.”

  “Party pooper.”

  I pull up a chair to his bed and sit down. “I tried to stop by last week because I wanted to talk to you, but you were having a procedure done. You feeling okay?”

  “Well, I’m better now that you’re here, honeybunch.” He smiles, his voice still quiet. “And I have a feeling I know what you want to talk a
bout. Why don’t you close the door?”

  I nod, suddenly nervous, latch the door closed, and lean against the wall next to Mr. Sands’s bed. “Yeah,” I say, unsure of how to start but knowing this is something I don’t want to joke about. “So that thing you asked me to help you with last week?”

  “Yes,” he replies.

  “Um, yeah. I just—” My mouth is dry, but when I swallow, it doesn’t help. I just feel my throat moving up and down. Actually having to do this face-to-face is much harder than just rehearsing it to myself, and for the first time with Mr. Sands, the words aren’t coming naturally to me. Nothing feels natural about this at all. I try again: “So the thing is, I don’t really think what you asked me to do is a good idea.” I pause, waiting for him to jump in. He doesn’t. “I mean, you’ve got to keep fighting because you just never know when they may find a cure for you.”

  His expression changes only slightly, like he’d been steeling himself for this response. “It was a mistake,” he replies.

  I exhale. “Okay, so you don’t think it’s a good idea anymore either, do you? I mean, you don’t want to—” I struggle even to say the word.

  “No, I haven’t changed my mind about that, honey. Death doesn’t scare me. It’s the living hell that comes before it that does . . .” Mr. Sands trails off. “But fear got the better of me when I asked you to help me. It was weak. Terribly weak of me,” he says. “I shouldn’t have burdened you with this—I can’t tell you how sorry I am that I did. All of this is just making me crazy. I’m losing it, Gracie. I’m losing . . . everything.”

  “But anything can happen.” I’m nodding rapidly, as if trying to erase the look of desperation painted on Mr. Sands’s face. “Things can change.”

  “I’m glad you think that, I really am.” There’s resignation in his tone. “But, if you have those pills on you, you can just tuck the envelope in the top drawer of my nightstand. And then let’s just try to forget this, okay?”

  I don’t know what else to say, so I unzip the front pocket of my book bag and remove the envelope. Then I open the drawer and slide the envelope to the very back, under a few old magazines and assorted clippings.

  “That’s fine,” he says after I close the drawer and turn back to him. “Now tell me some good news, honeybunch, I could use it.”

  “Good news . . . good news . . .” I have to think about this for a moment since nothing particularly cheery springs to mind, and I’m still feeling the sting that I’ve failed Mr. Sands. “Oh, okay, well, this is sort of funny. My mom got really pissed at me the other night because I didn’t sort the recyclables and she got a ticket from the Sanitation Department. She was so mad, I thought her head was going to explode.”

  “Grace,” Mr. Sands says, and from the fatherly tone of his voice, it’s clear he doesn’t approve. But he doesn’t scold, he just leaves it at that.

  When I leave Hanover House that afternoon, I head directly for the Fulton Pharmacy. As soon as I buy the package of M&M’S I’ve been craving, I start loading them into my mouth like I’m filling a Pez dispenser. I can’t stop thinking about the food they brought to him as I was leaving. Mr. Sands’s meal—if you can call it that—was an assortment of variously colored mush, shaped to resemble a slice of meatloaf, a helping of peas, mashed potatoes, and applesauce. As we watched the nurse set the tray in front of him he shot me a “get me the hell out of here!” glance. Who could blame him?

  I do my best to focus only on the M&M’S. I don’t want to think about the destruction of Mr. Sands’s motor neurons. I don’t want to think about full body paralysis. And I don’t want to think about the brave dead baseball player who set the “right” example for dealing with the disease.

  It’s past dusk as I ride down Shrader Lane. The street, chockablock with row homes—none of which looks particularly inviting in the daytime—seems even more intimidating in the fading light. I ring the doorbell of Eric’s house and open the screen door expecting him to come bounding down the stairs—as if he’d somehow sense my arrival. But instead it’s Eric’s mother who answers.

  “Well hello, hello!” she says warmly. “Come on in, Grace, I didn’t know Eric was expecting you.”

  “Actually, he isn’t,” I reply. “I’m just kind of dropping by.”

  “Eric’s been playing video games upstairs for the past several hours, so some human contact will do him good. He nearly killed me when I interrupted to tell him Chelsea Roy was on the phone waiting for him to pick up.”

  “That’s funny,” I say, more surprised by Chelsea’s call than Eric’s reaction.

  Mrs. Ward smiles and it’s not hard to see where Eric gets his looks from. She doesn’t wear much makeup or anything, but I have a feeling if she got all glammed out she could be movie star pretty. Plus she has this amazing chestnutty-red hair, which might be natural or could just as easily come from a box, but whichever it is, I’m going to try to duplicate it the next time I experiment.

  “Go on up,” she says. “Oh, and Grace, have you had dinner? Do you want to bring a snack up there for yourself?”

  “I’m good, thanks, Mrs. Ward,” I reply, holding out my bag of M&M’S to her. “You want some?”

  “I shouldn’t,” she says with a frown, “I’m trying to be good.”

  “Being good’s overrated,” I say, and she laughs.

  I knock on Eric’s door and when he doesn’t answer, I walk in anyway. Just as expected, he’s staring at his screen, headphones on, mouth slightly open, deep in the puzzle-plagued land of Zelda.

  “Hey.” I tap him on the shoulder.

  Eric jumps slightly at my touch. “Oh, hey,” he says, keeping his eyes fixed on the screen. “What’s up?”

  “You ever heard of Lou Gehrig?” I say, flopping down on his bed and staring up at the ceiling.

  “Yeah, sure. Why?” Eric asks, briefly turning around to look at me.

  “You know about that disease he had?”

  “Lou Gehrig’s disease?”

  “Good guess. So what do you know about it?”

  “Well, I’ve heard of it, but that’s about it,” he says, turning back to the screen to make sure neither he nor his princess meets with his own untimely fate.

  I lie back on his bed and stare at the light fixture in the center of his ceiling. A gross number of dead bugs have collected in the glass bubble. “You know you should really clean that light out,” I say. “It’s bug hell up there.”

  “I prefer to think of it as atmosphere,” he replies.

  “So did you read the next chapter in As You Like It yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh.” I wait to get Eric’s attention, but when I look at the screen, I can see he’s at a level he doesn’t usually get to, and that his house would pretty much have to be burning down to get him to stop playing at this point. I might get a reaction if I asked about Chelsea, but instead I get off the bed and stand behind him. I hover over his chair and put my hands on its arms. As I take a breath, I inhale the scent of his soap. I close my eyes and lean closer. The smell is familiar, but what I’m feeling is not. The closeness makes my skin tingle.

  “Hey, come on,” he laughs sensing my proximity, and bats his hand behind him. “You trying to throw off my game?”

  I don’t move. I don’t want to move. What occurs to me at that moment is that what I really want to do is just lean against Eric. I want him to put his arms around me. I want him to tell me everything’s going to be okay. And I don’t want him to let go.

  “Grace, seriously,” he says, his shoulders tensing. Though he’s not facing me, I know Eric’s not looking at the screen anymore either, because when I look forward, the hero, Link, is just standing in the woods, no longer moving, also appearing uncertain of his next move.

  “Sorry.” I quickly back away, trying to recover. “I guess I’m still a little shaky from being at Hanover House.” I sit down on the edge of the bed and prop my elbows on my knees.

  Eric finally puts the game on pause and tur
ns to look at me. “Why? What happened?”

  “Well, that resident I always talk about, Mr. Sands—”

  “The guy who taught you how to play cards?”

  “Yeah. So he’s the one with Lou Gehrig’s disease, and I think he’s really starting to go downhill.”

  “How much time does he have left?”

  “Don’t know.” I shake my head. “The only thing they do know is that he’s just going to get worse and worse, and they can’t do anything to stop it.”

  “That sucks. I’m sorry, Grace.”

  I consider telling Eric what Mr. Sands asked me to do, and I wonder how he would respond. But I decide not to say anything—to him or anyone else—because I think it would be like telling someone’s most personal secret, which is the last thing I’d want to do. It would also expose him to other people’s judgments, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. This is about what Mr. Sands wants.

  “Yeah,” I say, my stomach knotted with a variety of feelings, “I’m sorry too.”

  Chapter Six

  Surprises are a funny thing. When I was younger, I loved them. I couldn’t imagine anything better, and I couldn’t get enough of them. That’s probably because back then, surprises mostly came wrapped in brightly colored boxes, tied with silky ribbons. A surprise could also be a fuzzy little animal pulled from a magician’s top hat. Or a sweet-tasting candy-coated reward that turned my tongue and teeth exotic shades of the rainbow. But whatever it was, the surprise almost always came with a smile that seemed like a promise: This thing that you hadn’t even seen was going to make your day better.

  The surprises I’ve had recently have been an entirely different variety. They’re the pop quizzes I’m not prepared for. Fights I didn’t see brewing. Appearances and disappearances of people whose smiles mean squat. These surprises make me feel like I’m that poor fuzzy bunny who’s being yanked around by the ears.