by Jen Nails
“Nina poured the stock,” I said, wiping my forehead.
“A three-year-old could have done that,” she said.
“You made waffles,” I said.
“A baby could have done that,” she said. “Look at you, Steffy. You’re disgusting.” She was talking about how my hair was all tangly and how waffle crumbs, melted butter, and turkey stock were all over my pajamas.
“Crock-Pot?” said Dad as he filled up the coffeepot with water.
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, I thought that since we were gonna be at Mom’s all day, the turkey would have to cook somehow.”
“Yeah,” said Nina. “There’s always a party at Mom’s,” she said, “that anybody can go to who’s family.”
Dad’s back straightened. He was facing the other direction from us and spooning ground coffee into the coffeemaker.
“That anybody can go to who’s family,” Nina said again. She stood there a little longer, but Dad didn’t turn around. I started walking upstairs to go get changed. When I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth, I could hear them talking quietly. I stopped brushing, toothpaste stinging my mouth, trying to hear what they were saying. Then Nina stomped up the stairs, flounced down the hallway past me, and slammed her bedroom door.
On the walk to church, Dad was asking me if he should do anything with the Crock-Pot while we were out, and I said to just check the turkey to make sure it reached 165 degrees inside. He said he’d have the table all set for when we got home. Nina walked on one side and Dad walked on the other, and they didn’t speak. Instead of getting panicky, I was trying to notice how it was the best fall day out. You needed only a little sweater, and tree branches rocked gently from side to side. Red and brown and yellow leaves were dangling, hanging on just a little longer.
Jean Sawyer was waiting in the vestibule, and Dad said bye and I said bye and Nina didn’t say anything. But then Dad did something odd. He went downstairs to the church basement. I was giving Nina lots of looks but she wasn’t even letting anyone look at her, and then we were outside, following Jean to her car.
On the way to Mom’s, while Jean was asking Nina what she thought about the Broadway dancers in the parade, I couldn’t stop wondering what Dad was doing in the basement. Maybe he had to go to the bathroom was all I could come up with. But there was a bathroom in the vestibule. And then I remembered what Auntie Gina had asked him after dinner at her house that night, about his business at St. Theresa’s. Maybe he worked there?
We got to Mom’s and headed in to the party. There were the usual decorations and food. But it was the sick-people food in a sick-people place and not really meant for us, even though they always invited us to get a plate. Everyone had gotten wheeled or walked outside onto the big deck where the meal was, and they sat around looking at each other and us visitors and talking slow. Some of them were actually laughing sometimes and playing Monopoly and Scrabble and Uno.
We hugged and kissed Mom, and she squeezed our hands. We drank the Place’s version of sweet tea (not too sweet because some residents weren’t allowed too much sugar) and went through a photo album Mom had out.
“And that’s Grandpa Falcon,” I said, “pig picking.”
“Mmmm,” said Nina. “Let me see that.” We pored over pictures of this big cookout at Grandpa Falcon’s. There was Grandpa, turning the spit. Grown-ups I didn’t recognize holding cups of Cheerwine, it looked like. There was me in only a diaper with corn all over my face.
“There’s Steffy,” said Nina, “when she was the chubster.” I elbowed her, and we all three giggled. It just stung, though, being close with our mom like that for a few minutes, knowing it would all go away from her by the next time we came.
When we got to her and Dad’s wedding, she outlined his face with her finger and squinted. Even though I had seen those photos before, things got all disassembled inside of me when I looked at them now. Mom looked like the same mom from her senior picture that hung in our kitchen—wavy hair at her shoulders. Dad looked the same as he did now but with less wrinkles.
Somehow they looked smaller in those pictures, like they were doll versions of themselves. Nina got up with her phone after a minute. Another one of Auntie Gina’s rules was that we weren’t supposed to talk about Dad so much when we came. Helen gently took the album and told us Mom was playing the piano almost every day and remembering more and more of what she had practiced from the day before.
Now me and Nina sat on either side of our mom and had our arms around her and gave her kisses, and she liked that. I held her hand and squeezed, and she squeezed back. Nina handed her a plate of food, and she ate stuffing. Watching all the residents eating, I wondered if they sometimes forgot who each other were.
Jean came down hallway D and into the rec room a little before it was time for us to go.
“Hi there, sweetie,” she said to Mom. “It’s me, Jeannie Sawyer, your old neighbor. From Castlewood Drive?”
Mom stood and hugged Jean. “Castlewood Drive. Yes,” Mom said. “There was that brick wall that we used to climb on, right?”
“Right,” said Jean. “I think I fell off that wall more times than I crossed it!”
“Me too,” Mom said. They both laughed hard, and it reminded me of how much me and Nina were laughing yesterday. And it got me thinking how I hardly ever heard my mom laugh. I turned toward Nina, and she looked away because her eyes were watering and she had eyeliner all over her thumbs.
When we got home, Dad and some people were out front playing cards and drinking coffee. Jean came and hugged Dad, and then he introduced us to everyone. There were three guys with dirty fingernails and blue-stained hands—just like how Dad looks when he comes home from painting all day. They were the kind of working guys who Grandpa used to give a Coke and Oreo cookies and twenty dollars to, to help repair a side of a chicken coop or go up on the roof. The kind of guys you saw sitting on the curb in front of 7-Eleven waiting for someone to ask them to paint a house. It hit me that that was the kind of guy my dad was, too.
There was also this gray-haired lady with a pack of cigarettes in her T-shirt pocket. She shook my and Nina’s and Jean’s hands and said she was Carol, a friend of our daddy’s.
We said “Nice to meet you” to everyone, and then Jean came in to drop off two pies she had baked for us.
“Ooooh, yummy, yummy smell,” she said as she put down the pies on the counter. She was right. The turkey had been cooking all day long, and the rich smell of gravy and stuffing was so heavy in the air.
“Can you stay?” I asked her.
“Oh, hon, I have to get home to my parents,” she said. “My dad’s been cooking since yesterday. All the Sawyers are in town from all over.”
I thanked her for the pies, and as we hugged, I silently thanked her for coming and making my mom laugh today.
Once Jean had gone and me and Nina had pretty much gotten everything on the table, we started calling the guests in. Carol came in first—she had brought two soft loaves of French bread. She even brought her own butter and little containers of garlic salt and parsley, and while people were washing up and getting settled at the table, she made fresh garlic bread in our oven. It was cozy to me when someone came over to your house and brought something to cook, and your kitchen got shared with them for that meal.
I was so nervous that all these people were going to eat what I had made, I could barely look at anyone once we were all seated. But I didn’t have to be nervous. Sort of. I ended up forgetting cranberry sauce, and there was this moment when the gravy almost spilled all over Carol. But Dad caught the side of the bowl, and it only got on her jeans a little. She ended up laughing, and my heart went back to beating normally. I missed seeing the green bean casserole that Auntie Gina was famous for, but at least it was better than Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving menu. The meat had fallen off the bones, and let me tell you, it was the juiciest. Those worker guys brought store-bought apple pies, and Carol also brought sweet potatoes. Nina even remembered the whipp
ed cream for the pies.
Everybody said, about a hundred times, how good I’d done. I kept trying to say how Nina had helped, and she kept not letting me. For some reason, I could barely talk, because my whole heart was filling up behind my face. I had never had Thanksgiving with strangers, and it was a more clinking-fork than talking dinner. But Nina put on her holiday mix, and she was talking a lot to Carol, who was really nice. It all turned out to be not that weird to eat with these people. I wondered where their families were, if they had kids somewhere. I thought of Dad in California the last two years and wondered if he ever spent a holiday with some family like us.
Kitchen Sink
It was the Monday after Thanksgiving break. Denise’s mom was supposed to drop Nina off right after dance, like at five thirty. Dad was supposed to be home around the same time. On Nina’s dance days, they ended up getting home within just a few minutes of each other. When it got to be six o’clock, I called her cell and got her voice mail but didn’t leave a message. I called Dad’s cell, and he didn’t answer. What was the purpose of cell phones when people didn’t answer them? Sixth grade was the magic year that you got a cell phone, in Auntie Gina’s world anyway, so I guessed I’d get mine next year, and I’d answer it. I finally called the dance class place. Miss Ronnie said Nina had gone home with another girl in the class.
I didn’t know if I was supposed to be worried or mad, so I just kept looking around the fridge and the cabinets for my Kitchen Sink dinner. It’s where you hunted around the kitchen and threw bits of everything you had into a pot.
Even though it felt wrong to cook with nobody home, I set the table and kept going. I turned on the channel 3 news at six thirty with Bob Sebuda. I ripped off all the good leaves of lettuce and set them in a pile. Then I got rice cooking on the stove. I cut up peppers and mushrooms and fried them up together with olive oil. Then I threw in all the leftover turkey meat, too, like a substitute for chicken in a chicken stir-fry type thing. Then I poured one can of tomato sauce and one can of tomato paste over the frying veggies and meat, but it didn’t smell good anymore. Quickly I added garlic powder and let it simmer.
Finally Nina answered when I called her again and said she rode home with Denise from her class and that she was spending the night and bye. She was spending the night on a school night? Who was gonna eat this dinner?
But I just kept going, because it was all cooking already, and I sort of felt like I was too late into it to stop. So I scrambled some eggs. Then I dumped the rice, the stir-fry stuff, and the eggs into a big bowl. My idea was that you could take some of the mixture and put it into a lettuce leaf and roll it up like a burrito. I sat at the table and watched the steam rise from the bowl.
I was alone but hungry. Unfortunately, Kitchen Sink was gross. I decided I had to eat it, though, so I could figure out why. I tried to give myself tips. Tomato sauce and paste: bad move. The flavor of rice and turkey on lettuce: disgusting. And overall, too much garlic powder. It was a bunch of good separate tastes, but they shouldn’t have all been mixed together.
Then I turned on Jeopardy! and started putting stuff in the dishwasher. It was dark out. My eyes locked with my mom’s eyes from the picture of her above the sink. Sometimes when I looked at that picture I liked it because she was there watching me and being with me, and sometimes I wished that picture was gone so the reminder of her being fine and okay before her accident wasn’t always there, butting in. Right then it gave me a sting to meet her eyes when they were eyes from before that could have remembered everything I told her.
I called Nina’s cell again, and she didn’t answer. I called Auntie Gina’s cell, but she was coming back from New York that night, so I knew I wouldn’t get her. I’m gonna just do everything normal, I was telling myself. Homework. Shower. Pajamas. Teeth. The TV was blaring downstairs.
Finally, when I was getting into bed, I heard the screen door. The keys in the dish. In a second, the TV got turned down, and the fridge opened and closed. I could hear Dad getting out the bad dinner and then pressing microwave buttons. I held Wiley close to me and glanced at my clock. It said 9:36 p.m. I was wiping and wiping my eyes and nose with my sheet. I finally let myself fall asleep.
When I woke up the next morning, it felt like I hadn’t moved from holding Wiley by me all night.
During dinner that night (frozen pizza, because I was scared to cook anything after Kitchen Sink), I was bracing myself for Dad to say something to Nina. Ask her why she didn’t ask first to spend the night somewhere. Tell her not to do that again, like Auntie Gina would. It went like this:
“Nina, you call me if your plans change,” said Dad.
Dad, you could have called me since I guess your plans changed last night, too. You never got home that late before.
“What plans?” asked Nina.
“Plans that involve who’s picking you up and taking you here or there. Plans that involve letting me know where you’re going and when.”
“But it didn’t involve you,” said Nina. “You don’t have a car.”
“Yeah, but I’m your dad.”
“But you don’t have a car, and it involved cars.”
“Nina, just tell me what you’re up to, you hear?”
“You wouldn’t’ve answered your phone anyway, Dad,” she muttered.
And that was it. Dad ate another piece of pizza, and Nina finished her sweet tea. After dinner we all spread out: me to the sink, Nina to her room, Dad to the TV. He didn’t even get mad at her. Nothing. I knew it wasn’t my job to be angry at Nina for what she did, but it was someone’s. I did the dishes where you plunk things down louder than they need to be plunked.
When you pour tomato sauce out of the can, it’s all flowing and it just trickles right into whatever you’re cooking, like a little waterfall. But the tomato paste is thick and goopy, and you have to scrape it out with a spoon because you don’t want to waste any and then your fingers get all sticky, and you never really get all of it out of the can because it’s so hard to work with. Those were the two sides of Nina: sometimes all easy and smooth, and other times so stubborn and messy. I never knew which one I was going to get.
In the morning, after she came down the stairs and poured herself a bowl of cereal, Nina said, “Oh, Dad, I forgot to tell you. Mom asked about you.”
Dad put the newspaper down.
“Yeah. At Thanksgiving. She said, ‘Where is James? Why doesn’t he ever come?’”
Dad’s eyes cut over to me.
“No,” I said. “She didn’t say that.”
Nina stood up and threw down her bowl, which smashed into pieces on the floor. Milk got all over the place.
“Steffany,” she said, “you are such a butt-kisser.”
She banged upstairs, and her bedroom door boomed shut. The light fixture over the kitchen table shook.
Fully Cooked
Nina rode way ahead of me that morning. It was tricky to steer my bike and wipe my cheeks at the same time. My sister was really the only one in the world who could ever understand my whole life, and when she was mad at me, I just didn’t know what to do with myself.
The day dragged. In English, while taking notes on introductory paragraphs, body paragraphs, and concluding paragraphs, I got all in knots thinking about what Christmas would be like this year. Maybe Dad would invite Carol and those three guys, but it was hard to picture them around the same table as Auntie Gina and Harry.
Mrs. Ashton said that after winter break we needed to turn in an outline of what we’d say in our autobiography letter, that we could just go into our notebooks that we’ve been writing in all year and take that stuff and make it into an outline. All that was in my notebook was a bunch of lists of grocery store stuff and recipe ideas. I had so much work to do and still didn’t know exactly where I’d start.
After school I rode home by myself because Nina had dance, and for dinner that night I made chicken Parmesan with store-bought, premade, and already-breaded chicken breasts. They said “Fully Cooke
d” on the package. You just put sauce and then mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses all over them and put them in the microwave. To be a little fancy, I sprinkled Italian-ish herbs on top, like parsley, oregano, and basil.
I didn’t want to overdo it though. After the Kitchen Sink meal fiasco, I was nervous about cooking and wondered if I was just bad at it after all and nobody ever told me. Making something easy and precooked that night made me feel better, like I couldn’t mess it up. I boiled store-bought spaghetti to go with it, and Nina got dropped off just when I was taking the garlic bread out of the broiler.
“If you’re gonna borrow my scarf, tell me first,” she said, before she went up to her room. She didn’t even give me a chance to say I didn’t even know I put hers on and not mine.
Dad came in right after.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I said. He put his keys in the dish and then stood there in the doorway for just a second longer than normal.
“Mmmm,” he said, taking a big whiff of the dinner. His cheeks were all red, and when he passed me on the way to the fridge, there was the smell. I never knew that smell until Dad: beer breath.
Nina came down, and I put the food on the table. For some reason, we all just sat there for a second before anyone started helping themselves. Then Dad said, “You guys been out to your Grandpa Falcon’s old house? My old house? Man, it looks terrible. The whole yard is overgrown. The weeds spring up so high and tower into the air, about three feet, it looks like.” He lifted up his hand to about where he thought three feet would hit.
“Grandpa built that path that used to go up to the front door—I remember when he did that. Now you can barely see it. Those people need a Weedwacker.” He stabbed a piece of chicken with his fork and shook it off onto his plate.
“You guys,” he said, shaking his head. “You guys are like these two people in my life that I have no idea how to be around. You guys are like these two . . . things I’m trying to win over, and I just don’t know how. It’s like I’m . . . I’m tossing the darts, and I never hit the bull’s-eye.”