by Jen Nails
Harry got home at about eight o’clock, and a few minutes later his cell phone rang.
“Hello? Oh hi, Helen.” He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. I shot up from the couch. Helen never called Harry. Was something wrong?
“Yeah, she’s right here,” he said. “Okay.”
I took the phone. “Hi, girlie,” said Helen. “Everything’s fine. Update: your mom and I forgot about the letter. Little too much excitement around here. She wrote it, though, and she wants to give it to you, because she knows it’s due tomorrow. What can we do here?”
I got this pulling in my heart. Mom had remembered. When I had forgotten.
Harry ended up getting right back in his car and driving all the way over to the Place to pick it up for me. I couldn’t look at him when he handed me the envelope. “Thanks,” I said.
“Welcome, Steffy,” he said. He put his hand out and I held it, and we just stood there for a second. The feeling of squeezing a dad-type person’s big and sort of rough hand broke something inside of me, and I let go and turned to plop back on the couch. “You almost done?” he asked. “It’s getting close to ten.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s due tomorrow, so I have to do it.”
Once he was upstairs, I opened the letter.
Hi, Steffany,
When James didn’t come, you didn’t seem to think it was stupid of me to wear the purple dress for him. You didn’t seem to worry that he wasn’t there. You brought me cinnamon rolls. That crust was my mother’s recipe. You didn’t tell me it was okay that James didn’t come. You didn’t tell me that maybe he’d come another day. You didn’t say anything to try and cover up that it was truly awful.
And you made it into that big contest! You are so talented, I know you are.
I want to tell you one more thing and it’s this: remember that life could suddenly veer off and leave you stunned and changed forever. You and your sister and my sister are the only rafts I have that keep me afloat. After every one of your visits, I have to go to my room and be alone for a while so I can try to hold on to you for as long as I can and remember all that I am supposed to be. I love you.
Love,
Mom
Cheerios and Toast for Dinner
In the morning, I was so hungry I ate the eggs that Harry had cooked and fruit and two muffins. I even started a third. Auntie Gina gave me her letter for my autobiography as she pulled up to Greensboro Four.
“Now who’s Last-Minute Lucy?” I said. She bowed her head and smiled.
“I know,” she said. “You’re right.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Steffy,” she said, “I love you, my girl. We’ll talk tonight, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“And I’m stopping at the store this morning before my shift. You need anything?”
“No,” I said.
“Practice ingredients?” she asked. I shook my head and got out of the car. It felt weird for me and Nina to be getting to school in Auntie Gina’s car and not on our bikes. There wasn’t enough time to fill Lisa in on everything, but I told her a little and her jaw dropped when I talked about Dad at the Place. She just stopped, put down her backpack, and hugged me.
The day moved in slow motion, and all I wanted was to be at home, in my own bed. At lunch, Principal Schmitz-Brady came and told me that they were mentioning in the Greensboro Four end-of-the-year newsletter that I was going to be a finalist in Chefs of Tomorrow, and it would say the time and date when people could watch the live broadcast. I pretended that was great but just wanted to go home and go to sleep. The contest was two and a half weeks away. I didn’t know if I could get myself to do it. I would rather have had Dad back than have become a finalist. I knew how hard I tried to get my recipes good and all, how many pies I had made, and how many pounds of potatoes I’d boiled for practice gnocchi over the last few months, but it didn’t feel like anything right then. All I wanted was for my dad to still be here. For there to still be a chance.
When it finally got to be last period, I took out my autobiography and looked around at other people’s. Mine was really, really long compared to most people’s. Uh-oh. I realized I hadn’t read Auntie Gina’s letter and quickly unfolded it.
Sautéed Steffany Sandolini
by Gina Sandolini
1 cup perseverance
⅔ cup observer
2 pounds talent
1 tablespoon loyalty
dash stubbornness
Pour cup of perseverance over observer and mix together over low heat. Brown talent on both sides over olive oil until it reaches 165 degrees. Add loyalty and stubbornness. Pour sauce over talent and serve with rice and grilled vegetables.
It made me smile but I just wanted to turn it in, and I was so tired my head hurt. Finally bringing up the assignment and putting it on the pile made the pressing on my chest go away a little.
At the end of the day, Nina went to dance with Denise, and I was getting a ride home with Lisa. Right about a block away from St. Theresa’s I asked her dad if he could please just stop off there for a minute because they had left a pie pan there for me from a pie I donated a while back. I knew it kind of sounded weird but he said okay, and while Lisa and him waited in the car I ran in.
I wished for my dad. I wished he’d be in the basement, but when I got down there, it was empty of course. The folding chairs were all stacked up on this rolling cart thing in a corner, and the tables were folded and leaning against a wall. There was the faint smell of cigarettes though. I would come back down here again somehow. Maybe I would find Dad.
No one was home at Auntie Gina’s when I got dropped off. Lisa said bye and she loved me, and I said bye and I loved her. My instructions were to let myself in and that Auntie Gina and Harry would be home after their shifts, like around nine that night. Nina would be home after dance.
The kitchen was all cluttered with boxes that came in the mail that said Macy’s and Crate&Barrel and Williams-Sonoma. Wedding gifts. Also there was a big box with the name of the wedding dress place that we went to together. I guessed Auntie Gina had picked up her dress.
Auntie Gina had bought me yams that were sitting on the counter, and there were tomato sauces and pastes that stared at me when I opened the cabinet for cereal. All these little reminders about Chefs of Tomorrow, but I just wanted to hide from those ingredients that I was once so excited about. I went on the Chefs of Tomorrow website and saw my actual name printed on there, along with the other finalists.
After two bowls of Cheerios and a piece of peanut butter toast, I went up to my room and got into bed, even though it was only five thirty. Never ever would I have cereal for dinner, but I just couldn’t bring myself to go into the cabinets and put a meal together. I woke up a while later and it was pitch-dark out, and Auntie Gina and Nina were in my room, on my bed.
Auntie Gina said, “Steffy, I’m sorry to wake you. You have to know that I have been thinking of you and Nina all the last two days and just really had to work. Can you wake up a little so we can talk? You know that everything’s going to be okay.”
Everything feels very not okay.
“I’m heading to the Harris Teeter again tomorrow,” she said. “You need anything special?” Her hand stroked my hair. I was lying with Wiley, facing the wall.
I need to know where my dad is and what is going on.
“You’re still doing Chefs of Tomorrow, right?” asked Nina.
Why aren’t you talking about my dad, either of you? Why are you talking about stupid things that don’t matter?
No one was saying the thing that everyone was thinking. If they weren’t going to talk about the most important thing, then I wasn’t going to talk about anything.
When they left, and when I was in the place between awake and asleep, I was imagining Auntie Gina opening that wedding dress box. And then I was imagining Mom before her wedding, before putting on her dress, before holding our dad’s hand, before marrying him. How she l
ooked, how she felt, what she thought her life would be.
The Water’s Boiling
Nina, with her hair in a bun and wearing her sweats, slid her dance bag over her shoulder while Harry lifted her suitcase out of the trunk. She had her cell phone and earphones in her hands, and she wore a little eyeliner, too, like most of the rest of them. All the girls were laughing and talking, and their excitement just made the rotting feeling in my stomach worse. My sister was leaving again, right when I needed her most. Just like going to Denise’s on Christmas.
She even got to have her last day of school be the day before the real last day of school so she could ride the bus that Charlotte Rep was sending for the top-scoring girls from Greensboro. It turned out that she wouldn’t have needed Dad to drive her down after all.
Nina always got everything she wanted. When it was my turn to hug her, she went with her arms around my waist and squeezed, and I was limp. It went like this:
“Steffy, just think, tomorrow’s the last day of school, and soon it’s Chefs of Tomorrow. Everything’s gonna be fine.”
Now something in me was simmering, and I didn’t know if I could keep the lid on. She kept saying how fine everything was. Just fine. It’ll all be fine, don’t worry.
“It’s not fine, because whenever anything’s wrong, you leave,” I said.
“That’s not fair.”
“Yeah, it’s not fair that you can just leave whenever you want. You always do whatever you want and don’t think about anyone else.” The words were coming out of me fast.
“Shut up, Steffany. I would never tell you not to go and do your thing. You know what? Get your stubborn little passive-aggressive butt into the freakin’ kitchen to practice for the finals next Sunday. You’re not doing the one thing you love doing, and that’s what’s making you act like this. It’s not Dad, it’s not Mom, it’s you.”
The simmer in me turned into a rolling boil. Denise and her mom were sort of looking at us. Miss Ronnie was herding girls up onto the bus. When Nina turned to go get on the bus, I launched forward like a rocket, and I punched her in the back. She turned around real fast, our noses almost touching.
“Grow up,” she said.
“You grow up!”
Then Harry was pulling my arm, and people were trying to look away but weren’t. Miss Ronnie’s face was pointed somewhere else, but her eyes were on us.
When we were headed back to Auntie Gina and Harry’s, Harry said, “Good for you, Steffany.” Auntie Gina kind of slugged him.
She knocked on my door later that night.
“You want pie?” she asked.
“No. I want to talk now.”
“Okay.”
“Auntie Gina, what’s going to happen when you get married and Dad doesn’t come back? I don’t know what to do or how I’m supposed to . . . supposed to be!”
She sat and rocked me for a long, long time. Waves of feeling kept coming up and coming up, and Auntie Gina went out twice for tissues.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“Sometimes I wish . . . I wish you weren’t so nice to take in me and Nina. I didn’t want you to be. I wanted them. I wanted . . . my dad to . . . not leave.”
“Well,” said Auntie Gina after a second, “can I tell you a secret, and promise not to get mad at me?”
I turned my face to see her eyes. I nodded. “Promise?” she asked again. I nodded.
“Well. I was never trying to be nice by taking you and Nina. I just couldn’t see any other option than you guys being with me. When your mom’s accident happened, I knew you like she knew you. Saw you every day, changed your diapers and fed you, had sleepovers with you. Your dad and I even said that maybe I should move in with you guys, just to be there for you and Nina. And then, Steffy, I got home from the hospital, from seeing your mom right after the accident, and he was just gone. Like, disappeared. And there were you and Nina. And I knew you guys. I knew that you loved all foods and would play with anything, and that Nina only ate three or four things and only wanted to play with trucks or dress-up. I knew when you napped, and I knew how to calm Nina down from a tantrum.”
It was like a waterfall of all of the stuff from my life, and I wanted her to keep telling me and telling me.
“And now that everything is said and done, and your dad is gone again, my secret is,” she said, bending down and whispering in my ear, “as much as you wanted your dad to be with you . . . I wanted you to be with me.”
I tucked my head in, right into her shoulder, and we just sat there for a long time.
I remembered when I was really little and got scared at night I’d sneak down the shadowy hallway and into the back bedroom, and Auntie Gina’d say, “Well, you can either stay in bed with me for a little bit and then walk back to your room all by yourself, or I can carry you back in right now.” I always chose the carrying back.
Roasting Marshmallows
Mrs. Ashton passed back our autobiography projects on the last day of school. It was an early-dismissal day and then there was this good-bye-lunch thing that you could go to if you wanted. I’d said good-bye to everyone I’d miss, and I was sleeping over at Lisa’s that night anyway. Instead of staying for the lunch, we walked to St. Theresa’s, which was probably too far for us to walk but we knew exactly where we were going and we were officially sixth graders now. It was so easy to just go in and sneak right down to the basement.
“Oh my gosh,” she whispered when I told her about the meetings. “Right here?” she asked. “You just sit right here and they don’t see you?”
I pointed to my step—the third step from the top—and showed her how I hugged my knees and leaned against the wall and craned my head down a little bit for a perfect view.
“Mission accomplished, Steffany. Oh my gosh.”
“I need to come back tomorrow somehow,” I said.
“You can,” she said. “We’ll ride over. I still have my old bike.”
“All the way from your house?”
“Steffy, it’s not that far.”
“It’s farther than mine is,” I said.
“So?”
“But I don’t even know if he’ll be here for sure,” I said.
“But he might,” she said. “I have a feeling about it. And my feelings are usually right.”
The next morning we said we were going to take a bike ride, and Lisa’s mom said that sounded good. She made us promise to be back in an hour and we said we would. And she made us both wear helmets and knee pads and Lisa rolled her eyes, and as I Velcro-ed everything on, I thought about the basement and hoped Lisa wasn’t doing all this for me for nothing.
She was right. It really wasn’t that far. And her old bike was just like my bike, and it felt so good to get back on it and let it carry me. It took about fifteen minutes to get there, but it was uphill.
“Coming back’s gonna be quicker,” she said. “Come on.”
We parked and locked up our bikes out front. There was no mass this early on Saturdays, and there were just the usual old ladies in a few pews here and there. Lisa sat in the last pew with her book, and there was this big, swelling feeling in me and I couldn’t swallow for a second as I watched her just sit there, waiting for me. My very best friend in the world.
I made sure we got there just a little bit after I thought the meeting started so I wouldn’t risk someone seeing me go down. But there was another door that I thought they came in through anyway, down a slope in the back of the church that was an entrance right into the basement.
I tiptoed downstairs.
Dad.
Standing up front.
I almost called out to him.
Oh my gosh, my plan worked. It worked, it worked, it worked. There was a zippy, jittery feeling coursing through me, and I held my breath and hugged my knees tight.
He stood with his hands folded, one foot crossed in front of the other, looking at the cement floor for a minute.
“But that morning,” he
was saying, “it made so much sense to me for some reason. It would be easy. And I . . . I mean, I had nothing. I’d gotten evicted again. I had no job.”
He stopped to take a long sip of his Styrofoam cup drink.
“And I . . . I don’t know if anyone’s ever tried it, or thought about it.”
People nodded their heads.
“I just, I . . . went in. To the water.”
These words came out slow.
“I got as far as my neck.”
No one was drinking their drinks. No one was moving or even breathing, maybe.
“And then something really simple happened,” Dad said. “The sun just started rising. And I watched the whole thing. That big, giant ball of fire that keeps us alive. And I stood there. And I realized that—because I could feel the sun now—I hadn’t felt how ice cold the water was. And I thought, if there’s one thing—one thing I need to do in my life before I die, it’s go back to my daughters. Go back to my wife.”
Dad stood there, nodding slowly. He took a sip of his drink.
It was that same you’re-gonna-get-in-trouble feeling, knowing these things. Me and Nina and Mom were what had made my dad come out of the water.
“But that time—in the water?” he said. “That’s not even the half of it. Not even close.”
I was getting a hot feeling in my chest, and I just knew I couldn’t hear any more. There was a rushing feeling, like something was beating me up the stairs so quick I didn’t even have time to decide to go.
It was like when you’re roasting a marshmallow, and it accidentally catches fire. You yank it out real quick, without even thinking about it. But then you have this on-fire marshmallow, and so you blow it out. Once it’s done burning, you see that it’s black.
And I felt black right then. I couldn’t believe it, but I wanted to not know everything now. I wished I hadn’t gone down. I wished I hadn’t made Lisa come here with me. I wished me and Nina hadn’t ever made our dad try to go see Mom.
I just wanted to be back at our house, with my dad, making him eggs with lots of pepper. I just wanted the coffeemaker on and I wanted the sound of the newspaper wrinkling between his fingers.