The Kitchen Daughter

by Jael McHenry

  I don’t know how long I stand at the top of the stairs. I’m only aware of the cold and nothing else. Unlike yogurt, yeast can live through being frozen. Maybe, today, for the first time, I know what it’s like to be yeast.

  Behind me a low voice says, “Forget your keys?”

  Startled, I begin to fall off the stairs, and grab wildly at the railing. I catch it and for a moment I’m back in balance but then gravity is too much and I tear free again. I grab and miss the top rail and my right hand gets caught in the lower scrollwork and the flat rusted edge of the iron scrapes clear across my palm.

  Behind me there is a solid slab to rest on, and I think I’ve fallen all the way down the steps onto the sidewalk until I realize that I’m still vertical and the slab is breathing. I wrench myself so far forward I hit my chest on the rail, but at least that part of the rail isn’t sharp. Still, it strikes hard on my sternum, and it takes all my breath.

  “Whoa!” yells the voice. “I am so sorry. You okay?”

  I pull myself forward and sit down hard on the stairs sideways and press my forehead against the cold marble post between the iron rails. First Evangeline and now this and I’m a drop of water on a griddle. I’m completely out of control, and I can hear the beginnings of the chant, get/out/, but now that I’m not being touched maybe I can master it and I shut the world out: separating an orange into skinless sections.

  Peel it, but not with your fingers. Level off the top and bottom. Set it on the board. Remove the peel in strips with a paring knife, pushing down from top to bottom with slow, curved strokes. Nick off all the white parts. Cup the cool, wet skinless fruit in your hand. Take care. Don’t rush. Press the blade into the flesh of the orange, sink it down, a segment at a time, along the left side of the skin and then the right. Left and right. Left and right. As close as you can to the membrane. Press to the center with your knife, level and easy. If you cut right, the segment will fall out onto the board, triangular, gleaming. Left and right. Left and right. If you rush you’ll cut yourself. Take care with it. Cut right along the seam, right where the sweet fruit meets the tough membrane. Left and right. Left and right. As close as you can.

  I inhale and exhale. Lift my head from the comfort of the cold stone. Look up.

  His skin is the color most people would call olive. But olives come in many colors, black and purple and sour green. Kalamata. Gaeta. Castelvetrano. If it had to be an olive his skin would be a cured Arbequina. I don’t know how old he is. Older than me, not as old as my parents. His hair sticks up all over but still looks soft.

  “You okay?” he asks, in a low voice with a quality I can’t quite place.

  “Yes,” I say, because it’s easiest. “I don’t know you.”

  “I’m David,” he says, and reaches out a hand.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “Okay.”

  I cradle my injured hand in my uninjured one. “Just don’t, don’t even come close.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I’m really sorry. Give me a sec, I mean, I’ll give you a sec. Gotta see what’s not in pieces.”

  That voice, it’s odd, I can’t figure out what it reminds me of. He hops down the stairs and I see the paper grocery bags now, their contents spilling out and strewn on the sidewalk. The oatmeal, the butter, the oranges. I watch a runaway apple roll across the uneven street and come to its final rest in a storm drain. He gathers everything else up quickly and brings the bags back up the stairs.

  “Everything but the eggs looks okay,” he says. “Those are a total loss. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  His voice is muddy, that’s what it is. Dark and brown and muddy. A note to it like coffee left too long on the burner. And unsweetened, bitter chocolate. But there’s dirt in it too, deep, dark dirt, like the garden in October.

  “Okay, thanks, I’m going to go inside now,” I say.

  “Are you sure you’re okay? You don’t need to go to the hospital or anything?”

  “If I did I could just walk there,” I say, pointing. From here we can both see the PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL sign, blue and white, EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT specified in bright white lettering on cherry red underneath.

  “Okay. I understand. I’ll just set these up on the porch?”

  I stand up and step back toward the door as he approaches, and as I open it to go inside, the lingering brownie smell hits me and I remember why I was standing out here in the cold instead of going in in the first place, and I let it fall shut again.

  I press my back against the solid, reassuring bulk of the door and say, “I’m just going to stay out here a minute.” His feet are on the porch part of the stairs, the wide, flat part, with mine. If he doesn’t come any closer, I’ll be all right.

  “Are you crazy? It’s freezing!”

  “I’m not crazy,” I say. I watch his feet.

  “Well, you need to wash your hand out,” he says. “There’s rust in there.”

  His hand on my hand is a maddening feathery irritation and I jerk it back.

  “No!”

  “Okay.”

  He walks down the stairs and stops at a bike that’s chained to the No Parking sign. There’s a basket across the back so he must have used it to bring the groceries. He reaches into the basket and pulls out a bottle of water. To my surprise, he comes back up the stairs with it.

  “Hold your hand out,” he says. I don’t move.

  He says, “Rust. You don’t want it infected.”

  My father’s daughter, I know he’s right. So I force myself to stay still, and open my palm. He pours water across it and it spills over the side of my hand and runs out between my fingers and spatters on the porch. I watch the spattering drops hit David’s shoes since that’s easier than looking at the raw scrape across my hand, which is beginning to ache.

  “Well, it’s not bleeding a lot, but it looks pretty bad.”

  “That’s mostly scar,” I say. “This whole part here? That’s from years ago.”

  “But didn’t your dad fix things like that? For a living?”

  “Yeah! He was incredible.” I know this story, I tell this story. “People got in accidents, lost one finger, two, three, my dad could sew them back on. But there are just some things you can’t do, after a certain amount of time has passed. Your body doesn’t want you to bleed to death, so it seals things up, and that’s what happened to me. Dad couldn’t do anything about it. In surgery, time is the enemy. If time’s on your side, you can do amazing things. You can shear someone’s finger clear off and then reattach it. If they got to the hospital fast enough, and they brought the finger with them.”

  He puts his right hand out and says, “Believe me, I know.”

  At the top of David’s right palm, where it meets his fingers, there is a deep bone-white line, pink and slightly shiny on both sides like a raw pork tenderloin. It goes from the pinky to the middle finger, then hooks in the middle of the palm like the letter J.

  “These were off,” he says, running his left index finger along the scar, indicating all three fingers.

  “How did—”

  “I was in a car accident,” he says. “So I don’t know exactly. I wasn’t conscious. There’s a lot of metal in a torn-up car, and it’s sharp.”

  “Move your fingers,” I say.

  He obeys, tipping each one down in rapid succession from pinky to thumb and back again. They move perfectly.

  “So you got fixed.”

  “Your dad fixed me,” he says. “I mean, I never even met him, because I was out, and they had some other doctor come and talk to me afterward.”

  “Dr. Shaw,” I say. Dad talked about him.

  “Yeah. But Dr. Selvaggio, he was the one who put me back together again.” David points toward the hospital, toward the sign. “Right next door.”

  “That’s great! Good as new!”

  “I was fine,” he says, looking down at the iron railing. “But there were two of us. And she, my wife, Elena, she wasn’t fine.”

  “She was
injured?”

  “She died,” he says.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, because that’s what you say when people die.

  “It’s been about a year now.”

  I say, “Someone told me not to let grief drown me.”

  “That’s what my mom says too, but I don’t buy it.”

  “You think I should let it drown me?”

  He says, in his muddy, dark voice, “I think it doesn’t matter whether you let it or not, it will.”

  “Are you still drowned?”

  “Some days,” he says. “Some days, definitely.”

  “She said it would change.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman who told me not to let grief drown me. Gert. She said it might not get better, but it would change.”

  He nods and nods. “Well, all her grief is pretty far back. She’s dealt with it already. My dad’s been dead a long time.”

  “What?” Suddenly he’s talking nonsense, and I feel like the ghosts in my life are making more sense than the people, which I think is not a good thing.

  David says, “You look really confused.”

  “I am really confused, that’s why.”

  “It’s been, probably, fifteen years since Dad died? Sixteen? Not that she had an easy life before that, either, but that was the last time she lost someone. So what I’m saying is, it’s not like she doesn’t know what grief is like, because she absolutely does. More than most. I’m just saying, maybe she doesn’t remember just how hard it can be on a daily basis, when everything’s still fresh, not to jump in the river and just check out. Okay, you still don’t look any less confused.”

  “You think Gert knew your dad?”

  He says, “Yes, Gert knew my dad. Very well. Gert is my mom, you know.”

  This sounds ridiculous but, now, obvious. “I didn’t know!”

  “Well, no wonder you were confused.” His laugh is short and soft. It’s so different from his muddy voice that at first I don’t realize the noise is coming from him, and it takes me a moment to process. “That’s why I bring the groceries to your house. Because she asked me to. I’m not a real grocery store delivery service. I’m just a guy with a bike. It gets me out of the house, I think that’s why she does it.”

  “You’re always the one who brings them?”

  “Yep, it’s me.”

  “Well, thank you,” I say.

  “I’ll be back again,” he says. “Next week. You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get that hand wrapped up. You know how?”

  “I know how.”

  “Of course. By the way, Mom told me? About your parents? I’m really sorry.”

  “Thank you. I’m sorry too.”

  He says, “I won’t tell you it gets better. I don’t think it’s fair to tell someone how to grieve. Because some people, it takes them a long time to get over it.”

  “What about the others?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “You said some people take a long time to get over it. What about the other people? Do they get over it faster?”

  “No,” he says. “No, some people get over it slowly, and the rest of us, well, maybe we never do.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Omelet

  I carry the groceries inside. David is right. The eggs are all broken, bashed right in, the inside of the carton swimming in golden-yellow yolk. I drop the whole carton in a new trash bag. I put everything else away in the refrigerator and the cabinets. While I’m in the kitchen I’m just fine, focused on the task, but when I get up to my bedroom, I start to feel a distant tickling of fear again. The smell of brownies has wafted up to the corner and settled in. Even faint, it’s too strong to stand. I can’t even stay in there for more than a minute. So instead I walk to the top of the stairs and put my hand on the top of the banister there, where the finial is formed into a pineapple shape. I cup my hand over it because it’s familiar.

  That Evangeline ghost, that horrifying vision. She said it was her recipe. I cooked, she came, and when the smell of the food went, she did too. Is that the answer? The smell of their food brings them? In any case, I know what to avoid. No cooking from their recipes, no ghosts. I can’t risk it. Who can tell. Maybe Nonna was a fluke, her message not even meant for me.

  I’ll stop. I don’t want to, because I still feel like ghosts are my best hope for answers, but another ghost like this one and I’ll wear my heart right out. Better not to risk it.

  I take all the handwritten recipe cards I’ve found and tuck them into Ma’s chrysanthemum tea box for safekeeping. I put the box back on the highest shelf, behind glass. No more. Even if I’d found something to invoke Dad with, maybe it would be a disaster. Maybe he’d come back angry. Maybe he didn’t love me as much as I think he did. As long as I don’t see him face-to-face I’ll never know, and that might be a good thing. And I think of David with his Arbequina skin and his voice like mud and his overwhelming grief. Dad fixed his hand, but the rest of him is still broken.

  Things can always be worse. How has that stopped occurring to me?

  In my mind, I shove away the lingering brownie smell with a strong dissimilar scent: roasted garlic, soft and golden, all its bite rendered away under a glistening slick of olive oil. Carefully separating it from the papery, sticky skins. Pressing a yielding clove against my tongue and feeling the warmth of it along with the sweet salt taste. Not sweet like sugar is sweet, but in a more complex, magical way. Transformed by heat into something it previously wasn’t. Not better, not worse, just different.

  I dress my wound exactly as Dad taught me. Hydrogen peroxide first, to eat away all the dirt and rust and anything else that isn’t healthy skin. It foams like baking soda in vinegar. Slather it with Neosporin and keep it under bandages so the skin doesn’t stretch too much. Skin heals best in a moist environment. That way it’s less likely to scar. I remember him telling me exactly how healing works, how the skin cells knit themselves back together after trauma. I didn’t understand it all because I was five years old. But I always loved the sound of his tomato juice voice.

  I think about lying down on the spare bed, but I’m not tired, not now. Instead I go into the library. Here I won’t be haunted. I know what’s here. Tall bookcases packed with books, from ceiling to floor. Like the cookbook cabinet downstairs, these shelves are divided. On the wall to the right of the door are Ma’s books, and one shelf of cooking DVDs, all of which I’ve seen several times. All the other shelves are filled with Dad’s books except the bottom shelf on the left-hand side, which is stacked with three black storage boxes I don’t think I’ve ever looked in. The books are plenty to intrigue me. It’s easy to separate his books from hers. Hers are the paperbacks.

  Ma belonged to a ladies’ book group with a southern theme. Like the community garden, she organized it, and ran it like an empire. She was an organizer. But she wasn’t a reader. She probably spent less time with the book than she spent deciding what cake to take to the meeting. She made really good cake.

  For a moment I can almost smell the cinnamon, hear her whisk clicking in a melamine bowl, but then it’s gone.

  Once upon a time Amanda loved this room as much as I did. We have so little in common, but we were both avid readers growing up. I read almost nonstop when I was little, and it saved me in school. I hated classes, hated teachers. They always wanted me to do things I didn’t want to do. But because I was a reader, they knew I wasn’t stupid, just different. They cut me slack. It got me through.

  Reading couldn’t help me make friends, though. I never got the hang of it. I would talk to kids, and over the years a handful of them even seemed to like me enough to ask to come over, but after that first visit to the house they never lasted. Ma told me what I did wrong but I could never manage to do it right. Act interested in what they say, she said, but they never said anything interesting. Don’t talk too much, she said, but it never seemed like too much to me. So it wasn’t like people threw tomatoes at me,
or dipped my pigtails in inkwells, or stood up to move their desks away from mine, but I never really managed to make friends that I could keep.

  And I got used to it. I got used to a lot of things. Writing extra papers to make up for falling short in class participation. Volunteering to do the planning and the typing up whenever we had group work assigned, because I knew I could never really work right with a group. And the coping always worked. Up until three years into college, where despite Ma’s repeated demands to try harder, I stalled. Every semester since, I was always still trying to finish that last Oral Communications class, which I had repeatedly failed. This semester I only made it six weeks in before it became obvious I wouldn’t pass. I think maybe we’d both finally given up.

  I pick a book at random from Ma’s shelf. Instead of sitting down in Dad’s leather chair, I walk into my parents’ bedroom so I can sit down on her window seat to read. It seems fitting. The book is one of Ma’s southern romances, about a belle on an iron balcony with a disapproving family. There’s a young man, an upstart, forbidden by society but entranced by beauty and emboldened by love. It’s the usual, but I keep turning the pages to find out what happens next. It’s not hard to see why Ma was such a fan. There is something intriguing about knowing how things are going to turn out, but being constantly surprised by how they’ll get there.

  I’m still reading when I hear the door open downstairs, and Amanda calls out, “I’m finally here!”

  By the time I get downstairs she’s in the kitchen, setting a canvas grocery bag on the counter. “I brought some cereal, and milk, and a few other things. Don’t want to go hungry.” Then she opens the refrigerator and sees that it’s not empty. “Oh. What’s all this?”

  “I ordered the week’s groceries,” I say. “That’s what I do every week. How did you think I was eating while Ma and Dad were gone?”

  “Honestly, I didn’t give much thought to it. I’ve had a lot else to think about, you know. Well, now we’ve got way too much stuff.”