The Summer Kitchen

by Lisa Wingate

  I sat down with my book and figured that if my brother didn’t make it home pretty soon I’d eat the other tortilla with some butter and sugar on it. He wouldn’t want it by then, and we’d probably go to Wal-Mart tonight anyway. While we were out, maybe I could trade in my book and get another one at the Book Basket, if the store was open late tonight.

  In Fargo, the blind lady’s apartment had a TV in it, but in Dallas TVs cost extra—a lot. Reading’s not bad, though. You could take a book anyplace you ended up. A TV doesn’t fit in your suitcase so good.

  The woman next door was hollering at some guy and banging on the wall. It sounded like they were playing racquetball in there, but that probably wasn’t what was going on. Gross. Rusty said that woman was so big she came out the door in two different time zones, and he was pretty much right.

  I took my book to my bedroom, laid down, and pushed the pillow up around my ears, then opened the pages and worked on taking a mind trip. I was reading an old story about Seabiscuit, the racehorse. I always liked old books the best—like Nancy Drew, and Sam Savitt’s horse stories, Walter Farley, and Marguerite Henry’s Misty of Chincoteague. My mama and I used to read those books together, back when I was little and really believed that someone was gonna tie up a pony out in front of our house, with a big old bow on it, while I was gone to school. Every day, when the bus started around the last corner, I’d close my eyes and hope so hard it hurt, then open up and look. Every time I was bummed when there was nothing but Rusty’s stupid dog chained up in the yard.

  I don’t know what makes somebody keep dreaming for something over and over when it ends up hurting in the end. Mama used to say you can’t stop dreaming just because you’re afraid the dream won’t come true. She said a dream’s biggest enemy is being afraid. If the mountain’s big, you gotta dream bigger, Cass Sally Blue, she told me. Nothing’s impossible if you’ve got enough faith. You remember that. She might of got that from the Bible, but after a while I figured out that some kids are gonna get ponies, and some kids aren’t, and whether or not you get one doesn’t have anything to do with how much you wish for it. You’re either born into the pony-getting crowd or you’re not.

  Mama probably liked the old-style books because they made it seem like life was a little more rosy than that. Those stories from way back even had the bad stuff cleaned up to where it didn’t seem so real, and besides, I’d read those books with Mama, so when I laid down with them, it seemed like she was right there in bed next to me. I could still hear her voice saying the lines, her chest moving up and down under my ear, breath going in and out. She wheezed, kind of. Every once in a while her body would go stiff for a second, and she’d catch a real quick gulp of air, and I’d know she had a pain. She never said much about it, though. She’d just go on reading after it passed.

  About the time I started hearing Mama’s voice in my book and feeling her beside me, the baby next door got to crying. No one did anything about it. If my mama had been there, she’d of gone over and knocked that lady into next Tuesday. Mama was pretty quiet, and mostly she minded her own business, but she could get riled sometimes. The kids hollering on the steps and the baby crying while its mom carried on with a man would have riled her. I sure wished Mama could of been there to give that lady what for. It stinks that some kids get crappy moms who live forever, and some kids get moms who get sick and die, while they’re trying to do the best they can.

  I’d of gone over there to give that lady what for myself, but Rusty would of killed me. He had a heck of a time finding a place we could afford in Dallas. We didn’t need any trouble here.

  I wished Rusty would come on home. I hated it when he stayed out after work. As soon as the lights were on inside the apartment, it seemed dark and weird outside, like someone might be peeking around the edges where the mini blinds were too small. I didn’t like being by myself.

  When Rusty was gone late, I always started to think, What if he doesn’t come back? What if he got mugged, or had a car wreck, or just decided he was sick of all this mess and left? What would I do then? How long would I sit here and wait? Where would I go, whenever I finally decided to leave?

  I hated it when those questions took over my mind, so I read Seabiscuit instead. I liked the story. When Seabiscuit was a colt, he was skinny and knobby-legged. He was plain-looking—ugly, really—and he didn’t run worth a flip, even though he was what the horse racers call a blueblood. Nobody looked at him and figured he’d amount to anything.

  I could totally relate to Seabiscuit. Even though my daddy ended up in prison, so that probably didn’t rank me as a blueblood, we had the rest in common. I don’t think anybody ever looked at me and was too impressed, either. People always liked my hair, because it was blond and thick, and every once in a while someone said I had pretty blue eyes, but it was kind of like they just picked out one thing to be nice, because altogether the package wasn’t so hot.

  Every once in a while Rusty felt sorry for me and told me when he was a kid, he didn’t look like much, either. The problem was that Rusty still wasn’t too hot, if you asked me. He looked like a man-sized body with a little kid’s head on top, but maybe that was because I always knew him since he was a kid. Mama said Rusty looked just like his daddy, Ray John, and Ray John was sure enough handsome.

  At least my daddy didn’t have red hair and freckles. Things could of been worse… .

  I was falling asleep on the lumpy sofa by the time Rusty knocked on the door. The lady’d let her kids in and got them quiet finally, and the Mexican dudes were drinking beer and playing mariachi music down in the corner of the driveway. I didn’t think they meant to bother anybody. They were just loud. Most of the time they had their wives and about a million kids running around down there while they partied. As far as I could tell, there were about eighty-seven of them living in two apartments. Whatever they cooked always smelled really good, though.

  I heard them hollering at Rusty, “Hey, you wan-ee beer, amigo?”

  Rusty didn’t answer. He just knocked on the door again and said, “Open up, Cass.” There was only one key to the apartment, and the stinky guy who lived in the manager’s office across the parking lot, wouldn’t give us another one. I always kept the key during the day, and that way I could lock up if I went places.

  I looked at the squeaky clock while I walked to the door. After midnight. Geez. Rusty was gonna be tired getting up for work tomorrow. Dope.

  When I opened up, someone was with Rusty on the steps. Whoever it was tripped on the way in and just about knocked me over with something she was carrying. She stopped a few steps past me, then turned partway and looked for Rusty out the corner of her eye. She was pretty—tall and curvy, with jeans that fit good. Her skin was a soft caramel color. Her hair hung in a million long spirals down her back. It was blond, but no girl with that color skin has blond hair naturally.

  There were little wrinkles around the corners of her eyes, crow’s-feet my mama called them, and a tiny line that circled the side of her mouth. She wasn’t as young as her body made her seem. She had on lots of makeup, thick eyeliner drawn out to the sides in a greenish color that matched her eyes, like one of those belly dancers in the Ten Commandments movie that’s on TV at Easter.

  She turned a little more, her look scampering around the room like a rabbit hunting a place to hide. She had a big fat black eye and a cut on the side of her nose that was swelled up.

  The waffle lady in the oil patch town looked like that once. When I asked her what happened, she said she slipped in the bathtub and hit the faucet.

  Yeah, right.

  Rusty leaned out the door and checked the parking lot like he was watching out for someone, then he came in, did the lock, and walked right past me like I wasn’t there. He stopped beside the girl and pointed across to my bedroom. “Just put him back there in Cass’s room. That door, on the left,” he said. She hesitated, shifted something under a jacket in her arms, and Rusty put his hand on her back and sort of pushed her along un
til she got to the opening.

  She went in my room and shut the door, like she owned the place.

  “What the … heck?” I said. “Who’s she?”

  Rusty shrugged, watched the door a minute, then tossed his tool belt on the table in the kitchen. After the first one got stolen and he had to pay for it, he never left his work stuff in the truck anymore.

  “She’s gonna stay here,” he said, like that counted for an explanation. “They can sleep in your room.”

  “They who?” Rusty was such a butthead sometimes. Leave it to him to give my room away to some girl he picked up at the bar.

  “She’s got a little kid.” He moved to the sink and poured himself a glass of water. He swayed a little on his feet when he tipped his head back to drink it. “I can’t remember what she said its name is.”

  I stood looking at Rusty with my mouth open. “She just put her kid in my room? Where the heck am I supposed to sleep?”

  “You can sleep in with me.”

  “I’m not sleepin’ in with you. Yuck.” Actually, I figured Rusty would want to leave that spot open for the girl. “I’m not a little kid anymore, stupid.”

  Rusty let his head fall forward and rubbed his eyes. “Sleep on the couch, then, Cass,” he said, like he didn’t care if I hung from the light fixture so long as I wasn’t in his way.

  I got a sick feeling in my stomach, and it seemed like I was shrinking. What if Rusty got himself a little family all of a sudden, and decided I could go jump in a lake? Crossing my arms over my middle, I squeezed hard to make the hurt go away. I felt empty down deep, but it didn’t have anything to do with the tortillas and crackers wearing off. “She’s way too old for you, you know. What’s she, like, thirty or something?”

  Rusty set the glass down hard, so that it smacked the counter. “Knock it off, Cass,” he said, and started for the bathroom. “Tomorrow we’ll get one of those blow-up mats, maybe.”

  Tomorrow? I thought. She’s gonna be here tomorrow?

  But there wasn’t any point saying it. Rusty was already in the bathroom, shutting the door and then turning on the water.

  I went to the kitchen, and washed the glass, and put it away where it belonged.

  Chapter 3

  SandraKaye

  Our home in Plano sat silent and dark, as was usual lately. The days when it had hummed with life seemed both a short time ago and a long time—something I’d dreamed before suddenly awakening in this place where no one came home until they had to. I had stopped at Target and the grocery store after making the trip across town from Poppy’s. I’d bought groceries we probably wouldn’t use, just to occupy time I didn’t want.

  Maybe Maryanne and Mother were right about selling Poppy’s house. Maybe without the utility bills, estate sale, keeping the lawn mowed, and sorting through family photos and other mementos Aunt Ruth had carefully placed in boxes in the hall closet, we could all move on and accept the fact that what had happened to Poppy had just … happened. As horrible as it was, as hard as it was to accept, as much as each of us wanted to change the decisions that led to that day, we couldn’t. I couldn’t go back and force Poppy to give up the house he’d built and move out of the neighborhood. Rob couldn’t go back and find the time to put Poppy’s social security check on auto deposit. Christopher couldn’t go back and visit Poppy more often, and Jake couldn’t drive over to Poppy’s house from SMU to watch Sports Center on TV. Normally on Friday, Jake and Poppy would have gone to the bank and the store together, and Poppy wouldn’t have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, alone, while Jake partied with his friends at the fraternity house.

  What do you say to a child when a seemingly harmless decision has terrible consequences? What does he say to himself? I wished I knew. I wished I could return to the days after Poppy’s death and handle the situation more skillfully, become a rock on which the whole family could stand, rather than a confused, helpless bystander struggling to absorb the sudden impact, trying to answer the endless questions of the police detectives and news reporters, trying to will Poppy back to consciousness in the hospital, trying to decide who to blame.

  In a way, I could understand why Jake had run away to search for birth parents he’d never known. Somewhere in Guatemala he was looking for a family that didn’t have so much pain in it. At the same time I was angry with him for leaving and adding to our burden.

  As the garage door closed, the utility lights came on, providing an electronic welcome home. I entered the house, flipped the light switch in the hallway, walked past the family pictures of basketball and soccer teams, marching band competitions, vacations to Disney World, cruises to Mexico, and ski holidays where the four of us stood bundled in colorful coats, smiling for the camera, the perfect family sharing the perfect getaway. The parents in those pictures had convinced themselves that if they packed all the right suitcases, made all the right reservations, life would progress like a carefully planned holiday, reaching the milestones at all the right times, always safe and under control. The car would never drift off the pavement, or hit an unexpected hazard, or spin into dangerous territory. Now, everything was so far off course I couldn’t even imagine what we’d been thinking.

  Glare blotted out the last of the photos as I turned on the kitchen lights and the TV in the media room, so that if Holly looked out she’d know I was home. Across the street, her place was lit up like a Vegas casino, every square inch of the six-bedroom brick house filled with the activities of a gaggle of semi-adult children who had never fully left the nest, and Holly’s last two officially “at home” kids, sixteen-year-old twins, Jessica and Jacey. Holly liked to joke that at the rate she was going, the nest would never be empty. Be careful what you wish for, I thought, but I never said it because of the awkward moment that would follow.

  I checked the answering machine for messages. I’d made my weekly call to the Dallas Police Department that morning to check on Poppy’s case. As usual, there was no return call. After only six months, it didn’t seem that they should be letting the case go cold, but I knew they were—not because they didn’t care, but because their resources were tied up with investigations that looked more promising. It’s hard to solve a crime when the only witness is a woman passing by in her car at forty miles an hour, a hundred feet away. Two males in hooded sweatshirts. She thought they were young—maybe teenagers. One of them had struggled with Poppy, and he fell… .

  I stopped before the scene could play out in my mind again. Bobo scratched at the patio door, pressed his nose to the glass, and wagged his tail as I walked into the media room. He whined softly, tipping his head to one side, nudged his Frisbee, then gave me a pleading look through the half-black, half-white face that had inspired Jake to name him. Bobo, for silly or foolish, like a clown. Jake had been studying Spanish in school the year Poppy surprised the boys with the border collie puppy on Christmas Eve. Every boy oughta have a dog once in his life, Poppy had said. Good dog’ll get a boy through a tough spot quicker than all this therapy they do on TV nowadays. He had looked at Jake when he said it. Perhaps he knew that, as a teenager, Jake was beginning to struggle with the facts of his adoption.

  Poppy had prevailed in the argument about the dog, even though Rob had protested that we didn’t have time for a pet. There was never any saying no to Uncle Poppy, and for the most part Rob knew better than to try. If we said something Poppy didn’t agree with, he pretended his hearing aid batteries were dead. On Christmas Day, Rob scoured available stores for batteries and bought Poppy an entire box, wrapped up as a joke. Rob laughed and said he wanted the hearing aid fixed before Poppy showed up with a pony. By then, Bobo was a fixture in Jake’s lap, and we all knew the puppy wasn’t going anywhere. The puppy grew into a dog that ate everything from pool floats to extension cords, but it didn’t matter because Jake loved him so.

  Now Bobo was a sad reminder of Jake’s absence. Outside the window, he picked up his Frisbee, dropped it off the steps, and watched it clatter to a stop, as if he w
ere trying to figure out why it wouldn’t fly anymore.

  After turning down the TV, I stretched out on the sofa, so that I’d hear Christopher and Rob if they came in. When I woke up, the garage door was grinding downward. Christopher passed by in the hall, his backpack slung over one shoulder.

  “Hey,” I said, my voice scratchy.

  Christopher froze midstride, his body stiff and reluctant. Lately, if he could get away with it, he went straight to his room and shut the door. These days we were all in some way toxic to each other, without meaning to be. The sadness in each of us was so palpable that there was no way to be together without seeing it, sensing it, tasting its bitterness.

  “Hey.” Christopher gave a weary little smile that conveyed no bit of the gregarious high school junior who, not so long ago, had been telling knock-knock jokes and doing stand-up comedy in our living room.

  “Did Dad come in?” I asked, mostly for Chris’s benefit. I knew Rob would probably crash at the hospital, then get up, wash and change in his office, and go back to work. He seldom came home two nights in a row anymore. It was easier for him to remain at the hospital, entrenched in problems that could be managed. There was no managing Poppy’s death and Jake’s disappearance, no easy recovery plan that could be written out and carefully followed. There was only a nebulous grief that moved through the house like fog.