The Summer Kitchen

by Lisa Wingate

  “Uh-uh.” Christopher shook his head, wisps of blond hair falling over his eyes. “Want me to turn on the alarm before I go up?” His lanky body twisted as he looked over his shoulder toward the coat closet. Six months ago, it would never have occurred to him to wonder whether the alarm was on or off, because he knew his dad or Jake would handle it.

  “In a minute,” I said, standing up and crossing the room to the doorway. His hazel eyes flicked away, as if he wanted to be somewhere else. “Did you have a good study night?” Lately, it seemed as if Christopher’s life was one constant homework session. His course load this semester had him cracking the books at all hours.

  “Yeah.” He sighed, stretching his neck. “Semester physics final cram.” His lip curled with just a hint of the Christopher who hated math and all things related. Music, art, literature, and a host of sports had always been more his thing. This semester, he’d switched tracks and begun working hard to get the background that would be needed for premed.

  “Tough stuff,” I sympathized. Christopher came by his math aversion naturally.

  “Yeah.”

  “Wish I could offer to help you with that.” I felt a sudden yearning for all the times I’d sat on Christopher’s bed, repeating spelling words and review questions for tests. Jake had always been an independent student, but Christopher required extra attention.

  He hiked his backpack higher on his shoulder. “I got it. It’s just hard finding someone who can explain it so it makes sense.”

  A flash of thought moved between us so quickly neither of us could stop it, so clearly it might as well have been spoken out loud. If Jake were here, he could help.

  The unspoken reality made us step apart and look away.

  “I’m gonna go on up to bed. I’ll hit the alarm,” Christopher said, and I nodded, then swallowed the emotions in my throat.

  “All right, sweetheart. Love you.”

  “Love you too, Mom.”

  I turned off the TV, then followed Christopher upstairs and took a sleep aid I’d gotten from the health food store, even though using it made me feel like a failure. Growing up in a house with my mother would have made anyone leery of both pills and alcohol. The herbal stuff seemed harmless enough, though, and it put me to sleep. Most nights I dreamed of Jake. He was always standing in the upstairs hall, near his bedroom door. I’d move slowly toward him, saying, “You’re home. You’re safe. Thank God.”

  In the dream, he nodded, his dark hair falling over the twinkling brown eyes I’d loved since the moment a Guatemalan nun had led him into a little room, stood him in front of us, and introduced us as su nueva madre y el padre. It was hard to tell if Jake understood or not, but he looked up at the nun and nodded, his face very serious, very wise for a three-year-old. She put his hand in mine and he stood very still. Later, he would tell me that he thought I was going to take him to the mother he remembered. When we went to the airport and got on the plane, he thought she must be a long way away, maybe living in the sky in heaven, and that was where we were going.

  I fell asleep thinking of Jake and wondering where he was now, and why, six months after he’d abandoned his car at the airport and bought a ticket to Guatemala, he still hadn’t called home. I prayed halfheartedly as I drifted off that tonight would be the night the phone would ring and wake me up, and it would be him. But after six months of silence, I knew better than to set expectations. A prayer that went unanswered yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that doesn’t find much hope today, either.

  In the morning, when I awoke, for just an instant I thought Jake was down the hall in his room, and then I came to reality. I considered staying in bed. Sure, be just like Mother, a voice whispered inside me. Lie here and medicate yourself until you don’t know what day it is. As always, just the thought was enough to pull me upright, out of bed, and into the bathroom to get dressed. All of my life, there had been the underlying fear that one step down the slippery slope of substance abuse could land me in the pit of dependency and denial that had swallowed almost every member of my family. When I was growing up, Uncle Poppy and Aunt Ruth were the only normal relatives I knew. They were the reason I understood that what my family silently deemed as acceptable wasn’t acceptable at all.

  Downstairs, there was no sign that Rob had come and gone, and Christopher had left early again.

  I contemplated the day as, across the street, Holly and her twins climbed into the van and headed off to school. So far, neither of the twins had shown any interest in getting drivers’ licenses, and Holly wasn’t pushing it. She called from her cell phone as she was threading her way through Plano traffic. Holly was always multitasking.

  I told her about the meeting with the real estate agent.

  “Want to grab a Starbucks this morning?” she offered.

  The cabinets at Poppy’s house flashed through my mind. “I think I’m going to hang out here and climb Mount Laundry.”

  “Yuck. Starbucks is better.”

  “I know,” I agreed, and even as I said good-bye, I couldn’t put a finger on the reason I’d lied. Holly would have willingly dropped her plans and gone with me to help paint, or act as bodyguard and babysitter, but I wanted to spend a last day at Poppy’s house by myself. I wasn’t sure why.

  The question perplexed me as I cleaned the kitchen, then gathered some paintbrushes and a can of off-white semigloss left over from Chris’s one-act play project at school. Tucking them into the trunk like contraband, I checked for signs of life at Holly’s house before backing out and heading down the street.

  Guilt trailed me as I drove across town. If Holly found out where I was, she’d be hurt. She would think I was taking a step backward, doing what I’d done in the first few months after Jake left—sneaking off by myself so I could drive to the SMU campus and sit on the bench across from his fraternity house. Sometimes I’d stay there for hours watching the kids come and go, halfway believing that if I waited long enough, Jake would be one of them. He’d be back in premed, studying calculus or designing rockets in his head as he walked home from class. Watching all the other kids come and go, I’d be filled with the bitter heat of envy. Their parents could pick them up for lunch anytime they wanted.

  I hadn’t gone to the campus to sit for three months now. Not since Holly found out about it. Having to admit what I was doing made it seem pathological and pointless. The last thing Rob or Christopher or even Holly needed was to worry that I was going off the edge. I stopped driving to the campus and filled my time stuffing envelopes and answering phones for the organ donor network, checking in with the police, and finally taking care of cleaning out and selling Poppy’s house for Mother, who, thank God, remained entrenched in Seattle with Maryanne, where the two of them could share Valium and wine chasers while comparing symptoms of illnesses, real and imagined.

  If anyone found out I was painting the cabinets at Poppy’s house, that’s the excuse I’d give. I was just filling time so as to keep from ending up like Mother and Maryanne. Poppy’s house needed work, and who knew if the next residents would be able to afford renovations.

  Turning the corner onto Red Bird Lane, I noticed that Andrea had put up the real estate sign. It leaned to one side, Andrea’s name swinging forlornly off the bottom. The neighborhood was silent, the kids probably off to their last few days of school before summer break, the older residents locked in their homes behind burglar bars and dilapidated chain-link fences. I remembered when the neighborhood was filled with activity—children on bicycles, mothers pushing baby strollers to the little park across the creek from Poppy’s house, men mowing lawns, grandmothers and grandfathers sitting on porch rockers, waving as people drove by. Now the street was cloaked in stillness, the cracked sidewalks seamed with spires of grass, the windows opaque with cardboard and aluminum foil, porches only places to dump the rotting carcasses of old furniture.

  Painting the cabinets in Poppy’s house was probably pointless, truth be told. The people who moved in here most like
ly wouldn’t care.

  A lump rose in my throat, and I swallowed hard. Poppy loved this home, where he’d built a life with Aunt Ruth. He would have wanted it to go to a new owner looking as it had back when he and Aunt Ruth had the showplace of their little street.

  In all reality, I didn’t have anything better to do than paint cabinets today anyway.

  I took my supplies into the house, set them on the kitchen counter, and stood surveying the interior. The front parlor and the dining room lay soft and golden beyond the doors on either end of the kitchen, the wood floors warming in the languid morning light. The house looked larger with nothing in it, but even though the rooms were empty, they seemed full of the things that used to be there—Aunt Ruth’s old upright piano, the umbrella stand with the lion head carved on top, the game table where we played Parcheesi, Scrabble, and Hand ’n Foot, the recliners where Aunt Ruth and Poppy sat watching the old console TV that was always turned up so loud your head rang with sound long after you left the house.

  Every corner was filled with benevolent ghosts. On the walls, the shadows of pictures and furniture remained, baked in by the passage of years. Those could use a coat of paint, too, I mused, then laid out some newspaper and opened the partial gallon. Inside, yellow liquid and white pigment melted together in a strange swirl, the surface iridescent. I pushed in a stick and stirred it. Poppy would like that I was making use of leftovers. Having lived through the Depression era, he believed in waste not, want not. The garden shed outside was a testament to his thriftiness—so filled with old tools, pieces of lawnmowers, bicycle parts, wheels, axles, chains, gardening supplies, and other bits of memorabilia that we had given up trying to clean it out for the estate sale, and just locked the door.

  My reconstituted paint looked usable after a few minutes of stirring, but the paintbrush I’d brought from home was impossibly stiff. One of the boys had probably employed it for a science fair project and then failed to properly wash it out. Clumps of bristles sealed together left a streaky white mess across the newspaper when I tested it.

  I considered going out to the garden shed for another, but then decided it would be easier to run to the store. And probably safer. No telling what was living in Poppy’s shed by now.

  I locked up the house and the burglar bars, then drove past Blue Sky Hill to the corner where a Supercenter had been erected to serve the needs of the area’s new residents. It was only a few blocks away, but the glimmering commercial corner with its clothing shops, up-scale restaurants, and parking lots full of new cars seemed miles from Poppy’s street.

  In the hardware department, I deliberated the issue of paintbrushes until finally a young clerk offered advice.

  “What kind of existing surface are you trying to cover?” he asked, and I admitted that I had no idea whether the paint on the cabinets was oil or latex.

  He laughed, and something in the sound reminded me of Jake. I felt a twinge, like an imbedded splinter that rubs at the most unexpected moments. The clerk had the look of a college boy. He might be a student at SMU, like Jake.

  “I’ll take one of each,” I said, and held out my basket for the three brushes we had under consideration. “Thanks for the help.”

  “Anytime,” he answered. “Have a nice day.”

  In the self-checkout line, I paid with cash like a cheating spouse, afraid her clandestine life might be discovered by a careless charge on the credit card. I justified it in my own mind as I threaded through the crowds to the door, then stepped into the sunlight.

  “Excuse me,” someone said as I fished through my purse for my sunglasses before finding them on top of my head.

  “Excuse me,” the woman’s voice repeated, more loudly this time. “Could someone give me a ride to my apartment?”

  I didn’t know who she was talking to, but it wasn’t any of my business. Shifting my sack, I pulled out the car keys. A van stopped to drop off passengers, and a young man pushed a long line of shopping carts past the door, temporarily hemming in the crowd.

  “Excuse me,” the voice beckoned again. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a woman on the bench. Her legs were strangely bent, and two walking canes rested beside her. “Could anyone give me a ride to my apartment? It’s close by.”

  I looked around. There were men in business suits, a teenager with colored hair and a tattoo, a grandmother with a baby in her arms, a young woman in a pretty floral dress, an old man in leisure clothes, a mother with a little boy in hand, a pair of teenaged girls, and others—more than a dozen people altogether, and not one of them heard but me.

  The woman watched one passerby and then another as they skirted her bench and walked on, as if they could neither see nor hear her. The row of shopping carts moved away, and the crowd began to clear. I stood watching, oddly fascinated. The woman’s thin hands, little more than skin over bone as they lay upon her flowered dress, made me think of Aunt Ruth.

  “Could you give me a ride to my apartment?” Her eyes, a bright polished silver out of keeping with the weary, aged look of her face, met mine.

  “I … ,” I stammered, caught off guard. At least a dozen warnings regarding crime schemes ran through my mind. “I don’t …”

  “It isn’t far.” Lifting her cane in the general direction of Poppy’s place, she smiled, her brows rising expectantly, as if I’d already said yes. It occurred to me that if I didn’t pick her up, someone else might, and the next person might not have good intentions.

  I thought of Poppy. If only someone had stopped to help him as he struggled with his attackers, the day might have turned out so differently. “Sure,” I said. “Of course I will.”

  Bracing her canes in front of herself, she nodded and pulled to her feet, smiling. I noted that she didn’t have any packages, and an uneasy feeling crept over me again.

  She seemed to read my mind. “They have free senior coffee and doughnuts here on Thursdays.”

  “Oh, that’s nice.” I tried to imagine hitching rides with strangers just for a cup of coffee and a doughnut.

  “Yes, it is,” she agreed, as we walked slowly to my car. “A little treat makes a person feel special sometimes.”

  It was a sad idea, depending on a store freebie to make you feel special. “I imagine so.” As I helped her into my car, she patted my hand, and I was glad I hadn’t left her on the bench.

  “You’re not from around here,” she observed as I backed out of the parking space, then sat waiting for a line of traffic. “People who know the neighborhood zip around back and go through the Jiffy Lube parking lot. It’s a right turn.”

  “Ohhh,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll remember that.”

  She asked where I lived, and when I told her Plano, she laughed. “I remember when Plano was just a spot in the road. Back then we thought it was a long way out of Dallas. I taught there my first two years out of college, but then I got a job closer in.”

  I glanced at her, surprise obvious on my face before I hid it. No doubt she saw the question there, too. How does a teacher with a college education end up begging for rides at Wal-Mart? My mind repainted the picture of her, and I imagined myself in her place, then I pushed away the idea like an itchy sweater.

  A million years ago, I was going to be a teacher. I planned to be the one who recognized the children growing up with family secrets. I’d find the bruises, even the ones on the inside, and I wouldn’t look the other way. I would be a confidante whom children could talk to, because I knew how the bruises felt. As an adult, I wouldn’t be powerless to confront things that were wrong, and as a teacher, I’d be in a position to make a difference.

  Instead, I met Rob, and getting married at twenty seemed so much easier than sticking out another three years, working at the hospital reception desk and going to school, trapped at home with my mother and my stepfather. Rob was my white knight, and somewhere between putting him through medical school, struggling through the crushing disappointment of three miscarriages, and finally navigating the challenges of an intern
ational adoption, our life together eclipsed everything else. I had a son to raise, and then, after a miracle pregnancy with Christopher, two sons. Rob’s work was demanding. Someone had to be there to make a home and create a family that was healthy and happy. Jake and Christopher became the focus, but I’d never really considered that, in my efforts to give them everything that was missing from my childhood—the mom who scrapbooked every milestone, who showed up at the school parties with homemade treats, who read bedtime stories, drove the carpools, lined the batters up in the baseball dugout, and planned the huge birthday parties—I’d cast aside the dream I had for myself.

  It didn’t feel like a sacrifice. It felt like a mission. But now, despite such careful attention to detail, the mission had gone awry.

  “I had to quit work after my car accident,” the woman said, and I focused on the conversation again. “I wasn’t up to it.”

  “Oh.” I pretended to be busy looking for a gap in traffic, but I was thinking that I understood how it felt to lose the very thing you thought you did so well. In a way, I was as down and out as she was. “I’m sorry.” Shifting in my seat, I turned away from her, anxious to drop her wherever she wanted.

  “I loved the kids,” she offered. “I missed them. That’s been … oh … twenty years ago now. Doesn’t seem like it, though.”

  I gunned the car into a gap in traffic, because I didn’t know what to say.

  My passenger swayed in the seat, her hands catching the armrests. “I don’t think I’d want to be in the classroom these days. Kids aren’t like they used to be,” she said, looking out the window. “Back then, all you had to worry about was kids copying each other’s homework, and an occasional Saturday night party when someone’s parents weren’t home. If you had any problems, most of them had folks you could go to. Now, they live rough lives around these neighborhoods, and half the time there’s no telling where the parents are, or else they’re more messed up than the kids.” She pointed ahead to the narrow driveway of the shabby stucco apartment complex I’d passed last night.