The Summer Kitchen

by Lisa Wingate

  “Turn left up there,” she said.

  In the daylight, I read the government housing sign in front of the apartments. I’d never once given them a second thought before last night, even though we were only a few blocks from Poppy’s house. Once during the estate sale, I’d stopped for a soda at the mini-mart in the dilapidated strip mall across the street. The squat Pakistani man behind the counter was obliging enough, but the specially built cage around the register area and the group of men lingering in front made me uncomfortable. As we drove away, Holly pointed out that there was strange activity in that parking lot, all hours of the day. She surmised that, aside from possible drug deals and prostitution, it was a place where illegals hung out waiting for construction trucks to drive by with potential job offers. After that, we bought our sodas and filled up with gas on our own side of town.

  Holly would have died of shock if she’d seen me calmly waiting to turn left into a place that looked even worse than the strip mall. The apartment complex seemed to belong in some third world country. I tried not to give an outward reaction as we bumped over the entranceway, and I drove between the buildings, pretending not to notice the piles of refuse lying windblown against the buildings. Foul words had been painted along the walls in bright colors. Three kids watched us from the front steps of one of the apartments, their mocha faces curious and slightly suspicious as we passed. I looked at them in the side mirror—a toddler wearing only underpants; a boy with sleek, thin limbs hanging loosely from an oversized T-shirt and a pair of shorts that were too large; and a girl who probably should have been in elementary school today. She stood twisting a braid around her finger, watching my car.

  My passenger directed me to 9B. Behind us, the kids descended the steps and scampered toward the corner, the two older ones first, and the toddler following in a stubby, barefooted run.

  Where in the world were they going?

  “They wander around here all the time,” my passenger informed me, motioning to the kids as she opened the door and swung her legs around. “Be careful when you back out.”

  I put the car in Park, intending to help her, but she braced her canes and hauled herself from the seat before I could get there. After thanking me for the ride, she moved across the parking lot in a stiff, swinging gait, then disappeared into an apartment with lace-edged curtains that looked out of place against the clouded windows and weathered stucco.

  Opening the driver’s-side door, I checked the alley to make sure the children were out of the way. A young woman in tight flowered shorts, high heels, and a tank top came out of the end apartment. She balanced a laundry basket on her hip, her blond hair swirling in the breeze as she teetered down the steps, the shoes not suited to the heavy load. She was thin, long-legged, and gangly, her body hardly seeming strong enough to carry the overflowing basket.

  When she reached the bottom step, she looked over her shoulder and saw me watching. The wind lifted her hair, and in a freeze-frame of an instant I remembered her from the night before. Up close, it was obvious that she was much younger than the clothes made her seem. She looked like a contestant in some beauty pageant gone too far, a child dressed up in the trappings of a woman.

  Lifting her chin, she leered at me silently, as if saying, What’s your problem, lady? Then she tottered toward the street on her high heels, waited for the traffic to clear, and crossed to the strip mall parking lot, where the men whistled and catcalled as she passed the convenience store.

  I stood watching, feeling sick to my stomach, thinking perhaps I should drive over, just to make sure she was all right, but she quickly disappeared behind the building, and the men returned their attention to the street. I climbed back into my car and scanned the rearview mirror, waiting for her to reappear. Finally I gave up and put the car in Reverse, letting it drift along the narrow pavement. Movement caught my attention as I passed the end of the building, and I hit the brake, looking around for the children. The smallest of the three was a few feet away, trying to shinny up the side of a Dumpster surrounded by a tumbledown fence. His dark hair caught the light, making a raven halo as he slipped and hit the concrete. Frustrated, he scrambled to his feet and kicked the Dumpster, ringing it like a metal drum.

  What in the world …

  The mother in me sounded a note of alarm and reacted. Cutting the steering wheel, I bumped onto the curb, threw the car in Park, and got out. The little boy saw me and froze where he stood.

  “You get out of there,” I scolded. “This isn’t a good place to play.” As I moved between him and the road, he withdrew, then sidled up to the apartment wall and stood with his back pressed against it.

  A head popped out of the Dumpster, then vanished again. The toddler’s wide dark eyes followed me as I walked to the edge and peered inside. In the narrow strip of light, the two older children were playing in the trash, their thin brown legs buried in offal as they tore open sacks and spread the contents around. A sickening smell assaulted me, and my stomach roiled. The myriad of potential dangers flashed through my mind—germs, rats, disease, broken bottles, used syringes. This was no place for children to play.

  “You two get out of there.” My voice echoed into the Dumpster, and both children stopped moving at once. They turned to me, their hands rising from the trash bags, still gripping the contents, their faces moving from the shadow to the light. For an instant we stared at each other, motionless like figurines in a shoe-box diorama.

  The toddler squealed and ran away, the sound of his footsteps disappearing around the corner of the building. “You two kids come on out of there,” I repeated. “Come on out, now. You shouldn’t play there.” I tasted the odor of trash, and bile gurgled up my throat. Pressing a wrist to my lips, I backed away as the kids scrambled up the corner of the Dumpster. They exited on the other side and peered at me from behind the smelly metal box, like stray cats trapped in a corner, then bolted for the service alley, and disappeared. I walked back and forth, checking the alley and the parking lot, but wherever they’d gone, they weren’t coming back. Even so, I sat in my car watching for a few minutes longer.

  The rows of apartments remained silent, providing no clues, but as I turned my car around, then sat waiting for a gap in traffic, I had a feeling someone was watching.

  Chapter 4

  Cass

  The lady couldn’t see me, but I could see her. The Laundromat behind the convenience store had mirror tint on the windows, so if you didn’t know better, you’d think it was just an old closed-down store. I saw the lady chase those kids out of the Dumpster. She looked for them after they ran off, which was weird, I thought. Maybe she was from welfare, or Child Protective Services, or someplace. That Cadillac SUV didn’t look like social-worker wheels, but it could be. Maybe she was gonna pick up those kids and take them away. Their mama’d locked them out again, and they’d been banging on the door for, like, two hours, which was why I’d decided to go do the laundry, finally. Rusty’d stuck me sleeping on the sofa, so no matter how hard I tried to plug my ears, I could hear their noise the minute their mama shooed them out the door in the morning.

  Before he left for work, Rusty didn’t even say he was sorry for giving my room to some girl and her kid. He just dropped a little change on the counter, which meant he forgot to cash his check last night, which also meant that sometime today the big sweaty guy from the office would come tell me we hadn’t paid the rent yet. He’d stand right in the doorway and give me a creepy look, like he thought I was gonna invite him in or something.

  “Cass,” Rusty said after he put the change down, “go do some laundry today, okay? I’m outa work clothes. Here’s some money.” He kept his voice low, like we had the princess and the pea sleeping in the next room and we shouldn’t bother her.

  “Did you cash your check?” I knew the answer. If he’d cashed the check, he wouldn’t be digging through his pockets for money.

  “Nah, I’ll do it today.”

  “Rus-teee. The rent was due yesterday.” A l
ump came up in my throat, and I told myself I wasn’t gonna cry, and I didn’t.

  Rusty opened the lock and then let in the smell of morning air, and pavement, and the sound of cars passing by.

  “Wait.” I sat up, and got tangled in something, and I knew that during the night Rusty’d come out and wrapped me in one of the sleeping bags we used when we were on the road. “Are you gonna get that girl out of my room?” Surely he wasn’t planning to, like, just go off to work and leave some girl and her kid in my room.

  The hinges squealed, and the slice of light from outside got thinner. “Don’t worry about it, Sal. Just let her sleep.” His voice was soft, like he felt a little bad for leaving me with his mess in my bedroom. Whenever he called me Sal, I felt warm inside. When I was born, Rusty wanted my name to be Sally, after some girl he liked on a cartoon. My daddy wanted Cass, and he won out, but Mama gave me Sally for the middle name. Sometimes I liked Sally better. Sally sounded like someone sweet and perfect, who wore dresses with lace, and little white shoes, and lived in a house with a painted fence.

  “I gotta go. I’m late.” Rusty was out the door before I could say anything else.

  I tried to go back to sleep, but once the kids next door were outside, you might as well be trying to sleep next to the hyena cage in a zoo. I sat there wondering when that girl was gonna come out of my room. Finally I decided to just go do the darned laundry. I washed my face and put on makeup, gathered up my dirty clothes from the bathroom floor and Rusty’s from his room, then looked at myself in the mirror. Not bad. I could be sixteen, maybe seventeen, at least. If the girl woke up, I’d tell her that’s what I was. She’d probably buy it, because I was tall enough. It helped to be tall. I didn’t used to like it back in the fifth grade, when I got taller than all the boys, but Mama promised me I’d be glad one of these days. Turned out she was right. Like she always said, God’s got a purpose for everything. He must of known I was gonna need to look sixteen pretty soon.

  I piled the laundry in the basket and went out, and then there was the might-be-a-social-worker lady looking at me from her Cadillac SUV. The way she watched me was creepy—like she was staring right through me and could see everything. I squinted back at her, like as in, Who do you think you are, anyway? Driving around in a fancy car—you think you’re somebody?

  I hurried across the street and out of sight as fast as I could get there in the high-heeled shoes that used to be Mama’s, which wasn’t easy. The green sandals were still kind of big at the back, and my feet slid too far over the front, so I could feel little dots of hot pavement under my three middle toes.

  The guys in the parking lot whistled and called me Blondie when I went by. They didn’t care if the shoes were too big, or I wasn’t so good at walking in them. They just wanted me to turn around and act like I noticed them. I thought about it, but then I was afraid to, so I didn’t. I just walked on by like guys whistled at me every day. I didn’t look back to see what the social-worker lady was doing—not even once—until I was behind the mirrored window in the Laundromat. Then I watched her chase the kids out of the Dumpster, look around for them, and finally drive off.

  Once she was gone, I crammed all the laundry in one washer, so I could have some money left over to go to the convenience store for a pack of powdered doughnuts and a Coke. Rusty would probably come back at lunch with dollar burgers, or a Wendy’s value meal. Sometimes he did that when it was payday, and we hadn’t been to the grocery store and there was nothing left in the kitchen.

  While I walked back to the convenience store, I watched the kids from next door head to the Dumpster again. They’d probably heard the mariachi music in the parking lot last night, and they figured there was something good in there to eat. Sometimes those Mexican guys got so drunk on Friday night that, along with the beer bottles, they threw away containers with tortillas, fried pies, rice, and beans still in them. The stuff looked pretty good, if you could get past where it came from. I’d watched the kids sit on the steps and eat it before. I warned them you could get sick eating out of the trash, but they didn’t care. I told Rusty about it the next day, and he told me to stay out of the Dumpster. Duh. Like I would really crawl around in there and eat food that’d been sitting next to old diapers and beer bottles. Sometimes Rusty could be such a dope. It didn’t bother him that the fat guy came to the door and hung around asking me for the rent, or that the money on the counter this morning wasn’t enough for laundry and breakfast, and that he left some strange girl in my bedroom, but he did tell me not to eat out of the Dumpster.

  The kids were finished looking for food by the time I got the laundry done, had my doughnuts, and went back to the house. Rusty’s girl was still in my room. Her kid had moved to the couch, though, and was sitting with its arms twisted around its legs like a little pretzel. After looking a minute, I pretty well figured out that Rusty might of been wrong last night when he called it a boy. It had braids with little red rubber bands at the end, and it was wearing a pink T-shirt and girl underpants. And sitting on my sleeping bag.

  “I hope you’re, like, potty trained and stuff,” I said, and the kid just looked at me with wide eyes that were like drops of pistachio pudding in the middle of big white saucers.

  The kid sat still as a statue as I pushed the front door shut and dropped the laundry basket on the chair.

  “Geez, that’s heavy,” I said. My feet hurt like crazy. I pulled off the green sandals and dropped them by the chair, then locked the door and flipped on the light. When I turned around, the kid was still staring at me. Its eyes were too big for its face, like one of those nighttime animals you see on PBS—a three-toed sloth, or a lemur, or something.

  The eyes followed me across the room. I went and looked through the crack in my bedroom door, to see what its mom was doing. She was still passed out on my bed, her long arms and legs tangled up in the sheets. Her milk-and-coffee skin made the material look white, when normally it was brownish gray. Her arms and back, and her legs where they came out from under the sheet, were covered with a thin layer of sweat that made her glisten like plastic where the sun fell from the window.

  The door creaked and she took a big breath, then sighed. She had pretty lips, even with the lipstick smeared. The air came in and out between straight white teeth that looked like they’d be pretty, too, if she smiled.

  The little lemur whined on the couch, and I looked over my shoulder at it. Three or four years old, maybe. No telling if it talked or not. It had its thumb in its mouth right now. It whined like it knew I was wondering, but most of the sound got caught in the fist. Whatever it said sounded like “Gun-ungwee.”

  I stared at it, and it said it again, “Umm-ungwee,” then rubbed its stomach.

  I’m hungry. Oh, geez, it wanted food. Good luck, considering there was nothing in the kitchen.

  I pushed the bedroom door open some more. “Hey,” I said, but the lady in the bed didn’t move, so I said it louder. “Hey, your kid’s hungry.”

  She rolled over, grumbled something, then turned toward the wall and went back to sleep.

  “Hey!” I said, but she didn’t move. She told me to leave her the heck alone, and not in real nice words.

  Something touched the back of my leg, tickled there real light. I jumped and turned around, thinking it was one of those huge roach things that came up the drain sometimes.

  It was the kid, and I scared it. It ran back to the sofa and jumped into the corner, then stuck its thumb in its mouth again. The huge eyes got bigger and filled up around the edges. “Unnn-unnngweeee,” it mumbled again, unfolding its fingers over a cheek, so that it pulled the skin down on one side.

  “Ssshhhh,” I said, and tried to think. What in the world was I supposed to do with the kid now? Ignore it? Stick it back in there with its mom and hope she’d wake up? Go in and try to get her out of bed again? Go back outside, lock the door behind me, and just leave?

  Its lips trembled, and its nose wrinkled, and a big ol’ tear rolled down its cheek.
It had pretty skin like its mother, a soft color like milky tea.

  I wished I wouldn’t of eaten the whole pack of sugared doughnuts while I was doing the laundry. The kid probably liked doughnuts. Judging from the looks of things, there wasn’t much chance its mom had carried in any food with her last night. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t anything but the coat she had wrapped around her kid.

  I went into the room and looked around anyway, just in case she had a purse, or a little money, or something, but of course she didn’t. I checked the whole room, and there was nothing—not even some change in the jacket pockets or in her jeans, which were on the floor in a pile with some silver platform sandals. Cool shoes. Seemed like if she could afford those, she could feed her kid.

  I grabbed my book and went back out to the main room. Sitting down on the couch, I told myself maybe Rusty would show up after a while with something for lunch. The kid sniffled and whimpered on the other end of the sofa.

  “You wanna see my book?” I said. “It’s got pictures in it.” That was another thing I liked about old books. They had drawings in them. This one had drawings, and then right in the middle there were some actual racehorse pictures. “It’s about Seabiscuit. He was a big racehorse, and he won lots and lots of money.”

  The kid sniffled some more, then untwisted her arms and scooted over toward me. She was kinda cute, actually. Lots cuter than the kids next door—and lots quieter.

  “Unn-ungweee,” she said again, checking my face like she was hoping I’d finally get the point.

  “I know,” I told her. “But let’s look at the book a minute, ’kay?”

  Nodding, she scooched her rear into the ripped spot in the cushion right next to me. She didn’t smell so good—kinda like she’d wet her underpants and then it’d dried a while back. We looked at the book, and I showed her the pictures. She could make the horsie sound, and a sound for the trucks in the picture, and the train engine, which was cute.