The Summer Kitchen

by Lisa Wingate

  “No!” she wailed, her tears spilling over in streams that she wiped impatiently. “Just go, all right? I’m not in trouble. I’m fine. I just want to be by myself.”

  I stood up, vacillating by the door. “Will you and Opal be all right if I go?”

  Sagging back to the floor, she answered with a nod.

  “Okay then.” Am I doing the right thing? Is this right? “I’ll leave, but tomorrow I want to know what’s going on.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew I’d made a mistake. Her body stiffened, and her face took on a cool detachment.

  “Yeah, sure. See you tomorrow.”

  I knew I wouldn’t see her tomorrow. Not if she could help it. “Same time.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Would you like me to pick you up?”

  “No, that’s all right,” she answered blandly. “You better go before Rusty comes back.”

  There was nothing more to say but good-bye. I left the apartment feeling defeated and spent the drive back to Plano mentally playing out all the ways tomorrow might develop. None of them were good.

  At home, Holly was watching for my return. She was in my garage before I’d finished putting Bobo in the backyard.

  The moment I saw her face, I knew something was wrong. “Where have you been?” She sounded almost frantic, and I could tell she’d been pacing her kitchen, waiting for me for a while.

  “Holly, what’s wrong?”

  “I’ve been trying to call you for two hours.” Her face was red, her forehead beaded with nervous perspiration.

  “My cell was dead this morning, so I turned it off after I talked to the insurance agent. They’re still investigating the accident, but it looks promising. The other guys can’t keep their story straight, so that’s good for Christopher—”

  “Sandra, Chris is in the hospital.”

  “Chris is … what?” I tried to process the information, but I couldn’t take it in. Chris is fine. I dropped him at school this morning… .

  “Chris is in the hospital. Rob’s with him.” Holly slipped her hand under my elbow as if she thought I might collapse. “Get your purse. I’ll drive you.”

  Blood, and emotion, and warmth vaporized in my body like the moisture before an atom bomb, and I stood in a dry mushroom cloud as I grabbed my purse and started out of the garage. “What do you … what happened? Is he all right?” The day suddenly seemed long and impossible, like a terrible dream. Chris can’t be in the hospital… .

  Please say he’s all right. Please tell me he’s all right.

  Holly stopped me and looked both ways before we crossed the street.

  “Holl? Is Chris all right?”

  Holly chewed her lip. “He’s better now. He fainted in the workout room today. They’re not sure what happened—whether it’s related to the accident, or … something else.” The way she said something else caught my attention.

  “What else? Holly, what do you mean? What else?”

  She pretended to be busy getting in her car and cleaning out the passenger seat. “You really need to talk to Rob. I’m not sure what they’ve found out.”

  “Holly, what else? If you know something, I need you to tell me.”

  “Rob probably—”

  “Holly, what?”

  Her eyes fell closed for an instant as we backed out of the driveway, then she swiveled to check the road. “Jacey thinks he took something.”

  “Something?” I echoed. “What do you mean … something? What something?”

  Holly’s fingers kneaded the steering wheel. She pulled her chin into her chest like she had a bitter taste in her mouth. “Jacey saw him with another boy under the bleachers in the gym. They had a prescription bottle.”

  “A prescription bottle?” I felt sick. I wanted to push open the door, jump out and run away. “How would … why … Christopher wouldn’t do … He knows better than to take someone else’s prescription. Why would he do that?”

  Pausing at the stop sign, Holly turned fully in my direction and met my eyes. “Have you looked at him lately? Have you really looked at him? He’s not the same kid.” She clamped her lips closed, as if she were trying not to say anything more. Finally, she spit out, “He told Jacey he’s afraid you and Rob are getting a divorce. He thinks you’ve been out finding a new place to live or that you’re having an affair.”

  The words hovered around my head like a foreign language lost in translation. “A divorce … what?”

  Holly swallowed hard, her lips pale and pinched. “Sandra,” she said finally, “you’re gone all day, every day. You don’t want anyone to know where you are. I called the organ donors network. I know you weren’t there today. You haven’t been there in a week and a half. What’s going on?”

  Taking a deep breath as one reality collided with the other, I tried to arrange the truth into some format that would make sense. “Holly, there’s something I need to tell you.”

  Chapter 16

  Cass

  When Rusty came home at the end of the day, he was hotter than a Fourth of July firecracker right after it blows up. He’d drove around looking for Kiki for a while and even went by Kiki’s boyfriend’s house, but nobody was there. He asked about her at Glitters, but they said she hadn’t showed up for work, and the manager was ticked. She still owed him money, and if she didn’t come tomorrow, she was fired.

  Rusty finally had to give up looking and go home. Dallas is a big city, after all, and we didn’t know beans about Kiki, or where she might go with that boyfriend, or why she’d go with him at all. “She probably took off with him on a long haul and left us here with her kid,” I said, and Rusty didn’t answer. He sat there at the table with his head in his hands. “What kind of mom takes off without her kid?” I asked. “And with some dude who knocks her around, anyway?”

  “Hush up, Cass,” he muttered. “I don’t wanna talk about it.” Who could say why, but Rusty really had a thing for Kiki. I think he would of been less upset if I disappeared.

  I made us grilled cheese, and a box of macaroni and cheese, and potatoes with cheese, because Rusty liked cheese. I wanted to get him in a better mood. I had something to talk to him about. I’d sat at the table all afternoon and thought it through. It was clear in my mind, but I wasn’t sure how to bring it up to Rusty.

  I waited till Opal’d finished eating, then I ran a teeny bit of water in the bathtub, and let her play in it, because I didn’t want her listening. Even though she didn’t talk much, she understood a lot. I didn’t want her to understand this. Some things, a little kid just doesn’t need to hear. Ever.

  Rusty was guzzling down the leftover macaroni, bent close to the pan with the fork moving like the big steam shovel in the coal pits he worked in for a couple weeks one time. He looked up at me when I came back to the table.

  I figured I might as well spill it. “I think we should move on. From here, I mean.”

  Rusty shoveled in another mouthful of mac and cheese, like he didn’t even hear me. Sometimes he did that when he didn’t want to talk. Tonight, he looked like he didn’t want anybody around. His face was dark with dirt, and strings of sweat had erased little trails from his forehead to his cheeks, so that you could see sunburn underneath. He’d probably been stuck on a roofing crew today. He hated roofing.

  Watching him chew, then stir the macaroni, I tried again. “I think we should go. Now. Tonight.” In my head, I had it all worked out. We’d get everything packed up and have it ready, right inside the door. Then later tonight, after the Mexican dudes finished hanging out in the parking lot, and after the lights went out in Charlie’s office, Rusty could go get our truck, pull it up by the Dumpster, throw our junk in, and we’d take off. We could find a rest stop or a park to sleep in, and then in the morning do what we called a start-over—find a place to live, find Rusty a job, figure out the lay of the land.

  He turned my way, his pale red lashes shadowing his eyes, so that they looked black, not brown. “I gotta work tomorrow, Sal. We didn’t finis
h the shingles today. We gotta get done before the rain moves in. Supposed to be some big storms coming the end of the week. Man, I hate crawling around on that stinking tar paper.”

  As much as I loved my brother, sometimes I could see why his teachers wanted to ring his neck. Talking to him was like being on a cell phone that was way out of range. Only about every third word came through. “I think we should head east to Ft. Worth. If Ray John’s still in Ft. Worth, we’d have a better chance of finding him from there. We can, like, look in the phone books and stuff. If we get a place close to a library, I can search on the Internet some more, like I did in Lubbock. I think if we could be where there’s a library, we could find him.”

  Rusty stirred the macaroni, parted it like the Red Sea, and watched it fall back together. He was losing his appetite. Pretty soon, he’d get up, gather his stuff for a shower, and when he was done, he’d crash. We’d be stuck here another night, and another night might be too long. “You tried that before, Sal. It didn’t work.”

  “I can try some more.” It was kind of nice that he was calling me Sal. If he was mad at Kiki, at least he wasn’t mad at me. “We need a start-over. This isn’t a good place. Nothing’s gone right since we came here.”

  Pushing the pan away, he sat back in his chair, letting his arm dangle toward the floor. “We can’t just leave, Sal. What about Kiki?”

  “Heck with stupid Kiki.” I spit out her name like it was poison. “If she wants to go back with that jerk, you can’t do anything about it. He’s one big dude, Rusty. You can’t fight him.”

  Rusty pushed air between his teeth. “He needs to find out what happens when you take on someone who can hit back. Anybody like that needs his face knocked in.” An angry heat rose up in Rusty’s cheeks and showed in the places where sweat had streaked the tar away.

  “You can’t fight him.”

  “I can handle it, Cass.”

  “Mama wouldn’t—”

  “Mama’s not here!” He exploded out of the chair. “Mama’s not here, is she? Mama wouldn’t just stand back and let some dude hit a woman and a little kid. You don’t know the stuff he’s done. You don’t know what Kiki’s told me.”

  “She went with him again, Rusty.” I stood as tall as I could, but my brother still towered over me, so that I had to look up. I wished I had on Mama’s green shoes. “Did you ever think that maybe she’s just playing you? Did you ever think maybe she’s coming up with a big sad story so you’d feel sorry for her? Every day, she’s got some new excuse why she can’t bring home any money. And last night, when she came in from work, she was stoned, and I know she was stoned. I smelled weed, and she was bumping into everything. She’s got money for weed, but she can’t pay for food or a place? You ever think maybe she’s using us, so she’s got a bed to sleep in and somebody to watch her kid all the time? Maybe she just wanted to make that guy jealous. Maybe she likes it with him. Maybe that’s where she’s supposed to be. You ever think of that?” Even as I was saying it, my mind was telling me, You’re wrong, Cass Sally Blue. You know what Opal was like after Uncle Len showed up. She was so scared she didn’t quit crying for two hours.

  Rusty clamped his hands to the sides of his head. “Shut up. Just shut up, okay? I don’t want to think about it right now. I’ve gotta work tomorrow.”

  “Let’s just go. We can use the money from this week’s check to get a new place.” Somehow, I had to talk Rusty into it. This afternoon, before she walked out our door, Mrs. Kaye gave me that look—the one that comes right before somebody decides they gotta get in your business and do something about you. As soon as she drove off, I started making plans. For things to work, Rusty and me had to get out of here before Mrs. Kaye decided to call the police or social services, before sweaty Charlie showed up looking for this week’s rent, before Rusty got in a fight, before Kiki and Uncle Len got unstoned and came looking for Opal.

  Rusty’s lips twisted into a sneer, like he thought I was a stupid little idiot. “Right! And what’re we gonna do about her?” He sailed a hand through the air toward the bathroom, and there was Opal, standing in the doorway with bubbles and water dripping down her skin, her thumb in her mouth, and her big sad eyes looking up. She was holding her doll under her chin, and the doll was wet, too.

  “Oh, Opal.” I hurried in there, got a towel, and wrapped her up in it. The doorway was slippery, and I almost fell when I lifted her up. She put her head under my chin, like the doll was under hers, and I felt the water from her hair sink into my T-shirt as we crossed the room. “We’ll take her with us,” I said to Rusty.

  “We’re just gonna take somebody’s kid ?”

  “She doesn’t want her.” I hoped Opal wouldn’t understand who I meant by she and her. No kid should ever have to know its mama wants something else more than she wants her own kid. My mama wasn’t perfect, and she had bad taste in men sometimes, but I always knew she loved me and Rusty more than anything. When somebody loves you more than anything, they don’t need to be perfect. I could feel that way about Opal. I did feel that way about Opal already. “Kiki’d probably be glad. Then she could do whatever she wants with … whoever. She won’t have anything to get in the way.”

  Rusty looked sad. He watched Opal, and I could tell she was watching him. I felt her eyelashes brush upward against my neck. “You can’t just take somebody’s kid,” he said again. “It’s illegal, Cass. It’s really illegal.”

  I felt my worry spinning into something big and desperate. “We ran away. We took Mama’s truck. That was illegal. We worked it out. We’ve worked it out every step of the way. Nobody’s ever found us. Heck, probably nobody ever came after us in the first place. I bet Roger didn’t even bother to call anybody. Kiki wouldn’t either, I bet. She wouldn’t call anybody.”

  Rusty stuck his hands in his jeans pockets, sighed and shook his head. “We can’t… .”

  “We can,” I pleaded. “Come on, Rusty. We can do it. We can take care of her. She’d be like a little sister.”

  For a minute, Rusty seemed to think about it. Opal stretched out her arm, and he put his hand up and let her wrap her fingers around it. He had so much tar on his skin, him and Opal were the same color.

  My heart beat hard against Opal’s body, and I squeezed my arms tighter around her. If Rusty said no, I wasn’t sure what I’d do. I couldn’t let Kiki take Opal back. I had to keep her safe, but I couldn’t leave without Rusty. Me and Opal needed Rusty to take care of us. “Please,” I whispered, and my eyes started to fill, and I thought, Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry. You have to seem grown-up. You have to show him you can handle this. “That guy’ll hurt Opal. He said he’d hurt her. You didn’t see him when he was here. You didn’t hear what he said. We can take care of her.”

  Opal let go of Rusty’s hand and wrapped her arms and legs around me, like she understood every word we were saying. She hung on so hard, I felt my ribs squeeze tighter together.

  “Sal,” Rusty whispered, and he laid a hand on my hair. “We can’t even take care of ourselves.” His face was long and sorry, and the Adam’s apple in his neck bobbed up and down.

  “Yes, we can,” I told him. “I’ll get a job. As soon as we move, I’ll get a job.”

  Rusty’s fingers squeezed my hair, rubbed it like he used to rub that dog he loved so much. “You’re twelve years old, Sal. You can’t get a job. You need to be in school. We can’t pick up and run off with someone’s kid. When Kiki comes back, I’ll talk to her. She knows she’s gotta ditch that guy. She said it herself.”

  “Just because she said it doesn’t mean she’s gonna.” Opal started to whimper, and I rocked her back and forth. “Don’t you watch the news? Women say they’re gonna leave all the time, but they don’t. They just keep going back. They just keep doing it. They’re not strong like Mama. Almost none of them are like Mama.”

  Both me and Rusty knew that when Mama met my daddy, she was fallin’-down crazy about him. He was a horse trainer and a dirt track jockey, and he had a nice pla
ce with horses and a little pond out back. He was good to Rusty, and after they had me, he thought I was just it-on-a-stick. He got me a pink tricycle almost before I was big enough to ride it, and he got Rusty a bike and a little four-wheeler to drive, and he took Rusty fishing and stuff. He made Mama laugh, and paid for nice vacations and stuff.

  The day she found out he was paying for all those things by cooking meth in a shed on the back of the place, she packed our bags and left. She said she wasn’t gonna take a chance on losing her kids for anybody, even him. I was too little to remember all that, but Rusty did. Rusty begged and begged to go home, but Mama wouldn’t do it. She told him the three of us had to come first. Period.

  “I’ll talk to Kiki when she comes back.” Rusty patted my head, then started off to his room. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll work it out.”

  I didn’t have any choice but to let him go. There was no way I was gonna talk him into packing up our things and moving tonight. I’d just have to keep working on him and hope Mrs. Kaye didn’t decide to call anybody about us. If I stopped going down to Poppy’s house, maybe she’d forget. Angel and the Mexican kids could go there and get the sandwiches on their own. I could have Angel tell Mrs. Kaye I took a job somewhere else—the Book Basket, maybe, or I could say Mama was sick and needed me at home. We couldn’t have any visitors, because her immunities weren’t good… .

  Even while I was making the plans, I felt sad about it. I’d miss Poppy’s house, and helping Mrs. Kaye, and hearing her stories, and having tea parties at our little table in the summer kitchen. But family has to come first, just like Mama always said. No matter what else happens, the three of us are all that matters… . There were three of us again. Me, and Rusty, and Opal.

  “You can’t let Kiki take Opal back to that guy’s house,” I said, before Rusty disappeared into the bathroom with his sweats.

  He didn’t answer, just nodded, then shut the door.

  I sat down on the sofa with Opal, pulled the sleeping bag over us, and held her while her breath turned long and even. After a while, I fell asleep with her. When I woke up, the apartment was dark, and Rusty’s door was closed. I could hear him snoring softly in his room. The other bedroom door was still open. Opal was wiggling around and poking me on the sofa, so I carried her in and put her in the bed, then went back to the sofa and laid there a while, trying to get back to sleep.