The Summer Kitchen

by Lisa Wingate

  I was sad about tomorrow. It’d be weird, not getting up and going to Poppy’s. It’d be boring, and it’d stink knowing that Angel and the other kids could go down there, while me and Opal stayed home. If Mrs. Kaye came by our apartment, I’d have to holler through the door that Mama was too sick to have anybody come in. I’d feel bad telling her that, after she was always so nice to us. It’d be like when I had to cut loose from the Waffle Shop waitress in the oil patch town, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

  In the morning, by the time I woke up, Rusty was gone. I jumped out of the sleeping bag, thinking me and Opal better hurry and head off to Poppy’s house before Angel, Ronnie, and Boo came out. Then I remembered we couldn’t go today, or ever.

  Outside it was cloudy, and thunder rumbled far off. The morning glow around the window was gray blue, and even after I turned on the light, the apartment was dark. I squashed a roach in the corner and left it there, where normally I would have cleaned it up. It didn’t seem like it mattered right now.

  I tried to read my book, but I couldn’t get my mind into it. I wanted to open the window blind, but I thought I better not. If Kiki and her boyfriend showed up, or if Mrs. Kaye came by, I didn’t want them to be able to look inside.

  When Opal got out of bed, she wanted cereal first, and then she wanted to know when we were going to Poppy’s house.

  “We’re not going there today. We gotta stay home,” I told her.

  She pushed her cereal away, crossed her arms, and made a pout lip.

  “You better eat that before it gets soggy,” I said, and she twisted in her chair, lifted up her arms, and clamped them back down again. “All right, but you’re not getting any more. That’s it. You either eat it or you can just be hungry till lunch.”

  Opal squeaked and stuck her tongue out at me. I wanted to touch the pepper shaker and pinch that tongue, like Mama used to with Rusty. The pepper taste broke him of sticking his tongue out, that was for sure.

  Instead, I shook my finger at her. “You can sit there until you decide to eat, Opal. Don’t you get out of that chair until you finish your cereal. I’m gonna go take my shower.”

  I left her there pouting, which was just what Mama would of done. Opal blew a raspberry across the room at me, and I slammed the bathroom door. She whined louder. When I didn’t come back out, she came over and tried to open the bathroom door, then screamed and banged on it like a mini Uncle Len.

  “Stop that!” I hollered. “You go back and eat your cereal!” I felt a big lump coming up in my throat, and all I wanted to do was get away. I didn’t want to think about Opal screaming, or Uncle Len pounding on the door, or Rusty looking for Kiki on his lunch hour, or what might happen if he found her, or Poppy’s house, or the summer kitchen, where our picnic table would sit empty with yesterday’s hollyhock dancers slowly drying in the sun.

  I turned on the shower and got in. When I closed the curtain, a beetle fell off and landed by my feet. Skittering away, it tried to crawl up the side of the tub. The shower stream caught it and swirled it toward the drain, then around and around while it flailed its feet and tried to grab on. Every time it started to get a hold, the water caught it again and dragged it under. Finally it wasn’t strong enough anymore, and it just quit swimming. The water pulled it down and it disappeared.

  The lump in my throat burst open, and I wanted Mama so bad that the wanting squeezed around me until the hot steamy air was too thick to breathe. I pulled it through my throat in a long, slow sob, sat down under the water and let it rain over me, so that I couldn’t tell what was the shower and what was tears.

  Like all the other times, the tears came from someplace I didn’t understand, and then they drained away to that place again, a tide rushing in and washing away the sand, then going out again. When I got up, the water was freezing, and Opal was quiet outside the door. I shivered through washing my hair in the cold water, then got out, the air warmer than my skin. My teeth chattered, and I rubbed hard with the towel until my skin was red and raw. The towel smelled like cigarettes, like Kiki. I threw it in the tub, washed it and hung it up to dry.

  When I turned off the water, I heard someone knocking on the front door. By the time I got to the living room, Opal’d dragged a chair over and was trying to open the lock.

  Fear went through me like lightning. “No, Opal!” I whispered, then hurried across the room and pulled her off the chair. We listened to the knocking together. It was soft, and coming from down low, and I figured it was just Boo.

  “We’re sick,” I hollered. “We got the crud in here, and if you don’t want to catch it, you better go away.”

  Chapter 17

  SandraKaye

  Christopher spent the first five days of his summer vacation in the hospital, after showing irregular heart rhythms and difficulty breathing the day he collapsed at school. Under normal circumstances, he would have been released sooner, but Rob insisted he remain until we knew exactly what was in his system and how it got there. His insistence came with the silent insinuation that I wasn’t adequately supervising Chris at home—that since the car incident, I should have been picking him up every day after school and keeping him prisoner. The insurance agent felt so bad when he heard Chris was in the hospital, he stepped up efforts to clear Chris’s name, and came by the hospital personally to tell us the investigator was making progress in debunking the false claims, and he felt certain that everything would be cleared up soon.

  Even so, there was still the question between Rob and me of where to lay the blame for Christopher’s current problems. Rob insisted that he needed to be on a tighter leash. “He has to know he can’t just do whatever he wants,” Rob asserted in a whisper as we stood in the corridor near Chris’s hospital room, waiting for him to get dressed to go home. We were both grasping at straws, trying to figure out why Chris would have done something so foolish as to take a combination of medications—Ritalin he got from a friend so he could stay awake and study all night for finals, along with Xanax and OxyContin from our medicine cabinet to take the edge off his emotions. He’d heard about potential combinations from kids at school, who, according to Chris, thought nothing of sharing meds.

  During Chris’s time in the hospital, Rob and I had received a crash course in what kids casually referred to as pharming. According to Chris’s doctors, the problem of teenagers gleaning prescription medications and then using or trading them was rampant, especially in the suburbs, where medicine cabinets were rife with pills. Because the medications were prescriptions and available at home, kids thought of it as okay.

  After several days of discussing Chris’s problems in clinical terms, we now had to consider what lay underneath and how we were going to prevent it from happening again. Rob’s solution was to crack down, take greater control. “He has to be made aware that his actions come with consequences. This could have been deadly, Sandra. We’re lucky all he did was pass out at school.” Rob’s face went white, as if the realization of what might have happened had struck him fully.

  “Like you made Jake aware?” I spat, and Rob looked wounded. “You heaped the responsibility for Poppy’s accident on Jake until he couldn’t take it anymore, and now where is he?” All we’d done the past four days was argue, but so far we were filling in a paint-by-number to which even Chris didn’t seem to have the color key. We were groping for explanations in the dark—heavy class load, depression over Poppy’s death and Jake’s disappearance, guilt about the car accident, Christopher’s perception that Rob and I were falling apart… .

  “We’re not talking about Jake.” Rob’s eyes were bloodshot, sagging into deep circles at the bottom. Underneath the anger, he looked apprehensive and exhausted. “It’s Christopher we’re talking about here. He needs a calm, stable environment. He shouldn’t be worrying about whether the two of us can hold it together.”

  “No, he shouldn’t.” But the gulf in our family was growing every day. Of course Christopher saw it. He wasn’t blind.

  Rob lo
oked down the hall, his lashes narrow over soft brown eyes—Christopher’s eyes. Those eyes had caught my attention the day Rob and I met, and they were the first thing I noticed about Christopher when a neonatal nurse placed him in my arms. He had his father’s eyes. Rob’s beautiful golden brown eyes. The day Christopher was finally released from preemie care, there was so much joy, both Rob and I cried when we carried him into the house. All the emotion had scared Jake. He didn’t know what to make of it.

  How had we ended up here? Like this? I looked into Rob’s eyes now, and there was nothing in them but weariness, as if he were dealing with a medical case so complex he couldn’t figure out how to solve it. “Rob, we need … something … counseling or something. This isn’t us. This isn’t the way we’re supposed to be.”

  As usual, the suggestion that we couldn’t handle our family problems on our own fell on deaf ears. Physician, heal thyself. “Counseling won’t keep Christopher home, instead of hanging out at school or running off to friends’ houses,” Rob said flatly. “We have to do that. He needs you there. He shouldn’t be worrying about … where you are.” The words, the look of accusation, caught me like a left hook. After Chris had woken in the hospital, I’d explained to both him and Rob that my absences lately had only been because I was having some repairs and updates done at Poppy’s house, and that Holly was going to take care of things there for a few days until I could get back to it. It wasn’t the whole truth, but now hardly seemed the time to bring up Cass, Opal, and the ever-growing sandwich project.

  “I told you I’ve been doing some work at Poppy’s. There’s nothing for Chris to worry about.”

  Rob studied me, searching my face as a nurse passed. Was he wondering if there was something more going on? “Chris needs you to be …” Pausing to retract whatever word was in his mind, he replaced it with another. “Present.”

  An indignant flush rose in my cheeks. What about you? Where are you? You’re the doctor, the one who takes care of everybody. Where were you when we needed you to take care of us? “Maybe what he needs is for the two of us to wake up and see what’s going on. Maybe he’s waiting for us to notice that he’s given up everything he used to love. Maybe he’s medicating himself because he’s trying to pass a bunch of classes he hates so he can make you happy by becoming Jake. Maybe he thinks if he fills the gap, things will be like they used to be.” It was hard to believe used to be was only a few months ago. A few months ago, Rob came home at night from work, Chris played music, Jake and Poppy drove over for family dinners. Rob and I shared glasses of wine and talked about our next vacation, or the boys’ activities, or some triumphant lifesaving moment Rob had experienced in the hospital. We didn’t get as much alone time as we should have, and busy schedules often stood in the way of romance, but there was always the sense that we were partners, a team in raising our children.

  Now I looked at Rob and I realized I had no idea what he was really thinking or feeling.

  “Because Christopher is finally growing up and taking an interest in college prep, he’s trying to be Jake?” Lifting his hands in the air, Rob snorted, delivering a sardonic smirk.

  Normally I would have stepped back, tried to find a painless balance between what Rob wanted to hear and what I wanted to say. Something that wouldn’t cause conflict. But this time Christopher’s well-being hung in the balance. “He’s given up playing sports—it’s baseball season, for heaven’s sake, and he’s not out there with the team. Doesn’t that seem strange to you? Does that seem like Christopher?”

  “He needs the space in his schedule for—”

  “For what? So he can take online courses and rack up early college credits like Jake did?” My voice echoed down the corridor in a hiss, and I took a breath, reminded myself of where we were. Christopher was just down the hall, more fragile than ever, now that he’d failed to live up to expectations once again.

  Rob took a few steps away. “If he’s going to go premed, he’ll need—”

  “When have you ever known Christopher to show an interest in premed … before, I mean? Before Jake left?”

  Rob slid a hand into the pocket of his lab coat and fiddled with a pen. Click, click, click, click. “His priorities are changing. That’s to be expected.”

  “Expected? Why is that to be expected? According to whom? According to some article you read in a medical journal? According to some presentation you listened to at a conference? He’s our son, Rob. He’s a person, not a case study. Have you noticed that he never plays his sax anymore? It’s been sitting in the band hall broken for months, and he doesn’t even care. His guitar has an inch of dust on it. When would that ever have happened in the past?”

  Rob’s lips pursed. “I don’t see what one thing has to do with the other. It’s perfectly natural that as we mature we have to … give up things … surrender some impractical fantasies.”

  “Who says Chris’s music is an impractical fantasy? Why is it impractical? Why is his idea of playing baseball in college impractical? He’s wanted that since he was a toddler standing on the sidelines of Jake’s Little League games.”

  Rob answered with another sardonic puff of laughter. “I wanted to be an astronaut, but there came a point when it was clear that wasn’t likely to happen. Giving up the fantasy is part of becoming an adult. Christopher’s seventeen. At some point he has to understand that sports and music aren’t a future.”

  “Why?” I looked at Rob, so pragmatic, so steady in his emotion, so certain of black and white. All the things that once attracted me to him—the fact that he could be counted on, the fact that he was a decision maker, the fact that he took charge of everything and made me feel safe—frustrated me now. In his mind, there was only one way things should be. “Why? Why does he have to understand that the only future is the one we pick for him? Because we say so? Because you say so? Because now that Jake’s gone, the line of Dr. Dardens will end if Christopher doesn’t come through? What if his future is supposed to be something totally different? What if Jake’s was? What if we pushed so hard toward our vision, that’s why he finally left—because he couldn’t breathe anymore?”

  “He left because of Poppy. I take responsibility for that. I shouldn’t have been so hard on him about it, but—”

  Rob’s pager beeped, and the conversation ended abruptly. The emotion on his face, whatever he’d been about to say, was quickly cloaked behind the doctor’s mask. “I’ll see you at home. I’ll be back for a few hours this evening to pack before my flight.”

  I couldn’t answer at first. It hadn’t even occurred to me that Rob would still go to his annual medical conference in Canada. “Are you serious?” I choked out, feeling wounded, abandoned, pushed aside. “You’re still leaving for the conference, with everything that’s going on?”

  The pager beeped again, and Rob sighed wearily. “I don’t have any choice. I’m presenting, remember?”

  I don’t care! I wanted to scream. I don’t care if you’re going to a meeting with the president of the American Medical Association. We need you here. But there wasn’t any point in saying it. Rob was already disengaging from personal issues, cloaking everything behind his professional facade. He checked the pager impassively.

  Maybe I don’t care. Maybe I don’t care if he goes or not. The idea scratched the surface of my mind, sharp and painful as he turned and started down the hall. No question about whether or not he should take the page, or fly to Canada the day our son was released from the hospital. There never was.

  I went in and helped Chris gather his belongings.

  “You guys were fighting again,” he muttered, his face turned away as he pushed a pair of sweats into his duffel bag.

  I rubbed his shoulder blades. “No, we were just talking.”

  He put the strap over his shoulder and we started toward the door. “I’m okay. The pills were just a dumb idea. Lots of people do it. I thought it would … help.”

  Smoothing my fingers over his hair, I followed him into the corrido
r, steering him with my hand as if he were a child. “We need to talk about some things after we get home.” While Chris was gone, I’d cleaned out the pain pills left over from Rob’s back problems, along with every prescription bottle in the house. Still, I wasn’t naïve enough to believe things were fine just because Christopher said they were, or that he couldn’t find more pills if he wanted them. “We need to set up some counseling for you, to help get to the bottom of what’s going on.”

  “It was just the finals—all the pressure and stuff. I don’t need a counselor.” Chris’s head hung between his shoulders, as if he were trying to disappear so that no one would see him leaving the hospital. “Does everyone know why I passed out at school?”

  “The kids think you had the flu, but we did tell the guidance counselor about the boy giving you his Ritalin. The school has to deal with that issue.” I felt Chris’s shoulder blades rise and fall beneath my fingers. “We need to talk about why it happened. And I do want you to get started with a counselor down at Family Central. Some things have to change so nothing like this takes place again.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “It’s not as easy as just saying that. You need to tell us what’s going on, Chris. What you’re feeling. When you keep it bottled up inside, that’s when problems start.” You’re a fine one to be giving that advice, Sandra. You’ve been hiding all your life, afraid that if you said what you meant, the world would come to an end.

  “I’m really tired.”

  Chris watched the floor. His shoes squeaked on the linoleum, and long sandy curls fell over his eyes as we walked down the hallway.