The Summer Kitchen

by Lisa Wingate

  I waited until we reached the car before speaking again. Chris didn’t ask to drive, but climbed into the passenger side, laid the seat back, and closed his eyes, a pointed indication that he was too exhausted for further conversation.

  “Chris, I need to ask you something,” I said finally, trying to sort out the next words so they would sound exactly right.

  Sunlight exploded through the windows as we pulled out of the parking garage, and Chris threw an arm over his face, hiding in the crook of an elbow. “Can we talk later? I’m sorry about all this, okay, Mom? I really am. I screwed up. I understand. I won’t do it again. You and Dad can drug test me every day it you want. You won’t find anything again. Ever. It was stupid. I get it. I just had a lot going on with finals, and it … got to be too much.”

  “Are you all right now?” I wanted him to say yes, to hand me the simple answer, but at the same time, I wanted him to finally tell the truth, to let out all the pain he’d been keeping inside. So far I hadn’t found the key that would unlock him. I wasn’t having any better luck with him than I’d had coaxing Cass into the open. Hopefully, with Holly going to prepare the sandwiches in my place, some progress could be made where there had been a stalemate. Holly could talk the bark off a tree, and she was especially good with teenagers. “Chris, I don’t want you to feel like you have to keep it to yourself if you’re struggling.”

  Chris nodded, his face impassive, but the long, sinewy muscles in his arm tightened, as if he were clenching a fist on the other side of his body. “I’m fine, Mom. I told you.”

  “You know your grandmother’s history.” From the time the boys had grown old enough to understand it, I’d been honest with them about my mother’s substance abuse and the legacy of alcoholism and addiction in our family. The boys would have figured it out eventually, anyway. Grandma Palmer was never the same person twice. “When addiction runs in your family, you can’t take chances. You can’t try it once to see what it’s like. One time can be the beginning of something you can’t stop.”

  “I know.” The answer was labored and weary. Glancing from under his arm, he tried to see where we were—how much longer he’d have to remain trapped in the car with me. “You and Dad can drug test me anytime you want,” he repeated. Rob had already made known that, along with a long list of new rules and regulations, he intended to include regular drug testing in Christopher’s regimen.

  “I’m not talking about drug testing, Chris. I want to get to the bottom of why you felt like you needed to do it in the first place. I think spending some time with a counselor at Family Central might help you sort things out.” In between caring for Poppy’s house and all her normal activities, Holly had taken time to bring me a list of services from Family Central, the counseling arm of our church, where she’d attended a support group after losing her mother.

  Chris groaned. “Mom, I told you. It was just the finals and stuff. If I go to Family Central, everybody’ll think we’re, like, messed up or something.”

  Oddly enough, he sounded much like his father had when I’d suggested we try counseling. “Chris, the truth is nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  “I don’t see you and Dad going to Family Central.” His voice trembled. “Maybe you guys oughta go.”

  I drew in a sharp breath, suddenly feeling vulnerable. “Did you tell Jacey Riley you thought your dad and I were getting a divorce?”

  He grimaced, his nod almost imperceptible.

  “Chris, why would you think that?”

  His silence lingered so long that I wondered if he would answer at all. It was an embarrassing subject, difficult to talk about. “I just … you’re gone all the time, and it’s like it’s some big secret. I asked if I could come to Poppy’s with you, and you blew me off. I just figured … I thought … Jacey’s got a big mouth. I only asked her if she knew anything, like, from her mom.”

  “You should have asked me before you asked Jacey.” I hit the blinker, waiting to turn left, toward home.

  Chris raised his elbow, his eyes wide, mortified. “Mah-om! I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “Me either.” Glancing in the rearview, I found an empty spot in traffic, hit the gas, and pulled back onto the road, tires squealing. My mind spun ahead, solidifying an impulse into a plan of action.

  Chris popped upright and looked around. “What are you doing?”

  “We have somewhere to go.” I glanced at the dash clock. Over an hour until lunch. If we left now, we’d arrive at just about the right time. According to Holly, in the six days since school in Blue Sky Hill had ended for summer, word about the free sandwiches had spread through the neighborhood. The sandwich customers usually started coming around eleven thirty.

  Parting the hair on his forehead, Chris rubbed the lines that had begun to form there. “Can you drop me at the house? I just want to crash.” Glancing in the side-view mirror, he swiveled, looking longingly toward home.

  “Well, we’re not crashing.” We’re not. No matter what it takes, we’re not crashing. This family is done crashing. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  Pinching his forehead, he stretched the skin toward the center until his eyes were buggy on top. “What?”

  “It’s a mystery.”

  The answer garnered a double take from Chris, and for an instant I saw the bright, curious eyes of the little boy who loved the after-school drives that began with It’s a mystery. Sometimes, in reality, we were only going to the grocery store or the cleaners, but the fact that our destination was a mystery made it more fun. I’d take alternate routes while the boys asked for clues and tried to guess where we were headed. It’s a mystery would get them in the car without even so much as a minor argument about whose turn it was to ride in the front seat. They both knew that all mystery trips eventually ended at the ice cream parlor.

  Chris looked suspicious now. No doubt he knew we weren’t headed for ice cream. “Where are we going?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “You mean you don’t know?” Perhaps he thought my plan was to keep driving until we’d talked things through. He sagged in his seat, tired out by the idea.

  “I have someplace in mind.” I hoped I was doing the right thing. Please, please, let this be the right thing.

  As we pulled onto the highway, Chris looked mildly panicked. He wasn’t up for a major car trip with Mom. “Dad said he’d be home in a few hours. He was going to try to get out of the hospital early, to come home and pack.”

  “I know.” The odds that Rob would actually show up any earlier than he had to were slim. As usual, someone else would need his time, require it in a matter of living and dying, which would put all other issues on hold. “We have time.”

  Stretching to look out the window again, Chris clicked his teeth together contemplatively—a habit he’d had since childhood. “Are we going to Poppy’s?”

  “It’s a mystery.”

  Settling into his seat, he gazed out the window, lost in whatever private place he traveled to so often now, the one we couldn’t reach. Jake would have known how to find that place. Jake always knew. But there must have been a hidden place inside Jake, too—one none of us suspected. Somewhere inside, in the part that remembered the forgotten language of his childhood, there was the little boy who was left in the marketplace. A boy who so narrowly escaped disaster, who was almost sold into a life none of us wanted to imagine. Even years later, thinking of that life, thinking of Jake there made me sick. I never wanted him to know what he’d come from, but perhaps I should have told him, after all. Perhaps we had protected him so completely, cleaned his world so carefully that he felt the need to go off on his own to discover all the dirty truths beneath the shiny surface.

  In trying to give Jake and Chris a childhood different from my own, perhaps I hadn’t let them carry enough weight to strengthen them. I didn’t want them to be what I had been, what I saw when I looked at Cass and Opal—tiny adults, for whom the Edens of childhood had been spoiled by
bites of bitter fruit.

  “Chris, do you remember when you used to come down with croup?” I asked.

  Beneath lowered brows, he thought about it. “A little. Yeah, I remember a little, I guess.”

  I looked at the road, thinking into the past. “It always made me so angry when the pediatrician wouldn’t give you medication for it—an inhaler, antibiotics, cough medicine, something. I thought he was so ridiculous and old-fashioned. I kept taking you in and asking for something that would fix it, and every time Dr. White would smile and tell me medicating it would only make it worse. You just had to go through it and grow out of it, and when you were done, you’d have good, strong lungs.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “Those were some long nights.” My mind flashed back to lying on a pallet beside Chris’s toddler bed, listening for every breath, startling from scraps of light sleep to hold my fingers near his face and feel him breathing. “I used to open all the windows and we’d sleep in the cold, to reduce the inflammation. Sometimes, if it was bad enough, I’d bundle you up and we’d sit outside on the porch steps.” In the crisp air, I could see every breath, watch it rising as his tiny fingers lifted skyward, pointing out the moon and stars. “The cold and the dampness always helped.”

  Chris’s face opened. “I remember,” he said with a sudden fascination. “We used to find the Big Dipper and the North Star.”

  “We did.” The one thing I’d learned from my stepfather in all our years of living together was how to spot the constellations. On clear nights, he’d be out on the third-story deck with his telescope, stargaz ing. He’d set me on a deck chair and let me look, his hands steadying me in an awkward, embarrassed fashion. It was the only time we were ever close together.

  I never realized, when I was pointing out the constellations to Christopher, that I’d learned their names from my stepfather. I’d never considered that he’d contributed anything lasting to my life. In general, I only resented him for not protecting me from my mother, for not dealing with her addictions. He was an adult, after all. He had no right to be so impotent.

  A memory tickled my thoughts like a feather. “One night when I couldn’t get the coughing stopped, we went out there, and Jake woke up and came, too.” I felt Jake close now, his body warm and soft in his Batman pajamas as he snuggled under the quilt next to me. “He pointed out that it was a half-moon, and you looked up at it and started to cry.”

  “I did?” Chris’s face tipped curiously.

  “You looked up and said, ‘The moon broke! The moon broke!’ You wanted me to fix it.”

  Chris scoffed at his former self. “What a dweeb. Jake probably laughed at me.”

  “No, he didn’t. For days, he tried to explain the solar system to you. He got out books and tennis balls, and he played teacher. When he was done, he would ask if you understood now, and you’d say you did. Then as soon as the moon came up, you’d be at the window, having a fit.”

  Chris slanted a suspicious glance at me. “Was I really that dumb?”

  “You weren’t very old.” Not much older than Opal. Did anyone ever take Opal out to look at the moon? “You forgot about it, eventually.”

  “Jake probably got through to me about the solar system, after a while.”

  “Actually, I waited until the moon was full again, and I took you outside and showed you. You thought I’d fixed it.”

  Christopher smiled, his grin straight, white, impish, his eyes sparkling. “I guess that’s a little like hanging the moon, isn’t it?”

  It was meant to be a joke, or a compliment, but the words left me hollow. I considered the power I’d had in their lives without ever fully realizing it. “I think I fixed the moon more often than I should have.” A palpable uncertainty hovered at the end of the words. It’s always hard to know whether to be honest with your children about your own imperfections. It can’t be easy to find out that the person steering your ship doesn’t know where all the rocks are.

  Chris seemed to collect his thoughts. “What Jake did wasn’t your fault,” he said quietly, then looked at me. “He did it because of Dad. They’re both jerks.”

  A swirl of conflicting emotions twisted around me like a tangle of multicolored thread—blue, black, gray, bright colors. It was hard to know which to reach for. “Try to go a little easier on your dad and your brother, Chris.”

  “Jake isn’t my brother. If he were my brother, he’d be here. He wouldn’t have taken off.” His cheek tightened, a muscle twitching at the side of his mouth. He swallowed hard and looked away, his fingers gripping the armrest. I laid my hand over his, bleeding from the same wound, wishing I could heal it with Mycitracin and a Band-Aid, the way I’d tended skinned knees and scuffed elbows when he was little. How could I offer wisdom when I was so lost myself?

  Tightening my fingers, I held on. “Honey, the farther you go in life, the more you realize that most people aren’t trying to hurt anybody. They’re just trying to … get by. People don’t always make the right decisions—even the people we love. I know Jake loves us. He’s just trying to … find his way right now.” Please, please, let that be true. Please, God, bring my son home.

  Chris shrugged, as if he knew the words were more of a hope than a certainty.

  We drove on in silence until finally he recognized the exit. “We’re going to Poppy’s.” His voice held greater anticipation than he usually allowed himself these days. Coming here was more important to him than I’d guessed.

  “You solved the mystery,” I said.

  “Do I get an extra scoop of ice cream?” Chris grinned, knowing that the first one to discern the mystery destination always got an extra scoop.

  Chapter 18

  Cass

  Opal and me laid low for days. Every time the door rattled, I was sure Kiki and Uncle Len were back to take Opal, or it was the police or CPS coming to get all of us because Mrs. Kaye had turned us in. But every time, it was just the wind, or the kids next door. I kept telling them we had the flu and they better go away. I was gonna tell Mrs. Kaye that, too, but she never showed up. All I could figure was once she saw the mess in our apartment that day, she didn’t want to get mixed up in our problems. That hurt my feelings in a weird way, but it was for the best.

  After five days, I’d read Where the Red Fern Grows so many times I felt like it was my dog that’d died. Opal was even starting to know the story, too, because I’d read it to her over and over. I changed the end part for her, though. It was kinda funny, because I’d be looking at the words where Old Dan and Little Ann die, and I’d be saying something like, And Dan slept for two days, and then Ann came over and licked him on the nose, and he woke up. He felt a lot better after that. He got stronger and stronger every day, which was good, because it was time for a big raccoon hunt again… .

  Opal didn’t know what a “gak-coon” was, so I drew her one on a piece of paper. She liked it a lot, which was fine, because in my version of Red Fern, they didn’t kill the raccoons, either. Stories are a little like mind places. You can do whatever you want with them. I want my stories to have happy endings, where nobody hurts anybody. There’s enough hard stuff in the real world. You see it whether you want to or not.

  I was giving Opal a bath, and when I washed her head I felt something under the edge of her hair. I’d never noticed it before, but I had her tip her head forward, and under her hair I found three little white scars. There wasn’t much way a kid could get those on her own. Someone had to put them there. I saw a show like that at the blind lady’s house in Fargo—Grey’s Anatomy, I think. The doctor figured out some kid was abused because he had little round marks. Cigarette burns. Kiki smoked. Uncle Len probably did, too.

  Opal didn’t know how long the marks had been there. She didn’t even know what I was talking about, but then she couldn’t see the marks.

  That night, I made Opal show Rusty. She didn’t mind, because she figured it was something cool, and she liked Rusty’s attention. In the evenings when he
came home, she’d run at him like a linebacker, and he’d turn her upside down and hang her by her feet while she squealed.

  When I showed him the scars, I told him again that we needed to pack our stuff and do a start-over someplace else. I didn’t care if we went to Ft. Worth, even. I could look for Ray John on the Internet from anyplace. I just didn’t wanna be here, wondering where Kiki was, or if she’d show up again. The day before I found Opal’s scars, Rusty’d drove around looking for Kiki, and he went by Glitters, but it was like she’d disappeared off the face of the earth.

  It went through my mind that maybe the guy had killed her and dumped her in a ditch, but I didn’t like to think about it. Even though I didn’t want Kiki here, I didn’t want her to be dead, either. Opal asked about her some, and I said she had to go to the doctor, but she’d be all right. I figured, once we got a start-over, Opal would ask less and less, until finally she didn’t ask at all. But Rusty wouldn’t pack up and go, even after he saw the scars.

  “I just got a bunch of overtime work, Sal. Tomorrow night, I’m gonna go with Boomer to pick up a flatbed load of shingles down toward Houston. I get paid time and a half every hour it takes to drive there, get the load, and drive back,” he said. “We need the money. We couldn’t make a new start right now if we wanted to.”

  Rusty was probably right, but I didn’t like hearing it. Since we couldn’t leave, I had to come up with a plan B. I thought about it that night while I was trying to fall asleep. I decided if Kiki or Uncle Len came, I was gonna hide Opal in the cabinet and tell Kiki we’d dropped her at CPS. As soon as Rusty headed off to work, Opal and me practiced it. We put Wal-Mart bags in between all the pans so they wouldn’t make a sound. I decided I better tell Angel, and Ronnie, and Boo what to say, too, so I finally let them in when they came knocking that morning. Like I figured, Angel’d been going down to Poppy’s every day to get sandwiches.

  “They got a new lady down there,” she told me. “She makin’ them sam’iches now, and she handin’ them out right off the po’ch. I help her some. Her name Holly. You wanna go see?”