The Summer Kitchen

by Lisa Wingate

  He closed his eyes, then opened them again, as if he were hoping to wake up somewhere else. “Has it ever occurred to you that, while these people are willing enough to cash in on a free meal, they were surviving before you came there, and they’ll survive after you leave?”

  The fire of indignation in my belly flamed up like kindling with a handful of dry straw thrown on top. “Has it ever occurred to you that they might have been hungry before we came and now they’re not? I don’t need a medical degree to spot hungry people, Rob. I may not be a doctor, but I’m not an idiot, either. I’d like you to consider that I am capable of doing more than washing clothes, and scheduling the yard service and the housekeeper, and running everyone’s errands, and making sure there’s sandwich meat in the refrigerator when you happen to show up to eat. Has it ever occurred to you that I might be good at this, and that this might be good for me? That it might be good for Christopher—for all of us?”

  Rob’s eyes, a cool gold in this light, took me in, studied me. “I’ve never questioned your abilities. I’ve never questioned that you’re capable of doing anything you want.”

  The statement took me back. “Really? Because you’re talking to me as if I’m one of your underlings, and I need you to guide and direct me. I need you to support me, Rob. That’s what I need. I need …” How could I describe what I felt—the sense that, somewhere between Mommy-and-me playdates and the high school banquets, I’d become the birthday parties, the school projects, the PTO, the booster club, the soccer snacks, the doctor’s wife. I was the job I did. I loved the job, but now the job was changing, pieces of Mom evaporating like fog on a bathroom mirror. The same sense of change that made Holly wonder if she wanted another baby whispered to me that now was the time to do something new, to do this. The young college coed who’d planned to become a teacher, to be the one who made a difference to children who needed help, was awakening like a time traveler frozen in suspended animation. I could feel her catching her breath inside me. “Jake isn’t here. Christopher’s almost grown. This could be good for us, Rob. It’s been good for Christopher and me. We talk about things … new things, instead of grinding the past into finer and finer pieces—instead of sitting here grieving over Jake and Poppy. It’s time to move forward. It’s time for something new. Isn’t that why you were considering the teaching job?”

  For a moment, there was a spark of understanding in Rob’s eyes, as if I’d touched the part of him that wanted to break free, that felt as trapped as I did. Just as quickly, he closed the door. “Sandra, I’m all for your volunteering, or going to work, or whatever you want to do. I understand the psychology of a maturing home, but there are dozens of things you can do without driving to the seedy side of town and setting up a soup kitchen. There are things you can do here.”

  “What if I’m needed there? What if this is what I’m supposed to be doing? We sit in that big church on Sundays.” I stabbed a finger in the general direction of Victory Fellowship, just out of sight over the hill. “And we talk about having a sense of purpose. Well, I’ve found it. I feel it in every part of me. Nothing that’s happened these past few months has been by accident. It’s as if I’ve been pushed out of the nest, pushed toward that house, toward those people. It’s as if I’ve been preparing for this all my life.” I thought of the dreams I’d held as a little girl, the spirit that my mother’s addictions had tried to crush in me.

  “Sandra, there are social agencies set up to handle problems like this. Volunteer with one of them if you want to.” Rob’s voice was like my mother’s. Don’t muss your dress, SandraKaye. Stay away from little black children. You’ll pick up the dialect… .

  “I’ve done my research, Rob. I know this neighborhood. Economics, the rising cost of groceries, everything hits hard in a lower-income area like this. The community center had a summer feeding program, but the community center isn’t there anymore. The property was sold to a developer. New condos are going in just blocks away, but that doesn’t help the people who were there before. It only raises the tax base. They can’t afford to stay. They can’t afford to go. They can’t afford to live. Someone has to fill the gap.”

  Rob stared out the window, his eyes narrow. “I’m sorry, Sandra. I understand economics and urban redevelopment. I understand that other people have problems, but burying ourselves in some quest for social justice won’t bring back Jake, and it won’t erase what happened to Poppy, and it won’t … keep Christopher out of the medicine cabinet. I’m not interested in trying to save the world. We’ve got all we can handle just trying to put our own lives back together.”

  I could feel Rob pulling away, slipping through my fingers like sand. “Give it a chance, Rob. Come take a look—see what it’s about. I need this. I want you to stand behind me.”

  Leaning forward, he sighed, combing a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “What, exactly, are you proposing?”

  “First of all, I want to buy Poppy’s house from Mother. The café has to have a place that can’t be sold out from under us. Without a permanent location, we can’t even apply for grants, and—”

  His gaze lifted in a way that struck me silent, that burned through the seed of hope I’d begun to nurture. “Sandra,” he said flatly, “there was a message from your mother on the machine. She just accepted an offer on Poppy’s house.”

  Chapter 22

  Cass

  The minute I saw Mrs. Kaye get out of her car, I knew something was wrong. You can tell a lot by the way a person walks. She was only carrying a couple grocery bags and one of the metal pans we used in the café, but she moved like her body had an extra hundred pounds on it. She didn’t even wait for Christopher or Holly to get out—she just headed up to the porch with lines in her forehead big as corn furrows. Christopher didn’t look like he knew anything was going on. He shot a basket from right beside the car. Monk and his bunch had been hanging around on the street waiting for him to play a game of two on two and as soon as they saw him, they came like hogs to sooie, which meant Christopher wouldn’t be much help all morning. Working with him was about like working with Rusty—he didn’t stay on one track so well.

  When everyone got out of the car, it didn’t look like Holly knew there was anything wrong with Mrs. Kaye, either. She was whistling, and she hugged Opal and me around a stack of paper plates.

  Opal could tell something was different with Mrs. Kaye today, though—lots of times, it seemed like Opal had a feeling about things, even if she didn’t know the words to tell you. She knew when people were mad, or happy, or sad, or upset. Maybe she’d had to learn that to get by, living with Kiki and Uncle Len. She figured something wasn’t right about Mrs. Kaye, and she hung around by the door, looking up at her with a worried face.

  It didn’t take Mrs. Kaye long to send me and Opal to the front room to set up tables. As soon as we were gone, Holly plunked a cutting board down on the stove so hard I heard it. “Okay, out with it already,” she said. “What in the world is wrong with you today?”

  There was a long pause and then Mrs. Kaye turned on the radio by the door. I couldn’t hear what she said at first, for “Old Time Rock and Roll” playing on the radio. I got closer to the door, and then I picked up, “… want to say anything with Christopher in the car.”

  “Well, it’s just us now.” Holly had the knife going. She could do it really fast, like a Japanese chef on the Benihana commercial. She could even talk while she did it, which, considering she always talked with her hands, didn’t seem like the best idea. She’d chop, sling the knife, chop, sling the knife, and once in a while point it right at somebody like it was a giant finger. “Hey, by the way”—the chopping stopped, and I figured she was pointing the knife right then—“I did a bunch of research last night, and I’ve got a stack of grant applications printed off, and I thought—” She cut the sentence off right in the middle. “Good Lord, San, what’s that look for?”

  “My mother accepted an offer,” Mrs. Kaye told her. “She signed the papers y
esterday.”

  “The papers for what?” Chop, chop … chop, scrape, chop. “A new broomstick and a few dozen monkey men? I swear, San, one of these days you’re going to get up the guts to tell that woman off. What form of manipulation and guilt inducement is she into now?” Chop-chop-chop.

  “The house, Holly. She sold the house.”

  “What house?”

  “This house. Poppy’s house.”

  The kitchen went dead silent. It seemed like minutes passed before anyone said anything. I felt the time ticking inside my chest, like the big grandfather clock in the funeral parlor where Mama was in her casket. Bong, bong, bong, bong… . The closer I got to the box with Mama in it, the louder the sound was, until finally I put my hands over my ears and ran away.

  I wanted to do that this time, but I couldn’t. I had to know what they were saying.

  “How could she … I thought you were going to tell her to take the house off the market. I thought you were going to tell her we wanted it. Teddy took down the real estate sign last week.”

  “It fell down, Holl. I just didn’t have Teddy put it back up. I didn’t think there was anything to worry about. There hasn’t been a single sign of interest in the house since we put it on the market. I thought that if an offer did come in, the real estate agent would contact me, and then I could approach the issue with Mother. For one thing, I wanted to talk to Rob about the café first.”

  “Great. Now what?” It was the first time I’d ever heard Holly sound mad about anything. The knife went wild, chop-chop-chop-chop-chop-chop, and nobody said a word for a couple minutes again. “There must be something we can do. The house isn’t worth all that much. Just call the Wicked One and tell her we’ll buy it. We’ll come up with the money somehow—maybe get a bank loan, or—”

  “She sold it to a broker. That’s why I didn’t hear anything about it until after the fact. Mother had Maryanne call a home-buying company, and she dumped the place for what she could get. I tried to call Mother last night, and I got Maryanne, and you can imagine how that went. She said Mother was in bed with a headache. Maryanne thought I’d lost my mind, wanting to keep the house. She was delighted to let me know the place was gone, period, and there was nothing I could do about it, so there wasn’t any point in my talking to Mother. She had the nerve to tell me it was for my own good—that Mother sold the house so I wouldn’t have to deal with it.”

  “Ohhhh, I hate her.” I’d never heard Holly say anything like that, either. Holly liked everybody. “I hate both of them. I do.” The knife went wild. “Real estate contracts take a while to become final. There are inspections and such.”

  “It’s an ‘as is’ sale—one of those We buy shabby houses companies.”

  “Well, that’s it, then!” The knife stopped suddenly. “We’ll buy it back from the company. Hagatha and Medusa won’t have any control over it. It’s perfect. We’ll get the house, and we can stick it to the wicked witches, all at once. What could be better than that?”

  “I already called the company. It’ll be thirty days or more before the house is available. They inspect and renovate each property they take on, then they rent it out. I had a long talk with the property manager. I even explained what we were doing here. She was actually very nice, but she knew her stuff. We’ve got more problems than just the sale of the house. This property isn’t zoned for anything more than single-family use. Getting that changed would require a huge effort and it’s fairly unlikely we’d succeed. The kitchen here isn’t an approved commercial kitchen. Sooner or later, the health department will find out we’re serving food to the public—free or not—and they’ll shut us down. Apparently, you can’t just open your doors and start feeding people. People have to go hungry until you’ve got all the right permits. End of story.”

  Holly didn’t say anything, which sunk me lower than all the stuff Mrs. Kaye’d brought up. When Holly didn’t have a plan, things were bad.

  “Wildfire” came on the radio. I sat down in a chair and closed my eyes, and went to a mind place. I was the girl on the pony named Wildfire, running and running.

  “There has to be a way,” Holly whispered.

  I tried to decide whether to keep listening or stay in the mind place. The song went on, the pony busted down his stall and got lost in a blizzard. The girl ran after him in the cold, calling his name.

  Did she ever find him? I wondered, but in my mind, I couldn’t see the answer. I couldn’t stay in the place where things were good. I couldn’t stop the voices in the kitchen from mixing with the song.

  The girl in the story died, out looking for her pony. She got swallowed up by the blizzard and nobody saw her anymore, and she never rode Wildfire across the prairie with the whirlwind by her side again.

  Nothing good lasts. It’s a fact. You build a stall to keep the good thing dry and warm. You try to lock it up, keep it safe, but it busts out, and runs away, and you don’t even know why… .

  I waited all day for Mrs. Kaye to tell me about the trouble with the house, but she didn’t. Maybe she was having a hard time dealing. She didn’t tell Christopher, either, or Teddy, or Teddy’s mom, who’d had her nurse help her make cookies. They stayed to hand them out to the kids. For a little while around lunchtime, the people were eating, and things seemed okay. MJ told a story out on the porch, and the kids sat and listened. Even Monk and his gang quit playing basketball and stood where they could hear. Rusty and some of his buddies from the construction site came over for lunch. They paid for their food, even though Mrs. Kaye said they didn’t have to. Rusty and Boomer were headed off on another night run to pick up shingles from the dude in Houston, and he didn’t know when he’d be home, but probably not until early morning. He said to be sure I locked the door when me and Opal got home, and I said I would. I didn’t tell him anything about the café getting sold, because he didn’t look like he needed one more problem on his mind. He didn’t like leaving me and Opal home alone that long, but they were gonna get a hundred dollars each for the shingle run.

  I told him me and Opal would be fine, then him and his friends headed back to work.

  After story time was over and the people left, I looked through the window, and I saw MJ talking to Mrs. Kaye and Holly. I could tell without hearing the words what they were talking about. All three of them looked upset.

  Cleanup for the day went on like normal, except it didn’t feel normal. It felt like the end of everything. I guessed it was, but my heart still wouldn’t buy it. I wasn’t sure what would happen to Opal and me now, without the café to go to every day and without the food I got from Mrs. Kaye. Extra food and free lunch every day leave a big hole when you haven’t got them anymore, and you’ve still got three people to take care of.

  I tried not to think about it, but I couldn’t get to a mind place, even though I wanted to. When you grow up, there’s more things between you and your mind places, I guess.

  On the way home, I stopped and let Opal drop some bread crumbs in the creek, and then we hung out in the park a while. I sat on the lopsided merry-go-round and remembered all the talk we’d had about fixing up the place. Rusty was gonna get some bolts and a welder for the merry-go-round, and some spray-on stuff that would make the slide slippery again, and some cables and boards for the swing set frame. He’d talked to the guys at the construction site about welding together a teeter-totter and some frames for picnic tables.

  It was too much to think about, sitting in the park with Poppy’s house right on the other side of the trees, so I made Opal leave and we headed home. She didn’t argue. I guess she could tell I was in a mood, because she just held my hand and walked along real quiet, looking up at me every once in a while.

  When we turned the corner into the apartments, Kiki was sitting on our steps. By the time I saw her, we were so close I was surprised she didn’t hear us. She was just sitting there still as a statue, her knees wrapped up against her body like she was cold, and her head down between them. I froze, holding Opal’s hand
tighter and tighter. Opal was watching a bird hop along the gutter looking for food, so she didn’t see her mama at first. I moved in front of Opal. She tugged at my hand, watching the bird. I felt the pull stretching my arm as she tried to see the bird better.

  Run. Turn around and run away, I thought, but I couldn’t move. If we ran away, where would we go? Sooner or later it’d get dark, and we’d have to come home. How long would Kiki stay there? Why did she come? Why did she have to come back at all?

  I couldn’t wait until Rusty could get home and take care of it. He was probably already headed off with Boomer on the road job, overnight. Even if he wasn’t, I didn’t have any way to get ahold of him now.

  “Is a bird go.” Opal’s voice pushed back the silence. I caught my breath and jumped, jerking Opal close. The seconds seemed to pass in slow motion. Opal pulled from my hand, I saw her, I saw the bird. One leg was dragging behind it, the claws curled together, useless. The bird wasn’t looking for food; it was trying to get to someplace safe. On the steps, Kiki untangled like a ball of string, loose and slow, like she didn’t have the energy to stand.

  Opal splashed into the water in the gutter, trying to pick up the bird as it hopped toward the apartments. “Bird. Bird, ’mere bird.” She moved closer to Kiki without even knowing it.

  “Stop, Opal!” I ran after her and grabbed her up, swinging her onto my hip so hard she gulped out air.

  Kiki turned all the way toward us, and then I knew why she was back. She had a fresh shiner. Her eye was swole almost shut, with a cut underneath that’d bled down her neck and stained the front of her T-shirt.

  “Geez,” I muttered. “What happened to you?” As if I had to ask.

  “It … went bad.” Kiki’s head tottered on her neck, and I was afraid she’d pass out right there on the steps.