by Liz Adair
“Dinner? But I’m not ready to have people over for dinner.”
“It’s not people. It’s just the Timberlains. I like them, Mandy. Willow is a bit strange. But Jake and his dad are super.”
Mandy laughed. “All right. We’ll have them over.” She stood. “I guess you found out that the bedroom shares the bathroom with guests, so you’ll probably want to make a habit of locking the other door when you’re in there. Towels are in the cupboard. I’ll fix oatmeal for breakfast, and you will eat it. That’s a condition of staying here.”
Leesie climbed off the bed. “Are you going to make up conditions as we go along?”
“Probably. What time will Jake be by to get you?”
“Six thirty.”
“Six thirty! That’s some family tradition.” Mandy stood and smoothed the blanket. “I’ll leave shortly after you do, as I like to get to my office well before seven.” She hugged her sister. “I think I’m going to enjoy having you here.”
Leesie yawned. “Mother said she’d come up for my graduation, if not before. She said she’d bring Aunt Mary and Uncle Ron and whoever else she can convince to be part of her entourage.”
“She does love an excursion. Go to bed, Leesie.”
“I think I will.”
Mandy went back out to the kitchen and made some toast and hot cocoa. Then she put on a sweater and sat on the darkened deck to eat it, listening to the night sounds as she thought about the day.
When she finally came inside, she opened the small pantry next to the washroom and searched among the few commodities she had bought on her one trip downriver for something she could feed to company the next night.
MANDY SERVED ENCHILADAS Monday evening. All day, as her frustration with Grange increased, she looked forward to dinner. She soothed herself by picturing the way the cheese would spiral out of the small holes of her grater like Rumplestiltskin’s golden threads and how the sharp aroma of onions and cheese would combine with the spicy, earthy, essence of red chili and masa. She would use the brown tablecloth with a centerpiece of Vince’s leftover daffodils, and she imagined the palette of green, red, and yellow the enchiladas would make as she presented them to her guests.
Still, no matter what mental exercises she devised, she wasn’t able to keep her mind off the office two doors down from hers. Her frustration with Grange lay not in any verbal fireworks, but in the fact that she didn’t get a chance to fire even one salvo. His calendar said he would be at the high school all morning, so she spent that time planning clever, subtly stinging things to say to him. She would point out the fact that it was his salary, not hers, that threw the district’s budget out of whack. The district had always operated without an assistant superintendent, and they could do so now. He had been replaced. Hasta la vista, baby.
After noon, as she waited for Grange to arrive, she worked in her office, struggling to package her vision for the district reading program. Each time she heard a car on the parking lot gravel, she looked up, and her pulse ratcheted up a notch in expectation. In the end, all her scripting of clever, biting dialog was for nothing. He never showed.
By the time Mandy went home, she was wound up as tight as a banjo string. Determined not to think about Grange again, she changed clothes and put on her running shoes. After scribbling a note for Leesie, she left the front door unlocked, trotted down the steps, and headed up the hill. At Timberlain Road, she turned right and jogged past Fran’s house. Tulips splashed color along her fence line, and a bush by the corner of the house was beginning to break out in yellow blossoms. A robin hopped across the lawn as if to accompany Mandy on a leg of her journey, and she took a deep, cleansing breath and felt the stress begin to ebb.
The woods took over again just beyond Fran’s lawn, dense and tangled with dusky undergrowth, though here and there the chartreuse of new green looked like a candle in the darkness. Mandy ran on, noting after a mile that the look of the woods had changed. Instead of short-needled fir, these trees had long needles, and they were lined in a grid, as if planted by design rather than by the random hand of nature. Bushy undergrowth was gone, and the woods had a park-like feel. Mandy stopped and considered for a moment, then made her way carefully down and across the deep barrow pit alongside the road. As she entered the woods, she recognized the smell of pine, and she picked up her pace as she trotted along a straight lane under the bristly canopy. A soft bed of needles muffled the sound of her footfalls.
At length, she came to a bluff over the river. Swiftly moving water thirty feet below reflected the blue sky. It was a steep drop, and as she backed away from the edge to stand for a moment and catch her breath, she noticed a path that paralleled the riverbank. She decided to see if it would take her home. Trotting along, the trail alternately swallowed her in a sylvan tunnel or opened up to dazzle her with picture postcard scenes of mountains, river, and eagles. When she finally spied her house off to the right, she had not only shed the frustrations of the day, but a lightbulb had turned on in her mind, and she knew how she wanted to do her presentation on the reading program.
When she got home, the house was empty, so Mandy showered, changed, and began to start food prep for dinner. Leesie arrived with Rael and his family while she was chopping onions, and Mandy wiped her streaming eyes as she met Jake for the first time. He had the same gaunt wiriness about him as his father and the same honey curls, but he was taller by a good six inches.
Jake carried a guitar, and Rael chased him and the girls outside so his strumming wouldn’t interfere with the piano tuning. Rael opened up a satchel and took out his tools.
“How long will you be?” Mandy asked.
“I don’t think it will take longer than half, three-quarters of an hour. It seems to be just the lower register. The rest of the keys are pretty much in tune.”
While he worked, Mandy sat at her desk and outlined what she wanted to do on Thursday at the staff meeting. Then she went to the kitchen and quietly assembled New Mexico style enchiladas, layering onions and cheese between flat corn tortillas, fried and stacked three high.
As she worked, she watched Rael. The last rays of sunlight coming in the window made a halo of his sandy curls, accentuating the hollow in his cheek as he cocked his head to listen and defining the muscles in his arm each time he put pressure on the tuning lever.
Mandy popped the last plate in the oven and announced, “We’re just about ready to eat. Can you leave that and finish after supper?”
“Sure can. Want me to call the kids in?”
Mandy cracked an egg on the rim of a cast iron skillet. “That would be great.”
Rael put down his tool, poked his head out the door, and hollered. “I think they heard me,” he said. “Jake wouldn’t go so far that he’d miss the call to supper.”
“He seems like a nice boy.”
Rael smiled. “He is. I don’t know where he came by that. Not through the Timberlains, certainly.”
Mandy looked up from the eggs she was frying and grinned. “Oh, I don’t know.” She was interrupted by her sister’s boisterous entrance.
Leesie had her head turned, talking to the boy behind her. “And I couldn’t believe it, when I saw you in Contemporary Problems! Can you believe it that we have four periods together? What are the odds?”
“Pretty good when you’ve got a school as small as Inches.” Jake set the guitar in the corner. “I imagine you’re used to a bigger school.”
“Where’s Willow?” Mandy asked.
Jake and Leesie looked at each other, and Jake shrugged. “She was with us for a while, but then she wandered off.” He went to the door and bellowed her name.
“He’s got good lungs,” Mandy said as she carefully lifted eggs out of the skillet and onto a plate.
Jake shouted again and came in to report. “She’s just coming down the road. I don’t know where she’s been.”
Mandy opened the oven door. “Well, never mind. Sit. Rael, you be at the head. Jake and Leesie on this side. Willow c
an sit on the other when she gets here.”
As they took their places around the table, Mandy slipped an egg on top of each enchilada, ladled chili sauce over the whole, and arranged chopped lettuce around each circumference. Using a dishcloth, she carried the plates to the table. “Watch out. It’s hot,” she warned.
Willow entered and slid into the seat Mandy indicated, sniffing at the dish set before her with her mouth curled down. “What is this?”
Mandy was determined to look beyond appearance and manners. “Enchiladas. Leesie and I were raised on them.”
“Is this an egg on top?”
“Willow,” Jake said in a warning undervoice.
“Yes,” Mandy said brightly. “Are you allergic to eggs?”
“You might say so. I’m allergic to anything that takes advantage of animals. I’m a vegan.”
Leesie bent down and peeked under the table. Then she bobbed back up and said, “Just checking your shoes, making sure there’s no leather.”
Mandy frowned and shook her head at Leesie. “Well, take the egg off, Willow. Though, is catching an egg that surely would be laid whether someone was there to exploit the chicken or not— is that really taking advantage?”
Willow dragged her knife across the top of her enchilada with a look of distaste on her face. “Is that cheese?”
Mandy looked across the table at Rael. His eyes were twinkling, and he winked at her so quickly she wondered if it really had happened, but the humorous set to his mouth gave her a lead to follow.
“Yes, it is cheese, but you can scrape that off, too. What you’ll have left is onions, tortillas and lettuce. Why don’t you enjoy that, and if you would like a second helping, I’ll be glad to make it for you.”
“But how do we know the onion wasn’t exploited?” Leesie asked earnestly.
Jake snickered, and Mandy said, “That’s enough on that subject. Leesie, tell me about your first day of school.”
“Well, it took all of first period to get registered, and then, when I got to my second period class, who should be there but Jake!”
“And third period,” Jake said. “And fourth and fifth.”
“What do you have first period, Jake?” Mandy asked. She was surprised to see the young man color up, and he seemed reluctant to answer the question.
“Go ahead,” Leesie urged. “Tell us what you’ve got. Maybe I can get the same thing.”
“Mmm. Norfice.”
“Norfice?” Leesie’s brows knit. “What’s that?”
“He says he’s in the office,” Willow said.
Leesie went into a peal of laughter. “You arranged it! You arranged for us to have classes together. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Jake looked down at his plate and shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll be eternally grateful,” Leesie said. “I’ve never been to a school where I didn’t know lots of kids. It was totally awesome, walking into that room and seeing you there.”
“Are you going to play for us tonight, Leesie?” Rael asked.
She didn’t answer but frowned, her gaze fixed on the front deck. “What’s that?”
Everyone turned at once. It was getting dark outside, and all Mandy could see was the hump of a back, as if someone was scurrying across the deck, bent over to escape detection.
Jake jumped up. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know.” Mandy rose as well. She walked to the door and opened it. “There’s no one…” Her voice trailed off.
Rael was right behind her. “What is it?”
“There’s a shoebox on the deck.”
“Let me get it. I have an idea it’s a schoolboy prank.” He stepped out and looked around, then picked up the box. He lifted the lid and bent his head to peer inside. Suddenly his head snapped back and he shouted, “Ugh!”
“What is it?” Mandy asked in alarm.
Leesie and Jake crowded onto the deck, wanting to see, but Willow hung back in the doorway with the ghost of a smile on her face.
“Pee yew!” Leesie wrinkled her nose. “What is that smell?”
“What is it?” Mandy repeated, looking inside. “What are they? Hold the box to the light.”
As Rael held the carton under the porch lamp, they could see it was teeming with lime green bugs, each no bigger than a nickel.
“They’re called shield bugs,” Rael said. “See how they’re shaped like a shield? It’s early for them to be out, but sometimes they winter in a warm shed or outbuilding.”
“Another name for them is stinkbug,” Jake said. He looked from Leesie to his dad, both of whom were glaring at him, and added, “Except that usually they’re called shield bugs.” He cleared his throat. “Usually, that’s what they’re called.”
“It doesn’t matter what they’re called. Why would anyone leave a box of bugs on my deck?”
Rael laughed. “It’s spring. Do teenage boys need a reason?” He replaced the lid. “Jake, you go dump these way far away. I’m going to go in and finish the piano. Then we’ll listen to Leesie play for us.”
“I’ll go with you, Jake,” Leesie said. “Want to come, Willow?”
Willow blinked. “Um, I guess. Sure, I’ll come.”
“I’ll get a flashlight from the truck,” Jake said. He disappeared into the darkness beyond the deck, and the girls followed.
Rael and Mandy went in. She did the dishes while he finished his job. When he was through, he sat down and picked out a simple melody. “I can tune it, but I can’t play it,” he said. “Will you?”
She dried her hands on a dish towel. As she slung it over her shoulder and approached the piano, she asked, “What is that sound outside? It’s a little bit like crickets, but not really.”
“It’s frogs. Sure sign of spring.”
“Frogs! Really?” She slid onto the bench. “Listen to the way it pulses. Hear it? Ching chink-a, um, chink-a. Ching chink-a, um, chinka.” She picked up the slow cadence in the left hand. “This is one of my favorites.”
Mandy began to play a song by an obscure jazz musician, a haunting tune in a languid, Latin rhythm. She closed her eyes and let the music flow through her fingers, not from the memory of a printed page, but from somewhere deep inside. She played night sounds and loneliness, leaden skies and dark-haired strangers; she played faraway, starry, desert nights and someone whispering cherie in her ear.
As she played, just after the bridge, something under the muted rhythm began to swell, and she was suddenly swept along in a cascade of tones that became an elegant, soaring counterpoint to the melody. She dropped back to a soft, under-texture of rhythm and chord change and glanced for the first time at Rael. He sat in the dim corner with Jake’s guitar in his lap, and as the melody sprang from his fingers, all moody passion and smoldering intensity, it ripped the scab off Mandy’s heart. Tears beaded up on her lashes as they played through another chorus, and she felt inexplicably tied to this surprising man. She could hear through his music that love was a raggedly painful subject for him, too.
He let her take the lead again, and when the song was over, she sat with her hands lax on the keys, letting the chorus of frogs and the calls of the teenagers on their way home from disposal duty bring her back to here and now.
When Rael stood to put the guitar back in the corner, Mandy sighed and turned around on the piano bench. “I think I’m in love,” she said. “Where on earth did you learn to play like that? And how do you know about Carlos Rosa? I thought I was his only American fan.”
Rael shrugged. “Oh, you pick things up here and there. How about you? You’re really good.”
She laughed. “As long as you stay in the key of C, I do okay.”
“C is good.” Rael looked out the window. “Looks like the kids are back.”
Leesie and Jake came clattering up the steps, laughing about a raccoon that had been caught in the flashlight’s beam down by the river and had stood up and bared his fangs at them.
“I won’t have warm, fuzz
y feelings about raccoons anymore,” Leesie declared. “He looked totally pit bullish.”
Rael looked outside. “Where’s Willow?”
“Isn’t she here?” Jake looked around in surprise. “She said she was going back to the house.”
Leesie took off her sweater. “Last I saw her she was sitting in the chair on the deck. I saw her silhouette in front of the window.”
Rael frowned. “Jake, go check the truck. See if she’s there.”
Jake saluted with the flashlight. “I’m on it.”
“We probably better go,” Rael said. “The kids need to be up early, and I think Jake has some homework to do. Can we come another time and listen to Leesie play?”
“Yes, but only if it’s soon. Thank you so much for tuning the piano. It felt as if everything was out of kilter until that was done.”
Rael laughed. “I know the feeling.” He held out his hand. “Thank you for supper. Most enjoyable.”
Jake stepped in from outside. “She’s there, in one of her black moods. I left her be.”
“That’s fine. We’ll go on home now.”
“Aw, Dad! Leesie was going to play for us.”
“Another night.”
“But Dad!”
“You’ve got homework.”
Jakes shoulders slumped. “All right.” He turned to Leesie. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow?”
“You better.”
He smiled and turned to Mandy. “Thank you, Dr. Steenburg. Dinner was great.”
She walked them to the door. “You’re welcome, Jake. Come anytime. Thanks again, Rael.”
Leesie, standing behind her, called out, “’Night, Jake. ‘Night, Rael.” Just as Mandy was about to shut the door, she added an afterthought. “Tell Willow good night, too.”