She was right; they looked like any old bush, about five feet high with green-leafed branches.
“They’ll attract butterflies, but the real reason I have them is for the hummingbirds.”
We stopped at a bench between the two butterfly bushes. “In a month or so I’ll sit out here and listen to them buzz all around me. For now, I have a hummingbird feeder to get their attention, in case they show up before the flowers come in.”
The hummingbird feeder was on the back side of the bushes. It looked pretty simple: a clear plastic tube filled with water. At the bottom of the tube was a red circular base with a half dozen holes.
“Do they drink water?” I asked.
“Four parts water to one part sugar. They like the sweet stuff.”
An alarm on Old Lady Peters’ black wrist watch started going off. “Time for The Price Is Right. I’ve got a date with Bob Barker.” I knew who Bob Barker was; I’d even watched the show a few times. But to set your alarm to it seemed strange.
“Young man, walk me to that door,” she said, holding her arm out. It was the sort of thing my mother would do. I held onto her left elbow. We walked back up the brick path without speaking. I opened the screen door and she went inside. In my opinion, she didn’t walk like someone whose back was hurt.
7
I walked out the gate, in a good mood, feeling like I’d discovered something. But when I looked up, Dennis was walking up my driveway, carrying his tennis bag, smirking. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Bullshit.” Dennis was blond and smiled a lot.
“I threw my Frisbee over there and went to get it.”
He looked down at my empty hands. “Where’s the Frisbee?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t find it. It must have landed in the shrubs or something.”
“Maybe the old bag stole it.”
“Shut up,” I said, afraid she’d hear us.
“Whatever. I gotta take a piss.” He started up my back porch steps without an invitation.
As Dennis used the bathroom, I drank a glass of water, hoping now that we were inside he’d forget about seeing me coming out of her backyard. I used the bathroom after he did. When I came out, he was sitting on my living room couch, leafing through one of my Rachael Ray cookbooks. “This chick is hot.”
“Give me that,” I said. “It’s my mother’s.” I took the book from him and set it on the kitchen table. I wasn’t going to tell him the book was mine. “No practice today?”
“Coach is sick, so I get the day off. Unless you want to play a set or two.” Dennis had no problem taking me to the tennis court and running me around for an hour. Once a year, or so, I’d agree to a game, forgetting the embarrassment of playing with someone who was worlds better than me. Afterwards, I’d promise myself never again.
“No thanks,” I said.
He’d turned the TV on. It was that Giada lady from the show
“Everyday Italian.” I’d left the TV on the Food Network last night. I usually watched Rachael Ray or Bobby Flay when I got home from school. But Rachael was my favorite. She made cooking look so easy, the way she juggled things back and forth and gave you the feeling you could cook anything. Plus, she was cute and funny.
“Damn, this chick is hot too. I bet you jerk off to her every night.”
“Would you shut up, Dennis?” But I did have to admit Giada was hot and wore ridiculously low cut shirts. We settled in to watch her make shrimp scampi. At least if he was distracted with her, he’d probably forget about Old Lady Peters.
When the show was over, I asked, “So where’s Anna?” Anna was his girlfriend. Like Dennis, she played tennis and was blond.
“I don’t know. I tried calling earlier but she didn’t answer.”
He pulled his cell phone out and dialed her number. When she didn’t answer, he texted her some message. He saw me looking at his phone. “You need to get a cell phone,” he said. He’d told me this about a hundred times.
“Naw, I don’t think so.”
No one in my family had one. Both my parents said they were a waste of time. It was safe to say we weren’t the most technologically advanced family. Mom did all her writing on a typewriter. The laptop I used for homework was so slow that surfing the internet was a joke. I’d log on to check e-mail and could go and use the bathroom before anything came up.
Dennis flicked through the channels until he found a movie he wanted to watch, some comedy with Jim Carey. I’d seen the movie before. “This okay?” he asked.
“It’s fine.”
A few minutes into the movie, I looked over and Dennis had fallen asleep. I shook my head. He was a piece of work, but he wasn’t really a bad guy. Last year, he’d organized an MS walk when he’d found out one of the school librarians had Multiple Sclerosis. The event had gone off well, even got a big write-up in the local paper, and he’d raised over five thousand dollars for the local MS chapter. My mother said he’d probably only done it so he could put it on his college application. She was probably right, but at least he’d done something, helped a few people.
I took the remote control and changed it back to Food Network, lowered the volume. Bobby Flay was grilling fish tacos. They looked good, and I decided to try and make them soon. I held the remote control in my hand ready to change it back in case Dennis woke up.
When he finally did wake up, we played blackjack and fivecard stud. Dennis’ dad had a weekly poker match at their house and Dennis said he wanted to get better at it before he asked his dad if he could join. Like most things, Dennis was better than me at poker. Thankfully, we only used Monopoly money. He’d have no problem taking twenty dollars from me, even though his parents had a lot more money than mine. His dad was vice-president of something or other at the hospital where my dad worked.
“You know what we need to get you, Hale?”
“I can’t imagine,” I said, knowing what he was going to say.
“We need to get you a girlfriend.”
I shook my head. “No, thanks. I’ll be out of here in a couple months.”
He nodded. “That’s right.”
Dennis never mentioned my mother but he had told me the first week she was gone that if I ever wanted to talk about it he’d be glad to listen. We heard the front door open and my father walked in. I hadn’t realized it was almost six.
“Hey, Mr. Hale,” Dennis said.
“Hey guys,” Dad said, walking back to his room.
Dennis looked at me and was about to say something but didn’t.
“I better get going. My mom is probably going to have dinner ready soon.”
My dad came out dressed in his running outfit, sweat pants and a long sleeved T-shirt. “What’s for dinner, Julian?”
I looked at Dennis. He raised his eyebrows a little.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Dad shrugged and walked out the front door.
Dennis looked over at the cookbook. “Your mom’s, huh?”
“Well somebody around here has to cook. I usually just heat us up some TV dinners.”
“Sure you do,” he said, heading for the door.
While Dad was out on his run, I made tilapia with caramelized walnuts for dinner. I had the lightly breaded tilapia in one sauce pan and the walnuts smothered in butter, and a bit of sugar, in another pan. The snow peas had already boiled. The butter smelled good.
The tilapia recipe came from one of my Rachael Ray cookbooks. I pulled the tilapia from the heat and was drizzling the walnuts over the fish when my father came in the front door. He looked like he’d worked up a good sweat.
After Dad showered and changed clothes, he sat at the table.
“So how was your run?”
“Good,” he said. “Julian, your cooking keeps getting better.”
It did taste pretty good, but I thought the walnuts probably could have been cooked a little longer. They were still pretty crunchy.
“Work okay?” I a
sked.
“Sure. Nobody died on me today.”
The night before he’d told me how one of his patients had a heart attack and died in his hospital bed. He said the man was reall old and had a bunch of medical problems but everyone was still shocked when it happened.
“Do a lot of your patients die?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not really. If they start heading south we ship them to ICU.” He helped me with the dishes before we headed back to our separate bedrooms.
8
Each Saturday, since Mom left, Dad and I traveled to the local Harris Teeter and did our grocery shopping for the week. My father supplied the money, but I was really the one who did the shopping. I was pretty sure if I were old enough to drive myself, he’d be glad to send me to the store alone.
Dad pushed the cart, a few feet behind me, waiting for me to throw packages of chicken breasts, ground beef, and a couple pounds of salmon into the cart. I selected items from the grocery list I’d compiled according to the recipes I planned to make that week.
Before Mom left, I’d go grocery shopping with her on Saturdays, pushing the cart behind her as she walked down the aisles like she owned the place. Mom was good-looking and men noticed her. She was thin, had longish strawberry blonde hair and smiled at about every person we passed.
Mom never used a shopping list, said she liked to pick out whatever looked good. She said if she happened to forget an ingredient she’d just improvise. I wasn’t ready to improvise with my cooking. I needed the step-by-step instructions recipes gave me.
As we walked the aisles, my father would occasionally reach over and grab a bag of potato chips, maybe some pretzels, but not much else. After Mom first left, I’d thought his general state of numbness had to do with missing her, but then I wondered if it was because Dad couldn’t do anything on his own and counted on Mom to do everything. I’d come to believe it was probably a combination of the two.
“We got everything?” my father asked.
“I think so.”
We walked to the closest open register. The cashier was about my age. I knew she had to be at least fifteen to get a job here because I’d looked into applying for a job a few months earlier. She had dark hair and was thin, rail thin. I’d never seen her before, so I didn’t think she went to my school. Her badge said her name was Tia.
As if she could read my mind, she said, “Where do you go to school?”
“Grimsley.”
“I go to Greensboro Day School, but a couple of my friends go to Grimsley, Rachael Riggins and Valerie Baldry,” she said.
“Do you know a guy named Dennis Kindl? He’s on the tennis team.”
She shook her head. “I’m not much into sports.”
When I looked back at my father, he was flipping through the latest issue of People.
As I watched Tia slide bananas across the scanner, I remembered we were out of peanut butter. I walked down the pet food aisle as a shortcut. Since we didn’t have any pets—Dad was allergic to dog and cat fur—we avoided this aisle.
At the end of the aisle, I saw two kinds of bird food: red bird food and songbird food. I picked up a bag of songbird food with sunflower seeds and other white and brown seeds and nuts. I read the names of birds this food was meant to attract: chickadees, cardinals, finch, sparrow, nuthatch, tufted titmouse. My father’s voice pulled me back. “Julian. Let’s go. You’re holding up the line.”
As I turned, I noticed for the first time that he had gained weight in the last couple years. His legs looked softer than I remember them being. There was also a slight bulge in the belly of his white shirt. He hadn’t gained fifty pounds or anything, but his clothes looked tight and uncomfortable.
I set the bird food down and headed for the aisle where the peanut butter was. Tia smiled at me when I came back to the register with the large jar of Jiffy. “Sorry about that,” I said.
She smiled. “No problem.”
After our usual Saturday night take-out pizza, Dad went in his room and I stepped out onto the back porch. It was a nice night, cool and breezy. Birds chattered and called out next door. Occasionally, I’d see one fly out of the shrubs. I wondered what Old Lady Peters was doing. I pictured her sitting in front of the TV with Lucky on her lap or at her feet.
The phone rang. It was Mom. She sounded like she’d been drinking. She talked about the weather, about her novel, and then asked if I had any plans for Sunday. When I said I didn’t, she asked if Dad was still running.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Good for him.”
“Did you go shopping today?” I asked.
“No.”
“I thought with it being Saturday,” I said.
“Julian, I’m too busy to cook.” I couldn’t imagine my mother not cooking. At home, writing and cooking were the two biggest parts of her day.
“Everything else okay?”
“I’m fine. Let me talk to your father.”
I knocked on his door and he opened it without saying anything. I held the phone up. “It’s Mom.”
He half-smiled, took the phone and walked out to the back porch. I did the dishes, rinsed out our cups. I wished I could hear what they had to say to each other.
A few minutes later, he walked back inside holding the phone. I took it from him, lifted the phone to my ear and said, “Mom? Mom?”
Dad shook his head. “She’s already gone.” He walked back to his room and closed the door. I didn’t see him again until the next day.
9
As I sat out on the back porch eating my cereal for breakfast, my father came outside, dressed in his running outfit. “Going for a run,” he said. “Two miles.”
“That sounds like a lot.”
“If I’m not back in a half hour send out a search crew.”
“Will do.” He walked down the steps, toward the front of the house and all those miles ahead of him. At the grocery store, I’d bought a bag of sugar cookies. I wondered how easy it would be to feed one of those birds by hand like Old Lady Peters had done. I broke a cookie into five parts and placed them on the porch rail. I sat a few feet back and waited. It took a good ten minutes before a sparrow showed up. It hopped around the cookie before taking a piece and flying up on my roof.
After the same bird did this a couple times, I scooted my chair close to the rail, swept what was left of the cookie into my palm. I rested my hand on the porch rail, figuring the bird might not even realize he wasn’t eating off the same surface. But when I looked up at the roof again, he flew away, back toward Mrs. Peters’ yard and the safety of those shrubs.
I decided to go over to Old Lady Peters’ and see if she needed help with her birdfeeders and birdbaths. She’d said we could start on Monday, but I didn’t have anything else to do. So much of my life had centered around my mother that after she left I sometimes felt like I was floating from one place to the next. The only things I seemed to do were homework, cook or watch the Food Network. And I wondered from time to time if it was the act of cooking itself that I liked so much or the fact that it reminded me of my mother and the things we used to do together.
When Old Lady Peters wasn’t out back, I remembered it was Sunday and she was probably with her son. I wasn’t sure if I should be in her backyard alone, but it would be a nice surprise for her if I got the feeders filled before she came back. As I headed for the bucket of bird food up by the porch, Lucky walked out the cat door and rubbed his head against my leg.
I was changing the water in one of the birdbaths when I heard someone say, “Who the hell are you?”
I turned, my hand still squeezing the sprayer and squirted Simon square in the face with a thick stream of water. “Sorry, sorry,”
I said.
“Jesus, kid,” he said, wiping his face off with a handkerchief. “What are you doing?”
It seemed a pretty stupid question to me, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to answer it or not. “Filling the birdbaths.”
“I see that, but w
hy?”
Thankfully, at that moment, Old Lady Peters walked outside.
She looked at Simon, and at me, and started to laugh.
“What’s so funny, Mother?”
“Nothing. I asked this young man to help me with some chores around the house.”
Simon looked at her first and then at me, the corners of his mouth turning down. I didn’t know what to say or do, so I rolled the hose back up and left through the side gate.
As I sat on my back steps, I could hear them next door. “Are you paying him?” Simon asked.
“I tried, but he won’t take any money.”
“Kids these days.”
“Oh, please Simon. He’s a nice young man. Let’s go inside and have some pancakes.”
A few seconds later, the screen door slammed again. I heard a chirp-chirp and turned. Two sparrows were on the porch ledge taking turns pecking at what was left of my sugar cookie. I broke another cookie in half and held it out. One of the birds looked at the cookie, looked hard, and when I could actually feel it leaning toward me the bird lifted up in the air, hovered a foot or so from my outstretched hand, but flew away without taking what I offered.
I didn’t feel like watching TV, so I went for a walk. It was one of those quiet Sunday afternoons when the whole world seems to be asleep. A block from my house, I spotted something on the curb across the street.
It was an empty clay pot. I picked it up. It was dirty, but there didn’t seem to be any cracks in it. Since it was on the side of the road and the next day was garbage day, I figured someone was probably throwing it away. The pot reminded me of the one I’d destroyed. Thankfully, my father still hadn’t mentioned it. I wondered if I could take this one, maybe give it to Old Lady Peters.
I heard a thud, thud and looked up as my father jogged by on the other side of the road. He didn’t look up at me. His legs were all over the place, his arms tight by his side, his hands curled into fists. No, he didn’t look like the other joggers I’d seen, but he did look like a man with determination, something I hadn’t seen in him before.
Heart with Joy Page 3