31
The morning after the funeral, I woke surprisingly well rested. It was certainly the best night sleep I’d had since finding Mrs. Peters. I’d dreamed the story Gray told me, saw those rows of tiny graves. I tried to imagine what she looked like forty years ago. No definite image came to me, but instead one of light beauty. Her hands, her face, her white hair. They were all transparent and soft and warm to me.
I remember watching a TV show where the reporter talked about the distortion of death. He said when people die we often end up distorting them—their life and the way they look—until an image that is pleasurable, or very unpleasant if it was someone you didn’t like, takes over and is all you remember about a person.
I wondered if this applied to my mother too. She wasn’t, thank God, dead. But the two of us hadn’t breathed the same air in months. Was that long enough to distort my vision of her or her of me? It might be.
After eating a bowl of cereal on the back porch, and Dad leaving for work, I grabbed a handful of sugar cookies and headed over to Mrs. Peters’ backyard. I didn’t miss her as much as I thought I should. It wasn’t the hollow sadness I’d felt after Mom left or the numbness of the last few days when I half-expected her to call to me through the shrubs and fence.
I sat in the chair I’d sat in for the last few weeks, crumbled up a couple of the cookies and set them on the table. The sparrows and chickadees flew down quickly, and ate, as if they’d been waiting for their usual serving of cookies.
I could hear robins and titmouse, a blue jay and a starling. Silently, I called their names out in reply. I filled the feeders and changed the water in the birdbath. I stopped at the birdhouse and looked at the empty nest. The birds were gone. The nest itself was nothing fancy, a mish-mash of feathers and string, even the cellophane wrapping from a pack of cigarettes and some bits of old newspaper.
A half dozen sparrows were at the feeders, and I wondered which of them were the babies I’d watch grow. They all looked the same to me. I thought I’d like to take the nest home, maybe place it up on the shelf in my bedroom, but when I tried to pull it out it was so soft and wet that it fell apart in my hands. I cleaned out the rest of the birdhouse, thinking maybe those sparrows or another pair would use the house again.
Out by the butterfly bushes, I could see the tiny gray and green lines of hummingbirds, could hear the angry quick call of wrens.
There was so much life in her backyard, but I didn’t think it would stay like this forever. It was only a matter of time before Simon put the house up for sale.
I heard the meow and looked down as Lucky rammed his head into my ankle. He purred, purred, purred. I grabbed the leash off the dogwood’s low branch behind me, clasped it to Lucky’s collar.
We walked the same sidewalks we’d walked with Mrs. Peters. I didn’t think I could bring him home as a pet, not with Dad being allergic to cats. But maybe it would be okay if he stayed outside.
I told myself to stop thinking about that, because right now we were walking and I was pulling seed from my pocket and sprinkling it over the sidewalk. And birds were following us, walking and hopping along, gladly taking the food we offered.
I wondered if I felt better because I’d had a chance to see Mrs. Peters at the funeral and say bye and to tell her thank you. I wanted to make her proud by following my heart like she’d said. I wanted to cook, be a chef. But to get better I knew I had to step out of my kitchen and test myself against others, learn from them. And I knew that was some of what Tia’s offer meant.
32
After school, I fished Tia’s phone number out of my wallet and called her. A woman answered on the third ring: “Hello, Brogan’s Gourmet.”
“Is Tia there?”
“Sure, one sec.” The woman hollered for Tia.
A few seconds later, she picked up the phone. “Hello.”
“Tia, this is Julian.”
“Julian? The Grimsley boy.”
“I was just calling to see if I could come over and visit the cooking club.”
“Sure, we’re getting together on Friday. Eight o’clock.”
“Should I bring anything?”
“Everyone brings a recipe and the ingredients and we go from there. Sometimes we make all of the different recipes, other times we all work on the same one.”
“Who was that that answered?” I asked.
“Mom. She runs a gourmet take-away food shop.”
“Gourmet take-away?”
“She makes all these individual meals, lunch and dinner, in her kitchen and sells them at her shop downtown.”
“Why don’t you just work for her instead of the grocery store?”
“Why don’t you mind your own business?”
“Sorry.”
“I’m just kidding.” She laughed. “You ever tried working for your parents?”
“No.”
“That’s why you don’t understand.” In the background, I could hear a mixer spinning. I imagined Tia making a cake, something so good it melted in your mouth.
“See you on Friday,” I said.
Later, as Dad and I ate dinner—pan-seared scallops wrapped in bacon along with jasmine rice and steamed broccoli—I asked him what I’d been thinking about all day, “So what did you decide about Mom?”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember last week we said if you were going to get her back then you needed to do something.”
“I could just beg her to come back,” he said.
I shook my head. “How about we pay some editor a lot of money to buy her novel?”
“We don’t have a lot of money,” he said.
“You could call her and say I was kidnapped. We could write one of those hostage notes with the mismatched letters, demanding she come back or I get axed.”
He didn’t laugh, only shook his head.
“How about we send her one line of poetry every day? Not from the same poem or anything, just one line that sounds like poetry, send it to her on a postcard. Maybe not even one a day, maybe a couple times a week.”
He stared at me as if he didn’t know whether I was kidding or not.
“In school, last week we talked about something called found poetry. You find random sentences, even grocery lists, and put them together and they make a poem. I know it’s crazy but maybe crazy is what we need.”
I walked over to the table by the front door and pulled out a stack of fifty postcards Mom had bought last year to send to editors with her manuscript. The postcards were blank on one side and had the US Postal logo on the other.
Dad said, “I can’t write poetry, can you?”
“No, but that’s the beauty of it. It can be a line from a song, from a movie, something that has to do with missing someone. The cheesier the better.”
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of this before. ”How about something like this: the air is thicker without you here?”
He started to laugh. It wasn’t a mean laugh. “That’s good. How about ‘ain’t no sunshine when you’re gone’?”
“Perfect,” I said. “Let’s write a bunch down. We don’t even have to tell her they’re from us. We could sign them a secret admirer from Greensboro.”
He shook his head. ”She’ll know.”
“We’ll deny it.”
He laughed again. “How about my clothes don’t fit anymore?”
“Or without you, I’m like an otter in a sand pit.”
“I’ll make you a new pot every day.”
“Good,” I said. “What about please, please me?”
“Or bring the ocean back with you.”
“No more ocean breezes, just you,” I said.
He stood up and grabbed a pen and piece of paper and started writing some of the silly lines down.
“I’m blind without you,” he said.
“Life without you is like spaghetti without the meatballs.”
That one got him laughing good. “You’re a mess,” he said. “We’ll leav
e the list up on the fridge and whenever we get a new idea we’ll write it there.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“If this doesn’t work, she’s a fool.”
“A damn fool,” I said.
And we both laughed, laughed like a father and son on the way to some place we had never been before.
33
Dad pulled into Tia’s driveway, behind a white van with Brogan’s Groovy Gourmet painted on the side. The house was a yellow bungalow with one of those wraparound porches, a two-person swing hanging from the porch ceiling.
“Just call me when you’re ready,” Dad said.
“Will do.”
As I climbed out, holding my grocery bag with salmon and spinach, he said, “Life without you is like an IV full of antibiotics dripping on the floor. What do you think?”
“You’re a madman.” At least he was trying.
I walked up to the door, not sure what to expect. What I wanted to do was turn around and hop back in the car with my father and drive away. But I couldn’t do that. I’d come this far and knew
I needed to test my cooking against others and try to learn from them.
As I lifted my hand to knock, the door opened. It was Tia, followed by the smell of something sweet cooking behind her. She wore a white apron over her jeans and soft blue T-shirt. “Come on in,” she said.
I turned back and waved to my father. He’d waited for the door to open before backing out of the driveway. Tia and I walked through the house. The floors were shining hardwoods. There were real paintings on the walls: sunsets, a watermelon, and colorful gardens. I wondered if Tia painted them herself.
I spotted a pair of ceramic pots on the coffee table. They were both painted light blue with yellow stripes around them. While they didn’t look exactly like my father’s, they reminded me I still had to tell him what I’d done.
The kitchen looked like one of those kitchens you see on the Food Network, all the major appliances and the refrigerator were that silvery, stainless steel color. Standing by a long center aisle was a woman with long black hair tied up in a bun on the top of her head. She was talking on the phone as she worked. There were a dozen small aluminum containers on the counter, and she was putting shredded cheese on top of some dish that looked like it might be lasagna.
“That’s Mom. This is my kitchen,” Tia said as we walked into another room. Her kitchen was smaller, about the same size as mine, with a long center island, covered with a couple wooden cutting boards. The sink and fridge were against one wall, the stove and microwave against the other. I’d never been in a house with more than one kitchen before.
There were two girls, my age, standing at the sink, washing dishes. They turned when we walked in the room. I didn’t recognize either of them. They were both cute, one with straight blond hair, the other brown curls, and very thin. Why were these girls all so thin?
“This is Heather and this is Katherine,” Tia said, indicating that Heather was the blond, Katherine the brunette.
They both eyed me in a way that told me they had some serious doubts about a teenage boy who could cook. Opera music played from a boom box over by the fridge. The window above the sink overlooked the backyard, which I could see even in the fading light was full of flowers—the purple and red of tulips and iris.
“So what’s your specialty?” Katherine asked.
I shrugged. “Cooking, I guess.”
Heather rolled her eyes and said, “No, she means what kind of food. Katherine is a pastry cook and me, I’m good with meat.”
It took about everything I had to not laugh: good with meat.
It was obvious that neither of these girls were as interested as Tia in having a guy join their club. Who could blame them? Without any guys around they didn’t have to worry about trying to look good which they probably thought they had to do all day in school.
“Don’t know,” I said.
Tia took the grocery bag from me and set it on the counter.
“What did you bring?”
“Salmon, but maybe I should just watch tonight.”
Heather said, “I think he should cook, show us what he’s got.”
Katherine chimed in. “It’s only fair.”
I turned to Tia for help but she shrugged her shoulders and said, “Only if he wants to.”
While I wasn’t normally attracted to blondes, I had to admit Heather was cute. Something about her, beside the blonde hair, reminded me of Lucy Sanborn. Perhaps it was her lips: they were small and I wondered how they’d feel against mine.
“I’ll try,” I said.
Katherine and Heather sat on bar stools at the little island, drinking Cokes. I was nervous, could think of a hundred other places I’d rather be. My mother would get a kick out of this. I knew Dennis would too: Julian Hale alone with three girls. He’d never believe me.
I started the salmon and cleaned the spinach, then set the spinach in one pan while I cut up a square of butter and put it in a bowl to go in the microwave at the last minute. As I moved back and forth, touching the salmon with a wooden spoon, mixing the olive oil and fresh ground pepper for a few minutes, I felt like I was all alone, just me and the sweet smells of fish and butter and olive oil.
I waited for the salmon to turn orange-pink on one side before flipping it over and turning the back burner on, the one with the spinach. Time slipped away as ten, then twenty minutes flew by. The music stopped and started again. It was only when I began to serve the fish on the plates Tia had set out that I looked up. The three girls were still in their chairs at the bar. They weren’t saying anything. Tia was the only one that offered me a smile.
“So,” Tia said. “Let’s see if it is as good as it looks.”
All three of them took a piece of fish at the same time. The outside had a nice crust on it while the inside was softer. Just right. They took a second bite, this time forking a bit of spinach as well. It reminded me of Iron Chef America where the judges took their time eating, savoring every bite, letting the flavors float around their mouth, before they passed judgment.
“Damn. The boy can cook,” Tia said, winking at me.
Katherine said, “It’s okay.”
Heather only nodded.
“Let me have a taste.” It was Tia’s mom walking toward us. Like Tia, she was short with black hair.
Everyone watched her take a bite. She closed her eyes as she chewed. When she was done, she said, “Where did you learn how to cook?”
I shrugged. “Mostly from cooking with my mother.”
“Do you want a job?” she asked, winking at me.
I didn’t know if she was kidding or not, so I didn’t say anything. She walked away without another word.
Tia turned to Heather and Katherine and said, “Who’s next?”
Katherine said, “I’ll make brownies.”
Heather said, “Toad in the Hole.”
I’d seen Tyler Florence make Toad in the Hole once, but I’d never had it before. It was basically sausages cooked inside Yorkshire pudding batter.
Tia turned to me. “And I’ll make garlic buns.”
I sat back at the bar and watched the three of them get to work, relieved my part was over for the night. I’d never watched anyone besides my mother, and the chefs on the Food Network, cook. I felt like I should be doing something. There was a pineapple at the end of the island, so I went over and picked it up, cut it into pieces as they worked. I watched Tia as she rolled the dough. I could see the little bits of garlic she’d added in there.
After Heather seared her three sausages, she set them in this clear batter mix and put it in the oven. Tia slid her rolls on a cooking sheet in the same oven.
Katherine finished her brownies, patted them down in a baking pan and set them on the counter, ready for whenever the oven was free.
We ate and it was good. The garlic rolls were my favorite. Toad in the Hole was good too. I liked the combination of the sweet sausage and the soft Yorkshire puddings. But the
brownies weren’t that good. They tasted a little chalky. I wasn’t about to say anything, but Tia did, “They needed to be cooked more, maybe more milk.”
Katherine shrugged. “They taste fine to me.”
An hour later, after we cleaned up, Tia walked me to the door.
My father was sitting in the car, reading. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.
“That’s right. Register five.”
She laughed before closing the door.
34
True to her word, Tia was standing at register five when Dad and I walked up with our full shopping cart. She smiled at me. She seemed different here, almost submissive, but at home in the kitchen she was in complete control. I still didn’t understand why she worked here when I’m sure her mother needed help with her business.
“I’m still burping sausages,” she said.
“Me too,” I said.
“We’re going to get together tomorrow night, around seven. Do you want to come?”
I looked back at my father and he nodded. “Sure.”
“I hope those girls didn’t scare you off.”
“They’re not too bad,” I said.
“What are you going to cook?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” I said. “What about you?”
“Whatever I feel like.”
In the parking lot, my father turned the car on, hesitated a moment, then shut it off. “What’s up, Dad?”
He was obviously searching for the right words because he kept looking at me, then out the window, then back at me. I figured he was going to give me a ribbing about Tia. “You know about sex, right?”
“Of course.”
“Have you with anyone?”
“No, Dad.”
“Do we need to buy you some condoms?”
“Mom did last year. I have an unopened package in my bedside table. Thank you very much.”
He nodded, then pulled away. Did I think Tia was cute? Yes.
Did I want to spend more time with her? Yes. Did I expect it to go any further? Not really. I would be off to Mom’s soon and might not even be coming back, so the chances of anything really happening with Tia seemed pretty slim.
Heart with Joy Page 10