Heart with Joy

by Steve Cushman

  After our run, Dad and I walked over to Mrs. Peters’ backyard. Lucky was sleeping on the bench out by the butterfly bushes. I walked from feeder to feeder, filling them, and changing the water. I also filled Lucky’s food and water bowls, which I’d been doing since Mrs. Peters’ funeral.

  When I finished, I went and sat at the table next to my father. “You know he’s going to sell this place, don’t you?” Dad asked.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You looking forward to seeing Mom?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Will you take care of the birds while I’m gone?”

  “No problem,” he said. “How about this one, without you I’m like a bird without feathers?”

  I laughed. “Do you think she’ll come back?”

  A pair of cardinals hopped from feeder to feeder, taking turns eating.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  “I think she expected our lives to turn out different. When we met, she was going to be a successful writer and I was going to be a potter and now sixteen years later, I’m not a potter and she’s working on her fifth unpublished novel. Maybe she thinks if she doesn’t get this one just right it will be her last chance. Maybe she’s disappointed in me for quitting pottery.”

  “What if you start doing pottery again? Like we talked about.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t really miss it.”

  “But if you’ve got a talent for something, and you enjoy doing it, then shouldn’t you pursue it?”

  “Julian, the world needs more nurses than it does potters,” he said, standing up. “We should get out of here before her son shows up. He’d probably have us arrested for trespassing.”

  “You’re right about that.” I looked around the backyard again, sure that one day soon it would be gone.

  35

  I’d decided I’d make chicken Marsala for the cooking club and wondered what the others would make. Tia met me at the door. She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt again. More opera music played as we walked through the house. Her mother was sitting in her kitchen, working on her computer. She looked up and smiled as we walked by.

  When we made it to Tia’s kitchen, the girls weren’t there. Maybe they were in the bathroom. Maybe I was early. “What are you going to make tonight?” I asked.

  “A couple of filets and asparagus. And you?”

  “Chicken Marsala.”

  She nodded. “I’ve never made that before.”

  “It’s not that hard. Where are Katherine and Heather?”

  “They’re not coming tonight.”

  I figured they probably had homework or something.

  “So do you want to go first?” I asked.

  “No. You go ahead.”

  I’d only made the meal twice before and the first time it came out pretty good but the last time I made it a couple weeks ago the sauce was too thick. This time, I planned to use only a quarter cup of cream instead of the half cup the recipe called for.

  “What pots and pans do you need?”

  “Two big pans should do it.”

  She pulled them from beneath the counter. I dribbled some EVOO around one of the pans and started cutting the mushrooms.

  Once the pan was hot, I tossed in the chicken. Tia sat a few feet away watching me.

  “I sear one side, then start the mushrooms and Marsala in the other pan. Both sides of the chicken need to be seared.”

  She didn’t ask another question as I cooked. She just sat at the counter, sipping a bottle of water and writing in a little notebook.

  After putting the mushrooms in the other pan and cooking them down a little, I added the Marsala wine and the cream. I stirred the sauce for a few minutes, poured half of it over the cooked chicken while I let the rest cook into the mushrooms. And then I was done. I looked up at the clock: it had taken me twenty-nine minutes. Rachael Ray would be proud.

  Tia rubbed her hands together and said, “Let’s try it.”

  I waited a second, let her cut into hers first. After she lifted the first piece to her mouth, I cut off a small piece.

  “Umm,” she said. “That’s good, creamy but good.”

  I thought it was better than last time, but still a bit too creamy for my taste. Her mother walked in the room, carrying a beer. She had on white linen pants and a T-shirt. It was obvious she wasn’t wearing a bra because I could see her nipples through the shirt.

  “So what’s on the menu tonight?”

  “Julian made chicken Marsala,” Tia said.

  She walked over to Tia’s plate and scooped up a forkful. I wondered if Tia noticed her mother’s nipples. If so, she didn’t let on, but they certainly had my attention. I could tell she was a little drunk, and it reminded me of my mother. She would usually start off cooking sober, but quite often by the time the meal was done she would be slurring her words. And I wondered for the first time if that was one of the reasons I never invited anyone over to my house. Or maybe her drinking was one of the reasons I loved her so much—because she needed me to help her. Some nights, after one of our walks, I’d have to help her to their bedroom where Dad would be snoring away.

  Tia’s mother chewed slowly for a few seconds. The music stopped behind her. I wanted to run away. I’d been lucky the first time she’d tried my cooking and now she would see I wasn’t that good.

  When Tia’s mom swallowed, she smiled, then said, “Not bad. A bit on the creamy side, but pretty damn good. What are you cooking tonight, dear?”

  “I’m going to make filets and asparagus.”

  Her mother smiled. “She’s pulling out the big guns.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Tia said.

  Mrs. Brogan sat in the chair next to mine. I could smell her perfume. It wasn’t fruity, but softer and somewhat doughy. Maybe it wasn’t perfume at all but dough or some other cooking ingredient she had gotten on herself.

  “Can I do anything for you, Tia?”

  “Some music, please. The disc that says cooking.”

  I found it over by the boombox. It was opera again, some man and woman singing long notes, followed by silence and then more long notes. The only time I’d ever heard opera music before was in my sixth grade Music Appreciation class. Thankfully, I’d thought then, the teacher only made us listen to it for two weeks.

  I sat back down beside Mrs. Brogan as Tia arranged the filets in the center of the pan. The music swelled; the singer was practically screaming as the steaks seared in the pan, sending small tufts of smoke up into the overhead vent.

  Mrs. Brogan leaned toward me. “She’s better than she thinks she is.”

  I wasn’t sure how to take that comment because Tia seemed confident in her cooking.

  The asparagus went into a grill pan for a few minutes while she started on the hollandaise sauce. Tia moved with ease in the kitchen. She was thin but twice I caught myself looking at her butt. I could see the vertical lines of her underwear. The kitchen smelled wonderful, and the music and the fact that her mother was a little tipsy made me feel comfortable in ways I never would have expected.

  I thought about how Mrs. Peters told me to find what fills my heart with joy. Well, it didn’t take a genius to figure out this was it. In a kitchen here, with music, even God-help-me-opera, and the smell of cooking food, I felt at home. Was this what it was like to be good at a sport? Was this what a quarterback felt like when he walked up to the center and bent over, the crowd cheering, his heart thumping wildly, and then everything falls silent for a second or two before he says hike, grabs the ball and steps back to pass?

  When I looked up, Tia was setting a steak on each of our plates. They looked perfect, brown lines across the meat, a darker ring around the edge. She set four asparagus on each plate, dribbled the hollandaise sauce over them. My God, it looked like something you’d find, and something I’d seen, in a fancy French cookbook.

  She walked over and turned the CD off. “I love listening to it while I’m cooking but not so much when I’m trying to
eat.”

  “Tia’s filets are to die for,” Mrs. Brogan said. She cut a piece off.

  The middle was pink, slightly red. She took a bite, closed her eyes and smiled as she chewed. Then she kissed Tia on the forehead, said, “I love you,” and walked out of the room.

  Tia rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Mom’s a bit dramatic.”

  Oh, that’s nothing, I wanted to say, thinking of my mother.

  The filets looked delicious and I was ready to try one. They were really good. The asparagus was a bit softer than I would have liked and I wondered if they were cooked too much. I hesitated to tell her this, but figured if I wanted her to be honest about my cooking then I should tell her what I really thought.

  “Yeah, I agree,” Tia said. “But I don’t like to boil them. They take on too much water.”

  “To be honest. I don’t even like the taste of asparagus.”

  She laughed. “Neither do I.”

  After we ate, I washed the dishes while she dried them. We didn’t say anything as we worked and at one point we bumped into each other. She said, “Hey knock it off, Buster.”

  But I could tell she was only kidding.

  36

  Walking home from school the next afternoon, I turned the corner and spotted something as big as a car in Mrs. Peters’ front yard. As I got closer, I realized it was a large dumpster. Simon wasn’t wasting any time. He must have rented the dumpster to clean out her house, so he could get it ready to sell. Her old car was still in the driveway and I wondered if I could talk my father into buying it. He could probably get it cheap and I could use it when I finally got my restricted driver’s license. But I knew this didn’t make sense.

  I walked past the dumpster, toward the backyard, wondering if they’d taken anything out there yet. They hadn’t. The feeders and birdbaths were still there. I went ahead and filled and changed them, sat out on the bench by the growing butterfly bushes. Two hummingbirds took turns at the feeder. Lucky walked out from under the bushes and hopped onto my lap.

  “Looks like you’re going to have to move,” I said.

  He meowed, rammed his head into my stomach and for some reason I knew he wanted to go for a walk. I lifted his leash off the dogwood branch, filled one of my pockets with birdseed and headed out into the neighborhood.

  It was a warm, sunshiny May afternoon. Lucky walked straight ahead and I dropped seed from my pocket. Every minute or so I’d look back and see mockingbirds, cardinals and sparrows eating.

  We stopped at the elementary school, and I watched a couple kids, probably around ten or so, shooting baskets. Neither of them were very good, but they were trying, working up a good sweat. Where did their real talent lie? I assumed it was in something else and figured they were young enough and had plenty of time to discover what it was.

  They looked over at me and Lucky and started to laugh. And I laughed too because it was funny, a cat being walked with a leash.

  I made it home by five. The first thing I did when I walked in was go over to the answering machine and see if Tia had called. She hadn’t. I didn’t have much time before Dad got home, so I decided to make beaten chicken and yellow rice, with broccoli. This was one of Dad’s favorite meals and easy to make. I started with the rice because it took about twenty minutes. For the chicken, all you had to do was coat the chicken with eggs and breadcrumbs and cook them in a hot pan with a little EVOO. While they cooked, I’d steam the broccoli.

  Once I had everything going on the stove, I called my mother. I hadn’t spoken to her on a day other than our usual Wednesday or Saturday in months. But I wanted to talk to her. I didn’t miss her any more than usual, but it wasn’t about that. It was the dumpster in Mrs. Peters’ front yard that bothered me. It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it’s one thing to know something is coming and quite another to see it happen right before your eyes.

  The phone rang three, four times. I would have given just about anything at that moment for her to answer. I wanted to tell her about cooking with Tia and her mother, about the filets Tia had made and how they melted in your mouth. I wanted to tell her I wished she was here so I could invite her over to Tia’s and she could kiss me on the forehead like Tia’s mother had done to her. But the answering machine picked up. My mother’s sun-drenched, sweet southern accent said to please leave a message. I waited until I hung the phone up before offering my message: “life without you makes as much sense as a birdfeeder without food.”

  It seemed too good a line to let slip away, so I walked to the fridge and wrote it on the piece of paper there.

  37

  By the time I made it home from school on Wednesday, the dumpster in Mrs. Peters’ yard was starting to fill up. One of those Sheppard’s hooks, which the birdfeeders hung from, was sticking out of the dumpster.

  The workers had already left for the day, so I walked around back, not sure what to expect. The feeders and birdbaths were gone. So was the patio table and the bench out by the butterfly bushes. The wall of shrubs on our side of the yard was gone. I realized for the first time that the fence was covered in mold.

  It felt like I was in the wrong place, like this wasn’t Mrs. Peters’ backyard anymore. At school, I’d daydreamed about showing Tia this place and all the birds.

  The birdhouse was still attached to the fence but would probably be gone in another day or so since it looked like they were going to put up a new fence. I went in the house and grabbed one of my father’s screwdrivers and removed the empty birdhouse, brought it back to my yard.

  At the dumpster, I stepped on that same five-gallon bucket we had used to watch the baby sparrows grow. I pulled out the feeders along with the Sheppard’s hooks. I considered trying to lift the birdbath or the benches but knew they would be too heavy.

  I set the two birdfeeders in my backyard, on the Sheppard’s hooks, about ten yards apart, then went back for her bucket of bird food. It was only a quarter full. We’d have to buy some more food, and I’d see if I could get Dad to buy a birdbath for our backyard.

  I thought about the discussion I’d had with Dad. How he might need a place to work if he was going to start working on pottery again. I remembered him saying the world didn’t need more potters. But I didn’t buy that and didn’t think he did either. The world needed potters like it needed novelists, like my mother, and people to write cartoons and stand-up comics and old ladies to sit out in their backyards, watching birds. In my opinion, the world needed more people doing what filled their heart with joy instead of some job that buys them a fancy car or expensive house.

  I would clean out the shed, would offer the space to my father. It was the least I could do. If he tried and discovered he truly didn’t want to do pottery anymore that was fine. But he deserved the opportunity to pursue his passion. Mom and I both had it. Why shouldn’t he?

  I figured, since we had this big dumpster next door I might as well take advantage of it, fill it up with stuff from our shed. Hopefully they were charging Simon by the pound. The jerk.

  I started by removing the things I knew I had to keep and placing them to the side: the lawnmower, weedwhacker, blower, power sprayer, saw horses, gas cans, three plastic green lawn chairs, a couple of shovels and spades and rakes. Basically all lawn equipment would stay but the shed was also full of old pieces of wood, a door that had been there for as long as I could remember, a wheelbarrow with a flat tire, and some extra shingles from when we had the roof done.

  I decided to go check the time before I did anything else. I didn’t want Dad coming home and catching me doing this. I wanted it to be a surprise. It was 4:30. He was due to get off in a half-hour. I needed to make dinner but couldn’t do that and empty the shed before he got home.

  I called my father at work. When he got on the phone, he sounded out of breath. “You okay, Julian?” And I realized he must have thought this was an emergency. I wasn’t supposed to call him at work unless it was an emergency.

  “Everything’s okay. You coming home on time
?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you stop at the grocery store and pick up something for dinner?”

  “Sure. What do you need?”

  “Two filet mignons and some asparagus.”

  “What are we celebrating?”

  “Nothing. I just wanted to try making them.”

  “Sure. I’ll see you in an hour or so.”

  I went to work out back, filling the old Radio Flyer wagon Mom and I had found on one of our walks. She used it to transport mulch or plants around the yard. I started by loading the warped plywood and carting it to the dumpster. On my second trip, I filled the wagon with three bottles of weed killer and four old cans of paint. It took me five trips to throw everything except for the wheelbarrow away. It was too heavy and I’d need help with it

  I put all of the lawn stuff back in the shed and hurried back inside to wash up before Dad got home. I was sitting out on the back porch, watching birds start to land on the feeders, when he walked in the front door, holding a plastic grocery bag.

  “Sure doesn’t waste any time, does he?”

  “No, he doesn’t,” I said, taking the bag from him. “But I did take her birdfeeders out of the dumpster. Look.”

  We walked out onto the porch. A few birds scattered but most of them stayed put, eating. “Think we could buy a birdbath?”

  “I don’t see why not,” he said.

  After our run, Dad headed to the shower, and I started dinner. I knew from watching Tia that this was a pretty quick meal. She’d said seven minutes on each side for the filets. The asparagus would take less than five minutes.

  As I cooked, I thought about Tia. I liked cooking with her; I liked her mother; hell, I liked Tia. I felt comfortable around her. I wished she’d called me, invited me over for another cooking club meeting. But maybe they only had them on Fridays and Sundays and she had every intention of calling me before Friday.