I flipped the filets. The first side had seared up nice, very nice. The pan was smoking. It was almost time to start the asparagus.
My father walked out of his bedroom, changed into his usual nighttime outfit of grey shorts and white T-shirt just as I was pouring the hollandaise sauce over the asparagus. “We slumming tonight?” he asked, joking.
I’d never made filets before. We weren’t much of a red meat kind of family. Mom preferred to eat, and cook, chicken or fish.
“Tia made them the other night. She made them look easy to make and they tasted good.”
As soon as I said it, I knew it was a mistake because of the way my father smiled. “So what is going on between you and this girl?”
“Nothing, Dad. We’re just cooking together.”
“You are a strange kid, Julian,” he said. “When I was your age I wasn’t interested in cooking. I was interested in girls. Did I ever tell you about my first girlfriend?”
I shook my head. Of course, he hadn’t. “Did you have a lot of girlfriends?”
“No more than normal, I guess. A couple a year. You always remember your first one. Her name was Lily.” He smiled when he said Lily. “Her father, Mr. Bradford, ran the corner store and I’d go in there to buy gum or soda on my way home from school. I’d been going to the store for a year before I even realized he had a daughter. One day, I walked up to the cash register with some beef jerky and this little angel was standing there. She had blonde hair and freckles. I was probably younger than you, maybe thirteen or fourteen. I stared at her until she asked what my problem was. I mumbled something, threw a quarter on the counter and ran out the door.
“I started seeing her more and more at the store. She told me her Mom was sick. That’s why her father left her alone at the store so that he could take care of her. I started hanging out there for an hour or so after school everyday.
“One day, I asked her if I could kiss her. She smiled and said yes, so we walked into the back room and kissed. My first kiss. It was the week before Halloween. I remember walking home that day more alive than I had ever been before. The leaves on the trees were about the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. They fell down on me as I walked along the sidewalk. And I kicked them. I remember feeling like this might be the best day of my life.
“So the next day I stopped at the store again on the way home. Lily was there as usual. This time I asked her if I could kiss her and she said yes. We kissed again. I think I might even have hugged her this time. Again, I started for home, floating on air. A block or so from the store, I turned a corner and there was Mr. Bradford. He wasn’t a particularly big man, but I was just a kid.
“He said if I ever touched his daughter again he’d kill me. Two weeks later, they moved away and someone else took over the store.”
“Did the mother die?” I asked.
“I think so, but I never heard for sure. I got Lily’s new address from the man who bought the store and sent her a few letters, but she never wrote back. I’m not even sure she got them.”
“Dad, Tia and I are really just cooking together.”
He shrugged. “She just seems like a nice girl.”
The steaks were not quite as tender and pink as Tia’s. “They’re a little overcooked,” I said.
“Some people like their steaks well-done.”
“Do you?”
“Not really,” he said and we both laughed.
As we started to clean up, the phone rang.
“How you guys doing?” Mom asked.
“We’re fine,” I said as my father loaded the dishes into the dishwasher. “We were just talking about Dad’s first girlfriend.” Dad turned around and shook his head at me, raised his fist jokingly.
“Oh, were you,” she said. “What brought that up?”
And while I had said it to give Dad a hard time, I realized now that I was opening myself up. I considered telling her about Tia, about the cooking club. I would have told her all about it on Monday if I’d been able to reach her but didn’t want to now. It seemed like something I should hold onto. “We were talking about you?” I said.
She didn’t say anything for a minute. Dad walked back over and sat down across from me. “Julian, do you know anything about postcards being mailed to me from Greensboro?” she asked.
He’d mailed the first one on Monday.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Postcards?”
Dad looked up and smiled, his eyes wide.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, Mom. Here talk to Dad a minute. I’ve got to run to the bathroom.”
I handed him the phone and took off down the hall, toward my bedroom. I wondered if he would confess that they were from him, from us. I didn’t think they were enough to get her back, but at least we had done something. We had made a move, had reached out to her in some way we never had before. And Dad had had a girlfriend named Lily. I lay back on my bed, thinking about Tia, about cooking, and about my parents talking about some silly one-line poems.
38
As I walked up my driveway on Friday afternoon, two men were carrying an end table to the dumpster in Mrs. Peters’ front yard. I could see an old white couch, half a lampshade, and what looked like a brown La-Z-Boy recliner sticking out of the dumpster.
One of the men, a short, fat guy, waved.
“What are you guys doing?” Of course, I knew what they were doing but was curious how much he knew about Mrs. Peters.
“Cleaning the house out. Some old lady must have lived here before.”
I wanted to tell him about Mrs. Peters, about how she wasn’t just some old lady, about the story Gray had told me. But how do you begin a story like that? And would he even care?
“Throwing everything away?”
“The big stuff, furniture, appliances. Family will probably go through the rest of it.”
All of the shrubs in her backyard were gone now. The wooden
fence looked naked, tall and alone, green with mold. The butterfly bushes were still there, but I didn’t see or hear any hummingbirds. In fact, for a minute I didn’t see any birds at all. I wondered if they’d all moved into our backyard. The feeders had been covered with birds since I put them up. But then I heard a bird above me, first one or two, then what seemed like hundreds, calling out from above.
I looked up into the dogwood tree and spotted a group of sparrows. I walked over to my yard and grabbed a handful of birdseed, ran back and threw it in what was left of her backyard. The birds flew down from the tree. They were mostly sparrows but there were also a few doves and cardinals.
I didn’t see Lucky anywhere. If he, like the birds, used the shrubs for cover, where was he now? I called his name a couple times and there was no answer. Then the fat guy who’d talked to me out front came around back. “Hey kid, what are you looking for?”
“Did you see a black and white cat?”
“First thing this morning but not since then,” he said.
Maybe he could help me throw our old wheelbarrow away. I wasn’t sure if I should ask him, but he seemed nice enough. “I’ve got this old wheelbarrow I wanted to get rid off, think I could throw it in the dumpster?”
He smiled. “Like those fence posts and old shingles?”
I was busted. “Sorry,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter to me, kid. I’m just a strong back. Sure, get it and I’ll help you throw it away.”
I pulled it out of the shed and pushed it around to the front yard. He picked it up and threw it in there himself.
“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem.”
The other worker came out, carrying an end table. “What are you doing, Mike? This isn’t the community dump.”
“Give it a rest, Tommy,” he said.
Tommy shook his head. “Stop screwing around and help me with the fridge.”
Mike winked at me before following Tommy inside the house.
Out back, I locked the door to our shed. I’d cleaned it a
ll out now except for the lawn equipment. I still had to sweep it, maybe divide the shed in half, but Dad would still have a pretty good amount of room to work in.
When I walked up to my back porch, Lucky was sitting in one of the plastic chairs, his legs stretched out in front of him. He looked up at me, then lowered his head and went back to his nap. I guess he was officially ours now. When I’d asked Dad about it the other night, he said if Simon didn’t want the cat we could keep it outside but it couldn’t come inside because of his allergies.
The telephone started ringing.
“Julian, please.” And, of course, I recognized her voice. It was Tia.
“This is him.”
“What are you cooking?”
“Excuse me?”
“What are you cooking, right now.”
I’d told her how I usually watched a little Food Network when I got home from school and then started cooking before Dad made it home from work and we went on our nightly run. “Nothing yet,” I said.
“You slacker,” she said and laughed.
“What about you?”
“Well,” she said. “I was just thinking, maybe we should have a cooking club meeting tonight.”
“Sure,” I said.
“You ever made pizza before?”
“No,” I said.
“Well how does chicken with pesto pizza sound?”
“Green.”
“Stick to cooking, Buster,” she said. “Seven and don’t be late.”
I decided to go ahead and make dinner for Dad. I’d taken some chicken out before school and had planned on making a stir-fry, using spinach, mushrooms, yams, and chunks of chicken. It was an easy recipe, one I’d made a couple times before.
The mushrooms browned up quickly. My father had added a couple one-line poems to the list on the fridge: “Peace love and you” and “If I could walk on water, I’d walk on water with you.”
I shook my head. Perhaps he should stick with the medical metaphors.
A half-hour later, as I was cleaning up the dishes, Dad walked in the front door. “Hey, you,” he said.
“Hey, yourself,” I said.
“You ready?”
“Let’s go.”
As he stretched, out on the front steps, I told him how Mrs. Peters’ shrubs were gone. And I told him Tia had invited me over.
“Her parents are home when you go over there, right?”
“Very funny, Dad.”
“We’d better get going then,” he said, turning toward the street.
We headed out away from the house, our yard and the street. For some reason, I turned back and that dumpster looked as big and heavy as anything I’d ever seen.
39
As Dad drove me over to Tia’s, I asked him what Mom said about the postcard poems.
He laughed. “She didn’t know what to say.”
“Did you tell her they were from you?”
“No,” he said. “All I said was I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.”
“Did she have anything else to say?”
“We talked about my running and her novel and how she was looking forward to spending some time with you. And, by the way, you think you’re slick,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
He imitated me, “here talk to Mom for a second. I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”
We both laughed as we pulled up to Tia’s.
“Would you like to come in and meet Tia’s Mom?”
“Not tonight. What time should I pick you up?”
“Is nine too late?”
“I’ll see you at nine,” he said.
Tia met me at the door. “Chef Julian,” she said.
“Chef Tia,” I said, figuring it was a joke I should play along with.
I was surprised when I didn’t see her mother in the kitchen.
“Why don’t you work with your mom, cooking?”
“I will eventually. She thought it would be good for me to work at a grocery store first, so I can learn about different foods. I don’t have the heart to tell her that all I do is read magazines and slide food across a conveyor belt.”
Like before, Katherine and Heather weren’t there. “Where are
the others girls?”
“Well, they’ve both kind of quit the club.” She chewed on her lower lip a bit as if nervous about what I might say or do.
“Why?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes,” I said. But I already knew. It was about me. They’d both been coming over here for a year before I’d showed up.
“They said they didn’t want to cook with you.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I guess they viewed it as a girl’s club, and they didn’t want some guy showing them up.”
Did she think I’d showed them up? “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it. While they didn’t admit it to me, I know the real reason was because of what Mom said to you, about asking you to work for her.”
“I thought she was kidding.”
“She wasn’t and they’d both asked her in the past if they could work for her and she always said she didn’t think they were ready.”
“I guess it’s not really a club anymore, is it?”
“It was all a ploy to get you over here alone, in my kitchen,” she said. “It worked.” We both laughed, then looked at each other for a second longer than necessary.
“Anyway, let’s make some pizza,” she said.
“Sounds good.”
She pulled a bowl full of dough out of the fridge and set it on the counter. “I made this earlier. It takes a couple hours to rise. Do you know what’s missing?” she asked.
And I knew. There was no music playing. I walked over to the boombox and turned it on. Sounds of men and women falling in and out of love in some language I didn’t begin to understand erupted from the stereo.
She cut two chicken breasts into quarter size pieces and tossed them in a hot sauté pan with EVOO, followed by hissing, popping and a cloud of steam rising toward the ceiling.
“While those are cooking let’s get the dough ready.” She tossed some flour on the cutting board and dropped the dough on top of that, rolling it out flat. Then she pushed the edge pieces out with her fingers, forming the crust. From the fridge, she pulled out a small container of pesto.
“You don’t make it fresh?” I asked, kidding.
“I made it yesterday, smarty-pants.”
She covered the crust with the pesto sauce, just like you would do with pizza sauce. Then she spread the cooked chicken out on top of the pesto and dough. “And last, and most importantly, cheese.”
She spread a thick layer of mozzarella evenly across the still steaming chicken. She’d already pre-heated the oven to 400 with a pizza stone inside. She picked the pizza up with one of those longhandled pizza trays and slid it on top of the pizza stone, pulling the tray out. “In twenty, twenty-five minutes we should be good,” she said. “Let’s go outside and get some fresh air?”
We walked out the back door and sat on the porch swing, which was just big enough for two people. It was a nice night, probably sixty degrees, almost dark. I could hear a cardinal calling out, a blue jay’s angry reply.
“It’s none of my business, but all I ever see is your dad dropping you off here and at the grocery store. Is your mom around?”
The question didn’t bother me. I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d told the story to Mrs. Peters or if it was because Tia was asking. I told her about Mom living in Florida, about how she’d told me she was leaving because of the motel and her novel but that both my parents had admitted there was more to it than that. And I told her how I would probably be moving down there if it turned out she didn’t come back. I told her about the postcard poems we’d started sending her.
“You’re crazy,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“Have you ever been to Florida?”
&nb
sp; “When I was little but not in years. You?”
She shook her head. “I’d like to go.”
And because of the sweet smell of pizza in the air and the fact that I’d shared some of my history with Tia, I asked about her father.
I assumed her parents were divorced. I’d been in her house enough times and had not seen any real signs of a man living there.
“He died seven years ago,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. You know those operas I always play when I cook, that’s my dad singing. In some ways, I’ve already started to forget him but I remember his voice. That voice would sing to me as he drove me to soccer practice. That voice would wake me up on
Sunday mornings. His voice would whisper in my ear, goodnight my angel, I love you.”
“How did he die?”
“A car accident in Paris. Three people from his opera company died in the wreck. They were on their way to a show.”
“Geez, that’s awful. I am sorry.”
She leaned into my shoulder there on the swing. I could smell dough in her hair, could feel her blue-jeaned pant legs resting against mine. I wanted to reach over and lift her face and kiss her.
I wanted to take her hand in mine. I wanted to do a million things to her right there on the porch, all of them slow and gentle. But it would require one of us to move, which was something I did not want to do. So instead, I closed my eyes and thought about my father kissing a sad girl all those years ago in a convenience store.
Neither one of us said anything until we heard the stove’s timer going off. “You ready for a slice of Tia Brogan’s world famous pesto chicken pizza?” she asked.
“I guess I’d better be.”
“You’re right about that, Buster.”
She pulled the pizza out of the oven with the pizza tray. As we waited for it to cool, I did the few dishes she’d made dirty. She sliced the pizza and set four pieces on a plate. “Let’s eat outside.”
Back on the swing, the pizza was good and warm. The pesto had a nice bite to it.
“Julian, I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, or treat me different, because of my dad.”
“I won’t,” I said. “The same about my mother.”
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