Heart with Joy

by Steve Cushman

  When Mom came in, she turned up her Best of Van Morrison CD and poured each of us a glass of wine. She’d never given me wine before. “How can I help?” she asked.

  I told her to go ahead and cut the chicken into inch-long pieces.

  While she did that I got the onions and garlic going in the pan with a touch of olive oil. After she cut up the chicken, we set it in a mixture of black pepper, garlic salt and red pepper flakes. Then the chicken went into the pan.

  “Now don’t tell your father I let you drink wine tonight,” she said.

  “He’d only be jealous.” She gave me a big hug.

  I filled a sandwich bag full of cashews and used a hammer to crush them into smaller pieces and tossed them into the dish. It was coming together nice, smelled dark and rich. Mom poured her last inch of red wine into the pan and it sizzled and popped before fading away.

  After the rice was cooked, I took it off the heat and dumped the cut parsley in and stirred it up. I spooned some rice onto our plates, then the chicken on top of the rice. We sat on the couch to eat. I wished my father or Tia were here to taste it with us.

  “Wow,” she said. This is good.”

  “You helped.”

  “Not really.”

  We ate the rest of the meal in silence, a slight salt-scented breeze drifting in through the open back window.

  “You know he’ll take you back no matter what happened,” I said,

  finally, as we both sat there with empty plates across our legs.

  “I know,” she said.

  “The postcards.” He’d continued to send her a new one each day. She’d flick through her mail to find it, read it and smile before she taped it to that wall.

  “They’re wonderful. But if I come home will I still get them?”

  “If you need them you’ll get them.”

  “I don’t know what I need,” she said. I could see the tears forming in the corner of her eyes.

  “I do. You need to write and you need to be told you are special and you need the whole family to sit around and laugh together.”

  “If it’s so easy for you to figure out, how come he can’t?”

  “We could teach him.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Let’s clean up. This old lady is tired.”

  After cleaning up the dishes, we went to bed. Mom said good night and in less than a minute she was sleeping. I wasn’t tired and considered getting up and going for a late night walk. But it was only a passing thought because I had no intention of leaving my mother here alone, on this night, the last one we’d have together for some time.

  While part of me felt guilty for leaving, the other part knew she had made her own choices and she didn’t need me here. She was doing fine on her own. I closed my eyes again and leaned toward her shoulder and smelled her perfume. It could have been the perfume, or my belly full of food but I fell asleep faster than I would have thought possible.

  50

  Dad picked me up at the airport, just after noon on Sunday. I was a little nervous because I thought he might be disappointed at me for leaving Mom’s earlier than we’d planned. But he gave me a big hug and said it was good to have me home.

  “So what does she look like?” he asked, as we drove home.

  “She cut off most of her hair, but she’s got a tan, and she’s not so skinny. The postcards practically covered a whole wall of her apartment. Each day she’d run out to her mailbox, hoping for another one.”

  Dad turned to me and smiled. “It was a good idea,” he said.

  When we turned down our street, he said, “They sold Mrs. Peters’ house.”

  “That didn’t take long.”

  “No, Simon’s crew did a good job fixing up the place.”

  “What are the new people like?”

  “I only saw them once, when Simon was showing them the house. They’re young and the wife is pregnant. But they haven’t moved in yet.”

  “The good news is we won’t have to see Simon anymore.”

  He laughed again. “You’re right.”

  The first thing I did when we got home was go out to the backyard. A couple sparrows ate from one of the feeders, a blue jay and chickadee were at the other. Two mourning doves were in the birdbath, splashing around. Lucky walked down the back steps and rammed his head into my ankles, purring loudly

  One of the sparrows, a male, flew over my head and landed on top of the birdhouse. Dad must have nailed it to our side of the new fence. I grabbed Mrs. Peters’ birdseed bucket and carried it over to the birdhouse as the sparrow flew away. When I looked inside, I could see four white and brown-flecked eggs.

  Dad walked around the corner, carrying my suitcase.

  “Thanks for feeding the birds,” I said. “And for putting up the birdhouse. Looks like we’ve already got a family.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Do you want to go for a run?” I asked. I had been thinking about it on the flight, how I’d missed the time we spent together, covering all those miles.

  “I’ve given up on running a marathon,” he said.

  “What do you mean? Why?”

  “Let me show you.” He walked over to the shed and before he reached the door I knew what he’d done: he’d started working on his pottery again. Half of the shed was still full with the usual lawn stuff—the mower, weedeater, and edger—but the other half had a potter’s wheel and a little stool. There were two huge buckets full of dry clay. On a shelf behind him were about twenty formed pots that he’d made while I was gone.

  “You were right. Once I started back at it again I couldn’t stop,” he said.

  “Was it as good as you remember?”

  “Yeah. I’ll work on it over the weekends, a little at night, use the time I would have spent running. But I’m not going to be like my father and spend so much time out here that I never see you.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “You want me to show you how to turn a pot?”

  “That would be cool.”

  As my father donned his white apron and sat down on the stool behind his potter’s wheel, he seemed at home and comfortable with his head bent forward, his hands covered in clay. I wondered how different his life would have been if he hadn’t had me at all, if he’d never met Mom. But I didn’t suppose that mattered. We were here, with the life we had in front of us.

  51

  After Dad went to work the next morning, I rode my bike to Tia’s. I’d considered calling her, telling her I was back but hadn’t. I wanted to surprise her.

  It was the first time I’d ridden my bike over to her house. But with all the training Dad and I had done, five miles wasn’t really that far.

  As I knocked on the door, my heart was pounding. Then the door opened and she was standing there in a pair of jean shorts and a T-shirt. Her eyes got all big and she smiled. “What are you doing here, Buster?”

  “I couldn’t stay away.”

  “You’re the cheesiest boy I know,” she said.

  “Cheesy is good.”

  She hugged me, her long dark hair tickling my nose. She grabbed my hand and pulled me into the house. “Mom, Mom.

  Julian’s back.”

  Mrs. Brogan smiled, said, “About time. Go wash up, get an apron and some gloves and let’s get to work.”

  Tia was making paninis and Mrs. Brogan was working on four big pans of manicotti. “What we do,” Mrs. Brogan said, “is make lunch from seven to eleven in the morning and then I drive the food down to my shop for lunch. I’ve got a girl there who sells it. From noon to four we work on fancier stuff, dinner entrees. That’s about it, pretty simple.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Help Tia with those paninis.”

  I stood beside Tia and we must have made about fifty sandwiches that morning. She’d put the meat and cheeses inside the bread and then give it to me. I’d set it in the press and squeeze, count to thirty and pull the sandwich out, wrap it in a piece of white paper and label it.
By the time Mrs. Brogan left for her morning delivery, we’d filled two boxes with the paninis and another box full of individual servings of manicotti.

  Tia and I helped her mom carry everything out to the van. When she drove away, we sat on the porch swing. “So what happened?

  Why did you come back?”

  “Even with my mother there, it didn’t feel like home. It felt more like a vacation. And I missed my father and I missed you.”

  “Is your mom okay?”

  “Yeah, she’s fine. She’s happy down there.”

  “Do you think she’s coming back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Tia put her hand on my knee. “I dreamed you were coming back.”

  “Did you?”

  “You and me were standing beside each other cooking.”

  “Listen, Tia, I’ve got to tell you about something,” I said. “I kissed a girl when I was in Florida.” I told her how it happened, said I was sorry.

  “You only kissed her once?” she asked.

  “We kissed and then she walked back into her room and I never saw her again.”

  Tia seemed to think about this a long time. It was painfully long.

  “Was it as good as this?”

  She turned and kissed me. It was long and soft. When she pulled back, I said, “No, it was nothing like that.”

  “And you better not forget it,” she said.

  I leaned over and kissed her again, kissed her good this time.

  She didn’t resist, let out a little giggle. Then there was a car horn and we looked up as Mrs. Brogan was getting out of her van. “Knock it off you two,” she said. Tia and I laughed.

  As promised, the dinner dishes were fancier: pot roast, chicken with wild rice and broccoli, chicken Marsala, and chicken Caesar salad. My job was to cut up the non-meat ingredients for the pot roast: carrots and potatoes and onions. Mrs. Brogan walked over to me and watched me slice the onions. “Easy and direct,” she said, holding my hand and demonstrating how to cut. “You’ve got raw talent. We need to hone it.”

  After I’d finished with the pot roast ingredients, I started cutting and cleaning the romaine lettuce for the Caesar salads. Tia worked beside me, grilling ten chicken breasts at a time. The afternoon rolled on. On one wall of the kitchen, there was a chalkboard that listed what dishes were to be made on what days. Mrs. Brogan gave me copies of all the recipes and said to take them home and study them, so I didn’t have to ask how to make anything. She said the best chefs never look at recipes when they’re working.

  And then it was four o’clock and Mrs. Brogan and I were loading the boxes into the back of the van. “I’m glad you’re going to be able to work with us,” she said.

  “Thanks for the opportunity,” I said.

  She waved me closer to her van door, so I walked over. “And keep your hands out of my daughter’s pants.” Her voice wasn’t angry or threatening, just a calm steady warning. The kind of thing you’d expect from a good parent.

  After she drove away, Tia and I went back inside and kissed on the sofa and ran our eager, sore hands all over each other’s body. “Your mother told me not to touch you,” I said.

  “My mother is crazy.”

  We kissed some more. The telephone rang and Mrs. Brogan’s voice filled the room, on the answering machine. “Tia, Julian, what are you two doing? Knock off the hanky-panky. Don’t make me set up cameras in that house.”

  We laughed and hugged and she rested her head on my chest, both of us hot and tired, smelling of food, so much food, this life in the kitchen.

  52

  The rest of June and July flew by. While I missed training with my father, our new routine was that we’d have dinner as soon as he got home from work, then he’d go out and work for an hour or two on his pottery. He always invited me out there to work with him and some nights I did, others I stayed inside nursing my fresh kitchen wounds and studying all of Mrs. Brogan’s recipes, watching the Food Network or reading cookbooks, picking up tips wherever I could get them.

  I saw Dennis once, a couple weeks after I returned home. While we were nice enough to each other, it was obvious we weren’t going to be good friends again. We lived different lives, were heading in separate directions the way two people who were once close sometimes do.

  A few days a week, Dad and I would go for long walks through the neighborhood. We talked about what types of dishes I was cooking and the possibility of me going to culinary school and of course we talked about Mom and if she might be coming back. I wasn’t sure if Mom told him I knew about her affair. I assumed she had, and I appreciated the fact my father never mentioned it or said a bad word about her.

  Dad told me he’d finally given her an ultimatum. She had until Labor Day to decide whether or not she was coming back. What he planned to do after that day, I didn’t know. Perhaps that was the day we’d finally drive down to Florida, pull her out of that little apartment and bring her home. While Mom and I still talked a couple nights a week, the phone calls had become as much for her and Dad as they were for me.

  I spent nine hours a day at Tia’s house. We cooked and laughed and our hands stayed full of dough and dirty with all the sauces and ingredients we used. It was hard work, harder than I imagined it would be, and our fingers were sore from all that cutting and chopping, but we never complained. It was good work and felt like what I should be doing.

  Sometimes when Mrs. Brogan had her back turned or walked out of the kitchen to use the bathroom Tia would walk over and kiss me. At times she seemed like my girlfriend and other times we were two chefs working side by side, quietly competing to see who could cook faster, better, make the dish prettier.

  I cut so many peppers and onions over the summer that I couldn’t get the stink out of my hands. Mrs. Brogan would walk up to me, look over my shoulder and whisper, “Beautiful slices. Cooking is art. Cooking is like falling in love.”

  Whenever Tia told me her mother was a little crazy, I would say crazy was good. And I was glad I hadn’t lost my interest in cooking.

  That it hadn’t been a fad or phase I was going through. If anything it had become part of me, something I would be pursuing forever.

  Would I have made it to this point if my mother hadn’t left us? If I hadn’t had to start cooking on my own, if Mrs. Peters hadn’t called for my help that day? I don’t know. But, I’d learned, that sometimes it’s those things you hadn’t expected, like my father becoming a nurse, that fill your life in ways you never could have imagined.

  On the first Tuesday in August, with my Mother’s deadline still a month away, Tia and I were sitting out on her porch swing, eating sugar cookies we’d made that day. It was a little after four, so Mrs. Brogan had left to make her last delivery. Soon I would be heading home, to make dinner for Dad and me, and I hoped for the same thing I did every day: when I rode my bike up the street I would see Mom’s yellow VW Bug in the driveway.

  And as I hoped for that, I hoped for more: the three of us sitting down to a meal my mother and I had cooked. As we ate, Mom would talk about her novel, how this or that character finally figured out what they wanted and the novel now made sense. Dad would wait his turn and then tell us about one of his patients or about some new pot or vase or coffee mug he’d been working on. I would listen to them talk and laugh and then from nowhere one, or perhaps both, of my parents would turn to me and say, referring to the meal we were eating, ‘this is good Julian, damn good.’

  I heard the chitter-chatter above me and the word chickadee formed in my head. Tia was leaning into my shoulder. There was flour on her naked knees. I wanted to brush it away, but didn’t want to wake her. She was breathing easy, exhausted, napping as she tended to do at this time of the day. I looked up at the elm tree above us and spotted the tiny black, white and gray bird.

  I crumbled what was left of my cookie and set it on the porch rail. A few seconds later, the bird flew down and took the cookie, disappearing into the tree again. I did this two more times, s
etting the food closer to Tia and me. And each time the bird gladly took what I offered.

  I set the last bit of cookie in the palm of my hand. The bird flew down and landed on the porch rail, looked left and right. I considered waking Tia, saying hey check this out, but she was sleeping and comfortable.

  “Come on,” I whispered to the tiny bird.

  And like magic, it flew over and landed in the palm of my hand, settled there for no more than a second, plucked the bit of cookie I offered and flew away. Tia moved slightly; she moaned easily; but she didn’t wake. I knew that I would have to leave soon if I wanted to have dinner ready by the time my father made it home. But I had a few more minutes, so I closed my eyes, leaned into Tia, and listened to the birdsong. It was beautiful. They were everywhere.

  The End

  Steve Cushman lives in Greensboro, North Carolina with his wife and son.

  In addition to Heart With Joy, he is the author of Portisville, a novel, and Fracture City, a short story collection. www.stevecushman.net