“Or even how to start,” I add.
“Yeah, and that,” she says, but she doesn’t sound all that mad about it.
I yank on my shoes, skip tying the laces, grab my backpack.
“Sandy gave me the keys to his house too,” she says. “I gotta return those too.” She turns like she’s leaving. I fall in behind her. She looks back, annoyed, and stops.
“He told me he might give you keys. I thought you’d throw at least one of them back at us. Two felt safer,” I say.
She squints at me like she’s surprised I know that. She pulls out Sandy’s key. “You guys mean business.”
“How could you not know that?”
She shrugs and walks to the window instead of the door, leaning her forehead against the glass. The fog has settled gently on the hoods of the vans. The orange one looks permanent today, like it’s been glued in place. “You let that parrot get taken.”
“That was before.”
“Eventually, you’d get distracted, forget about me.”
“No. We won’t.”
I stand beside her. I think she believes me.
“What are you going to do with that thing?” I ask, pointing with my forehead at the food cart down below. It’s actually shiny in a few places.
“It’s not mine. Why does everyone keep asking me what I’m doing with it? I don’t know. Nothing.”
“Does it work?”
She waits a beat before pouncing on a reply. “I just want it clean. When it’s clean, I’ll be done.’
“Okay.”
She crosses her arms. “So, what’s this thing you have to show me?” she says.
“Tomorrow. I’ll show you tomorrow.”
“But you put your shoes on.”
“So I could be ready for whatever you’re doing next.”
She stomps the perimeter of my room, pretending to be massively inconvenienced. It makes me smile.
“Your heroes,” she mumbles, cruising past the portraits on the walls.
“Yeah.” I watch her follow the wall around.
“Wings.”
“Yeah.”
“Shouldn’t it be capes?”
“Wings are more permanent. They can swoop down, pick you up, take you places.”
“Uh-huh. Makes sense. Man, you’re weird.”
She points to the big poster—just finished, just pinned up across from the door. “Who’s the girl?”
I can’t tell if she’s kidding.
“Don’t you recognize her?”
She turns back to the portrait, makes the quietest squeak of recognition or horror or both. “Gimme a break.”
“You don’t like it? I’ve been working on it for a while. You saw some of the sketches.”
“It’s ridiculous. My head’s the size of a rhino.”
She flops, legs crossed, onto the rug and stares up at her herself, obviously pleased.
“It’s one of my best.” I like the way the hair blows back, curling like vines, and the same curling pattern is repeated in the wings. “You know, your name doesn’t suit you,” I say, looking back and forth between the portrait and the girl. “You’re more of a Rosalind.”
“Mom jokes that my name is French,” she says. “But it’s not. It’s as close as she could get to Gee Whiz. That’s how she felt when she found out she was pregnant with me. Like Gee Whiz, how’d this happen?”
She smiles, but just with the corners of her eyes.
“Why’d she tell you that?” It’s not very nice.
“It’s the truth. She always tells me the truth.” Her face darkens a little. “Except when she doesn’t know it yet.”
“Or when the truth might improve later,” I add.
This brings up Jeanne Ann’s royal chin. She likes my interpretation.
“Your name doesn’t suit you either,” she says, swinging her legs to face mine. “Cal is a cowboy name.”
“It’s not my full name. My full name is Callebaut.”
“Calabow?”
“It’s a kind of chocolate. From Belgium.”
She snorts. “La-dee-da.” Then she gets serious.
“Cal. Callebaut.”
“Yes?”
“We can’t sleep down there another night.”
Jeanne Ann
“This is never going to work,” I mumble to Cal, hanging back. He’s brought everyone over to the back doors of the Carrot. I can’t believe Mom actually opened up.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she rasps now, looking for me in the group. There are tissues erupting from her sleeves like pillow stuffing.
“Tea in the morning”—Mrs. Paglio leans in, smiling—“white horehound flowers, a bath. Mr. Paglio doesn’t appreciate comforts like those anymore.”
Mom looks at Mrs. Paglio through slitted eyes, then at me like, Who is this person?
“You’ll just catch more of a chill in here,” Cal’s mom says.
“No.” There’s an edge in Mom’s voice now. “I’m not going in one of the houses. I—”
“I told you,” I mutter.
“Can Jeanne Ann sleep over? Just Jeanne Ann?” Cal edges forward.
Mom looks at me and closes her eyes. Her whole body settles down. “She’s just going to get sick in here with me.”
The words push me and pull me. But I go.
Cal
Jeanne Ann isn’t one hundred percent sure, but she comes back home with Mom and me. We set her up in the den, across from my room. She seems eager to take a bath and go to bed, so she can get back to her mom as soon as the sun is up.
I know that makes sense. Her mom’s the priority. But I wish Jeanne Ann could enjoy being here.
She told us we could wash her clothes. Mom and I sort through them while Jeanne Ann is in the bath. I separate out the colors and Mom squirts a special detergent on the clothes with the most stains, then throws them in the wash.
“I keep wondering about the rest of Jeanne Ann’s family,” I say, holding up a shirt for a final inspection. “Her mom has a mom. Where’s she?”
“Maybe they argued. Maybe there was a big misunderstanding,” Mom says.
I turn to face her. “Maybe they never made up. It must’ve been a really bad fight if she can’t call her now.”
Mom squirts another shirt, slides her eyes toward me.
“Let’s never have one of those fights,” I say.
JULY 28
Jeanne Ann
I wake to a feather lightness in my limbs, like my muscles are not connected to my bones.
It’s the mattress beneath me. I’m in Cal’s house, in a spare bedroom. This is the first morning in over a month that I’ve woken up on something other than metal. I’d be panicked if I weren’t so comfortable.
The clock on the desk says five a.m. It’s ringing softly, almost like a ringer in a dream. Cal set it to do that. He said it was a pleasant way to greet the day, like brushing your face with a feather.
It’s still dark, but gray-dark instead of black. I throw off the covers and walk to the window on the other side of the room.
The van is still there. Mom’s still inside. Alone. It’s probably too early to go down. I don’t want to wake her, or worse, scare her. I’ll go down when the sun is up.
My stomach growls while I dress. There’s a pile of clean clothes on the floor by the bed. The clothes smell like soap. I am tempted to lie back on the bed and cover myself with my clean wardrobe.
But I’m too hungry.
I dress and make my way to the top of the stairs.
I’m an invited guest here.
I still have the key to this house.
Cal said I should make myself at home.
I tiptoe down. I can feel the nearness of food. The refrigerator gurgles just for me.
“Hello?” I whisper. Every light is on down here.
“Hello?” I whisper again.
One of the cabinets is open, and the oven light is on. I smell something baking. Cookies? I edge toward the scent.
A sack of sugar stares back at me from the counter.
“Coffee cake—sour cream and walnut,” I hear behind me. Cal’s mom—Lizzie—is standing in the kitchen doorway. She steps toward me. “I know you want to go soon. I thought you should wake up to something sweet.” She’s pulled her dandelion fuzz into a ponytail atop her head. A smock—green, with the restaurant logo—is dusted with flour, protecting her pajamas. She doesn’t seem mad to find me down here. “Does that sound appealing?”
“Uh, sure.”
“It’ll be ready in a few minutes. Milk?”
“Uh, yeah. Yes, please.” I’m not entirely comfortable with Cal’s mom.
She pours me a tall glass.
She cocks her head to study me, then raises her eyebrows way high, like I’m supposed to say the next thing, but I don’t know what it is.
A buzzer saves us. She pulls on mitts and extracts the cake. We hover over it, inhaling the steam. “That will be good,” I say, admiring the swirls of yellows, browns, and tans in the crumbly top of the cake.
“Yes, it will,” she says.
For a small person, Lizzie takes up a lot of space.
We both have our elbows on the counter and our chins resting in our hands.
“I thought you didn’t cook.”
“Oh.” She dips her head and scratches her scalp with all ten fingers. “Did Cal tell you that? I don’t cook at Greenery. That’s true. I gave that up after Cal was born, so I could be around to, you know, raise him . . . whatever that means. Ends up you can be around and still bungle all that . . .” She trails off, pulls a tissue from her pajamas, blows her nose, starts up again. “I don’t cook at home much either. But, of course, I know how. I mean, I’m really quite good. Sometimes, when you’re really, really good at something, you don’t want to do it at all, unless it’s your best work. Know what I mean?”
I nod. “When I’m writing a report on a new book—to tell the librarians if I think they should carry it—I don’t want to be interrupted.”
“Yeah. Yes. You get it.”
I continue staring into the cake. I would like to make something that smells this amazing and looks like it will fix everything that has ever gone wrong in the whole world. It sounds corny—but who knew you could pass time so comfortably, just staring at a cooling cake.
When the steam clears, Lizzie unclamps the metal band around the cake, exposing the full glory. “We should really wait till it cools to eat it,” she says, then, ignoring herself, pulls out a chair for me and cuts two slices, one for each of us.
“My mom doesn’t bake,” I say, through a hot mouthful. I’m trying not to shove the entire thing into my mouth at once. It’s like eating a small butter island. “She thinks baking is for prisses.”
Lizzie makes a hmfff sound. She takes a sip of her milk. “Everyone in the kitchen is the same: slaves to fat, fire, and time. No prisses survive. I know. I’ve hired a few by mistake. Has your mom ever baked anything?”
I bring my shoulders to my ears—dunno—I can’t recall ever waking up to this smell. I’m not even sure our oven worked.
“Well, I’ve only met her twice, but if I had to guess, your mom’s just scared of what she doesn’t know.”
I turn that over a few times while Lizzie cuts me another slice. “I didn’t think Mom was scared of anything till we got here.”
She pours me another glass of milk, taller than before. She watches me drink it.
“You might like baking,” she says. “It’s for precise minds. You can’t really improvise. You have to have a plan and stick with it.”
She’s looking me over, that same judge-y up-down that she gave me the first time we met.
“What?” I’m annoyed.
“Nothing. It’s just, the oven’s still on. You could make something.”
I catch myself halfway into a shrug and stop. “Okay.”
She starts pulling down more ingredients. Butter, salt, baking powder.
She slides me a cookbook—Mom has this same one—and I start paging through. I stop on a familiar picture, slide the recipe over to her. “Can I try this?”
The recipe is for buttermilk biscuits. The picture reminds me of I Capture the Castle—the girl in the book ate biscuits over the sink and felt rich, though she was poor. I think hers were the English kind of biscuit, which is more like a cookie. But still.
The cookbook says buttermilk biscuits can turn out like “hockey pucks” if you don’t make them correctly. They absorb gravy. They pair well with ham and eggs. I like ham and eggs.
“Excellent choice,” Lizzie says, skimming the recipe. She grabs a few more ingredients, then taps the page.
I move closer to her.
“It’s all there, on the card. You can’t mess it up if you know how to read.”
I go slowly. Lizzie hovers. I don’t know why, but I’m excited. The recipe says to measure everything out on a cookie sheet and mix the ingredients with my fingertips. It feels like I’m playing, like I’m a kid in a sandbox. This isn’t cooking. The flour moves like sand. The butter squishes, forming little flakes and pebbles.
I step back, raise my batter-caked hands overhead. I’ve read the directions carefully but this can’t be right. My pile has gone from dry to sticky/clumpy. I thought I was going slowly, but it all happened so fast. No wonder Mom is scared of baking.
“Good, good, stop there. A few more turns and you’d be in trouble,” Lizzie says. She pokes at the batter. “This is perfect.”
“It is?” It looks like mashed potatoes.
“Yeah. Now you roll it out.”
I like the feeling of the rolling pin, its weight—it’s more powerful than it looks. When I’ve got a not-too-lumpy disk—less mashed potato, more tacky Play-Doh—she hands me an empty jar, upside down. “This is my favorite part.”
I discover it’s my favorite part too. Perfect circles. Press. Press. One. Two. Press. Press. Three. Four. It’s hard to believe this will become something edible. But I don’t care. Perfect circles. Look at that.
I think Mom would like this.
“What time is it?” I say, quickly pulling back my hands. I run to the living room window before she can answer.
I tap the window, leaving a flour dusting on the glass.
Lizzie follows me. Here I am baking when I should be taking care of my mom across the street. The sun is up.
“She is working so hard to get you out of there,” Lizzie says. I nod. “She’d want you to stay until the biscuits are cooked. I know it.”
Lizzie puts the biscuits in the oven and comes back. I have to stay near the windows now.
She sits down beside me on the rug. I don’t know why, maybe it’s the smell of butter, the warmth of the room, but I tell Lizzie about Mom. The job interviews that went nowhere, but didn’t have to. The dish-washing. The cookbooks and the unsent letter to Julia Child (“Really?” Lizzie says. “Ambitious.”) The Hydras at O’Hara’s House of Fine Eats. The food we ate at home, and the food, I’ve come to find out, we didn’t eat.
She asks questions. I answer. She nods a lot. I wait for her to tell me what to do. Cal says his mom likes to tell people what to do. I might enjoy being told what to do, at this point. But if she’s making a list of ways to adjust us, she’s doing it silently in her head. Eventually, she gets up and excuses herself, and I think that’s the end of the conversation, but she comes back half a minute later with a thin newspaper, and flops down again. “Have you ever read the classifieds, Jeanne Ann?” she asks, paging through to the back. “After a long week, I find them wildly distracting.”
* * *
• • •
<
br /> I walk two finished biscuits to the guest room, sit down on the floor, plate in lap, facing the window.
I have to juggle the first biscuit from hand to hand to avoid burning myself. It is seriously attractive, I think. Golden brown on the top with flaky layers along the sides. It looks like a picture in one of Mom’s cookbooks.
Cal enters, sniffing. I offer him one.
“Your mom and I made them,” I say.
His eyes go wide. He is nodding and smiling, crumbs falling out of his mouth.
“Are you going to try yours?” he says.
“Gimme a second. I’ve never fed anyone before.”
JULY 28
Cal
“What can I do now?” I whisper. We’re just outside the van. Jeanne Ann’s holding a green box filled with biscuits for her mom.
“I don’t know,” she whispers, her back to the van. I don’t think Jeanne Ann’s ready for life back in her own box.
“So, you’re still gonna leave when she’s better?”
“I guess.”
“Will you stay at our place again tonight?”
“I don’t know.”
A car honks just as she’s squeezing the door handle. We turn to look. It’s Sandy in his camper van, idling at the stop light. He waves. Jeanne Ann raises a hand and watches him turn the corner. I can’t tell if she’s happy or sad.
“He can’t go home,” she says, almost like she’s talking to the sidewalk. We both look at the green van in his spot.
“I want you to stay,” I say.
She rolls back her shoulders, opens the door. “You just want a friend at middle school.”
I smile. “You do too.”
JULY 30
Jeanne Ann
The fever makes Mom say nutty stuff. Today I thought she was asleep when I cut my finger on a pineapple can. “Crapinade,” I hissed, biting down to stay quiet.
“Don’t say that,” she muttered, eyes closed.
“What? Why?”
She groaned. “I picked it up from family. Then, one of my stinkier boyfriends started using it.”
“My dad?”
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