The Summer Kitchen Read online

  Jake was always Poppy’s favorite. Even after Christopher was born, there was still something special between Poppy and Jake. They never went more than a few days without seeing each other.

  Now it hurt to remember that… .

  The real estate agent introduced herself, and we shook hands. My cell phone rang as she returned to her car to rifle through the backseat for paperwork.

  I answered the phone, and Holly was on the other end. I should have known it would be her, checking to see how things were going. Over the years, we’d shared everything from pregnancies to caring for aging relatives. Together we’d celebrated all the major firsts of motherhood—first steps, first tooth, first day of school, first date, first car, first high school graduation. But now there was a vast, dark place we couldn’t inhabit together. Poppy’s death and Jake’s disappearance were on the fringes of every conversation, waiting to slip in like a fast-moving storm and throw dampness over everything.

  “Where are you?” Holly never beat around the bush. She was quick and to the point, which made her great at managing a family and running a part-time catering business. “I just drove by. Your car’s been gone all afternoon. You’re not out at Poppy’s house alone again, are you?”

  “I’m meeting the real estate agent,” I said, ignoring Holly’s need to be everyone’s caretaker. With six kids around the house, mothering came naturally to her. “I wanted to get the last of the yard sale junk out to the curb before she came. She’s here now, though.”

  Holly coughed indignantly. “You should have called me. I told you I’d come with you anytime you need to go down there.”

  “I know you did, but there wasn’t much left to clean up—a few flowerpots, some picture frames and whatnot. I’m just going to leave those boxes of dishes in the cellar, and the big roasters. Whoever buys the place can deal with them.”

  Holly wasn’t about to be sidetracked. “You shouldn’t go over to that house by yourself, SandraKaye.” I knew Holly was serious when she used my full, properly Southern, double name.

  “It was broad daylight. Anyway, I thought the real estate agent would be here, but she was late.” The truth was that Holly was probably right. Rob didn’t want me coming here by myself, either. The neighborhoods south of Blue Sky Hill hadn’t quite made the turn to revitalization yet. As the new residents uphill started neighborhood watch programs, put in expensive surveillance systems, and demanded greater police protection, the less savory elements of the area were forced to frequent new territories. During the estate sale, we’d engaged a private auction firm experienced at operating in older parts of town. They’d come with security attached.

  “I don’t care if it’s high noon,” Holly complained. “You know what can …” She swallowed the end of the sentence, and I pictured the blood draining from her face as we both realized she’d inadvertently pointed out that, just blocks from here, on what should have been a perfectly ordinary Dallas evening, Poppy’s attack had proven that lives could collide in an instant, with painful consequences.

  The real estate agent closed her car door and headed my way with a clipboard.

  “Listen, Holly, I’d better go so we can knock out the disclosure paperwork while there’s still enough light outside.”

  Holly sighed. “Does the real estate agent have anybody with her?” By anybody, she meant anybody six feet tall and burly.

  “No. It’s just her.” Watching the agent stagger across the lawn, her high heels sinking into the grass, I cupped my hand over the phone and added, “She could probably poke someone’s eye out with those stilettos, though.”

  Holly chuckled. “You’re out of there by dark.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  Holly gave the word an indignant cough. We both knew I could be on the south side of Chicago and my mother wouldn’t be calling to make sure I was all right. “Don’t insult me, but I mean it. By dark, okay?”

  “I’m forty-nine years old, Holl. I can handle this.”

  Holly sighed. “Call me when you’re done?”

  “All right. I’d better go now.” The real estate agent, Andrea, was already beginning to move around the house with her notepad. I tucked the phone into my pocket and joined her on the tour.

  My mind filled with memories as I considered the reduction of family history to meaningless tick marks on a real estate disclosure sheet.

  Tick … torn screen in the bottom left corner of the bay window. Poppy’s spinster sister, Great-Aunt Neva, lived in that room, years ago. Her lanky gray cat came and went through the tear in the screen. We all pretended we couldn’t see it. I was never sure why.

  Tick … loose floorboard on the porch, just left of the door. Jalicia, a little girl from two streets over, and I played dolls under there. The loose board was our periscope hole. We watched for signs of my mother, or Maryanne. If a car rolled up, we’d slip out the side beneath the oleander bush and run around back to part ways. Mother didn’t approve of my playing with a black child. Sooner or later, I would begin to pick up the dialect, and then where would we be? Being freckle-faced and cursed with my father’s curly, flyaway strawberry blond hair, I had enough drawbacks already. Maryanne, who had been blessed by my mother’s first husband with normal hair and no freckles, added that Jalicia knew way too much for a nine-year-old—about sex, in particular. Mother hated that the streets at the base of Blue Sky Hill were going mixed. There was a time in Dallas, she said, when people stayed with their own sort, even in the working-class neighborhoods.

  Mother spoke the words “working-class neighborhood” as if she hadn’t come from one, as if she hadn’t grown up just down the block in my grandparents’ house, where the yard was always scrappy with unmowed weeds and the holly bushes covered the windows like shrouds. If not for her fortuitous third marriage to my stepfather, she would probably still have been living in the shadow of Blue Sky Hill.

  Tick … dent in the iron portico post, where Aunt Ruth backed the car into it when she learned to drive, after Poppy’s heart attack.

  Tick … a crumbling rock foundation in the backyard… .

  “What in the world is this?” Andrea asked, studying the square of vegetation that grew around the old foundation.

  “There was a summer kitchen, back before the place had air-conditioning. They did their cooking out here, so as not to heat up the house. After they tore the building down, Aunt Ruth planted flower beds around the foundation.” Surveying the rectangle of sandstone peeking from beneath a tangle of hollyhocks and honeysuckle vines, I smiled at a memory. The hollyhocks were already taking over, forming the green walls of a living room. On long summer days, Jalicia and I had created dolls from the hollyhock blooms, turning them upside down, then adding buds for heads and rose petals or dwarf mums for hats. A miniature cancan of hollyhock dancers performed summer shows atop the back fence, where in the old days Aunt Ruth had fed tramps off the train. The wanderers had scratched a symbol on the gatepost, a house blessing of sorts, a sign for the lost that this was a friendly place.

  Aunt Ruth told stories about those traveling men, struggling to find their way home from the war. She said if you looked hard enough you could still see the house blessing, even years after the train had stopped running, and the men were gone, and the post had been painted over.

  Jalicia and I sometimes stared at the fence, imagining we could see the carving there. We tried to decide what the symbol for a friendly place would look like. Maybe a peace sign, like the ones the hippies wore, with a smiley face in it.

  Did the lost men of yesterday need a friendly place as much as Jalicia and I did?

  Andrea tapped her pencil against the clipboard, frowning. “I guess we could call it a raised garden,” she mused, and then we moved on, the remains of the summer kitchen now a sales point.

  Filling out the rest of the disclosure sheet didn’t take long. Andrea was fast and efficient, no time for sentiment. She wasn’t certain developers would be interested in the house, particularly with everything e
lse on the street still privately owned, but she had sold some properties a few blocks away to a development company, so a speculative buy was a possibility.

  “Developers take places as is, which makes things easier,” she commented as we stood in the kitchen, marking off leaky pipes and flickering light fixtures.

  “That’s good,” I said, studying the doughnut of fingerprints on the cabinet where Aunt Ruth kept kiddie cups acquired long ago in boxes of Trix, Bisquick, and Tide. An antiques dealer had bought the cups at the estate sale, the gleam of a tidy profit in his eye. I wished the cups had gone to someone who would use them.

  Squinting at the fingerprints, I wondered if some of them were Aunt Ruth’s, or Poppy’s, or Christopher’s … or Jake’s. I felt sick all over again. I didn’t want someone else to wash away the traces.

  “Those could use a coat of paint,” Andrea observed when she noticed me looking at the cabinets. “But people shopping in this price range don’t expect much.”

  I contemplated the idea that painting the cabinets would be preferable to washing them. Sealed between coats, the fingerprints would remain forever. It was an odd thought, considering we’d just been speculating that the house might be torn down for development.

  “I think I’ll get some paint and do that tomorrow,” I heard myself say. The words seemed to come from outside, as if I were in the box seats at a theater, hearing them being spoken onstage.

  Even Andrea seemed skeptical. She made a note on her pad, and we started toward the door. Before stepping out, she eyed the darkened street. “I’ll come back tomorrow and put out a sign,” she said, then hurried to her car and got in. She waited until I’d locked the burglar bars on the front door and made it to my car before she backed out and wheeled away.

  Looking at Poppy’s place in the glare of the headlights, I felt regret settling over me like a wool blanket, itchy and uncomfortable, not right for the season. Everything in me wanted to go back—two years, ten, twelve. I could be that young mother again, driving to Poppy’s house with the boys strapped in the back, the two of them fighting about who touched whom, while I threatened that, if they didn’t straighten up, I’d turn the car around and we’d go home instead of visiting Aunt Ruth and Uncle Poppy.

  I never did, of course. Jake and Christopher knew I wouldn’t.

  Closing my eyes for a moment, I tried to imagine myself back in time, tried to replace the wool blanket with a new suit of clothes and make it a reality. I could almost hear the boys in the backseat… .

  A car alarm sounded nearby, and my game of imagination popped like a balloon. I called Holly to tell her I was headed home. She didn’t pick up, so I left a message, then drove away, feeling strangely numb, disconnected like a ghost not really in this world or any other.

  Around the corner, the boys who’d passed Poppy’s house earlier were bouncing a basketball against the side of a crumbling one-story building that housed income-assisted apartments. A teenage girl with a long blond ponytail stepped from the end apartment and hollered at them as I waited for the car ahead of me to make a left turn into a deserted strip mall.

  A police car passed in the right lane, slowed as the officer surveyed the activity. The girl on the porch and the boys froze in place, their postures deliberately casual. As the cruiser disappeared down the street, the boys picked up their basketball and moved on.

  Chapter 2

  Cass

  The next time those stupid gangbanger wannabes came and threw basketballs against our wall, I was gonna do more than just go out and holler at them. I was gonna flag down the police myself.

  I really was. I didn’t care how much trouble it started.

  A siren went off somewhere down the street, and then a car alarm in the other direction. The siren faded off, but the car alarm kept going and going. I went back inside, sat down on the sofa, closed my eyes, and tried not to hear it.

  Some lady told me once that when you don’t like where you are, you could close your eyes and think of the place you’d rather be—even if you’ve never been there and had just seen it in a movie or a magazine. If you believed it enough, she said, it’d be just like you were there. A mind trip, she called it. She was living in some two-trailer-park oil-field town in West Texas and working in a Waffle Shop that smelled like cow poop, so I figured she had to be on some kind of trip, just to get by.

  She was nice enough, though. She showed me that if you sat behind the hotel next door, up top of the electric box, you could look over the fence and watch the drive-in movie for free. When she was my age, she used to do it. Most of the time the wind was blowing enough you couldn’t hear it, but after a while you got good at reading lips and making stuff up. I could always make stuff up like nobody’s business, which is important when you’re like Rusty and me. When you show up at a place too many days in a row, people ask questions, and you’ve gotta have an idea what to tell them so they don’t start thinking they oughta call somebody official.

  I don’t know why people need to stick their noses in—like just because you’re young means you’re stupid and can’t take care of yourself. The lady in the Waffle Shop was okay, but after a while she got all motherly and started poking into our business, and I had to quit going there. But before that, she’d bought me lots of French toast, so that was cool. I liked the mind trip thing, too. I used it sometimes, when we landed in places that, basically, stunk.

  In my mind place, there’s a field so long you can’t see across it, and I’m on a white horse, just running and running, like that song “Wildfire.” When we were in the truck and that song came on the CD, I’d turn it up loud and close my eyes, to see if I could find anything else to add to my mind place. I added the moon and the hoot owl, but I left out the early snow, because I don’t really like the cold. We stayed two whole months in Fargo when Rusty got work at a feedlot, and it stunk big-time, because it snowed like crazy and the wind blew ninety miles an hour, like, all day long. Rusty was gone short-hauling cattle, and I was stuck in a dumpy apartment over some lady’s garage.

  The lady was old and almost blind. If you weren’t standing right in front of her she could hardly see you. So the good thing was she really believed I was seventeen instead of twelve, and Rusty was twenty-two, and there wasn’t any problem with my brother and me being out on our own. Rusty told her some story about our parents dying in a plane crash, and she felt real sorry for us, after that. She wouldn’t even take the rent when Rusty finally got it together. She just pushed it back in his hand, and folded her fingers around his, and said, “You save that for a rainy day, young man.”

  Too bad it turned rainy about two weeks later, when Mr. Henry down at the feedlot got a fax from his insurance company, telling him Rusty was seventeen. The ID Rusty’d used when he got the job was fake, but Rusty had figured since it fooled Mr. Henry in the job interview, we were home free. He’d unpacked his stuff in the apartment and everything. He liked Mr. Henry’s niece, who worked the desk at the feedlot. The funny thing was, since she was sixteen, Mr. Henry thought Rusty was too old for her, and then, when he wasn’t too old anymore, we had to grab our stuff and go. Mr. Henry’d had a long talk with Rusty in his office. He wanted to know what kind of trouble Rusty was in. I’m still not sure how much he got Rusty to admit, but the only reason he let Rusty out of the office was because Rusty’d promised to go pick me up, so we could all drive to the sheriff ’s office together and get help.

  Rusty and me were out of the blind lady’s apartment quicker than you can say grab the cookie jar, and that was the end of the cold country. We headed for Texas, which was where we’d started out to go anyway. The one person who could help us was there. Somewhere.

  The bad thing is that Texas is a big state, and it’s not so easy finding one single person, especially when you’re not sure about the name, or where to look, and you’ve got to make a living along the way. Rusty decided we shouldn’t stay in another small town. In a small town, everybody’s in your business. You can’t just move in a
nd find a job and get a place to live without everybody noticing. In a big city like Dallas, Rusty said, nobody’d know us from Adam.

  He was pretty much right, but at least in Fargo we didn’t have gangbanger wannabes throwing a basketball against our wall, and three little brats next door, whose mom locked them out on the steps whenever she got tired of looking at them, or when she wanted to have a man over, which was a lot. It didn’t matter how much those kids whined out there, or banged on the door, or whatever. If she was busy inside, she was busy. She turned up her stupid rap music to where it’d block out the noise. Too bad that didn’t stop everyone else from hearing it.

  Dallas was too loud all the time. I couldn’t get to a mind place, even when I tried really hard. After two weeks in the apartment, I was ready to call Child Protective Services. They could pick up those kids next door, and the gangbanger wannabes who stole the spare tire out of Rusty’s truck and then spray-painted stuff all over the tailgate. Rusty had to spend thirty bucks—which we needed for groceries—on spray paint and a used spare, so he could get to work down at the construction site a few miles away. After that, he started leaving the truck parked down at Wal-Mart, where there was security. I talked him out of killing the stupid gangbangers, and they got away with it, since we couldn’t call the police on them. I thought about calling CPS, since the wannabes weren’t much older than me, but I figured they might tip off CPS that the disabled mom who supposedly lived with us didn’t really exist. She was just an ID number the guy who ran the place used so he could rent to Rusty and me and still get his kickback from welfare.

  I gave up trying to get to a mind place and went to the kitchen. The noisy clock on the wall said it’d be a little while yet until Rusty came home. Good thing today was payday, because there was nothing left in the kitchen but some soda crackers, a tub of butter, some ketchup, mustard, a couple tortillas Rusty got leftover from someone’s lunch at work, and a half bottle of flat Sprite. I ate one of the tortillas and left one, in case Rusty wanted it later, but he’d probably stop off for happy hour with the guys from the construction site. He usually did on Friday. He said it kept him in good with the rest of the bunch, which mattered, since we didn’t want anybody asking questions.