Life Sentences (19 page)

“Just checking my e-mail,” he said. “I hope that's okay.”

“I thought you had a BlackBerry.” He had, in fact, placed it on the nightstand while they were having sex, and it had vibrated intermittently throughout.

“They're great for reading e-mails, but I'm too fumble-fingered if I have to reply more than yes or no. However, it looks as if the office survived without me.”

She straddled him, blocking his view of the computer, rubbing his neck.

“Careful,” he said. “You'll make me late.”

She could indeed, and it was tempting. But it was enough, for now, to know she had that power. She wouldn't have it for long. That was how these things worked, although this didn't feel like anything she had known before. Still, it was important not to take advantage, not to make trouble for him. And important to show him that she had the self-control to break away as needed. She gave him a long, fluttering kiss, running an index finger along his earlobe—then stopped before it went too far.

“You're right,” she said. “You have to go.”

“You're wicked,” he said, but she heard nothing but admiration in his voice.

 

THE CHARLES BENTON BUILDING,
named for the longtime city and state budget adviser, was an incongruous presence on the stretch of strip clubs known as the Block. Local rumor held that Benton had insisted it be built there in hopes of destroying the Block. The more extreme version claimed his wife had once worked as a dancer at one of the clubs before embracing a life of Christian piety. Gloria, aware of the chronically inaccurate gossip about her life, had trouble putting stock in any of this, but it was interesting, strolling past the famed Two O'clock Club to go look up campaign finance reports.

“You can get those online,” the clerk said. She was young and bored, so young that it hadn't occurred to her that her job might be less boring if she actually welcomed opportunities to do it. That was one of the lessons of youth: It wasn't work that was boring but the lack of it.

“I know,” Gloria said. She didn't, in fact, but she had ventured down here and hated to think of it as a wasted trip. “But that's only for the more recent reports, right? I'm looking for a report from 1979.”

“Nineteen seventy-nine?” She made the date sound as distant as 1776 or 1492.

“Yes—but also—” Gloria did the math in her head. The city races
were in odd years, but the state election calendar ran on an even schedule, with the senate up for reelection every four years. “Nineteen ninety. And 1998.”

“That might take a while,” the clerk said. “I might not be able to get it by the end of the day.” She pointed to the clock, which showed it was almost four.

“I'll have someone from my office pick them up tomorrow.” She paused. “It will be someone from the office of Gloria Bustamante, okay? Picking up the campaign records for Julius Howard. Gloria Bustamante's office, state senator Julius Howard's finance reports, for the senate race, but also for city council president.”

She hit both names hard, hoping the girl was a gossip or that there was someone lurking nearby who would find this interesting. Let another rumor fly out of the Benton Building, she decided. Let them know that she was snooping, not that she had any idea what she might find. The fact of Reg's daughter had hit her hard. She had a hunch—nothing more—that someone else would be even more shocked to see this miniature version of Donna Barr. Excuse her—Donna Howard-Barr.

CALLIE SET OUT HER SUPPLIES
as she did every Thursday morning now. Butter to soften, eggs to reach room temperature. Flour and sugar were always at the ready, in canisters labeled as such. She loved those canisters, which she had purchased from QVC with her first-ever credit card. She loved how it had felt, going into Lowe's when she first moved over to the shore and buying the things she needed as she needed them. Back then, she hadn't envisioned how important flour and sugar would become to her, and she might choose differently if she were outfitting her kitchen today. The porcelain containers were pretty but heavy, and she lived in fear of dropping one of the lids and breaking it. Yes, she could afford to buy a new set, or superglue the broken lid, if such a
thing were to come to pass. But she never got over that fear of breaking things.
You clumsy child,
her mother would say to her, as if Callie were cursed, possessed by a demon that made her drop and spill and trip.
You stupid child.
Now her mother's hands shook and she often dribbled food and liquid down her own front, pretending all the while she didn't notice. If Callie said, “Mama, there's a spot of juice on your robe,” Myra Tippet replied, “No, there's not.”

Callie hated lying. She knew most people would find that funny, given that it was the general perception of things that she was the biggest liar that ever was, and worse. But she did not believe silence was a lie, on a par with false words. Long before she had taken refuge in silence, she had made this distinction. Her mother had been adamant that Callie never lie, not to her. Callie didn't, but she refused at times to give her mother the evidence she required in order to punish her.
Who ate the peanut butter? Who left the towel on the floor?
Her mother would shake her and shake her and shake her, but Callie wouldn't even cry. As long as she didn't say any words, she wouldn't be a liar.

What should she bake this morning? She had been thinking about one of her more complicated recipes, ginger cookies frosted to look like half moons, but the children liked simpler things. She flipped through a new cookbook, one borrowed from the library, and found a recipe for strawberry cupcakes. Too early for fresh strawberries, but she had frozen, and the recipe said that was okay. Not preferable, but okay. Once, she would have been wracked with doubt over such a choice. The instruction
Season to taste
almost left her in tears. How could she be trusted to make such a momentous decision on her own? How could she leave it to her taste, her mouth, so clearly inferior to everyone else's?

When she first started baking, Callie had watched the various cooking shows on television and treated their words as gospel. Then she had realized that there was a multitude of small disagreements as one traveled from the Church of Martha to the Church of Paula to the Church of That Italian Girl Whose Name She Could Never Quite Get. She
began to check out cookbooks at the local library, looking for one authority she could respect, someone with standards yet not overly fussy. No one was right. Again, it was that chiding quality, the smug murmur of the playground all over again.
You can do it that way, but you should do it this way.
She almost found the guide she was looking for in this British woman, but then she saw her on television and decided she was too beautiful and poised. A woman like that could never really understand someone like Callie, what went on in her little neat-as-a-pin kitchen, her messy mind.

Months went by before Callie realized she could, in fact,
buy
a cookbook if she desired. More than one. Other than her time at community college, she had never purchased a book for herself. She drove over to Salisbury, where there was a Barnes and Noble. The selection overwhelmed her and she went outside and sat in her car for a while, fighting the urge to turn around and go home. Once, only once, when she was twelve, she had been inside Donna Howard's house and sneaked upstairs, where she had thrown open the closet doors and looked at the clothes hanging there. How did someone ever choose from such a bountiful array? The bookstore reminded her of that feeling. It had been much easier at the little library, taking what was there. She had never even put a book on hold. Eventually, she persuaded herself to go back inside the bookstore and emerged with not only a cookbook but a coffee drink, which had required almost as much in the way of decision making.

The book she had chosen was fat and bright yellow.
How to Cook Everything,
it promised. No photographs, just simple line drawings, and written in a style that reminded her of her favorite teacher, back in junior high, a biology instructor who explained things in such cheerful, confident tones that Callie didn't stop to think if a task was hard or difficult, or even that biology was a science and she hated science. This book had the same kind of brisk you-can-do-it attitude. She found herself speaking to the author, Mr. Bittman—she couldn't imagine using his first name, although they were probably not that far apart in age—as she worked. “Must I use milk in my omelet, Mr. Bittman?” “Yes, Callie,
it does make a difference.” “What are your thoughts about cake flour, Mr. Bittman? Piecrusts?” “I believe in using all butter in piecrusts.” Although she had a radio and a television in her kitchen, she worked in silence, the better to commune with her teacher.

In the early days, she had tossed out the things she made, feeling wasteful, not sure what else to do with them. She liked baking sweet things, but she didn't have much of a sweet tooth, strange to say. The seven years in jail had taken a toll on her digestive system and she found she could eat only simple things, in small amounts. A piece of fruit or a cup of yogurt at breakfast, soup at lunch, a sandwich at dinner. She learned from Mr. Bittman how to expand her menu. She roasted a chicken and marveled at how good it tasted, then stretched it out for days—cold chicken for lunch, chicken salad with homemade mayo. She squeezed a lemon wedge over a piece of fish, broiled, not fried. But she felt she must bake at least once a week, and she had no idea what to do with all that food.

She tried to give her baked goods away, attempted to interest local shops and food pantries, only to run into all sorts of rules and regulations. Eventually, she found a private Christian school down toward Cambridge that allowed her to sell her treats at lunchtime and donate the profits back to the school. Callie had a feeling that even this arrangement was vaguely outlaw, susceptible to being shut down by the health department at any moment. And she wasn't sure that she wanted to get in too deep when it came to the school's beliefs. They struck her as the kind of Christians who were a little short on forgiveness, who would not want to consort with her if they knew about her past. She had even worried, for a moment, that her name registered with the principal, but that was pure paranoia on her part. If her first name hadn't been shortened, all those years ago, it might have been more memorable. But, bless Tisha, she had been Callie since she was nine, and while it wasn't the most ordinary name, it could slip by where Calliope never did. It had been strange, a month back, to hear that version of her name again. She had thought—maybe hoped, to be honest—
that something might happen. What, she didn't know. Something, anything, to relieve the sameness of her days, not that different from jail when you got down to it. Dull days, haunted nights.

The cupcakes were almost too easy to make. She paged through the book, the kind filled with stories and gorgeous photographs, more incredible than any fairy tale Callie had known as a child. Fairy tales, with their evil people and inexplicable behavior, made perfect sense to Callie. A cookbook where every food memory seemed to be a happy one—that was something she couldn't quite fathom. Hadn't anyone else ever dropped a fast-food burger and had it snatched from her hand, told she couldn't eat it because it had touched the ground? Didn't anyone else ever spill her sweet tea? She couldn't imagine buying this book. Besides, she had yet to be disappointed by Mr. Bittman. He had promised to tell her how to cook everything, and she had yet to find anything she wanted to cook that he couldn't help her with. Callie was big on promises, too. She kept the ones she made, no matter how often others broke their promises to her.

Why hadn't she baked for her boys, either of them? Of course, Donntay didn't live long enough to eat solid food. Why hadn't she been able to keep a spick-and-span house as she did now? Was it simply a matter of being older? Or was it also about having money? Could she have had money before? But she had never asked, and even now, she took it with reluctance. She wasn't a gold digger, and despite what some people thought, her pregnancies had not been an attempt to trap or embarrass anyone. But she had been overwhelmed by motherhood, unprepared. And something more. Once, when Gloria made her talk to a psychiatrist, Callie had tried to describe the feeling, akin to living in an airless tunnel. In the weeks after her boys were born, she couldn't quite breathe and she felt as if her eyelids were closing of their own accord. Not because she was tired, necessarily, although she was exhausted.

Of course, she was brokenhearted, too, but she couldn't tell that part, could she? Oh, she knew what Gloria promised, how she could tell
her or the psychiatrist anything and it would be held confidential. Anything, of course, except the circumstances of what really happened that morning, the day that Donntay died.

She packed the cupcakes into the boxes she now kept on hand and drove down to the school, her car fragrant with strawberries. The boys hung back at first, but the girls went crazy for those pink cakes and the boys soon realized it was pink or nothing. She charged fifty cents, which meant thirty-six dollars for the school. The principal said Callie could deduct it all from her taxes if she kept records, but Callie didn't take deductions. With a paid-for house and Delaware's low property taxes, it didn't pay for her to fill out the longer form. Besides, that would have been another lie, claiming she was doing charity when she was really baking to hold on to her own sanity.

Driving home, she thought about the cake that had been served at Donna Howard's end-of-school party. Instead of the usual sheet cake, it had been more like a wedding cake, multiple layers in a hard sheen of frosting, a garden of flowers spilling down its side. Tastewise, it had been disappointing. The flavors were too grown-up for kids, Callie realized now. Could she make such a cake? It wouldn't do, not for the school, but the challenge appealed to her. She had come a long way in the five years since she had been amazed to learn that creaming butter did not, in fact, mean adding cream to butter. She could make a layer cake, but what would it take to create one of those hard-candy icings, more like armor than sugar? She would have to consult Mr. Bittman. She imagined him standing next to her, his voice soothing and mellow, reaching in to show her a technique. The librarian had said there were videos, that Mr. Bittman had a blog that Callie could read on the library computers. But Callie had her version of the man and she didn't want anything to intrude on that. She would make the cake and take it to her mother's nursing home, where the staff was always grateful for her treats.

With every spin of her hand mixer, with every egg cracked and every cup of flour sifted, she told herself that she was making a lie true.