The Kindness of Strangers (3 page)

She cleared the kitchen, while Danny continued poring over his vocabulary list. She scraped the uneaten portions into the sink but couldn’t bring herself to grind the chick in the garbage disposal, too. She wrapped the chick in the empty tortilla bag before she set it in the trash can.

When Nate came back downstairs to leave for school, Sarah asked, “Do you want me to drive you? Since it’s raining so hard?” The high school was only a block away, but she wanted to offer something, she didn’t want the argument to be the last words spoken before he left. He didn’t answer, though. He didn’t acknowledge her in any way; he just went out the front door. Sarah’s intention to drive him turned into wanting to run him over.

“How about you, Danny?”

“No, that’s okay,” he said. “I like the rain. But thanks.” Her eyes teared again when he hugged her before he went out the door. He at least wore a raincoat and carried an umbrella. Nate had left with just his sweatshirt hood up. He’d be wet and cold all day. Sarah felt a pang. She should have stopped him. She was a horrible mother.

She stood on the porch and watched Danny walk away up the boulevard. His elementary school was two blocks in the opposite direction from the high school. Oakhaven was so small there were no buses. When Danny waved before turning at the end of the street, she went inside.

Sarah snapped into action in the kitchen. Chopping and slicing were usually meditative tasks for her—time that her mind filled with new ideas and inspiration—but this morning, as she chopped onion, pressed garlic, and grated ginger for the Thai curry, she found her rhythm off. She kept thinking about the dead chick. What was wrong with her? Why had it unsettled her so? Was it just the argument with Nate?

She heated oil in a deep skillet and added her chopped ingredients. This curry was for a book club she catered every month, one of the jobs that was the “bread and butter” of her business, the Laden Table. The Laden Table had first started here in the house when Nate was a baby. Before that, Sarah had been one of the chefs at L’Auberge, a four-star restaurant in town. Once Danny entered kindergarten, she had moved the Laden Table downtown, opening a catering and carryout shop. Every day hundreds of people had wandered in and chosen lunch from her daily-changing menu. She had closed when Roy got sick and sold when he died. Now the Laden Table operated out of her home again. Sarah missed the excitement of the interactions with her regulars—from the Dayton Ballet dancers to the Sheraton Hotel’s shoeshine man to the lawyers from the firm that had been next door.

Gwinn Whitacre, one of Sarah’s former employees she’d been able to keep part-time, had been urging her to reopen the carryout shop. As much as Sarah missed it, she thought it was insane to even consider, as overwhelmed as she felt at the moment. “Simplify,” she said aloud, as she added mushrooms, sweet pepper, and lemongrass to the skillet, tossing and stirring. Her father had always said that to her. She feared she’d forgotten how.

And actually, while the vegetables cooked, she needed to check the amount of sugar-dough flowers already made, as it was time to get serious about Debbie Nielson’s daughter’s wedding cake. Sarah stirred the skillet contents, then dashed down to the basement. In one corner of the basement sat her son’s rabbit hutch, the black-and-white rabbit, Klezmer, blinking at her in the light. On the other side, beyond the storage freezer, were shelves and shelves full of sealed plastic storage containers of sugar-dough flowers. Debbie had ordered a three-tiered spice cake filled with apricot praline cream. It was to be decorated in antique white buttercream icing to match the bride’s dress. Debbie had wanted real flowers on the cake—the same used in her daughter’s bouquet—but Sarah had talked her out of this. There was always someone who ate the flowers, after all, especially at a reception so large, and the chemicals from the flowers tainted the flavor of the cake. So Sarah and Gwinn would cover the cake with cascades and swags of sugar-dough roses, lilacs, orange blossoms, and hydrangea. Sarah could hear herself telling the students in the class she’d taught just months ago, “Don’t wait until the week of your cake project to start making flowers. Flowers can be made and stored for up to six months in advance. If you’re organized and give yourself plenty of time to complete a cake, it can be a work of art.”

Yeah, right. If you’re organized.
Sarah skimmed over the labeled boxes. They had plenty of Gwinn’s lovely roses and rosebuds. Plenty of lilacs. She’d need to get started on the hydrangea, though. As behind as she was, she looked forward to it. She’d stop at the florist and pick up real hydrangea to review. She’d study it, take it apart petal by petal to note the configuration and shape. She prided herself on making the flowers botanically correct, with petals as thin as the real thing.

If she was going to the florist, she might as well check her stock of florist wire and tape. Moving one storage container, she bumped a roll of florist tape off the shelf and it rolled over near the rabbit hutch, behind a bale of straw used for bedding. Sarah cursed and followed it. As she bent to retrieve it, she spied a magazine jutting from under the bale of straw. A magazine that had obviously been hidden. With heavy arms she pulled it out and turned it over. A
Hustler.

Sarah tried to swallow the rage that boiled up her throat.
Breathe.
She opened the magazine to an image of a woman bent over, legs spread, presenting herself to Sarah.

Breathe. Breathe.
What the hell was she supposed to say about this?

She stared at the woman, and as she did, she heard the sizzling in the kitchen. “Shit!” She ran up the stairs, dropping the magazine on the kitchen island, and stirred the smoking skillet. Some of the peppers had stuck to the bottom, but she was able to salvage the rest.

Salvage. Hmm. A vocabulary word. Now she had a sentence for Danny.

She stirred in the coconut milk, the fish sauce, and the Thai red chili paste. Her chest ached.

She’d found a
Playboy
two months ago in Nate’s room, just weeks after finding condoms in his jeans pocket in the laundry. She expected the
Playboy.
He was sixteen, after all, soon to be seventeen. She hadn’t been surprised, or angry—mostly sad at having to navigate this territory without Roy. But
Hustler
? She didn’t care so much that he had it, but for God’s sake, did he have to leave it in the most likely place for Danny to find? It exhausted her to think how she’d ask about this magazine. She was tempted to ignore it, seeing as how they had a platterful of problems already.

She removed the skillet from the heat and covered it. Now all she needed was the seafood. The market that supplied all of the area’s restaurants had just opened.

She couldn’t stop thinking about Nate as she drove over and hunted for what was best in the market that morning. The mussels would look dramatic with their black shells against the creamy pink sauce, but she settled for halibut and shrimp for the book club. Completing the meal would simply require poaching the seafood in the base while the rice cooked.

Nate still hung heavy in her thoughts on her way home when she drove along the Oakhaven golf course and passed the sunny, welcoming house of her friend Courtney Kendrick. This yellow house, with its periwinkle trim and shutters, had been one of her favorites long before the Kendricks had moved into it four years ago.

Sarah slowed the van.

It struck her that she’d come up with only two blessings that morning, so she added Courtney as the third. Courtney had been doggedly devoted to Sarah’s survival in the months following Roy’s death.

Sarah looked at the big house, remembering those daily phone calls.

“Hi. So what did you decide to wear today?” Courtney would ask.

“I’m not dressed.”

“You should put on that pretty green sweater,” her tiny blond friend would declare. “And those black pants you wore to open house. Put those on and come meet me at the Starbucks on Brown Street.”

“No . . . I can’t.” Everything was so impossible then.

“Yes you can. I’ll come get you. I have a break in an hour. Get dressed.”

And Sarah learned that if she didn’t dress, Courtney would come in and
make
her. And drag her by the hand to the car and force her to go drink coffee like a normal person.

Those phone calls: “What have you eaten today?” “How about we get your hair cut?” “Today we’re getting your van an oil change.” “What’s Danny wearing for school pictures tomorrow?”

Sarah blinked away the tears.

Then she blinked again and squinted through the rain.

Courtney’s son, Jordan, walked alone down his long driveway toward the road. Jordan was in Danny’s fifth-grade class. He used to be Danny’s best friend, but in the past couple of weeks, they’d seemed to have had a disagreement that neither Sarah nor Courtney could figure out. It pained both women. Jordan was an odd child, shy and aloof, but Sarah liked him. She was more than a little aware that Danny was odd and shy as well, and that without each other the two boys seemed destined to be outcast loners. Before she’d gotten pregnant, she used to wonder aloud, “What happens if we have the kid no one likes?”

Roy used to kiss her and say, “Then we’ll just love him more, because he’ll need it.”

Courtney worried seriously about Jordan and had told Sarah yesterday that she and Mark were having Jordan tested for Asperger’s syndrome, known to cause the sort of social-interaction handicaps that Jordan seemed to have.

The rain poured as heavy as a waterfall, and Sarah knew that Jordan was more than an hour late to school. She pulled her van into the driveway beside him, and Jordan stopped walking and stared at her. He carried his green backpack in front of him, his arms crossed over it against his chest, as if he expected someone might snatch it from him. The rain matted his blond hair to his forehead. Sarah rolled down her window. “What are you doing out here?”

Jordan looked at her and said, “Walking to school,” as if she were an idiot.

“Where’s your mom?”

“At work.” An ob-gyn, Courtney worked in a private practice as well as at Miami Valley Hospital, the same hospital where Roy had worked.

Sarah frowned. She knew that Courtney drove Jordan to school every morning. “Well, is this good timing or what, then? Get in. I’ll take you.”

But he stood there, as if uncertain. Water ran over Jordan’s face, beading in his lashes. It ran off his earlobes and fingertips and the bottom hem of his blue parka, but he didn’t move. Sarah remembered herself standing in the rain earlier that morning, how good the shocking cold had felt. She looked into Jordan’s face, and he, too, seemed to radiate a sense of new purpose. The wind shifted, and rain poured in the van window, soaking her sleeve. “Come on. Get in,” she said, as gently as she could.

Jordan walked around to the passenger side. He put his book bag on the van floor and climbed in.

“Is your dad at work, too?” Sarah asked.

Jordan nodded. Mark was president of Kendrick, Kirker & Co., a huge PR firm.

“Why are you so late for school?”

Jordan shrugged and looked out the window. “I fell back asleep.”

“Your mom left you alone?”

“She was on call. She had an emergency.”

“Well, we’ll get you there.” Reaching behind her, Sarah pulled a white cotton tablecloth out of the pile she’d packed for the lunch. “Here. Dry off.” He took it from her, and she backed out of the drive. For a moment he just held the tablecloth; then he wiped his face.

Keeping an eye on the road—she’d twice nearly hit deer down here along the golf course—Sarah attempted to elicit some kind of friendliness from this boy. She was never sure if he was just unbearably shy or simply hated talking to her, but she always wanted to
try;
it seemed too cruel to pretend he wasn’t there and drive along in silence.

“I’m cooking for you guys again Friday night,” she said. Tomorrow she’d cater curried chicken on rice noodles, with lime-and-pepper sauce, for three couples at the Kendricks’. Mark was entertaining some clients.

Jordan didn’t answer.

“Those parties are probably boring, huh?” She wanted desperately to fill this quiet, to be nice to him. “Are there ever any kids your age, or is it just grown-ups?”

Jordan looked straight ahead but whispered, “There’s kids.”

“Oh, good. Do you like them?”

He shrugged, then pulled the tablecloth around him, as if cold. Looking at him draped in white like that, Sarah remembered that kids at school mockingly called Jordan “the angel,” partly because he was so obviously the teacher’s pet but mainly because of an incident she’d witnessed at the choir concert rehearsal. The concert was very much a
Christmas
concert, even though the school called it a “holiday” concert, apparently in concession to the non-Christian families like her own. She’d been standing with Danny’s class lined up in the gym waiting their turn to go onstage and practice. They watched the fourth-graders sing “Silent Night,” and the lights changed to reveal a tableau of little girls dressed as angels. Jordan, standing at her elbow, had said, “I wish I were an angel.” He had a way of blurting out the most bizarre statements to no one in particular, and half the time Sarah thought he didn’t
mean
to speak aloud. She was certain he hadn’t meant to that time, as he startled and blushed at the derisive laughter from the kids in earshot.