The Kitchen Daughter (14 page)

Ma looks down. This feels so strange to me because I have never met her eyes and had her be the one to look down. I was always the one. Things are different now.

She says, “I’m not going to talk to you about that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s for your dad to tell you. Not me.”

“But is she—Who is she?”

“She’s not anyone, Ginny.”

This is infuriating. “Of course she’s someone.”

“She exists, yes. But—you don’t understand, Ginny. She’s not important.”

“Tell me who she was anyway.”

“Okay,” Ma says. She sighs. “She was a nurse at the hospital with your dad.”

“What was her name?”

“Ginny, how could that possibly matter?”

“I want to know.” I shake the picture at her again, so she knows I’m serious.

“Okay, fine, her name was Evangeline.”

“That can’t be right!” Evangeline, the ghost. Skinny, hairless, terrifying. She cried out against Doc, her love for Doc, her hate for Doc. If she was a nurse at the hospital—if Dad had all these pictures of her—

Ma says, “Why do you look so scared? Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” She reaches out a hand toward me, but stops, so it hangs there outstretched in the space between us.

“Was she … were they …”

“Sweetheart, slow down, be calm. Tell me what you want to say.”

“Is she … did they … is this what you had to forgive Dad for?”

She pushes the hair away from her face again, shaking her head, looking up at me. “Your father never needed my forgiveness for—What are you asking, Ginny?”

“I just said it. Is this what you had to forgive Dad for?” I brandish the picture.

“You don’t understand at all, Ginny,” she says.

“Then help me understand!” I want to fling the picture down but I don’t want to damage it. I want to throw something, hard. I can feel my arms tingling, my throat closing. I slap my free hand down on the butcher block so hard it stings. I focus on that feeling so I don’t crumble.

“I can’t,” she says. “Your dad has to be the one to help you.”

“But I can’t talk to him! I can only talk to you!”

With her frustratingly cool, gentle spearmint voice, Ma responds, “Ginny, your dad never wanted to talk about this with you and I respected that. I still respect that.”

I shout, “But you’re both dead! I’m still alive! Don’t you think what I want is more important?”

She looks me in the eye and says, “No.”

This time I look down. I put the imaginary grape in my mouth again. I set the photo down safely, pick up the spoon, stir the gravy. I can still smell it, and as long as I can, we can keep going. I have to make myself be calm, so I do. I make myself speak slowly. I say, “There was a letter from Dad asking for your forgiveness …”

“What letter?”

“Up in the chimney. In the bedroom fireplace.”

“I never—Oh.” The tension in her shoulders shifts. “I guess I did put a letter up there. And forgot about it. If I’d remembered I would’ve gotten rid of it. That was … that was a long time ago.”

“But I found it. I have it. It asks your forgiveness, and all I want to know is, was an affair with Evangeline the thing he wanted your forgiveness for?”

The spearmint voice again. “Sweetheart, that’s none of your business.”

“Of course it’s my business! You’re my parents.”

“No, that doesn’t make it your business, not at all.”

I’m confused. “But you said Dad could talk to me about it?”

“That’s different. That’s totally different.”

“You don’t make any sense.”

Ma says, “Sweetheart, I love you so much, but you just don’t understand and there’s no way I can explain any of this to you.”

“You know I’m not stupid,” I say, still clutching the spoon, unable to let go.

“Of course you’re not!”

“Why don’t you think I’ll understand?”

Ma says, “Just trust me.”

I say, “No.”

The smell is getting faint. Stirring doesn’t help.

“Ginny. We don’t have time for this. I’m trying to tell you. About Amanda.”

“Always Amanda!” I shout.

“No, you don’t understand. Listen to me. Are you listening?”

I look straight at her, and listen.

She says, “It’s very important that you not let Amanda,” and her mouth is moving but I can’t hear what she’s saying and too late I notice her edges are translucent like an aspic and she’s gone.

I sit down hard on the kitchen floor, reeling, exhausted. I spent too much time asking all the wrong things.

When she’s gone I want her here. When she’s here I want her gone. She’s right, I’m difficult, and in many ways. It’s all too overwhelming. I lean against the wall next to the shelves of cookbooks and stare at the door of the oven. The light inside is still on. The oven door is so clean I can see the outline of the bulb. I wonder what the oven door at Amanda’s looks like. I wonder if Amanda has ever even used her oven. At her wedding shower she opened up a box with a big pot in it and said,
But the only thing I know how to make is reservations!
Everyone laughed, except Ma, and me.

I could have asked Ma anything. She was right here. But I fell into the old habits, the old patterns, right away. To be fair, so did she. I don’t want to blame her because there shouldn’t be any blame. But it makes me sad, and it makes me resigned. There’s not much point in trying to change, it seems. I really thought there might be.

Getting up from the floor, I reach for the stove. I turn up the heat under the gravy, stirring, hoping. The smell is faint but unmistakable, rich and porky and smelling like home. It doesn’t bring her back. Nothing brings her back. The gravy cools into a thick sludge. When I was a kid I ate it fast. First I had to be sure there were an equal number of sausage lumps on each piece of biscuit, but then I didn’t pause until it was gone. Today I eat three helpings of it over biscuits, sitting on the floor of the kitchen, hoping in vain with each bite.

Midnight comes in to nudge against my bare feet, and I let her lick the last of the gravy from my fingers. Stroking her long, soft fur helps me push away the thoughts that are boiling in my head. I can’t be at a boil right now. I just can’t. Amanda is coming back in just a few hours and I have no answers, only questions.

Ma was on that step stool, in this kitchen, close enough to touch. As long as I can still bring her here, she isn’t gone. I guess this is a good
thing and a bad thing. It still feels like they’re about to come back. Maybe they will. That’s impossible, but ghosts are impossible. Lots of things are impossible. And yet they happen.

Have I succeeded, or failed? I didn’t bring Nonna, but I brought Ma, and her message is almost the same. I know a little more than I did before. Another piece of the puzzle.

Amanda. Stop Amanda. I don’t know what I’m supposed to stop her from doing, but I know where to start.

The house. Right now, Angelica doesn’t scare me. Right now nothing does. Right now nothing could hurt more than having my mother’s ghost appear in our kitchen, immediately size up the situation, and ask how my sister is doing. So now is the time for me to do things that would normally make me run, desperate for the solace of the closet floor.

Angelica’s number is still on the refrigerator, right where Amanda stuck it with a magnet a week ago. I dial it. She doesn’t pick up. I don’t leave a message. I decide this isn’t a problem. She’ll probably come by with more unwelcome visitors soon, and I can tell her then.

In the meantime, I perform a thorough search of the kitchen cabinets. Physically crawling inside a cabinet at twenty-six is not like crawling inside a cabinet when you’re five. For one thing, when you’re five, it’s awesome. For another, when you’re five, you actually fit.

But Dad tucked his scotch bottle back here to hide it. It’s not out of the question that other things might be hiding. So I kneel down and empty the cabinets of their All-Clad and their Le Creuset and of Grandma Damson’s long-neglected, well-seasoned cast-iron pan. And I thrust my head in, working my shoulders through the narrow gap, to see for myself what’s all the way in the back. I reach an arm and trail my fingers along the seam where the back wall and bottom shelf of the cabinet meet.

The most interesting thing I find is the crank for the pasta press.
Which is good, because now I can make pasta. The happy thought distracts me. I love to make pasta, and it’s been ages. I think there’s some semolina from Talluto’s in the back of the cupboard. I picture the soft, stretchy dough becoming relaxed and slick. Absorbing flour. Long, translucent sheets become piled-up ribbons of tagliatelle. My stomach gurgles. In the tight space the sound is magnified.

Even from deep inside the wooden box, I can hear the front door open. There are voices, besides. At first I think about staying down. Hiding. But this is unreasonable. I may feel invisible sometimes, but with half of me sticking out in plain sight, I’m not.

I inch out of the cabinet, back pockets first, careful not to hit my head. By the time I get up and smooth my hair down, they’re in the living room already. Angelica and two women. I watch them from the doorway to the kitchen. They haven’t seen me yet. The taller woman wears a gray suit like Angelica’s navy one, and shoes so tight I can see her flesh swelling along every seam. The other woman wears all black and waves her hands around. Her fingernails are red and gleaming, perfect long ovals, like Hot Tamales. Amanda’s look like that sometimes. It’s a manicure. I’ve never had one. I wouldn’t want someone’s hands on my hands like that. Picking and scratching and rubbing while I squirm. It couldn’t end well.

Angelica says, “You can see how high the ceilings are in here, aren’t they great? It just lights up on sunny days.”

“Lovely,” says the one in tight shoes.

Angelica points up and shows them the scrollwork along the ceiling, which makes them ooh and aah. It’s enough. More than enough.

“Excuse me,” I say to the three women.

“Hi, Ginny,” says Angelica. “Sorry, I thought you were out. We’ll be here just a few minutes.”

“No,” I say.

The woman in the suit says, “No?”

“No?” asks the woman with the red fingernails.

“No,” I say again.

No one responds.

After a moment Angelica says, “This is one of the current owners, ladies.” She sounds so completely like Amanda, down to the way she takes a breath.

I say, “I’m sorry, this house is not for sale.”

The one in the suit says, “Did someone beat us to it? Let us make a counteroffer, at least.”

“It’s not for sale.”

She says, “Then why did we trek all the way over here?”

“I’m sorry,” I say again.

Angelica says, “No, no, don’t worry, Jen. It’s just a small misunderstanding.”

“I’m sorry you came all this way for nothing,” I say.

“Ginny!” says Angelica, her orange juice voice pitching higher, into the grapefruit range. “We can have this conversation later. Just let me finish showing Jennifer and Holly around.”

“No. Please leave now.”

The one in the suit says, “Okay, this is too weird. Hol, let’s go.”

“You have a beautiful home,” says the other one, waving her hand over everything as she follows her friend toward the door.

Angelica says, “I’ll call you later! So sorry! We’ll clear this up!”

The door closes and I hear heels clicking against the sidewalk.

I know I’ve been rude. Knowing it doesn’t change anything. I can’t take this anymore, and some things are more important than being polite. There used to be a rule, but now it doesn’t apply.

Angelica says, “Ginny, that wasn’t very nice.”

I mumble all my words out in a rush. “I know. I just want you to stop, okay? No more people. We’re not going to sell. I’m staying.”

Angelica says, “That’s not what I discussed with Amanda. I was
given to understand the two of you wanted to sell, and you’d be moving in with her.”

“No.”

She says, “That was the plan.”

Trying not to sound agitated, I tell her, “The plan has changed.”

“I’m not sure you can do that,” she says. She is taking care to pause before and after everything. So am I.

“It’s half my house too,” I say. From the legal perspective, ignoring all others, that’s true.

Angelica says, “I’m going to have to speak with your sister about this.”

“I understand.”

“Why don’t we call her right now?”

“She’s busy at home. Brennan has to go back to L.A. Tonight.”

“I could still—”

“Don’t bother her,” I say, and with some effort, I raise my eyes to Angelica’s face and stare directly at her eyes. They are brown, and narrow, and not like Amanda’s at all. One one thousand. Two one thousand.

She looks down.

“Well. Okay. Anyway. I’ll talk to Amanda.”

“Okay.”

I close the door behind her.

Was I successful? I don’t know. My hands are tingling a little. My stomach feels empty and hollow. At least I’m not in a panic. I can walk from room to room without diving into the closet or losing myself in new iterations of the Continental Cuisine dinner party menu. (If the dessert were ANZAC biscuits or a pavlova, the meat course could be a beef daube, or a carbonnade flamande … there are so many possibilities.)

Shouldn’t use the word
normal.
There’s no such thing, I remind myself. A line from the Normal Book:
Normal is a setting on the dishwasher.
But still, for once, I wonder if that’s how I’m feeling, right now. Not happy, not sad. Just … normal?

I put the black-and-white pictures of Evangeline under the carpet in my closet again. I can’t think about her right now. I can’t make sense of what Ma told me. The only thing I can do is look for a recipe Dad wrote so that I can see him and ask him these questions. I pull book after book from the shelves of the library, leafing through them, sliding them back in place. Nothing else turns up. Not a single thing.

I go back to the kitchen, but I think I’ve finally looked everywhere. Nothing else behind the glass doors of the cookbook cabinets. Nothing among the pots and pans. Nothing in the junk drawer. An unbent wire hanger swept from side to side reveals nothing lodged under the fridge. My father has never written anything resembling a recipe on anything resembling a piece of paper. It’s torture to know that whatever this is, a gift or a curse or both, his is the ghost I will never be able to see.