The Summer Kitchen (28 page)

“Yes.” Cass looked tired, and much older than twelve or thirteen. “Rusty’s just a moron sometimes, that’s all. I gotta clean up this mess. Mama won’t like it.”

“What’chew talkin’ about, Mama?” Angel piped up. “You ain’t got no—”

“Shut up, Angel,” Cass spat. “Just shut up.”

Jerking her chin upward, Angel dropped the drinking glass. It fell to the floor and splintered into more pieces. “Well, fine. You can clean up yo’ own junk, miss big mouth.” She stalked out the door and disappeared.

Opal wiggled drowsily out of my arms and slid to the floor. “Uh-oh,” she said. Steering her around the glass toward the threadbare sofa, I took in the place where Cass was living. It was even worse than the exterior indicated—just a small main room and a tiny kitchen sparsely appointed with crumbling furnishings. The olive linoleum was brown with filth around the edges and under the furniture. In the kitchen, the single counter leaned to one side, and missing patches of Formica formed divots in which food and debris had collected. Around the sink, the counter had rotted through in several spots, so that it was hard to tell what was holding up the sink. Water dripped continuously from the faucet, leaving a long oval of rust and lime. A sleeping bag on the sofa indicated that someone had been using it as a bed, and there was dirty laundry everywhere.

Opal climbed onto the sofa, and something brown and torpedo-shaped scampered from underneath, then disappeared into a crack in the floor. A shiver ran across my shoulders, and the sensation was quickly followed by a growing, angry heat. No one should be living like this.

Cass stopped cleaning and watched me survey the apartment. Her expression told me I was telegraphing my thoughts. She looked nervous and embarrassed.

“I can help you clean up.” My mind spun through the barrage of new information, piecing facts together.
What’chew talking about, Mama?
There was no mother living here.
Yo’ brother girlfriend come out, and they gettin’ it on. . . .
Opal’s mother wasn’t a relative; she was living with Cass’s brother. Cass was living with her brother, some woman who had an abusive ex-boyfriend, Opal, and most likely no one else.

“I can do it.” Filling her chest with air, Cass straightened her shoulders, then squatted down to rake up ice that had been scattered from a McDonald’s cup. “It’s no big deal, okay?”

Opal scooted off the couch, and Cass swung a finger at her. “Opal, stay there! You’ll cut your feet.” Her voice reverberated through the low-ceilinged room and blasted out the door.

I picked up a piece of glass, moved sideways two steps, and set it on the table. “All right, then, I’ll just sit here and we can talk.”

Cass sagged over the McDonald’s cup. “You better go. I’ll get in trouble. I’m not supposed to let people in.”

I sat on the edge of a dining chair, folding my hands between my legs. “Cass, if you’re in trouble . . .”

“I’m not, okay?” Standing up, she faced me. “I’m not. You gotta go before Rusty comes back.” The words ended in a stifled sob, both a plea and a demand.

I closed my eyes, trying to decide what to do. Was I making the situation worse? Could I make it better? “Maybe I could talk to your brother.”

“No!” she wailed, her tears spilling over in streams that she wiped impatiently. “Just go, all right? I’m not in trouble. I’m fine. I just want to be by myself.”

I stood up, vacillating by the door. “Will you and Opal be all right if I go?”

Sagging back to the floor, she answered with a nod.

“Okay then.”
Am I doing the right thing? Is this right?
“I’ll leave, but tomorrow I want to know what’s going on.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew I’d made a mistake. Her body stiffened, and her face took on a cool detachment.

“Yeah, sure. See you tomorrow.”

I knew I wouldn’t see her tomorrow. Not if she could help it. “Same time.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Would you like me to pick you up?”

“No, that’s all right,” she answered blandly. “You better go before Rusty comes back.”

There was nothing more to say but good-bye. I left the apartment feeling defeated and spent the drive back to Plano mentally playing out all the ways tomorrow might develop. None of them were good.

At home, Holly was watching for my return. She was in my garage before I’d finished putting Bobo in the backyard.

The moment I saw her face, I knew something was wrong. “Where have you been?” She sounded almost frantic, and I could tell she’d been pacing her kitchen, waiting for me for a while.

“Holly, what’s wrong?”

“I’ve been trying to call you for
two hours
.” Her face was red, her forehead beaded with nervous perspiration.

“My cell was dead this morning, so I turned it off after I talked to the insurance agent. They’re still investigating the accident, but it looks promising. The other guys can’t keep their story straight, so that’s good for Christopher—”

“Sandra, Chris is in the hospital.”

“Chris is . . . what?” I tried to process the information, but I couldn’t take it in.
Chris is fine. I dropped him at school this morning. . . .

“Chris is in the hospital. Rob’s with him.” Holly slipped her hand under my elbow as if she thought I might collapse. “Get your purse. I’ll drive you.”

Blood, and emotion, and warmth vaporized in my body like the moisture before an atom bomb, and I stood in a dry mushroom cloud as I grabbed my purse and started out of the garage. “What do you . . . what happened? Is he all right?” The day suddenly seemed long and impossible, like a terrible dream.
Chris can’t be in the hospital. . . .

Please say he’s all right. Please tell me he’s all right.

Holly stopped me and looked both ways before we crossed the street.

“Holl? Is Chris all right?”

Holly chewed her lip. “He’s better now. He fainted in the workout room today. They’re not sure what happened—whether it’s related to the accident, or . . . something else.” The way she said
something else
caught my attention.

“What else? Holly, what do you mean? What else?”

She pretended to be busy getting in her car and cleaning out the passenger seat. “You really need to talk to Rob. I’m not sure what they’ve found out.”

“Holly,
what else
? If you know something, I need you to tell me.”

“Rob probably—”

“Holly,
what
?”

Her eyes fell closed for an instant as we backed out of the driveway, then she swiveled to check the road. “Jacey thinks he took something.”

“Something?” I echoed. “What do you mean . . .
something
? What
something
?”

Holly’s fingers kneaded the steering wheel. She pulled her chin into her chest like she had a bitter taste in her mouth. “Jacey saw him with another boy under the bleachers in the gym. They had a prescription bottle.”

“A prescription bottle?” I felt sick. I wanted to push open the door, jump out and run away. “How would . . . why . . . Christopher wouldn’t do . . . He knows better than to take someone else’s prescription. Why would he do that?”

Pausing at the stop sign, Holly turned fully in my direction and met my eyes. “Have you
looked
at him lately? Have you really looked at him? He’s not the same kid.” She clamped her lips closed, as if she were trying not to say anything more. Finally, she spit out, “He told Jacey he’s afraid you and Rob are getting a divorce. He thinks you’ve been out finding a new place to live or that you’re having an affair.”

The words hovered around my head like a foreign language lost in translation. “A divorce . . . what?”

Holly swallowed hard, her lips pale and pinched. “Sandra,” she said finally, “you’re gone all day, every day. You don’t want anyone to know where you are. I called the organ donors network. I know you weren’t there today. You haven’t been there in a week and a half. What’s going on?”

Taking a deep breath as one reality collided with the other, I tried to arrange the truth into some format that would make sense. “Holly, there’s something I need to tell you.”

Chapter 16

Cass

When Rusty came home at the end of the day, he was hotter than a Fourth of July firecracker right after it blows up. He’d drove around looking for Kiki for a while and even went by Kiki’s boyfriend’s house, but nobody was there. He asked about her at Glitters, but they said she hadn’t showed up for work, and the manager was ticked. She still owed him money, and if she didn’t come tomorrow, she was fired.

Rusty finally had to give up looking and go home. Dallas is a big city, after all, and we didn’t know beans about Kiki, or where she might go with that boyfriend, or why she’d go with him at all. “She probably took off with him on a long haul and left us here with her kid,” I said, and Rusty didn’t answer. He sat there at the table with his head in his hands. “What kind of mom takes off without her kid?” I asked. “And with some dude who knocks her around, anyway?”

“Hush up, Cass,” he muttered. “I don’t wanna talk about it.” Who could say why, but Rusty really had a thing for Kiki. I think he would of been less upset if I disappeared.

I made us grilled cheese, and a box of macaroni and cheese, and potatoes with cheese, because Rusty liked cheese. I wanted to get him in a better mood. I had something to talk to him about. I’d sat at the table all afternoon and thought it through. It was clear in my mind, but I wasn’t sure how to bring it up to Rusty.

I waited till Opal’d finished eating, then I ran a teeny bit of water in the bathtub, and let her play in it, because I didn’t want her listening. Even though she didn’t talk much, she understood a lot. I didn’t want her to understand this. Some things, a little kid just doesn’t need to hear. Ever.

Rusty was guzzling down the leftover macaroni, bent close to the pan with the fork moving like the big steam shovel in the coal pits he worked in for a couple weeks one time. He looked up at me when I came back to the table.

I figured I might as well spill it. “I think we should move on. From here, I mean.”

Rusty shoveled in another mouthful of mac and cheese, like he didn’t even hear me. Sometimes he did that when he didn’t want to talk. Tonight, he looked like he didn’t want anybody around. His face was dark with dirt, and strings of sweat had erased little trails from his forehead to his cheeks, so that you could see sunburn underneath. He’d probably been stuck on a roofing crew today. He hated roofing.

Watching him chew, then stir the macaroni, I tried again. “I think we should go. Now. Tonight.” In my head, I had it all worked out. We’d get everything packed up and have it ready, right inside the door. Then later tonight, after the Mexican dudes finished hanging out in the parking lot, and after the lights went out in Charlie’s office, Rusty could go get our truck, pull it up by the Dumpster, throw our junk in, and we’d take off. We could find a rest stop or a park to sleep in, and then in the morning do what we called a
start-over
—find a place to live, find Rusty a job, figure out the lay of the land.

He turned my way, his pale red lashes shadowing his eyes, so that they looked black, not brown. “I gotta work tomorrow, Sal. We didn’t finish the shingles today. We gotta get done before the rain moves in. Supposed to be some big storms coming the end of the week. Man, I hate crawling around on that stinking tar paper.”

As much as I loved my brother, sometimes I could see why his teachers wanted to ring his neck. Talking to him was like being on a cell phone that was way out of range. Only about every third word came through. “I think we should head east to Ft. Worth. If Ray John’s still in Ft. Worth, we’d have a better chance of finding him from there. We can, like, look in the phone books and stuff. If we get a place close to a library, I can search on the Internet some more, like I did in Lubbock. I think if we could be where there’s a library, we could find him.”

Rusty stirred the macaroni, parted it like the Red Sea, and watched it fall back together. He was losing his appetite. Pretty soon, he’d get up, gather his stuff for a shower, and when he was done, he’d crash. We’d be stuck here another night, and another night might be too long. “You tried that before, Sal. It didn’t work.”

“I can try some more.” It was kind of nice that he was calling me
Sal
. If he was mad at Kiki, at least he wasn’t mad at me. “We need a start-over. This isn’t a good place. Nothing’s gone right since we came here.”

Pushing the pan away, he sat back in his chair, letting his arm dangle toward the floor. “We can’t just leave, Sal. What about Kiki?”

“Heck with stupid Kiki.” I spit out her name like it was poison. “If she wants to go back with that jerk, you can’t do anything about it. He’s one big dude, Rusty. You can’t fight him.”

Rusty pushed air between his teeth. “He needs to find out what happens when you take on someone who can hit back. Anybody like that needs his face knocked in.” An angry heat rose up in Rusty’s cheeks and showed in the places where sweat had streaked the tar away.

“You can’t fight him.”

“I can handle it, Cass.”

“Mama wouldn’t—”

“Mama’s not here!” He exploded out of the chair. “Mama’s not here, is she? Mama wouldn’t just stand back and let some dude hit a woman and a little kid. You don’t know the stuff he’s done. You don’t know what Kiki’s told me.”

“She
went
with him again, Rusty.” I stood as tall as I could, but my brother still towered over me, so that I had to look up. I wished I had on Mama’s green shoes. “Did you ever think that maybe she’s just playing you? Did you ever think maybe she’s coming up with a big sad story so you’d feel sorry for her? Every day, she’s got some new excuse why she can’t bring home any money. And last night, when she came in from work, she was stoned, and I know she was stoned. I smelled weed, and she was bumping into everything. She’s got money for weed, but she can’t pay for food or a place? You ever think maybe she’s using us, so she’s got a bed to sleep in and somebody to watch her kid all the time? Maybe she just wanted to make that guy jealous. Maybe she likes it with him. Maybe that’s where she’s supposed to be. You ever think of that?” Even as I was saying it, my mind was telling me,
You’re wrong, Cass Sally Blue. You know what Opal was like after Uncle Len showed up. She was so scared she didn’t quit crying for two hours.