The Summer Kitchen (29 page)

Rusty clamped his hands to the sides of his head. “Shut up. Just shut up, okay? I don’t want to think about it right now. I’ve gotta work tomorrow.”

“Let’s just
go
. We can use the money from this week’s check to get a new place.” Somehow, I had to talk Rusty into it. This afternoon, before she walked out our door, Mrs. Kaye gave me that look—the one that comes right before somebody decides they gotta get in your business and
do something
about you. As soon as she drove off, I started making plans. For things to work, Rusty and me had to get out of here before Mrs. Kaye decided to call the police or social services, before sweaty Charlie showed up looking for this week’s rent, before Rusty got in a fight, before Kiki and Uncle Len got unstoned and came looking for Opal.

Rusty’s lips twisted into a sneer, like he thought I was a stupid little idiot. “Right! And what’re we gonna do about
her
?” He sailed a hand through the air toward the bathroom, and there was Opal, standing in the doorway with bubbles and water dripping down her skin, her thumb in her mouth, and her big sad eyes looking up. She was holding her doll under her chin, and the doll was wet, too.

“Oh, Opal.” I hurried in there, got a towel, and wrapped her up in it. The doorway was slippery, and I almost fell when I lifted her up. She put her head under my chin, like the doll was under hers, and I felt the water from her hair sink into my T-shirt as we crossed the room. “We’ll take her with us,” I said to Rusty.

“We’re just gonna
take
somebody’s
kid
?”

“She doesn’t want her.” I hoped Opal wouldn’t understand who I meant by
she
and
her
. No kid should ever have to know its mama wants something else more than she wants her own kid. My mama wasn’t perfect, and she had bad taste in men sometimes, but I always knew she loved me and Rusty more than anything. When somebody loves you more than anything, they don’t need to be perfect. I could feel that way about Opal. I
did
feel that way about Opal already. “Kiki’d probably be glad. Then she could do whatever she wants with . . . whoever. She won’t have anything to get in the way.”

Rusty looked sad. He watched Opal, and I could tell she was watching him. I felt her eyelashes brush upward against my neck. “You can’t just take somebody’s kid,” he said again. “It’s illegal, Cass. It’s really illegal.”

I felt my worry spinning into something big and desperate. “We ran away. We took Mama’s truck. That was illegal. We worked it out. We’ve worked it out every step of the way. Nobody’s ever found us. Heck, probably nobody ever came after us in the first place. I bet Roger didn’t even bother to call anybody. Kiki wouldn’t either, I bet. She wouldn’t call anybody.”

Rusty stuck his hands in his jeans pockets, sighed and shook his head. “We can’t. . . .”

“We
can,
” I pleaded. “Come on, Rusty. We can do it. We can take care of her. She’d be like a little sister.”

For a minute, Rusty seemed to think about it. Opal stretched out her arm, and he put his hand up and let her wrap her fingers around it. He had so much tar on his skin, him and Opal were the same color.

My heart beat hard against Opal’s body, and I squeezed my arms tighter around her. If Rusty said no, I wasn’t sure what I’d do. I couldn’t let Kiki take Opal back. I had to keep her safe, but I couldn’t leave without Rusty. Me and Opal needed Rusty to take care of us. “Please,” I whispered, and my eyes started to fill, and I thought,
Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry. You have to seem grown-up. You have to show him you can handle this.
“That guy’ll hurt Opal. He said he’d hurt her. You didn’t see him when he was here. You didn’t hear what he said. We can take care of her.”

Opal let go of Rusty’s hand and wrapped her arms and legs around me, like she understood every word we were saying. She hung on so hard, I felt my ribs squeeze tighter together.

“Sal,” Rusty whispered, and he laid a hand on my hair. “We can’t even take care of ourselves.” His face was long and sorry, and the Adam’s apple in his neck bobbed up and down.

“Yes, we
can,
” I told him. “I’ll get a job. As soon as we move, I’ll get a job.”

Rusty’s fingers squeezed my hair, rubbed it like he used to rub that dog he loved so much. “You’re twelve years old, Sal. You can’t get a job. You need to be in school. We can’t pick up and run off with someone’s kid. When Kiki comes back, I’ll talk to her. She knows she’s gotta ditch that guy. She said it herself.”

“Just because she
said
it doesn’t mean she’s gonna.” Opal started to whimper, and I rocked her back and forth. “Don’t you watch the news? Women say they’re gonna leave all the time, but they don’t. They just keep going back. They just keep doing it. They’re not strong like Mama. Almost none of them are like Mama.”

Both me and Rusty knew that when Mama met my daddy, she was fallin’-down crazy about him. He was a horse trainer and a dirt track jockey, and he had a nice place with horses and a little pond out back. He was good to Rusty, and after they had me, he thought I was just it-on-a-stick. He got me a pink tricycle almost before I was big enough to ride it, and he got Rusty a bike and a little four-wheeler to drive, and he took Rusty fishing and stuff. He made Mama laugh, and paid for nice vacations and stuff.

The day she found out he was paying for all those things by cooking meth in a shed on the back of the place, she packed our bags and left. She said she wasn’t gonna take a chance on losing her kids for anybody, even him. I was too little to remember all that, but Rusty did. Rusty begged and begged to go home, but Mama wouldn’t do it. She told him the three of us had to come first. Period.

“I’ll talk to Kiki when she comes back.” Rusty patted my head, then started off to his room. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll work it out.”

I didn’t have any choice but to let him go. There was no way I was gonna talk him into packing up our things and moving tonight. I’d just have to keep working on him and hope Mrs. Kaye didn’t decide to call anybody about us. If I stopped going down to Poppy’s house, maybe she’d forget. Angel and the Mexican kids could go there and get the sandwiches on their own. I could have Angel tell Mrs. Kaye I took a job somewhere else—the Book Basket, maybe, or I could say Mama was sick and needed me at home. We couldn’t have any visitors, because her immunities weren’t good. . . .

Even while I was making the plans, I felt sad about it. I’d miss Poppy’s house, and helping Mrs. Kaye, and hearing her stories, and having tea parties at our little table in the summer kitchen. But family has to come first, just like Mama always said.
No matter what else happens, the three of us are all that matters. . . .
There were three of us again. Me, and Rusty, and Opal.

“You can’t let Kiki take Opal back to that guy’s house,” I said, before Rusty disappeared into the bathroom with his sweats.

He didn’t answer, just nodded, then shut the door.

I sat down on the sofa with Opal, pulled the sleeping bag over us, and held her while her breath turned long and even. After a while, I fell asleep with her. When I woke up, the apartment was dark, and Rusty’s door was closed. I could hear him snoring softly in his room. The other bedroom door was still open. Opal was wiggling around and poking me on the sofa, so I carried her in and put her in the bed, then went back to the sofa and laid there a while, trying to get back to sleep.

I was sad about tomorrow. It’d be weird, not getting up and going to Poppy’s. It’d be boring, and it’d stink knowing that Angel and the other kids could go down there, while me and Opal stayed home. If Mrs. Kaye came by our apartment, I’d have to holler through the door that Mama was too sick to have anybody come in. I’d feel bad telling her that, after she was always so nice to us. It’d be like when I had to cut loose from the Waffle Shop waitress in the oil patch town, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

In the morning, by the time I woke up, Rusty was gone. I jumped out of the sleeping bag, thinking me and Opal better hurry and head off to Poppy’s house before Angel, Ronnie, and Boo came out. Then I remembered we couldn’t go today, or ever.

Outside it was cloudy, and thunder rumbled far off. The morning glow around the window was gray blue, and even after I turned on the light, the apartment was dark. I squashed a roach in the corner and left it there, where normally I would have cleaned it up. It didn’t seem like it mattered right now.

I tried to read my book, but I couldn’t get my mind into it. I wanted to open the window blind, but I thought I better not. If Kiki and her boyfriend showed up, or if Mrs. Kaye came by, I didn’t want them to be able to look inside.

When Opal got out of bed, she wanted cereal first, and then she wanted to know when we were going to Poppy’s house.

“We’re not going there today. We gotta stay home,” I told her.

She pushed her cereal away, crossed her arms, and made a pout lip.

“You better eat that before it gets soggy,” I said, and she twisted in her chair, lifted up her arms, and clamped them back down again. “All right, but you’re not getting any more. That’s it. You either eat it or you can just be hungry till lunch.”

Opal squeaked and stuck her tongue out at me. I wanted to touch the pepper shaker and pinch that tongue, like Mama used to with Rusty. The pepper taste broke him of sticking his tongue out, that was for sure.

Instead, I shook my finger at her. “You can sit there until you decide to eat, Opal. Don’t you get out of that chair until you finish your cereal. I’m gonna go take my shower.”

I left her there pouting, which was just what Mama would of done. Opal blew a raspberry across the room at me, and I slammed the bathroom door. She whined louder. When I didn’t come back out, she came over and tried to open the bathroom door, then screamed and banged on it like a mini Uncle Len.

“Stop that!” I hollered. “You go back and eat your cereal!” I felt a big lump coming up in my throat, and all I wanted to do was get away. I didn’t want to think about Opal screaming, or Uncle Len pounding on the door, or Rusty looking for Kiki on his lunch hour, or what might happen if he found her, or Poppy’s house, or the summer kitchen, where our picnic table would sit empty with yesterday’s hollyhock dancers slowly drying in the sun.

I turned on the shower and got in. When I closed the curtain, a beetle fell off and landed by my feet. Skittering away, it tried to crawl up the side of the tub. The shower stream caught it and swirled it toward the drain, then around and around while it flailed its feet and tried to grab on. Every time it started to get a hold, the water caught it again and dragged it under. Finally it wasn’t strong enough anymore, and it just quit swimming. The water pulled it down and it disappeared.

The lump in my throat burst open, and I wanted Mama so bad that the wanting squeezed around me until the hot steamy air was too thick to breathe. I pulled it through my throat in a long, slow sob, sat down under the water and let it rain over me, so that I couldn’t tell what was the shower and what was tears.

Like all the other times, the tears came from someplace I didn’t understand, and then they drained away to that place again, a tide rushing in and washing away the sand, then going out again. When I got up, the water was freezing, and Opal was quiet outside the door. I shivered through washing my hair in the cold water, then got out, the air warmer than my skin. My teeth chattered, and I rubbed hard with the towel until my skin was red and raw. The towel smelled like cigarettes, like Kiki. I threw it in the tub, washed it and hung it up to dry.

When I turned off the water, I heard someone knocking on the front door. By the time I got to the living room, Opal’d dragged a chair over and was trying to open the lock.

Fear went through me like lightning. “No, Opal!” I whispered, then hurried across the room and pulled her off the chair. We listened to the knocking together. It was soft, and coming from down low, and I figured it was just Boo.

“We’re sick,” I hollered. “We got the crud in here, and if you don’t want to catch it, you better go away.”

Chapter 17

SandraKaye

Christopher spent the first five days of his summer vacation in the hospital, after showing irregular heart rhythms and difficulty breathing the day he collapsed at school. Under normal circumstances, he would have been released sooner, but Rob insisted he remain until we knew exactly what was in his system and how it got there. His insistence came with the silent insinuation that I wasn’t adequately supervising Chris at home—that since the car incident, I should have been picking him up every day after school and keeping him prisoner. The insurance agent felt so bad when he heard Chris was in the hospital, he stepped up efforts to clear Chris’s name, and came by the hospital personally to tell us the investigator was making progress in debunking the false claims, and he felt certain that everything would be cleared up soon.

Even so, there was still the question between Rob and me of where to lay the blame for Christopher’s current problems. Rob insisted that he needed to be on a tighter leash. “He has to know he can’t just do whatever he wants,” Rob asserted in a whisper as we stood in the corridor near Chris’s hospital room, waiting for him to get dressed to go home. We were both grasping at straws, trying to figure out why Chris would have done something so foolish as to take a combination of medications—Ritalin he got from a friend so he could stay awake and study all night for finals, along with Xanax and OxyContin from our medicine cabinet to take the edge off his emotions. He’d heard about potential combinations from kids at school, who, according to Chris, thought nothing of sharing meds.

During Chris’s time in the hospital, Rob and I had received a crash course in what kids casually referred to as
pharming.
According to Chris’s doctors, the problem of teenagers gleaning prescription medications and then using or trading them was rampant, especially in the suburbs, where medicine cabinets were rife with pills. Because the medications were prescriptions and available at home, kids thought of it as okay.