The Summer Kitchen (5 page)

I checked the answering machine for messages. I’d made my weekly call to the Dallas Police Department that morning to check on Poppy’s case. As usual, there was no return call. After only six months, it didn’t seem that they should be letting the case go cold, but I knew they were—not because they didn’t care, but because their resources were tied up with investigations that looked more promising. It’s hard to solve a crime when the only witness is a woman passing by in her car at forty miles an hour, a hundred feet away. Two males in hooded sweatshirts. She thought they were young—maybe teenagers. One of them had struggled with Poppy, and he fell. . . .

I stopped before the scene could play out in my mind again. Bobo scratched at the patio door, pressed his nose to the glass, and wagged his tail as I walked into the media room. He whined softly, tipping his head to one side, nudged his Frisbee, then gave me a pleading look through the half-black, half-white face that had inspired Jake to name him.
Bobo,
for silly or foolish, like a clown. Jake had been studying Spanish in school the year Poppy surprised the boys with the border collie puppy on Christmas Eve.
Every boy oughta have a dog once in his life,
Poppy had said.
Good dog’ll get a boy through a tough spot quicker than all this therapy they do on TV nowadays.
He had looked at Jake when he said it. Perhaps he knew that, as a teenager, Jake was beginning to struggle with the facts of his adoption.

Poppy had prevailed in the argument about the dog, even though Rob had protested that we didn’t have time for a pet. There was never any saying no to Uncle Poppy, and for the most part Rob knew better than to try. If we said something Poppy didn’t agree with, he pretended his hearing aid batteries were dead. On Christmas Day, Rob scoured available stores for batteries and bought Poppy an entire box, wrapped up as a joke. Rob laughed and said he wanted the hearing aid fixed before Poppy showed up with a pony. By then, Bobo was a fixture in Jake’s lap, and we all knew the puppy wasn’t going anywhere. The puppy grew into a dog that ate everything from pool floats to extension cords, but it didn’t matter because Jake loved him so.

Now Bobo was a sad reminder of Jake’s absence. Outside the window, he picked up his Frisbee, dropped it off the steps, and watched it clatter to a stop, as if he were trying to figure out why it wouldn’t fly anymore.

After turning down the TV, I stretched out on the sofa, so that I’d hear Christopher and Rob if they came in. When I woke up, the garage door was grinding downward. Christopher passed by in the hall, his backpack slung over one shoulder.

“Hey,” I said, my voice scratchy.

Christopher froze midstride, his body stiff and reluctant. Lately, if he could get away with it, he went straight to his room and shut the door. These days we were all in some way toxic to each other, without meaning to be. The sadness in each of us was so palpable that there was no way to be together without seeing it, sensing it, tasting its bitterness.

“Hey.” Christopher gave a weary little smile that conveyed no bit of the gregarious high school junior who, not so long ago, had been telling knock-knock jokes and doing stand-up comedy in our living room.

“Did Dad come in?” I asked, mostly for Chris’s benefit. I knew Rob would probably crash at the hospital, then get up, wash and change in his office, and go back to work. He seldom came home two nights in a row anymore. It was easier for him to remain at the hospital, entrenched in problems that could be managed. There was no managing Poppy’s death and Jake’s disappearance, no easy recovery plan that could be written out and carefully followed. There was only a nebulous grief that moved through the house like fog.

“Uh-uh.” Christopher shook his head, wisps of blond hair falling over his eyes. “Want me to turn on the alarm before I go up?” His lanky body twisted as he looked over his shoulder toward the coat closet. Six months ago, it would never have occurred to him to wonder whether the alarm was on or off, because he knew his dad or Jake would handle it.

“In a minute,” I said, standing up and crossing the room to the doorway. His hazel eyes flicked away, as if he wanted to be somewhere else. “Did you have a good study night?” Lately, it seemed as if Christopher’s life was one constant homework session. His course load this semester had him cracking the books at all hours.

“Yeah.” He sighed, stretching his neck. “Semester physics final cram.” His lip curled with just a hint of the Christopher who hated math and all things related. Music, art, literature, and a host of sports had always been more his thing. This semester, he’d switched tracks and begun working hard to get the background that would be needed for premed.

“Tough stuff,” I sympathized. Christopher came by his math aversion naturally.

“Yeah.”

“Wish I could offer to help you with that.” I felt a sudden yearning for all the times I’d sat on Christopher’s bed, repeating spelling words and review questions for tests. Jake had always been an independent student, but Christopher required extra attention.

He hiked his backpack higher on his shoulder. “I got it. It’s just hard finding someone who can explain it so it makes sense.”

A flash of thought moved between us so quickly neither of us could stop it, so clearly it might as well have been spoken out loud.
If Jake were here, he could help.

The unspoken reality made us step apart and look away.

“I’m gonna go on up to bed. I’ll hit the alarm,” Christopher said, and I nodded, then swallowed the emotions in my throat.

“All right, sweetheart. Love you.”

“Love you too, Mom.”

I turned off the TV, then followed Christopher upstairs and took a sleep aid I’d gotten from the health food store, even though using it made me feel like a failure. Growing up in a house with my mother would have made anyone leery of both pills and alcohol. The herbal stuff seemed harmless enough, though, and it put me to sleep. Most nights I dreamed of Jake. He was always standing in the upstairs hall, near his bedroom door. I’d move slowly toward him, saying, “You’re home. You’re safe. Thank God.”

In the dream, he nodded, his dark hair falling over the twinkling brown eyes I’d loved since the moment a Guatemalan nun had led him into a little room, stood him in front of us, and introduced us as
su nueva madre y el padre.
It was hard to tell if Jake understood or not, but he looked up at the nun and nodded, his face very serious, very wise for a three-year-old. She put his hand in mine and he stood very still. Later, he would tell me that he thought I was going to take him to the mother he remembered. When we went to the airport and got on the plane, he thought she must be a long way away, maybe living in the sky in heaven, and that was where we were going.

I fell asleep thinking of Jake and wondering where he was now, and why, six months after he’d abandoned his car at the airport and bought a ticket to Guatemala, he still hadn’t called home. I prayed halfheartedly as I drifted off that tonight would be the night the phone would ring and wake me up, and it would be him. But after six months of silence, I knew better than to set expectations. A prayer that went unanswered yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that doesn’t find much hope today, either.

In the morning, when I awoke, for just an instant I thought Jake was down the hall in his room, and then I came to reality. I considered staying in bed.
Sure, be just like Mother,
a voice whispered inside me.
Lie here and medicate yourself until you don’t know what day it is.
As always, just the thought was enough to pull me upright, out of bed, and into the bathroom to get dressed. All of my life, there had been the underlying fear that one step down the slippery slope of substance abuse could land me in the pit of dependency and denial that had swallowed almost every member of my family. When I was growing up, Uncle Poppy and Aunt Ruth were the only normal relatives I knew. They were the reason I understood that what my family silently deemed as acceptable wasn’t acceptable at all.

Downstairs, there was no sign that Rob had come and gone, and Christopher had left early again.

I contemplated the day as, across the street, Holly and her twins climbed into the van and headed off to school. So far, neither of the twins had shown any interest in getting drivers’ licenses, and Holly wasn’t pushing it. She called from her cell phone as she was threading her way through Plano traffic. Holly was always multitasking.

I told her about the meeting with the real estate agent.

“Want to grab a Starbucks this morning?” she offered.

The cabinets at Poppy’s house flashed through my mind. “I think I’m going to hang out here and climb Mount Laundry.”

“Yuck. Starbucks is better.”

“I know,” I agreed, and even as I said good-bye, I couldn’t put a finger on the reason I’d lied. Holly would have willingly dropped her plans and gone with me to help paint, or act as bodyguard and baby-sitter, but I wanted to spend a last day at Poppy’s house by myself. I wasn’t sure why.

The question perplexed me as I cleaned the kitchen, then gathered some paintbrushes and a can of off-white semigloss left over from Chris’s one-act play project at school. Tucking them into the trunk like contraband, I checked for signs of life at Holly’s house before backing out and heading down the street.

Guilt trailed me as I drove across town. If Holly found out where I was, she’d be hurt. She would think I was taking a step backward, doing what I’d done in the first few months after Jake left—sneaking off by myself so I could drive to the SMU campus and sit on the bench across from his fraternity house. Sometimes I’d stay there for hours watching the kids come and go, halfway believing that if I waited long enough, Jake would be one of them. He’d be back in premed, studying calculus or designing rockets in his head as he walked home from class. Watching all the other kids come and go, I’d be filled with the bitter heat of envy. Their parents could pick them up for lunch anytime they wanted.

I hadn’t gone to the campus to sit for three months now. Not since Holly found out about it. Having to admit what I was doing made it seem pathological and pointless. The last thing Rob or Christopher or even Holly needed was to worry that I was going off the edge. I stopped driving to the campus and filled my time stuffing envelopes and answering phones for the organ donor network, checking in with the police, and finally taking care of cleaning out and selling Poppy’s house for Mother, who, thank God, remained entrenched in Seattle with Maryanne, where the two of them could share Valium and wine chasers while comparing symptoms of illnesses, real and imagined.

If anyone found out I was painting the cabinets at Poppy’s house, that’s the excuse I’d give. I was just filling time so as to keep from ending up like Mother and Maryanne. Poppy’s house needed work, and who knew if the next residents would be able to afford renovations.

Turning the corner onto Red Bird Lane, I noticed that Andrea had put up the real estate sign. It leaned to one side, Andrea’s name swinging forlornly off the bottom. The neighborhood was silent, the kids probably off to their last few days of school before summer break, the older residents locked in their homes behind burglar bars and dilapidated chain-link fences. I remembered when the neighborhood was filled with activity—children on bicycles, mothers pushing baby strollers to the little park across the creek from Poppy’s house, men mowing lawns, grandmothers and grandfathers sitting on porch rockers, waving as people drove by. Now the street was cloaked in stillness, the cracked sidewalks seamed with spires of grass, the windows opaque with cardboard and aluminum foil, porches only places to dump the rotting carcasses of old furniture.

Painting the cabinets in Poppy’s house was probably pointless, truth be told. The people who moved in here most likely wouldn’t care.

A lump rose in my throat, and I swallowed hard. Poppy loved this home, where he’d built a life with Aunt Ruth. He would have wanted it to go to a new owner looking as it had back when he and Aunt Ruth had the showplace of their little street.

In all reality, I didn’t have anything better to do than paint cabinets today anyway.

I took my supplies into the house, set them on the kitchen counter, and stood surveying the interior. The front parlor and the dining room lay soft and golden beyond the doors on either end of the kitchen, the wood floors warming in the languid morning light. The house looked larger with nothing in it, but even though the rooms were empty, they seemed full of the things that used to be there—Aunt Ruth’s old upright piano, the umbrella stand with the lion head carved on top, the game table where we played Parcheesi, Scrabble, and Hand ’n Foot, the recliners where Aunt Ruth and Poppy sat watching the old console TV that was always turned up so loud your head rang with sound long after you left the house.

Every corner was filled with benevolent ghosts. On the walls, the shadows of pictures and furniture remained, baked in by the passage of years.
Those could use a coat of paint, too,
I mused, then laid out some newspaper and opened the partial gallon. Inside, yellow liquid and white pigment melted together in a strange swirl, the surface iridescent. I pushed in a stick and stirred it. Poppy would like that I was making use of leftovers. Having lived through the Depression era, he believed in waste not, want not. The garden shed outside was a testament to his thriftiness—so filled with old tools, pieces of lawnmowers, bicycle parts, wheels, axles, chains, gardening supplies, and other bits of memorabilia that we had given up trying to clean it out for the estate sale, and just locked the door.

My reconstituted paint looked usable after a few minutes of stirring, but the paintbrush I’d brought from home was impossibly stiff. One of the boys had probably employed it for a science fair project and then failed to properly wash it out. Clumps of bristles sealed together left a streaky white mess across the newspaper when I tested it.

I considered going out to the garden shed for another, but then decided it would be easier to run to the store. And probably safer. No telling what was living in Poppy’s shed by now.