The Summer Kitchen (7 page)

The rows of apartments remained silent, providing no clues, but as I turned my car around, then sat waiting for a gap in traffic, I had a feeling someone was watching.

Chapter 4

Cass

The lady couldn’t see me, but I could see her. The Laundromat behind the convenience store had mirror tint on the windows, so if you didn’t know better, you’d think it was just an old closed-down store. I saw the lady chase those kids out of the Dumpster. She looked for them after they ran off, which was weird, I thought. Maybe she was from welfare, or Child Protective Services, or someplace. That Cadillac SUV didn’t look like social-worker wheels, but it could be. Maybe she was gonna pick up those kids and take them away. Their mama’d locked them out again, and they’d been banging on the door for, like, two hours, which was why I’d decided to go do the laundry, finally. Rusty’d stuck me sleeping on the sofa, so no matter how hard I tried to plug my ears, I could hear their noise the minute their mama shooed them out the door in the morning.

Before he left for work, Rusty didn’t even say he was sorry for giving my room to some girl and her kid. He just dropped a little change on the counter, which meant he forgot to cash his check last night, which also meant that sometime today the big sweaty guy from the office would come tell me we hadn’t paid the rent yet. He’d stand right in the doorway and give me a creepy look, like he thought I was gonna invite him in or something.

“Cass,” Rusty said after he put the change down, “go do some laundry today, okay? I’m outa work clothes. Here’s some money.” He kept his voice low, like we had the princess and the pea sleeping in the next room and we shouldn’t bother her.

“Did you cash your check?” I knew the answer. If he’d cashed the check, he wouldn’t be digging through his pockets for money.

“Nah, I’ll do it today.”

“Rus-teee. The rent was due yesterday.” A lump came up in my throat, and I told myself I wasn’t gonna cry, and I didn’t.

Rusty opened the lock and then let in the smell of morning air, and pavement, and the sound of cars passing by.

“Wait.” I sat up, and got tangled in something, and I knew that during the night Rusty’d come out and wrapped me in one of the sleeping bags we used when we were on the road. “Are you gonna get that girl out of my room?” Surely he wasn’t planning to, like, just go off to work and leave some girl and her kid in my room.

The hinges squealed, and the slice of light from outside got thinner. “Don’t worry about it, Sal. Just let her sleep.” His voice was soft, like he felt a little bad for leaving me with his mess in
my
bedroom. Whenever he called me Sal, I felt warm inside. When I was born, Rusty wanted my name to be Sally, after some girl he liked on a cartoon. My daddy wanted Cass, and he won out, but Mama gave me Sally for the middle name. Sometimes I liked Sally better. Sally sounded like someone sweet and perfect, who wore dresses with lace, and little white shoes, and lived in a house with a painted fence.

“I gotta go. I’m late.” Rusty was out the door before I could say anything else.

I tried to go back to sleep, but once the kids next door were outside, you might as well be trying to sleep next to the hyena cage in a zoo. I sat there wondering when that girl was gonna come out of my room. Finally I decided to just go do the darned laundry. I washed my face and put on makeup, gathered up my dirty clothes from the bathroom floor and Rusty’s from his room, then looked at myself in the mirror. Not bad. I could be sixteen, maybe seventeen, at least. If the girl woke up, I’d tell her that’s what I was. She’d probably buy it, because I was tall enough. It helped to be tall. I didn’t used to like it back in the fifth grade, when I got taller than all the boys, but Mama promised me I’d be glad one of these days. Turned out she was right. Like she always said, God’s got a purpose for everything. He must of known I was gonna need to look sixteen pretty soon.

I piled the laundry in the basket and went out, and then there was the might-be-a-social-worker lady looking at me from her Cadillac SUV. The way she watched me was creepy—like she was staring right through me and could see everything. I squinted back at her, like as in,
Who do you think you are, anyway? Driving around in a fancy car—you think you’re somebody?

I hurried across the street and out of sight as fast as I could get there in the high-heeled shoes that used to be Mama’s, which wasn’t easy. The green sandals were still kind of big at the back, and my feet slid too far over the front, so I could feel little dots of hot pavement under my three middle toes.

The guys in the parking lot whistled and called me Blondie when I went by. They didn’t care if the shoes were too big, or I wasn’t so good at walking in them. They just wanted me to turn around and act like I noticed them. I thought about it, but then I was afraid to, so I didn’t. I just walked on by like guys whistled at me every day. I didn’t look back to see what the social-worker lady was doing—not even once—until I was behind the mirrored window in the Laundromat. Then I watched her chase the kids out of the Dumpster, look around for them, and finally drive off.

Once she was gone, I crammed all the laundry in one washer, so I could have some money left over to go to the convenience store for a pack of powdered doughnuts and a Coke. Rusty would probably come back at lunch with dollar burgers, or a Wendy’s value meal. Sometimes he did that when it was payday, and we hadn’t been to the grocery store and there was nothing left in the kitchen.

While I walked back to the convenience store, I watched the kids from next door head to the Dumpster again. They’d probably heard the mariachi music in the parking lot last night, and they figured there was something good in there to eat. Sometimes those Mexican guys got so drunk on Friday night that, along with the beer bottles, they threw away containers with tortillas, fried pies, rice, and beans still in them. The stuff looked pretty good, if you could get past where it came from. I’d watched the kids sit on the steps and eat it before. I warned them you could get sick eating out of the trash, but they didn’t care. I told Rusty about it the next day, and he told me to stay out of the Dumpster. Duh. Like I would really crawl around in there and eat food that’d been sitting next to old diapers and beer bottles. Sometimes Rusty could be such a dope. It didn’t bother him that the fat guy came to the door and hung around asking me for the rent, or that the money on the counter this morning wasn’t enough for laundry and breakfast,
and
that he left some strange girl in my bedroom, but he did tell me not to eat out of the Dumpster.

The kids were finished looking for food by the time I got the laundry done, had my doughnuts, and went back to the house. Rusty’s girl was still in my room. Her kid had moved to the couch, though, and was sitting with its arms twisted around its legs like a little pretzel. After looking a minute, I pretty well figured out that Rusty might of been wrong last night when he called it a boy. It had braids with little red rubber bands at the end, and it was wearing a pink T-shirt and girl underpants. And sitting on my sleeping bag.

“I hope you’re, like, potty trained and stuff,” I said, and the kid just looked at me with wide eyes that were like drops of pistachio pudding in the middle of big white saucers.

The kid sat still as a statue as I pushed the front door shut and dropped the laundry basket on the chair.

“Geez, that’s heavy,” I said. My feet hurt like crazy. I pulled off the green sandals and dropped them by the chair, then locked the door and flipped on the light. When I turned around, the kid was still staring at me. Its eyes were too big for its face, like one of those nighttime animals you see on PBS—a three-toed sloth, or a lemur, or something.

The eyes followed me across the room. I went and looked through the crack in my bedroom door, to see what its mom was doing. She was still passed out on my bed, her long arms and legs tangled up in the sheets. Her milk-and-coffee skin made the material look white, when normally it was brownish gray. Her arms and back, and her legs where they came out from under the sheet, were covered with a thin layer of sweat that made her glisten like plastic where the sun fell from the window.

The door creaked and she took a big breath, then sighed. She had pretty lips, even with the lipstick smeared. The air came in and out between straight white teeth that looked like they’d be pretty, too, if she smiled.

The little lemur whined on the couch, and I looked over my shoulder at it. Three or four years old, maybe. No telling if it talked or not. It had its thumb in its mouth right now. It whined like it knew I was wondering, but most of the sound got caught in the fist. Whatever it said sounded like “Gun-ungwee.”

I stared at it, and it said it again, “Umm-ungwee,” then rubbed its stomach.

I’m hungry.
Oh, geez, it wanted food. Good luck, considering there was nothing in the kitchen.

I pushed the bedroom door open some more. “Hey,” I said, but the lady in the bed didn’t move, so I said it louder. “Hey, your kid’s hungry.”

She rolled over, grumbled something, then turned toward the wall and went back to sleep.

“Hey!” I said, but she didn’t move. She told me to leave her the heck alone, and not in real nice words.

Something touched the back of my leg, tickled there real light. I jumped and turned around, thinking it was one of those huge roach things that came up the drain sometimes.

It was the kid, and I scared it. It ran back to the sofa and jumped into the corner, then stuck its thumb in its mouth again. The huge eyes got bigger and filled up around the edges. “Unnn-unnngweeee,” it mumbled again, unfolding its fingers over a cheek, so that it pulled the skin down on one side.

“Ssshhhh,” I said, and tried to think. What in the world was I supposed to do with the kid now? Ignore it? Stick it back in there with its mom and hope she’d wake up? Go in and try to get her out of bed again? Go back outside, lock the door behind me, and just leave?

Its lips trembled, and its nose wrinkled, and a big ol’ tear rolled down its cheek. It had pretty skin like its mother, a soft color like milky tea.

I wished I wouldn’t of eaten the whole pack of sugared doughnuts while I was doing the laundry. The kid probably liked doughnuts. Judging from the looks of things, there wasn’t much chance its mom had carried in any food with her last night. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t anything but the coat she had wrapped around her kid.

I went into the room and looked around anyway, just in case she had a purse, or a little money, or something, but of course she didn’t. I checked the whole room, and there was nothing—not even some change in the jacket pockets or in her jeans, which were on the floor in a pile with some silver platform sandals. Cool shoes. Seemed like if she could afford those, she could feed her kid.

I grabbed my book and went back out to the main room. Sitting down on the couch, I told myself maybe Rusty would show up after a while with something for lunch. The kid sniffled and whimpered on the other end of the sofa.

“You wanna see my book?” I said. “It’s got pictures in it.” That was another thing I liked about old books. They had drawings in them. This one had drawings, and then right in the middle there were some actual racehorse pictures. “It’s about Seabiscuit. He was a big racehorse, and he won lots and lots of money.”

The kid sniffled some more, then untwisted her arms and scooted over toward me. She was kinda cute, actually. Lots cuter than the kids next door—and lots quieter.

“Unn-ungweee,” she said again, checking my face like she was hoping I’d finally get the point.

“I know,” I told her. “But let’s look at the book a minute, ’kay?”

Nodding, she scooched her rear into the ripped spot in the cushion right next to me. She didn’t smell so good—kinda like she’d wet her underpants and then it’d dried a while back. We looked at the book, and I showed her the pictures. She could make the horsie sound, and a sound for the trucks in the picture, and the train engine, which was cute.

When we ran out of pictures, I went back and started reading her the story. Her braids felt soft against my arm, and I got used to the way she smelled. She seemed to like listening to the story, and it was sort of cool to have someone to read it to.

After a while, I heard a car door close, and I figured it was Rusty home with some lunch, but it was just the fat guy from the office, coming back from someplace with a new box of cigarettes under his arm. He saw me looking out the blind and headed my way.

Shoot,
I put on the green sandals real quick. The taller the better, I figured. It was a lucky thing that when we’d left home I’d brought some of Mama’s clothes. Grown-up clothes are important, sometimes. The shoes hit my feet in all the raw spots as soon as I stood on them. I didn’t know how Mama wore those things all the time, working down at the packing plant. She took care of the reception desk before she got so sick, so she needed to look good.

The guy checked me out like he thought
I
looked good. He went all the way up and down, from my shoes to my hair, then licked his nasty lips like I was a piece of pie on a plate.

“Rent’s due yesterday,” he told me.

“Oh,” I said, and blinked and smiled, like I didn’t notice he was wearing a greasy old T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off and his big fat hairy arms sticking out. The hair went all the way up into the shirt, a solid line, and then it came out the neck hole. It grew up his head and stopped around a big shiny circle, like a golf green, only white. “I thought my brother gave it to you. He must of forgot to cash his check.”
He was too busy picking up stray girls and kids.
“He’ll bring it today.”

“He better,” he said, and then all of a sudden he turned friendly. He took a step forward and leaned against the door frame, and I didn’t have much choice but to move back into the apartment. “You doing okay here by yourself all day?”

A sweaty feeling broke over my skin and itched under my shirt. “Yeah, sure. Why wouldn’t I be?” I wrapped a hand around the doorknob, figuring that if he tried to come in, I’d act like I got off balance, and swing the door shut, and clobber him with it. “I can take care of myself.”