God is in the Pancakes (15 page)

“Nothing's ever easy, is it?” I ask under my breath as I follow her out. Unsurprisingly, Natalie's grandfather doesn't respond. “Yeah, that was my guess too.”

I
haven't eaten all day, and I'm so hungry by the time I get home, the only thing I can think about is the can of Pringles I plan to dive into when I get inside. The salty tang should do a nice job of stopping the pain echoing in my stomach and head. But when I walk into the house, I find Lolly sprawled out on the couch, looking disheveled, like she hasn't showered or bothered combing her hair. Jake must have done it. He must have told her about Natalie and broken her heart.

“Hey,” I say. I lean against the side of the couch and grab her foot. “I'm sorry about you and Jake.” I shake her foot back and forth a little in what I hope seems like a gesture of understanding; considering what went on with Eric, if there's one thing I get right now, it's the need to have people be there for each other when everything feels like it's gone to hell.

“What are you talking about?” Lolly replies.

“Your breakup?”

“We didn't break up,” she says emphatically.

“You didn't?”

“Nooooo,” she says, her tone now implying that she's speaking to a vegetable. “Why would you even ask that?”

Getting out of here as quickly as I can seems to be my only move now, so I head for the kitchen. “Oh, uh, I don't know,” I say over my shoulder, wishing I could hit REWIND/DELETE.

“Who told you we broke up?” Lolly asks, bolting upright from the couch.

“I can't exactly remember.”

“Well, we didn't. We
definitely didn't
break up,” Lolly says, punctuating each word in the sentence.

“Okay, I believe you. Sorry.”

But this doesn't satisfy her. “I mean, if we'd broken up, would Jake have given me
this
this morning?” She walks over to me and points to an ugly reddish-purple hickey on her neck, which looks more like a wound than a sign of devotion.

“You're right, Lolly,” I reply, feeling the heat rising to my cheeks. “If a hickey doesn't say ‘I'll love you forever,' it's hard to know what does.”

“Who told you we broke up?”

“It doesn't matter. If you say you haven't broken up, you should know, right?” I walk into the kitchen, but Lolly follows me.

“Tell me! Or are you just bullshitting again, Grace?”

This is not the time to be pushing me. “You want to know who it was? Do you
really
want to know who told me?” I ask, looking her directly in the eye. We're both priming for a fight, as if hurting the other will somehow make each of us feel better.

“Yeah,” she says, “Grace, tell me. Where'd you get your juicy gossip?”

“Natalie Talbot.” I cross my arms in front of me and stare at my sister to see how she'll react.

She laughs.

“Oh-kay!” replies Lolly. “Right, sure she did, because you and Natalie are such great friends.” Then she shakes her head. “Just because you have some sort of problem with Jake, that's no reason to start making things up.”

“Think what you want,” I say. My cheeks are burning now. “But according to Natalie, you and Jake are done. And she would probably know since she's the one he dumped you for.”

“You know what?” Lolly's voice is much calmer than I would have expected. “I think that's so funny, I'm going to call Jake right now and tell him what you said.”

“Go ahead.” I shrug. “But I wouldn't if I were you.”

“Well, then it's good for us both that you're not.” She takes the kitchen phone out of its cradle and punches in Jake's number.

“You'll regret it,” I say, realizing she's serious about calling him. Then, “Don't.”

“Now you're scared you're going to get called on your shit.”

I look at my sister and suddenly that righteous feeling I'd had—the feeling of watching someone get a well-earned slap—starts fading into a much less cool sensation of knowing she's about to get hurt.

“Hey,” Lolly says into the phone. “Nothing . . . Well, actually, my little sister and I were having a chat here and you are never going to believe what she just came up with. Grace just told me she heard that we'd broken up.”

“Lolly, don't do this.” I lunge for the phone.

“Get away from me,” she yells, pulling it back to her ear. “So, Jake, do you want to tell Grace yourself how ignorant she is? I mean, do you know she even said that Natalie Talbot told her that we'd broken up?” Lolly cocks her head to the side and narrows her eyes at me as she awaits his response. But even though I can't hear what he's saying on the other end, it's pretty clear that it's not the firm denial my sister was looking for. “What?” she says. “What do you mean?” There's another pause as I see the information seeping into Lolly's body. “I don't believe this,” she finally bleats, her voice no longer full of bravado, now sounding smaller, as if she's deflating. “Why would you . . . You know what? Whatever. I just can't believe you'd do something this shitty. I was even going to . . . You're such an asshole!”

Lolly jabs at the END button on the phone and throws it on the kitchen counter.

“Lolly, I'm sorry,” I say, looking down.

“Oh, I'll bet you are,” she hisses. “You loved that, didn't you? You loved telling me he cheated on me. You probably couldn't wait to do it.” Her voice catches in the beginning of a sob and she storms out of the kitchen, then loudly runs up the stairs.

I wait to hear her door slam—which it does a few seconds later—then I open the cabinet next to the refrigerator. But instead of pulling out the potato chips, my eyes land on a jug of maple syrup.

Pancakes.

That's what I really want. So I take out two eggs, a stick of butter, and a carton of milk. I grab the flour, sugar, salt, vanilla, and baking powder from the pantry and start beating the ingredients together with Mom's old hand mixer. As I spin the mixer around the bowl, watching the chunks of butter break and fold into the batter, I'm mesmerized by the pattern the beaters spin into it. I keep moving the mixer around and around the bowl until the thick batter looks almost silky. My hand starts to ache from the movement and weight of the mixer, but the pain, so simple and easy to locate, is almost a relief. You're supposed to leave a few lumps so the batter doesn't spread too thin when you pour it. Thin is
not
an attractive pancake trait. So when I've beaten away all but the last few lumps and imperfections, I detach the mixer blades and lick them clean.

The round griddle, which I find packed away in a high cabinet above the oven, hasn't been used in a long time and it takes me a while to free it from under all the other random and rarely used kitchen crap stored up there. My father had given it to my mother as a Mother's Day present. Even at age eleven I knew Mom wasn't going to be pleased by the gift. Mom didn't talk to him for the rest of the day. When she finally spoke to him the next morning at breakfast—for which Dad made pancakes—I remember hearing the word
selfish
thrown around a lot. I also remember Dad yelling back that everything he did, he did for the family. When Mom snorted, he said her problem was that she'd never had faith in him. He said a man couldn't fully exist without others believing in him, and that it was killing him. Mom said if he needed her to believe in him so badly, he had to provide more than hokey promises for the future.

The first Sunday after Dad left—the first Sunday I missed church and our pancake brunch—I spent the day wondering if the reason Dad was now with Nancy Falton was because she believed in him more than Mom did, and whether that made his decision okay. It's like that question “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I?”

I wipe off the griddle, then grease it before putting it on the stove and turning on the heat. As I drop generous dollops of batter on the griddle, I stay focused on the symmetry of the circles I create, which expand before they shrink again on the hot surface. I smile when I see the air bubbles pop to the surface—I always do—and today I think they make it look like some spirit inside the molten batter is trying to escape. I flip each pancake when it becomes firm, and they slide off the spatula with ease, leaving no chunks of batter behind. Once they've turned the perfect shade of golden brown, I take my stack of eight over to the kitchen table. I don't know how long the jug of Aunt Jemima syrup has been sitting in the cabinet, but I don't really care, and I squirt what remains all over the huge mound of pancakes.

I take the first bite and close my eyes to block out any other sight, sound, thought, or feeling. I do this with every bite thereafter, chewing as slowly and deliberately as I can. I tear through pancake after pancake, kneading each bite against the roof of my mouth with my tongue. I run my index and middle fingers through the stream of syrup pooled on the sides of the plate, then lick them clean.

But something's off.

Eating pancakes alone isn't the same; it almost feels like I'm missing some of my taste buds. For the girl who used to guard her plate so that no one would reach a fork over to steal a bite, the need to share this experience feels strange. I pick up the phone and dial Dad's number.

“Hullo?” he says. But the fact that his voice still sounds exactly the same when so much else has changed isn't a comfort, it somehow seems unfair. He should be affected too.

I can't do it.

It's too much.

I hang up and set the phone down on the kitchen table, biting my lip as I push my plate away.

The last communication I had with Eric was our series of text messages on Friday when he accused me of lying to him about being sick. The last time we saw each other, my face and lips were pressed against his and then I ran out of his bedroom. So when he called over the weekend, I screened and didn't return the call because I didn't know what to say and it was just another thing I couldn't handle. When I see him at school this morning I don't have any clearer idea of what to say to him, so playing it cool—or as cool as I'm capable—feels like my only move.

“Hey,” I say, approaching Eric at his locker. “What's up?”

“Hi.” Eric continues unloading his book bag, and I keep standing there like an idiot.
Hi,
that's all I get.

“So how was the Vietnam test?”

He slams the top half of his locker shut with his palm. “Well, you would know if you'd called me back.”

“I—I wanted to,” I reply, looking down and away, “but my mom took away my ‘weekend phone privileges' again.” The lie comes out easily enough.

Eric stops, seeming to consider this. “Because she caught you cutting?”

“No,” I say, wanting the reason to be even more extreme. “See, I told Lolly that her relationship with Jake was over, and she went ballistic.
Then
Mom started hassling me and I was just so done with the whole thing, I told her that that was exactly the type of behavior that caused Dad to leave.” The lie keeps rolling.

“You said that to your mom?” he asks, squinting. It's hard to read what Eric makes of this, so I just shrug. “Harsh.”

“Yeah, I know,” I reply, “I just kind of lost my head.”

Eric nods, then turns back and closes the bottom half of the locker. I start to get a vague sense of relief that this explanation could have done the trick until he turns on his heel and faces me. “Grace, look.” Eric's head dips forward. “The reason I wanted to talk to you was because I'm trying to figure out what's going on with us. You know chatting about feelings or whatever isn't exactly my thing, but aren't we supposed to talk about what went on the other night?”

In front of me is the guy I've been friends with since fourth grade, and he's staring at me so closely right now, it feels like I'm standing naked in the school hallway. What is he seeing? What is he thinking? On the one hand I want to know, but on the other, what if, in a chat like that you discover the other person—the one person you look forward to seeing more than anyone else—doesn't like you as much as you like him?
Would I really be better off or happier knowing that?

“Well, it doesn't have to be a big deal,” I say, now turning my attention to my shoes. “We
could
just agree not to talk about what happened that night and then we wouldn't have to worry about it, right?”

Eric opens his mouth but doesn't say anything for a moment. “We could, but I mean—”

“Yeah, you know, this way there won't be any weirdness and we can just go back to the way things have always been, right?” I let my eyes tag Eric's, then I give him a playful punch on the shoulder.