The Kitchen Daughter (10 page)

“Oh, of course,” says Angelica. “The only certainty is uncertainty.”

She runs her fingers along the edge of the mantel. I hope she’s not looking for dust, because knowing Gert, she’s not going to find any.

“You must have missed it when you were in L.A.,” Angelica says to Amanda.

“L.A.’s just so different,” says Amanda. “The house wasn’t what I missed.”

Angelica turns to me and says, “You’ve lived here all your life?”

“Yeah.”

“It’ll be a big change for you to leave.”

“It would be, yes,” I say.

Amanda says, “Since you’re here, Cuh, you want to tour around a bit?”

“I would, but I’m starving.”

“Well, then why don’t we go to lunch first?”

“Fabulous!”

Amanda says, “Okay, Ginny, we’ll see you after lunch, then. You okay here?”

“Of course.”

She says to Angelica, “I just need to wash my hands, meet you at the front door,” and she’s gone.

I look over at Angelica’s shape in the doorframe and think of Nonna’s warning,
Do no let her.
Is she the one I’m supposed to stop? How can I? If I could find the right ghost to ask, maybe I could find out. But fear still holds me back.

“Amanda says you like to cook,” says Angelica.

“I do.”

“You should get in the habit of making something every morning while we’re showing the place,” she says, looking up at the branching pattern of the molding and down at the long boards of hardwood. “Baking, especially. Cakes, cookies, breads. Makes people like the house more. Makes them think it’s a home.”

“It is a home,” I say.

“
Their
home,” she clarifies.

Amanda’s orange juice voice calls from the hallway, “Get a move on, Cuh!” and both of them chirp and chatter their way out the door. I’m left alone.

I walk up the stairs, they squeak under my feet, I walk into my parents’ closet, pull the door tight shut, and sit down with my hands in Dad’s shoes. I need the dark. I need the comfort. I look for a food memory to calm me and I settle on ceviche. A tart bite, a clean, fresh wave of flavor. Think of the process. Raw fish is translucent, but when you drip the lime juice onto it, it becomes something else. Cubes of white-fleshed fish begin to flake. Shrimp turn pink. Texture becomes color. Visible streaks, almost stripes, show the grain.

The shoes haven’t always been part of my self-soothing, but the small dark space has. Ma used to call it recharging my batteries. She knew the strain of interacting with people wore me out. So after school, or other activities that took me out of the house, she’d give me permission to recharge my batteries for one hour. Never longer. When I sit down on the floor of the closet I set a mental clock. Even though she’s not here to tell me what to do, I’m doing what she’d tell me if she were here.

Whether this is a good sign or a bad sign, I have no idea.

The hour isn’t up yet when the doorbell rings. I want to ignore it. I am comfortably settled in the far corner of the closet, where no light can reach. But what if it’s Amanda and she’s forgotten her keys? She’ll have a fit.

I settle Dad’s shoes back in place, right on the right and left on the left, and go down to open the door.

“Hey, remember me?” he says. “David?”

“Yes, of course.” His voice sounds a little less muddy than before, a little more like very strong coffee. His brown hair still sticks up all over.

“How’s your hand?”

I hold up the gauzed mitt. “Just fine, thank you.”

“I brought you something.”

He hands me a carton of eggs, flipping the top open to show their round, smooth white tops. “Voilà. One dozen, intact.”

“Oh, my sister bought some too, so we have more than we need already.”

“I just thought I’d replace the ones I broke. I feel bad about that.”

I realize I’ve been rude. Ma would be appalled. “Sorry, no, we can always use eggs, right? Come on in. I’ll put them in the fridge.”

I head for the kitchen and he follows me at a distance. He gives me plenty of space. I like that. It makes me comfortable, which right now is the thing I most need.

“Wow, this is a great kitchen!” he says. “Huge! The stove’s so vintage. Love it.”

“You like to cook?”

“I’m not very good at it.”

“It’s not hard.”

David says, “People who are naturally good at things always think they’re easy.”

“No, you just have to learn, is all.”

“And you have to get all the right ingredients, and plan ahead, and it takes so much time … it just doesn’t seem worth the effort. I don’t have the energy.”

I say, “You’re overthinking it. Are you hungry?”

“Well, actually, yes. I haven’t had lunch.”

“Hand me the eggs.”

He does. I pause to think. All the ghosts have come when I cooked from recipes. Handwritten recipes. I can do this without worry.

“Here,” I say. “I’ll show you how easy it is to make an omelet. It’s so fast, you won’t believe it.”

“You really don’t need to,” David says.

“I know. But this’ll be so quick.” I like being the expert for a change, and focus immediately on the task. Butter and eggs are all I need for my mise. A fork, a bowl, a plate. A knife for the butter. The
pan’s already waiting on the stove. Silently, I crack and beat the egg, heat the pan, drop in the butter, pour the egg in, swirl and swirl and fold and flip it out onto the plate. The whole business takes less than two minutes.

“That’s amazing!” says David, taking the plate from me. “You make it look so easy.”

“I love it,” I say. “So I learned it.” It’s an explanation that leaves a lot out. But I learned a long time ago that people don’t really want explanations. Ma taught me almost everything I know about cooking, but the omelet, I learned from Julia Child.

He leans against the kitchen wall to eat. He wolfs down the fragile envelope of egg.

When the plate is clean, he says, “Thank you. That hit the spot.”

“Do you want another?”

“I’ve abused your hospitality enough.”

“It’s not abuse!”

“I didn’t mean it literally,” says David. “But thank you. You don’t need to.”

“Just so you can see it again,” I say, and make him another. Heat the pan, drop the butter, shake. Swirl. Flip.

He says, “That’s amazing, how fast you are. I could never do that.”

“Of course you could. You just have to learn.”

He eats the second omelet more slowly. His eyes are on the plate and not my face, so I tell him everything. How to whisk the egg. How to heat the pan. How much butter to drop in and when. Most important, how to shake the pan to cook the egg nearly all the way through to the point of almost-doneness, without going too far. How to tip and roll so the omelet comes out curled just right on the plate. Julia makes them in about twenty seconds on the DVD, but that’s because she already has the eggs cracked and whisked and ready to go. There’s always a trick like that.

The front door bangs and Amanda’s voice calls, “Hey, what smells so good?”

“Omelet,” I yell. To David I say, “Do you know my sister?”

“No,” he says through a mouthful.

“Hey, Amanda, I’d like—” I’m saying as she walks in, and she stops short in the doorway with her hand on the sill.

“Excuse me, who are you?” she says, her voice sharp with acid.

“I think Ginny was about to introduce me,” he says. “I’m David. I’m—”

She interrupts him and doesn’t reach for his hand. “What are you doing in my kitchen? With my sister?”

“It’s not your kitchen, I made him an omelet, he was saying he doesn’t cook, he brought eggs,” I try to explain, but she’s not even looking at me.

“Back up, back up,” David says, and I almost do, but that’s not how he means it. “I’m Gert’s son, David.”

I say, “He delivers the groceries. The eggs got broken, so he brought new eggs.”

He says, “I’m really not sketchy. I swear.”

Amanda drops her hand from the doorframe and says, “I’m sorry. Let’s start over. I’m Amanda, Ginny’s sister.”

“Do you live here too?”

“Yes,” she says.

“No, you don’t,” I say.

“It’s a lovely home,” says David.

“Thank you,” says Amanda. “Do you and your wife live in the area?”

Nobody says anything.

She says, “Your ring. I assumed.”

David says, “There was an accident. Last year.” I hear the unsweetened chocolate again in his voice now, drying, bitter.

“I am so sorry,” says Amanda. “I didn’t know. I was living in California. Mom kept me up on some of the news, but—I am so sorry.”

David says, “You couldn’t know.” There’s more silence.

“Amanda, do you want an omelet?”

“No, thank you.”

Then I remember she just came back from lunch, so it was a dumb thing to say, but at least it was something. Ma said,
Nature abhors a vacuum, and that goes double for conversation.

David says, “My mom sure does love your family. You know she won’t let anyone else clean this place?”

“Who else would?” I ask.

“She’s got a whole business,” he says. “Four employees. This is the only house she still cleans herself.”

“I didn’t know,” says Amanda. “Do you work for her too?”

“No. I do this as a favor. I’m not a full-time delivery boy.”

“Oh, what do you do?”

“Well, actually, I guess I’m between things right now. Right now I’m just a guy with a bike.”

We all trail off into silence again and this time I can’t think of a single thing to break it.

Eventually, David turns to me and says, “It was nice to see you. Thanks for the cooking lesson. Enjoy the eggs.”

“Thank you,” I say.

We all sort of shuffle toward the front door.

“Have a nice night,” he says.

“You too,” my sister and I say in unison.

Amanda opens the door and lets him out, like a fly.

Immediately after the door falls shut, she turns to me and says, “I can’t believe I am such a tool.”

“You’re not a tool.” I don’t know how she means it. A hammer? A saw?

“An idiot. That thing about his wife, and then, the job thing, geez. Sometimes I can’t say anything right.”

“Now you know how I feel.”

She doesn’t say anything so I sneak a look at her face, but she’s looking at me intently and I can’t make myself hold her gaze.

She goes on, “Well, it’s no fun. Anyway, I was all thrown. I come back home and you’re standing in the kitchen with a complete stranger. What was I supposed to think? You have no instinct about people at all. You’d let an axe murderer in and make him fettuccini alfredo.”

“That’s not true.”

“It practically is. I worry about you.”

“Stop worrying.”

She hisses, “I can’t.”

“Well, stop talking about it, at least.”

“Okay.”

She goes upstairs to pack some more. I rinse the pan out in the sink and swipe it with a towel. I rub away a few stubborn droplets and lean down to put the pan back. Then I rinse the spatula, dry it, and put it away in a drawer full of long-handled things. Everything in its place.

Amanda is wrong. I do have an instinct about people, and it tells me David is just fine. I wonder if he doesn’t cook because his wife did all the cooking until she died. I wonder what she was like. Like Ma, maybe, capable and in charge, always repeating rules and being protective. I felt smothered sometimes but I know Ma always tried to do what was right for me. One of her unsuccessful lessons in how to make and keep friends was
Be a little mysterious.
Of course I could never find the right level of mystery. If I asserted myself, she said,
Don’t be too insistent
, and if I hung back too much, it was
Don’t be such a little wallflower.
I preferred to think of myself as a cat. If I think of my behavior as cat behavior instead of people behavior, it pretty much
always makes sense. Maybe that’s part of why I love Midnight. Maybe she reminds me of me.

Maybe it’s like David said. People who are naturally good at something think it’s easy. Ma was born charming so she couldn’t explain to me how to be that way. Amanda can’t explain people to me either. When we were kids we were each other’s best friend, but the older she got, the more she pulled away. I’m not good with Amanda, not anymore. I used to be. That was when we were little and she looked up to me. Now she thinks she knows better than I do. About everything. I wonder if Parker and Shannon are like us, the older sister teaching the younger sister what she knows. I wonder if things will change for them, like they’ve changed for us, over time.

When it’s time to go to sleep she makes up the bed in her old room. I hear her call her family to say good night. She still has an orange juice voice no matter who she’s talking to, but sometimes when she talks to the girls, it’s a lighter, softer voice, like orange juice cut with club soda.

I wait until it’s very late, and then go back to Ma and Dad’s room. It’s risky. Amanda might wake up. But I need this reassurance, and there’s only one way to get it.

I slip the Normal Book out of its hiding place in the chimney and make sure none of the paprika dust has gotten on my clothes, then sit down on the window seat to read. I wish it were day outside. I’d prefer more light, but I don’t want to turn on a lamp. That might attract attention.

Cross-legged on the window seat, Midnight curled up in the doorway like a fat, useless security guard, I thumb through the book. Some of the cutouts are newspaper. Some are printouts. The earliest clippings are yellowed with age. I’ve been gathering them a long time. I cut them neatly in squares, and paste them in double columns down each page.