The Kitchen Daughter (25 page)

“Oh, it’s you!” he says.

“It’s me.”

“I got the check.”

“That’s not what I’m here about.” I realize I’m not responding the way he expects. I add, “Good.”

“Come on in before all that cold air ends up in here,” he says, and I go in, and he shuts the door behind me. “You know, no one has ever visited me here before.”

“Gert hasn’t?”

“I always go to her apartment,” he says. “She’s come here once, maybe. I go over there, we have dinner, I stay overnight in my old room from when I was a kid. If she came here, she’d have to see what I have left of Elena. I’d have to be who I am instead of the one she wants me to be.”

My eyes are still adjusting from the bright sun glinting off the snow outside. All I can tell is that the apartment is small and dark and warm.

He says, “Sorry, sorry. Pretty heavy conversation for me to lay on you first thing in the morning. But for some reason I always want to tell you everything. You’re a good listener.”

“I don’t know if I’m that good,” I say.

“Well, anyway. Sorry. My issues aside, how are you? How do you like the place?”

Now that my eyes have adjusted I can see that the apartment is a small room made smaller by the stacks of cardboard boxes lining each wall. Each one is labeled in Spanish, which I can’t read. There’s only enough room for a bed, a chair, and something that looks like a lamp with a brightly patterned cloth draped over it. The cloth on the lamp is the only color in the room. The only window I see is here, high up, near the door.

“It’s like being in a 250-degree oven,” I say to David.

“Is it that hot?”

“No, I mean, it’s dark, and warm. Two hundred and fifty degrees is a good warming temperature. It’s the lowest a lot of ovens go.” I’m struggling to make conversation, to be polite, not to let what I want override everything else. It’s hard. I don’t think I’m doing it right. But if I just tell David what I want from him with no conversation at all, I know he’s less likely to help me. We need to go through this process.

“Oh.”

He says, “Well, let me show you around the place.”

“I think I can see everything.”

“Everything but Tambo,” he says, and reaches for the cloth I thought was covering a lamp. It isn’t a lamp at all. It’s a birdcage.

Inside is a single bird, very small, drab in color. Black on the top of its head and under the beak where its chin would be if birds had chins, white on the sides of the head, tan on the breast. Not much bigger than David’s thumb. Not an exotic bird. Just like the ones I see flying around outside. It looks like it has soft feathers. It flicks its black-and-white tail from side to side.

“She was Elena’s,” he says. “Her favorite kind of bird.”

“What kind?”

“Chickadee. She just loved that word. It was her favorite English word. When she found out we had chickadees in Pennsylvania, she was so excited, and we’d go out biking to try to spot them. So when she found an injured baby one, you should have seen her. There was no question. She was going to save that bird. And she did. She didn’t let Tambo die, and I haven’t either.”

I can’t wait any longer. “David, I have a favor to ask you.”

“What is it?”

“I need you to take me to my sister’s house.”

“Where’s your sister’s house?”

“Out in Haddon Township.” I keep looking at the bird. It shakes its wings, in a tiny rippling motion, a kind of shiver.

David says, “What, you want me to ride the train with you?”

“No.”

“We won’t both fit on the bike.”

“No, I want you to drive me,” I tell him.

Silence at first. Then David says, spitting the words out like cherry pits, “You want me. To get behind. The wheel of a car.”

“Your mom says you still have the car.”

“You asked her first?”

“Yes.”

“And she sent you to me.”

“Not really.” I tell the truth. “She said you have a car.”

“She’s not stupid enough to think I’ll drive it.”

“Why not? Why do you have it if you don’t drive it?”

“Do I have to spell it out for you? Do you remember this?” He thrusts out his hand toward me and I see the thick scar where my dad sewed his fingers back on. As much time as he’s had to heal, it still looks raw.

“Your accident,” I say, realizing. “You were driving.”

“And that was the last time I drove, and I killed my wife doing it. So you’ll understand why I’m not exactly eager to hop behind the wheel.” His voice is the darkest I’ve ever heard it, all the chocolate notes smothered under seething, spreading mud.

“Just this once,” I say, desperate. “It’s a beautiful day. The weather’s fine. It’s an easy drive.”

He says, “You have a sick sense of what’s easy.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. I force myself to look away from the bird, at him. I get as far as his chin. “I’m not good at this. I know that. I know I’m weird and quirky and I don’t act the way you expect polite people to act. I’ll never really know all the rules. So I say things wrong and I do
things wrong. But I’m a person and so are you and I just need this one favor. It will make a huge difference for me. I need to see my sister, and I need you to take me to her.”

He says, “No.”

“No?” My stomach feels like it’s full of cookie dough.

“Look at it from my position,” he says. “You’re asking me to do something I am really terrified of doing, and you haven’t even given me a good reason.”

“I have to tell Amanda something.”

“Call her.”

“I have been. Since yesterday, over and over. She won’t answer. She doesn’t want to hear what I have to say.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s private.”

David snaps, “Be private and take the subway, then.”

“The subway doesn’t go to her house.”

“Call a cab.”

“Amanda put a hold on my credit card,” I say. “And all the cash I have isn’t enough to pay for it.” I’ve put several twenty-dollar bills in the pocket of my jeans, but I know they’ll only cover the trip out, not the trip back. And I have to come back. I don’t know what I’ll find there.

“You can find a better way. A different way. Don’t ask me to do this. Not unless you can give me a really good reason.”

My heart is beating so hard I can hear it. I need something to calm me. Something sweet and rich and decadent. Not chocolate, not pie. There it is. Tres leches cake. A white cake waiting in a white porcelain baking dish. Cream pouring down, not a drizzle, but a thick, steady, heavy stream. Soaking into the dry sponge of the cake. Being drunk up hungrily. Seeming to disappear, but changing everything. Texture. Taste. The cake can’t stay the way it is. Without all three milks it’s too dry. It has to change.

I open my eyes. I’m willing to risk everything.

“I can help you see your wife again,” I tell him.

“What did you say?”

“Just what you think I said. It sounds crazy, but it’s true. I can help you see your wife again.”

He sits hard on the bed, springs up again, clenches his fists, unclenches them. It’s too much motion for a tiny room. I take a step back toward the door. “That is sick, Ginny, just sick. My wife is dead. You know that.”

“I do! That’s why I’m the only one who can help you. I can see ghosts.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I know. I know. It is.” The air in here is getting hotter, harder to breathe. It feels even more like I’m inside an oven. I scramble to make myself make sense. “I never believed in ghosts either. Not till I saw one. But ever since my parents died, I can make something from a recipe, and I can see the ghost of the person who made it.”

“That is … I don’t know … it’s ridiculous, that’s all I can think, ridiculous.”

“But it’s true.”

“But it’s ridiculous.”

I ask him, “Do you have a recipe?”

“For what?”

“Doesn’t matter. Anything. Anything of Elena’s. Any recipe she wrote.”

“Yes.”

Everything is uncertain. I am running out of strategies and he doesn’t believe me. I don’t know how to make him. “Tell me about it. The recipe.”

He gulps in air and says, “Okay, yes, I have her recipe for aji de gallina. It’s a Peruvian dish, her favorite, with chicken and potatoes.
In a yellow sauce. When we were dating she gave it to me and said if I could make it I would impress her. I never made it but she married me anyway.”

I still need to know one more thing. “And is it … from a book, or—”

“She wrote it down for me,” he says.

He fumbles with his wallet and drops it on the carpet. I don’t bend to pick it up, we are too close in here. He opens the wallet and pulls out a folded piece of paper. The chickadee softly chirps three notes.

Carefully, David unfolds the paper and spreads it out on the bed. He beckons me over, and I cross the short space to look.

A handwritten recipe. Sharp slanted letters and numbers, all leaning right. Faded, but whole.

In a quiet, hard voice like a brick, David says, “Is this what you need?”

“Yes. Her handwriting. I’ll make the recipe, and she’ll come. I promise.”

“You promise?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not enough,” he says. “I can’t believe you, it’s just not possible.”

He lifts his hand quickly and I think for a second he’s going to hit me, so I step back, but I trip on a box and land hard on the bed, on my side. Without thinking about it I hold up my hand as if that will keep him from hitting me if that’s what he wants to do. This is why my mother wouldn’t let me get into these situations. I can’t read them. I can’t save myself if someone has bad intentions.

David says, “Don’t be afraid,” and I realize I shouldn’t be. He isn’t going to hurt me.

He grabs my extended hand.

“Your dad,” he says.

I wonder if he wants to know if I’ve seen the ghost of my dad. I start, “Yesterday, he said—”

“Don’t,” David interrupts. “I don’t want to talk about ghosts.”

I don’t know what he’s saying.

He places the palm of his hand against mine. His hand is dry and firm. I feel the warmth of his skin. One scar against another.

David says, “For your dad’s sake, I’ll do it. Because he helped me.”

I sit up. “You’ll do it?”

“Yes,” he says. “I’ll take you to your sister’s.”

I
T TAKES A WHILE
to find the keys, but I don’t rush him. Any minute he could still change his mind. It’s a terrible thing to ask of him, but I need his help. And I’ve promised something in return that he needs. Even if right now he doesn’t believe me, or doesn’t think that’s what he wants. I promised. We won’t know for a while who made the more dangerous bargain.

The garage is in back. It’s musty and cobwebbed. The car is covered under a cloth, and when he pulls the cloth off, I see its silver sides are smooth and unmarked.

He answers my question before I ask it. “That’s the worst part. I made her let me drive that day, it was her car, I shouldn’t even have been behind the wheel. And if you ask me to say one more word about it we are not going anywhere. Okay?”

“Okay.”

We get in the car. I hand him the directions. He nods, three times, and hands them back to me. We drive in silence, his hands high up on the wheel, my feet jammed hard against the floor. My legs are tense and straight as celery sticks.

The streets are familiar at first. Brick from the 1830s mixed with tall modern glass boxes, everything colorful and close together. Narrow, one-way streets, packed tight. Then things open up a bit more. We take the parkway, moving north. Roadways blur into one another.
Wide, gray streets. A long bridge, soaring upward. With the gray sky there is little to see. The warm, dry air of the car makes me sleepy. I almost give in to it. My head lolls against the window.

From the other side of the car, David says, “Ginny? You all right?”

“I’m okay.”

“You don’t look okay,” he says. “You look awful.”

“You look awful,” I say. It’s a reflex.

“I suppose I do. This isn’t easy for me.”

I apologize, not as a reflex, but because I mean it. I shouldn’t have put him through this. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” he says, his eyes on the road.

We arrive before I realize we’ve turned off the parkway. The house is large and white. I don’t know how to describe it. I never learned the words for architecture. With all the things I threw myself into between my childhood and now—round things, and ESP, and Turkish rug patterns, and letters written by nuns, and food, so much food—I was never all that interested in houses. I’ve only been here twice before. It looks big and comfortable. It looks like a place real people live.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll wait here.”

I remind myself, this is what I wanted. Before I can second-guess myself into inaction I push the door of the car open and stride up to the front door, rapping on it with my knuckles, rap rap rap a steady rap.

Nothing happens.

I turn my fist to the side and instead of rapping I’m pounding, and I realize how desperate I am to see Amanda’s face appear at the door, so I pound, and I pound, slamming my fist into the wood of the door like I’m crushing a bagful of graham crackers, but the firm wood doesn’t yield, not even a little.

“Amanda!” I shout. “Amanda!”

I think I see little faces at the window, but it could be my imagination.

Someone is coming up next to me on the porch, and I think for a second it’s David, but he’s still in the car. Brennan must have come out of a side door, or the garage, maybe. He steps up onto the porch with me and I back into the only space left, against the door.

“Stop shouting,” he says.

“I’ll stop shouting when she comes out. Amanda!”

“No, stop shouting,” he says, and reaches for my mouth with his hand. I smack his arm, hard. He yanks it back.

He glares at me and I make myself glare back at him, gaze locked, silent.

Brennan says, “Ginny, she doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“It’ll only take a minute,” I say.

“She’s not coming out.”

I try to tell him. “I just want to explain to her, it’s the family, she doesn’t know about Dad, and the syndrome, and me, if it’s Shannon, there are so many different points on the spectrum she shouldn’t be afraid—”