The Sweetness of Salt (14 page)

chapter

30

I was in seventh grade when the call came about Goober’s birth. Sophie had been out of the house for almost five years by then, and her visits home—which were already occurring less and less—had dissolved into long, drawn-out screaming matches, mostly with Dad. I remember how long it took to get to the hospital. And how silent it was in the car.

Sophie seemed startlingly skinny when we saw her, especially since she’d just had a baby. Her bare arms looked bony sticking out of the blue hospital gown, and when she got up at one point to shuffle to the bathroom, I could not make out even the smallest curve of a belly. Her face was unnaturally pale too, as if the blood had drained out of it, and her lips were dry and cracked. She was happy to see us, though, and cried a little when Mom hugged her.

The nurse brought the baby out of the nursery, wheeling her into the room in a big plastic bassinet that had been set atop a metal cart. I remember thinking she was not very cute. In fact, she was kind of squished looking. Still, I cooed along with Mom and Dad as they bent over her, trying to wiggle their index fingers into her tightly closed fists. Sophie leaned her head against the pillow and watched them tiredly.

After an hour or so, Mom and Dad left to get some lunch. I stayed with Sophie, not ready to leave her just yet. She patted the side of her bed and I scooted up next to her. “I’m glad you’re here, Julia.”

“Me too.”

“How’s school?”

“Pretty good.”

“What about your classes? How’re they going?”

I had all As, but I didn’t say that. “They’re all right. I like my math teacher. He’s cute.”

Sophie grinned. “I had a cute math teacher once. In tenth grade.” She leaned her head back against her pillow. I could see the veins beneath the skin of her neck. “God, that seems like so long ago.”

“It was a long time ago.”

She lifted her head. “Yeah, I guess it was.” There was a pause as she looked over at Goober sleeping soundly in her bassinet. “Can you believe I’m a mother?”

I shrugged. “I guess I’ll get used to it.” I started to ask about Goober’s father, but something inside told me not to.

“Do you think I’ll be a good one?” Sophie asked.

“A good what?”

“Mother,” she said. “A good mother.”

“Well, yeah. Sure. You’ll be great.” I reached out and pulled the bassinet a little closer to the bed. “Besides,” I lied, “she’s so cute.” I looked back over at Sophie, and was startled to see her eyes pooled with tears. “What’s wrong?”

She shook her head. “I don’t
feel
anything,” she whispered. A single tear rolled down her face as she spoke. “Nothing.” I was too afraid to ask her what she meant. Sophie kept talking, her eyes wide and unblinking, as the tears leaked out. “You know that rush of love you’re supposed to feel when you look at your baby for the first time?” I nodded dumbly, although I had no idea what she was talking about. “I haven’t felt it, Julia. Not once. Not when they gave her to me to hold after she first came out, and not after they cleaned her all up and gave her back to me.” She stared vacantly into the basket. “What’s wrong with me?” she whispered.

“Nothing.” I could think of nothing else to say. “Nothing’s wrong with you.”

Suddenly, as if someone had shaken her, she blinked, and then pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “Oh my God,” she said. “I’m sorry. I can’t believe I just said all that. I’m so sorry. I have all these hormones swimming around inside of me right now and…” The color had come back into her cheeks, a deep flush of pink that started at the bottom of her throat and made its way up. She flattened her hands against the sides of them, as if to stop the heat from rising. “Agh!” She uttered a funny little scream. “I’m sorry, Jules. Really. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s okay.” I turned back toward the bassinet, because her apologies made me feel embarrassed. There was no need for them, but she did not understand that.

“You want to hold her?” Sophie asked behind me.

“Can I?”

“Of course you can.” Sophie pulled the bassinet over until it was even with her side of the bed. She lifted Goober carefully with two hands and then placed them in the cradle of mine. I couldn’t believe how light she was. It was like holding a loaf of bread. Goober stirred a little as the transition was made, and scrunched up her nose, but then she settled back down again and the wrinkles disappeared from her face. Her skin was as smooth as a petal and deep pink. Tiny eyelashes stuck out like the edges of a feather, and her lips were shaped like a heart.

“Wow,” I whispered, looking back over at Sophie. “She really is adorable.”

But Sophie was looking past me, out the window, at something I could not see.

chapter

31

Sophie got a phone call around four o’clock that afternoon that made her face go pale. “What is it?” I asked. We were still painting and I had paint everywhere—in my hair, on my arms, even on my face.

She snapped her phone shut and shook her head. “Oh, nothing. Just some stupid stuff with the bank. I still have a bunch of papers to sign for the house.” Her eyes swept the room as if looking for something. “Listen, let’s stop for today, okay? I’m gonna have to go up to Rutland for a little bit. It’s only about twenty minutes away, and it shouldn’t take long. Will you be all right here without me?”

“Well, yeah. Of course. Are you sure everything’s okay?”

She shook her head again. “It’s nothing. Seriously. Don’t worry about it.” She glanced out the window. “I’ve been using Jimmy’s truck when I need to go places, but it’d be great if I could just take the Bug now. You mind?”

“The keys are in my suitcase,” I said.

She roared out of the driveway, spewing dust and pebbles beneath her tires. I watched until the green car made a left at the light, and then I went back inside the house. I pulled off my dirty clothes and got into the shower. Sophie’s shampoo did nothing to erase the paint spatters from my hair. I leaned forward, examining the sullied strands in the mirror. It looked like I had a really terrible case of dandruff. Ugh. And my eyebrows were a mess, thick and stiff as barbed wire. I opened the mirror, poking around for a pair of tweezers. There was a tall bottle of pink Barbie shampoo, several packets of matches, a tube of toothpaste, and some dental floss. That was it. I shut the mirror. Of course Sophie didn’t pluck her eyebrows. She probably didn’t even own a tube of lipstick.

I leaned closer to the mirror again, examining the rest of my face. My skin looked a little more tan. My cheeks were fuller too, probably from all the pancakes I’d been eating at Perry’s. There were dark circles under my eyes—most likely from my lack of sleep the night before—and a few blackheads on my nose. Still, not terrible. Even with the barbed-wire eyebrows and paint-speckled hair.

I got into clean clothes and brushed my hair. A tiny pot of blackberry lip gloss was in the bottom of my suitcase. I slicked it over my lips and rubbed them together.

Good enough.

I headed out the door.

Everything seemed to slow down inside as I stood in front of the yellow house again—my heartbeat, the chattering inside my head, even the pulse in my wrists. My breathing became more measured, my anxiety a non-issue. The name of this street was Furnace Road, which puzzled me. If I’d had anything to say about it, I would have called it Shady Tree Lane. Or maybe Maple Leaf Drive. Something pretty and delicate. Something alive and beating.

Aiden was working behind his wheel when I walked up the lawn. His hat was down low over his eyes, and one Converse sneaker tapped out a beat as he swayed slightly with the spinning clay. He stopped when he saw me, and turned off the motor.

“Hey,” he said. “You’re becoming a regular.”

I winced, taking a step backward. “I shouldn’t…I mean…”

“Hey, relax,” Aiden said. “I was just making an observation. I didn’t mean anything by it.” He reached out suddenly and, with a swipe of his hand, crushed the small clay shape in front of him.

I gasped. “What did you do that for?”

“It’s no good,” Aiden said. “I didn’t get it centered right.”

I held out my hand. “Can I try?” Aiden looked up in surprise. “I mean, if it’s okay with you.”

“Have you ever worked on a pottery wheel before?” he asked.

“No.”

Aiden hesitated and then got up from his seat. “Okay.” He scraped the mound of clay off the wheel and kneaded it for a few minutes, then handed it to me. I held it in my hands, trying to get used to the feel of it against my skin. It was surprisingly dry—and heavy. Not very pliable either. I could feel the muscles in my forearms flexing as I squeezed it, the tips of my fingers pressing until they turned white. “That’s it,” Aiden said as I worked it back eventually into a mound. “Now put it on the wheel and see if you can get it centered.”

I nervously glanced at him out of the corner of my eye and sat down on the little stool. My feet touched a corner of the magazine pile and the wheel was at chest height, directly in front of me. I reached out and pressed the clay down on the wheel.

“Okay, wait,” Aiden said. “You can’t just set it down all dainty like that. It’s got to be attached to the wheel. Really stuck on. Pick it up and try again. And this time, bring your arms up and really fling it down. Use your whole body.”

“Fling it down?” I repeated. “Won’t I break the wheel?”

He shook his head. “Nope. It’s built for that.”

I tried to remember the last time I had flung anything anywhere. Maybe a sneaker when I was learning to tie my shoes? The action was so foreign to me that just thinking about slamming the clay down on the wheel made me giggle.

“Come on!” Aiden said. “You can do it! Throw it!”

I lifted my hands tentatively. Bit my lip. Stared at the black marker in the middle of the wheel. And then I let my arms fall, hard. The clay hit the wheel with a dull thudding sound—and then stayed there.

“Awesome!” Aiden said. “Perfect. Now step on the pedal, get her started.”

The wheel moved much faster than I expected it to, and I shrieked as the clay began to wobble back and forth. “Lighten up on the pedal,” Aiden encouraged me. “And lean in with your whole body so you can get that clay in the middle of the wheel. There’s nothing pretty about this process, so don’t worry about looking all graceful or anything. Lean in. Give it your whole weight.”

He let me go through the process three times. Three times I flung the clay on the wheel and bent over it, trying desperately to push—and then keep—the clay into the center. Three times I failed.

But as I walked back to Sophie’s place a little later, I couldn’t help but smile.

The clay had a mind of its own. I could respect that.

chapter

32

It was early the next week by the time we finished priming the walls inside, and we were halfway through scraping paint on the outside. We worked until early evening on Tuesday, sanding and cleaning the floor. Walt had loaned Sophie his electric sander, which cut most of the work in half, but Sophie insisted that I do the corners with a small piece of regular old sandpaper. By the time the shadows outside had begun to lengthen and the sun had fallen behind the trees, my fingers were so sore I wondered if they would remain attached if I used them to do anything else.

“Why did you ask those Table of Knowledge guys to stop helping you again?” I asked, struggling to my feet.

“Because I want to do this on my own,” Sophie answered. “I like doing things on my own. Come on, let’s get something to eat and hit the hay. We’ve done a lot today. You tired?”

“Tired?” I repeated. “Try exhausted.”

She punched me lightly in the arm. “You’ll be okay after a good night’s sleep. Let’s find some grub.”

In my opinion, Sophie’s kitchen was the best thing about the whole house. With three brick walls—one of which framed a floor-to-ceiling window—real marble countertops (which Jimmy had found in a quarry), upper and lower cupboards, and a wooden pot rack dangling from a length of chain from the ceiling, there was not much else that needed changing. Sophie said she and Jimmy were still thinking about tearing out most of the cupboards to make room for another oven, but that was still up for debate. Now, she opened and shut the cupboard doors, looking for something to eat. “What do you feel like? I can make some pasta, some macaroni and cheese…”

I dropped down heavily on top of a stepladder that was propped against one of the brick walls, and leaned my head back. “Anything’s fine. I don’t know if I even have the strength to chew.”

“I wish I knew how to cook better.” Sophie scanned the contents of another cupboard and then shut the door. “I can bake you into the grave, but ask me to put together a chicken dinner, and I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Then just bake something. We don’t have to have a dinner-dinner. I’ll eat anything.” I watched through the window as a baby squirrel made its way up the trunk of a large oak tree next to the house.

“Yeah?” Sophie put her hands on her hips. “Okay, then. You feel like some biscuits?” I didn’t have to answer. She had already rolled up the sleeves of her shirt and was grabbing flour, baking powder, and salt out of the cupboard. She measured them into a bowl, reached for a pinch of salt and tossed it in. Next, she cut up a stick of cold butter into neat little cubes, poured in a measuring cup of milk, and mashed the whole thing in between her fingers, pressing and turning it inside the bowl. After a few minutes, she dropped a small, round mass of dough onto the flour-sprinkled marble countertop and began pushing it with the heels of her hands.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Kneading,” Sophie said. She lifted one shoulder, brushing a piece of hair out of her face. “You have to do this to make it soft and pliable. Otherwise the biscuits come out sort of dumpy.”

“Dumpy?” I repeated.

“Yeah, like big hunks of Play-Doh.” She rolled her hands against the now baby-smooth mound, pulling it back with her fingers. “You gotta give it some love, you know? Get all the rough edges out by pulling it a little this way, and then pulling it a little that way. You’ll see.”

My exhaustion faded as I watched my sister work. It was exactly the way I remembered, when I used to sit on the step outside the kitchen at home. Sophie’s fingers flew over and under and then on top of the dough. Finished with the kneading, she pulled and stretched it into a circle, and then started rolling it with a pin. When she got it to a thickness that she seemed to like, she dipped the rim of a water glass into some flour, then pressed it down into the dough, forming small, perfect circles. She brushed each biscuit with a coat of melted butter, and finished with a sprinkling of sugar, then placed the tray in the oven. Her confidence and the way she knew her way around her ingredients filled me with awe all over again.

“I bet you could bake anything,” I said finally, as she set the timer.

“I’ll try anything when it comes to baking.” Sophie nodded toward the oven. “I’ve made those biscuits so many times over the years I don’t even need a recipe. The trick is the butter. It’s gotta be cold.”

“You really do like baking, don’t you?” I said stupidly.

“I don’t think there’s anything else in the world I’d rather do,” Sophie said. She had started washing at the sink; clouds of soap suds encircled her wrists. A soft, floury scent had already begun to fill the room. “I love everything about baking.”

I felt a twinge of jealousy. “I remember one time you told me that your favorite thing about baking was being in the kitchen with a head full of ideas.”

Sophie laughed. “That sounds pretty accurate.”

“What else do you like about it?”

She shook the soap suds from her hands and then leaned against the sink. For a moment she stared out at the fading light through the window, then she turned back around. “I think the preciseness of it. Baking demands an exactness that I love. It calms me down for some reason. Centers me.” She shrugged. “It probably sounds really weird, but I like the fact that when you bake, you have to follow a specific set of rules in order to get the right result.” She wiped her hands on the edge of her jeans. “A lot of people like to cook for the exact opposite reason—if they add too much of this or don’t have enough of that, they don’t have to worry; they can just substitute something else. Not knowing how or what they’re going to end up with is exciting, I guess.” She shook her head. “Not me. I’d rather know right from the beginning what I’m going to get.”

She pulled a dishcloth from her shoulder and began wiping it over the countertop. “Besides, I never feel this way anywhere else.”

“What way?”

“Happy,” she said simply. “I’m happier in a kitchen than anywhere else.”