“Hey, you gonna show me where the kitchen is?” I called after him, but he didn’t answer. “Guess not.”
I stood there for a few minutes, waiting to see if he’d come back. When he didn’t, I slid my backpack down and set it on the tile. The zipper hung open where it was broke, and I could see the Someday Book inside. I’d been carrying it with me since I got it out from under the bed. It was mine, after all, and even though the ideas in it seemed stupid now—
someday I’m gonna fly an airplane; someday I’m gonna have a horse; someday I’m gonna have a big bedroom with a roof thing over the bed
—it was still kind of interesting, looking back at what you dreamed about in the seventh grade. Besides, if Mama found it around our place, I’d be dead for sure, because she’d know I’d been in her box.
I wandered through the downstairs, checking out the hallway to the left. A couple bedrooms and bathrooms, and a little room with lots of bookshelves and windows, some sofas at one end, and an old pool table at the other. There were photos in the hall, the old kind with the colors faded—a little girl running in the waves on a beach, a boy playing in the sand under a palm tree, a family standing on the deck of a sailboat, smiling for the camera. Mom, dad, two kids. The perfect postcard. The sailboat was high-dollar, and the man looked enough like J. Norman that I figured out who it was. He had red hair when he was young. He wasn’t a bad-looking dude—nothing like the prune-faced guy who’d just opened the door. But the man in the picture didn’t look happy, either. The woman and the little girl and the boy were all focused on the camera, but the man was looking off a bit, like he’d pasted on a smile for the picture, but his mind wasn’t in it. I stared at it and thought,
If somebody put me on a boat like that, my mind wouldn’t be anyplace else.
That looked like the good life, right there.
I wandered on past some more baby pictures and high school graduation pictures, and pictures of J. Norman and his wife. They’d gone on trips all over the world—the Great Wall of China, some pyramids like in Egypt, a big ship out in the ocean, a castle someplace. His wife had on pretty dresses in some of the old pictures, and hats to match, and little white gloves. She was as classy as an old-time movie star, with a big white smile, and red lipstick, and dark hair piled high on her head. From where I was standing, the life in those pictures was a fairy tale.
I left the photos and went back up the hall and across the entryway, past the stairs. I could hear J. Norman up there making noise in one of the rooms. He had a TV on loud, and drawers and cabinets were slamming. Mama’d told me I was supposed to keep an eye on him, and that his daughter didn’t want him upstairs, but what was I supposed to do about it—go up there and carry the man down like a big ol’ baby? He was a grown-up, after all, and if he felt good enough to be smacking drawers around, he couldn’t be in too bad shape.
Then I thought,
Yeah, what if he fell down or something, and that’s what all the racket up there is about?
I remembered when Mrs. Lora came home from the hospital the first time. The night she got back, she fell in the bathroom and was stuck beside the toilet. I had to break the door lock to get in there and help her out.
Maybe I should check on Mr. J. Norman Grouchface Smartmouth Alvord. . . .
Then again, if he saw me, he’d probably bite my head off for bothering him. The kitchen was a safer place, since that’s where I told him I’d be. . . .
I tiptoed up a couple steps and listened, anyway. He was talking to someone up there . . . or talking to himself. Anyway, he wasn’t yelling for help, and so I decided he wasn’t dying or anything. I left him be and went through the rest of the downstairs. There were so many rooms there, you could get lost. I liked the front room with flowered sofas and lace curtains and a cabinet full of teacups from all over the world. Each one had a little label on the bottom telling where it came from. I could’ve stayed in that room all day, but I figured I’d better go do the job I was supposed to do.
The kitchen was huge, with green tile countertops, a refrigerator big enough to stuff dead bodies into, and a giant brick archway with pans hanging overhead. Inside it, the shiny new stainless-steel stove looked weird, since everything else in the kitchen was old. Off to the left, a little table sat tucked back by some windows. There were bird feeders hanging all over the backyard—like, fifty of them. Birds darted in and out, checking the feeders, but they were empty and it looked like they’d been that way for a while. I wondered if the pretty lady in the pictures used to fill them. One time when we lived in Odessa, Mama and me rented a trailer house from a lady who fed the birds out back of her house. She said a free bird is good for the soul.
There was an envelope on the counter with my name on it. I opened it and found money and a note inside. J. Norman’s daughter wrote the note, I guess. It was full of instructions, step by step, for what I was supposed to cook, and where everything was, and how to turn on the stove, and to be sure to turn it off, and where to set J. Norman’s plate, and that I was supposed to hang around and clean up after he ate. Geez. Really, as long as she must’ve spent writing all that, she could’ve just fixed him dinner herself. At the bottom, the note said,
I assume your mother told you that my father is not to be climbing the stairs unassisted, under any circumstances. All necessary items have been moved downstairs for him. If he argues with you about this, please call, and I’ll talk to him.
After that, there was a phone number and her name,
Deborah
. At the top of the page, the stationery had a fancy emblem from the college, and her full name, Deborah Lewis, PhD. She had perfect handwriting, and the strokes were deep into the paper, like she was pushing hard when she wrote.
Since I’d already messed up in my first thirty minutes on the job, there was no way I was gonna call her. Anyone who’d write a note like that wasn’t about to pat me on the head and tell me it was all right.
I was supposed to make some kind of pasta for J. Norman. His daughter’d left all the ingredients in the refrigerator, chopped up in separate little baggies—onions, mushrooms, green peppers, and low-fat imitation hamburger crumbles. There was pasta and a bottle of sauce on the counter, and whole-wheat bread. The note did everything but tell me which side to butter it on. Guess
Deborah
didn’t know I’d been cooking since I was old enough to pull a chair up to the stove, because Mama was always too tired, and most of her boyfriends liked food on the table when they came in. I didn’t mind it so much. Once I got old enough to come home and stay by myself after school, cooking gave me something to do, and besides, I like to eat.
J. Norman didn’t have to worry about me eating
his
food, though. That low-fat fake hamburger smelled nasty, even once I put the vegetables in. I looked around in the refrigerator to see if there was anything else I could add to it, and came up with a little low-fat ham. I chopped it thin and put it in, and fried it all and added the sauce. In about twenty minutes, dinner was done, and it was only four fifty-five. Now what was I gonna do with myself until six, when I was supposed to leave? Four till six Tuesdays and Thursdays. Man, this was gonna stink.
I put the food on the table, made toast and a glass of orange juice (just like the note said), and set a single place at the table. Then I went looking for J. Norman. He was upstairs in a room with the door shut. I knocked on it, and he hollered at me, “What do you want?”
“Your food’s ready,” I told him.
“I’m occupied.”
“Well, it’s ready, and it’ll get cold.” What was I supposed to do now? Kick in the door, drag the man downstairs, and sit him in front of his plate? This job was such a stupid idea. Why was I even still here?
“What’s in it?” Something in the room, a drawer shutting maybe, smacked like the crack of a gun going off, and I jerked back.
“What’s in what?”
“The food? What’s in the food?” His voice was closer to the door now. Just on the other side, but we were still yelling through the wood.
“The stuff that was in the refrigerator.”
Duh.
“I don’t like those things.” A chair squealed. I guessed he was sitting down in it. Looked like J. Norman wasn’t coming to dinner.
I gathered up my
nice
and tried one more time. While I was cooking, I’d started coming up with a use for the money for this job, and I was getting kind of attached to the idea. “I made it like your daughter said. Like Deborah said. In the note. I know how to cook.”
“She doesn’t care what I like.”
“Except I added a little ham.”
“What for?”
“To make it taste better. Like pasta carbonara.” I had pasta carbonara in a restaurant with Mrs. Lora once, and I liked it, so me and her found a recipe. Now I couldn’t help wondering if that was the Italian in me coming out.
“Never heard of it.” The chair creaked and a drawer slid open. “I don’t like ham.”
“Then why’s it in your refrigerator?” He didn’t have an answer for that, I guess. He snorted loud, and then the phone rang. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to answer it or not. I thought about the fact that it might be Deborah, and if nobody answered, she’d think something was wrong. Then she’d come over and find J. Norman upstairs and his dinner all cold on the table. I’d be out of this job in a hurry. Mama would go off on me like crazy.
The phone on the hall table kept ringing and ringing. I could hear one in the office, too. Guess J. Norman wasn’t gonna answer no matter what. Maybe I needed to. Maybe I’d get in trouble if I did. Maybe I’d get in trouble if I didn’t.
Finally, I grabbed the phone. It was Deborah, and she was mad. “He’s ignoring the phone, isn’t he?” she asked, and I heard a click like someone was picking up another receiver. Deborah heard the click, too. “Is that him? Did he just pick up? Dad, are you on here?”
“I don’t think so,” I told her, and I wasn’t sure why I said it. The office door opened, and J. Norman poked his head around the corner, the phone cord wrapped across his chin and pulling his left ear down flat. The sunlight reflected off his glasses, so that I couldn’t see his eyes, but his mouth was hanging open a little.
“Has he eaten?” Deborah wanted to know. “Did he give you any trouble about it, because I told him not to. . . .”
“He’s eating right now.” Whether I was trying to save J. Norman’s rear or my own, I didn’t have a clue, but Deborah sounded like she could chew somebody up one side and down the other. “That’s why he didn’t pick up the phone.”
J. Norman tilted his head back, squinted at me underneath the black plastic rims of his glasses. He frowned, like I had him all confused.
“You want to talk to him?” I asked. “Because I can go in the kitchen and get him.”
J. Norman put up a one-handed stop sign and shook his head. He made a sidestep toward the stairs, like he was afraid Deborah could see him right through the phone. The cord stretched tighter and his ear got flatter.
“It’s just that he’s, like, in the middle of dinner.” I looked him in the eye. He stopped with his hand on the doorframe. “He likes it a lot, I think.”
His eyes went wide.
“He’s eating a
ton
,” I said.
He cocked his head to one side and squinted at me again.
Deborah let out a long, slow sigh, like the mad was flowing out of her. “No, don’t bother him. I’m glad to hear he’s eating a good meal, for once. I just wanted to check in.”
“Everything’s great. He can’t get
enough
of that pasta. He even said he
liked
it.” I stared J. Norman dead in the face, and his mouth dropped open again.
“He did?” Deborah was in full-on shock.
“Yes, ma’am. He even told me ‘thank you.’ ”
J. Norman coughed like he had a bone in his throat, and he shook a fist in the air.
His daughter said good-bye; then I pushed the button to hang up the phone, pointing the antenna at him. “You owe me big-time now.”
I had a feeling I wasn’t gonna have near as much trouble with Mr. J. Norman anymore, and I was right. By the time I left for the day, we were getting along, if that’s what you call it when two people act like they don’t notice each other, but they don’t argue, either. I cleaned up the rest of the kitchen and left him at the table, eating pasta carbonara. I couldn’t tell if he liked it or not, but I didn’t really care, so everything was fine.
Russ was gone when I got home, and Mama was already down at the university, trying to get those classrooms shiny clean so she could get promoted from being on a temporary status to full-time with benefits. That meant I was free to finally get in Mama’s closet again and pull out the secret boxes.
I opened the big box first this time. It was full of old clothes that smelled kind of musty, but they weren’t the kind of clothes Mama would wear anymore. They were nice dresses, like she might’ve put on for a dance or a party at someplace fancy, but all of them would be too small for her now. Smashed on one side against the cardboard were some things that must’ve been hers when she was a kid—a china doll in a pretty dress but with her hair moth-eaten; a lacy white little girl’s dress, like a wedding dress, only smaller; a pink ballet costume and a pair of crushed ballet shoes. I never even knew my mama was a dancer.