The Fourteenth Goldfish (7 page)

My mom gets home from school early. When she walks in the door, she’s carrying two big bags of groceries.

“Rehearsals are going great, so I let everyone have the day off! I thought I’d make us dinner,” she enthuses. She adds, “I feel like I’ve been neglecting you lately, Ellie.”

She spends the rest of the afternoon in the kitchen. When we go in for dinner, it looks like a
tornado hit the place: dirty bowls and measuring cups are piled in the sink, and flour is all over the counter. She must have used every single pot in the house.

“Dinner is served!” she announces, and places our plates in front of us with a flourish.

There’s a breaded, fried, patty-like thing lying in the middle of each plate. Next to it is some singed asparagus.

My grandfather and I both take a bite.

“So?” my mom asks. “What do you think?”

It’s mushy, with a weird texture, and has way too much pepper.

My grandfather makes a face. “What is this supposed to be?”

“Fried eggplant,” she says.

His answer is decisive. “Nope. Don’t like it.”

She looks at me. “Do you like it?”

I shake my head.

Her shoulders sag in defeat.

The eggplant goes in the trash and we order Chinese.

My grandfather and I are in the kitchen the next day after school, and he’s complaining about my mother’s cooking.

“If she had paid as much attention to chemistry as she did to this theater nonsense, she’d be a good cook,” he says. He exaggerates the word “theater” so that it sounds like
thee-a-tah
.

“Chemistry? What does that have to do with anything?”

He looks at me. “Cooking is science.”

“It is?” It has always seemed so arty to me.

“It’s all basic chemistry,” he says. “In fact, science has its fingerprints all over the kitchen.”

He opens the refrigerator and takes out a block of cheese, waves it.

“Louis Pasteur discovered a way to kill bacteria in drinks: pasteurization, or heating at high temperatures. It was practically a miracle at the time! That’s why we can drink milk and eat cheese without getting sick.”

I’d had no idea that cheese was a miracle.

“I like to cook,” I tell him.

“Of course you do,” he says, as if it’s perfectly obvious. “You take after me.”

Maybe I do take after him.

He claps his hands. “Let’s make dinner.”

“What should we make?” I ask. Most of my recipes are breakfast-oriented.

He looks in the refrigerator and then goes to the green wooden recipe box on the windowsill above the sink. The recipe box belonged to my grandmother. Sometimes when my mother’s had a bad day, she’ll pull out the little cards and read them. She says she just likes to look at her mother’s handwriting.

My grandfather ticks through the recipes with a critical eye, then pulls one out.

“Ah, yes, this will do nicely,” he says.

I look at the recipe card. It has stains on it like it’s been used a lot. In perfect loopy cursive, it reads:

He adds, “And it’s French like Louis Pasteur.”

“The only French food I’ve ever eaten is French fries,” I confess.

“You can’t go wrong with French food,” he assures me. “It’s the best cuisine in the world.”

We settle in at the kitchen counter, working side by side. He’s a tidy cook; he cleans up as he goes along, just like me. He shows me how to cut the carrots. How to brown the chicken with bacon. How to combine everything and simmer with red wine. I start to see how the kitchen is kind of like a laboratory. The glass bowls. The measuring spoons. The gas flame on a stove is like a Bunsen burner. When you think about it, even cooks’ white aprons are similar to the white coats that scientists wear.

But maybe there’s also a little magic in cooking, taking all the plain old ingredients and turning them into comfort and memory. Because when my mom walks in the door, she sniffs the air expectantly.

“Something smells wonderful,” she says.

“We cooked dinner!” I say.

My grandfather holds out a plate to her.

“Is that—” she starts to ask.

My grandfather finishes her sentence. “Your mother’s coq au vin.”

She takes a bite and her face turns up in a smile.

“It tastes exactly the way I remember it,” she murmurs.

His eyes shine. “Yes,” he says.

My grandfather’s in the bathroom.

He likes to take a book with him, and sometimes he’ll stay in there for an hour. My mom has started to jokingly call it his “office.”

The doorbell rings, so I answer it. I don’t know who I’m expecting to see, but it certainly isn’t Raj.

“Hey, Ellie,” he says. He’s wearing his usual black outfit.

I smile back weakly. “Uh, hi.”

We stand there for a minute.

Raj shifts on his feet. “So, are you going to invite me in?”

I stand back. “Oh, sure. Come in!”

He walks into our foyer and looks around the hallway. “Is Melvin home?”

Confusion floods me. “You’re here to see Melvin?”

Before he can answer, the toilet flushes and my grandfather emerges from the bathroom.

“You’re late,” my grandfather informs him.

“Yo, Dr. Sagarsky,” he says.

I’m dumbfounded. “You
told
him?” I ask my grandfather.

“Why not?” My grandfather waves a hand at Raj’s earring. “Who’d believe
him
anyway?”

“I almost didn’t believe it,” Raj admits. “But it’s amazing what you can find on the Internet.”

He holds out a piece of paper.

It’s a printout of an old newspaper article. It says:
Fresno Boy Wins Central Valley Science Fair
. Next to
the article is a photo of my grandfather with the caption “Melvin Sagarsky, age 15.” He looks exactly like he does now, except with a crew cut.

“I think I like you better with short hair,” Raj says to my grandfather.

“Try being bald for thirty years, and see how fast you cut your hair when you get it back,” my grandfather says.

“By the way, did you know you have a fan club in Finland?”

My grandfather preens. “They have T-shirts now.”

“I saw that,” Raj says. “I’ll buy one when they come in black.”

“Let’s get to work,” my grandfather says.

“Work?” I echo.

“He hired me,” Raj answers.

I turn to my grandfather. “You’re paying him?”

My grandfather looks unconcerned. “I have plenty of money. Start saving now. Compound interest is a wonderful thing.”

“But why him?”

“He has all the qualifications I require in a lab assistant.”

“Oh,” I say, and feel oddly hurt. I thought
I
was his lab assistant.

Raj gives me an ironic smile. “An older brother with a car.”

My grandfather has a plan to get into building twenty-four, and it feels like it’s straight out of a spy movie.

We’ll go at night when there are fewer people around—just a few lab assistants running experiments. And the security guard, of course. But my grandfather has that covered this time. Raj will ring the front bell to create a diversion. While the security guard is distracted, my grandfather will use his key card to get in the back door and grab the
T. melvinus
. Raj’s brother will drive the getaway car.

“It’s a perfect plan,” my grandfather says. “And it’s much easier than taking all those buses.”

He picks a night that my mother has late rehearsals so she won’t know about our criminal activity. I’m holed up in my bedroom looking at microscopic photos of bacteria on the Internet. I want to learn more about the whole cheese thing. Bacteria are strangely beautiful. Some are cylindrical, some are coiled, some are spheres. They have impressive names:
Escherichia coli. Bacillus megaterium. Helicobacter pylori
. There’s even a bacterium named after Pasteur:
Pasteurella multocida
. I think about my grandfather and the jellyfish and feel a little jealous. I kind of want something named after me.

My bedroom door slams open, and my grandfather is standing there dressed head to toe in black. He’s raided my mother’s closet and is wearing her favorite black T-shirt and a black leather jacket from her “punk phase” in college. Even his legs are in black.

“Are those Mom’s leggings?” I ask him.

“Is that what they’re called?” He hurries me along. “Time to go. Our ride is here.”

A car is idling at the curb, Raj’s brother behind the wheel. We get in and Raj introduces everyone.

“This is my brother, Ananda,” Raj says. “This is Melvin and Ellie.”

Ananda just nods and cranks up the radio.

“By the way,” Raj says, “I have to be home by nine-thirty. It’s a school night.”

“This shouldn’t take long,” my grandfather says, holding up our picnic cooler. “We’ll just grab the
T. melvinus
and go.”

The trip is a lot faster than taking the bus. When we arrive at building twenty-four, there’s only one car in the lot. We cruise by and then park down the street.

My grandfather hands a ski mask to Raj and pulls one over his head.

“Seriously?” Raj asks.

“They have security cameras, you know.”

“Great,” Raj mutters.

They take off into the darkness, and Ananda and I sit in silence, listening to the radio.

His eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror.

“Do you do this sort of thing a lot?” he asks me.

“Just once before,” I tell him.

We don’t have to wait long. My grandfather and Raj run up to the car and jump in.

“Drive!” my grandfather shouts, and we take off.

“Did you get it?” I ask my grandfather.

“I couldn’t even get in!” he barks.

Raj looks at me. “His key card doesn’t work anymore. They must have deactivated it.”

My grandfather grumbles the whole way home.

When they drop us off, Raj leans out the window and calls to my grandfather, “You still have to pay me.”

The next morning, my mother asks, “Have you seen my black leggings? I can’t find them anywhere.”

“Check with Grandpa,” I tell her.

She narrows her eyes at me. “I don’t even want to know.”

It’s eight o’clock on Saturday morning and my grandfather is pacing the front hall. He’s been up and dressed since six-thirty. I know because I’m the same way: I get up early even on Saturdays. Maybe it’s a scientist thing because my mom is all about sleeping late.

“When are we going?” he calls out, his voice ringing through the house.

He wants to get his own computer and a few
other things from his apartment. My mom promised him we would go over the weekend.

“Rome is going to fall again by the time you people get moving!”

My mom stomps down the hall in her pajamas. She is not an early bird.

“Would you just relax?” she snaps. “I haven’t even had my coffee.”

It’s after ten when we finally get in the car and head to my grandfather’s apartment. I look out the window as we drive along the highway. We pass a sign for a biotech company. It says
WE ARE THE FUTURE OF MEDICAL RESEARCH
and has a picture of a bacterium I recognize.

“Look! It’s
Escherichia coli
!” I say to my grandfather.