The Kitchen Daughter (15 page)

Dinner is a bowl of cereal, under milk just beginning to go sour. It’s the last of a carton and I don’t feel like opening a new one.

I’m not surprised when my phone rings. I’m only surprised it took so long.

“Ginny,” says Amanda. “Come on.”

“I tried to tell you,” I say, bracing myself against the back of the chair, setting my spoon down in what’s left of the milk.

“Regardless, that was really mean of you. Angelica was all worked up.”

“I wasn’t trying to be mean.”

“Well, being mean is something that we sometimes do without trying. That’s what I tell the girls.”

“Did Brennan make his plane?”

“Yes, we got him out of here on time, barely. He’s still in the air, he’ll call when he lands. Don’t try to change the subject. I’m angry with you.”

“Be angry, that’s fine,” I say. “As long as you’re listening to me.”

She’s silent for a minute, then she says, “Okay, Ginny, I’m listening.”

“I don’t want to sell the house. I told you that.”

“And you don’t see why we need to?”

“We don’t need to.”

“Okay, I need to. And maybe you think that’s selfish. But I can’t take care of two houses. And you don’t know the first thing about it.”

“I can learn.”

“We don’t know for sure. It would be so much easier—” She breaks off. There’s a howl in the background. Her voice shouting “Is everything all right?” is so loud I take the phone away from my ear.

She says, “This is actually the worst possible time to talk about this. I have to go.”

“Okay. Let’s not talk about it. But while we’re not talking about it, don’t let Angelica show the house.”

She says sharply, “Look, I don’t have time to fight with you right now.”

“I’m not fighting. I’m just saying.” I feel strong. I make my points clearly. “Let’s just simplify. You’re right. There’s too much going on. Let’s just let that one thing go, for now. Okay?”

She says, “Well.”

“Just for a week,” I say. “You can just put it on pause for a week.”

She says, “Okay.”

I say, “I’ll see the three of you in the morning then, right?”

“Right.”

“Good night, Amanda,” I say, and that’s that.

That night, on my way to bed, I stop and look out my parents’
window. While my attention was elsewhere, it snowed. The world stands blanketed outside, so thoroughly snowed over that the streetlight’s glare bounces off the snow and back up through the window. I sit on the window seat, lean back against the yellow cushions, and look out at the world.

Even with the shades the light is unusual. Not as bright as full day. Like it’s perpetually the undisturbed half hour before sunrise. Only because the light is never-changing, it’s hard to tell if the sun will ever come up.

I
wake up on the window seat, sunrise shining right into my eyes. I haven’t fallen asleep here before. For a moment I worry Ma will yell at me but then it all comes back into my head. All the truth. So I reposition my sore neck on a better pillow, and I try to make sense of everything.

What happened in the past. Dad wanted Ma to forgive him. Dad took twenty-nine pictures of Evangeline. Evangeline loved and lost someone named Doc. But Ma thinks none of this is important, or if it is important, only Dad can talk to me about it. But I can’t get him, because he didn’t leave me any recipes. Dead end.

Then, what’s happening now. I’m not supposed to let Amanda do something. Both Ma and Nonna say so. Is it the house, or something else? I’ve stalled her on the house at least. That’s something. Maybe during the week’s reprieve I will figure something else out. I don’t know how, but it’s possible.

I
HAVE TIME
to shower and put different clothes on before the doorbell rings. I go down to answer it, thinking Amanda probably has her hands full. But then I see the grocery bags, and I realize it wasn’t Amanda who rang the doorbell, it was David.

I open the door, and he is unhooking his bike from the No Parking
sign. Last night’s snow is beginning to melt, so there is slush on the ground and his shoes look wet and muddy. He already has his helmet on his head. It is white and webbed and reminds me of tripe.

I come out onto the marble stairs under the portico and call down, “Thank you.”

“Oh, sure, you’re welcome!” he calls back. Then he turns his attention back to his bike again, turns the key in the lock.

He is rushing to get away. I think about why that might be. “She’s not here,” I say.

He turns the key back the other way, leans the bike against the signpost again, and takes the steps in three long strides. “So what is the deal with your sister?” he says, his muddy voice stretching out all the low vowels. “When she came into the kitchen and saw me there? I thought she was going to punch me in the throat.”

“She’s protective.”

“I’ll say.”

“My mother was too.”

“But … you’re a full-grown adult. Aren’t you?”

“Yeah. But—” I try to find the right way to express it. I settle on, “I’ve never been out on my own.”

“It’s overrated,” says David, waving his hand as if a fly were bothering him. “I live on my own now. In a basement. It sucks.”

“But you lived with your wife first.”

“Yes, I did.”

“That didn’t suck.”

He says, “Well, some days it did, but most of that was just surface stuff. You know, fights about who left dishes in the sink, or arguing over money. Stupid things. Somebody came home later than they should have and didn’t call. Misunderstandings, suspicions, things we argued about that we didn’t need to, if we’d tried to stop ourselves. Nothing that seems important now. Nothing that mattered.”

He thrusts a wallet at me, open to a picture of a woman who’s beautiful in a way I’ve never seen. Her face isn’t a feminine face. It’s all strength and angles, no give, no curves.

“We met in Peru,” he says. “Mountain biking. Traversing the Cordillera Blanca. It was like we’d known each other forever, from the day we met. Something about her.”

“Love at first sight?” I’ve always wondered about that.

“Something like that, I guess,” he says, his voice all black coffee and baking chocolate now, dark but pleasing. “We just fell so hard so fast, and I stayed there longer than I was supposed to, and I spent all my days and nights convincing her that when I came back to the States, she had to come with me.”

The end of the story is obvious. I know how it turned out. It still sounds romantic. “And she did.”

“And she did. And it was wonderful, it was everything I wanted. Even on the days when I was furious with her, or she was furious with me. I couldn’t imagine living without her. Then one day I had to.”

I close his wallet and hold it out for him to take. His hand brushes mine and I flinch away, hard.

“About that,” he says.

“About what?”

“You,” says David. “I told you something very personal about me. Now I think it’s only fair you tell me something about you. What’s with that? Not wanting to be touched? Or is it just me, you’re scared of me?”

“No,” I say. “It’s not just you. I … I don’t like to be touched.”

“At all?”

“Well, no, I guess. Some touch is okay.”

“Like what?”

“Like my parents hugging me, or Amanda, if it’s family, people I trust, it’s different. And your mom does this thing.” I demonstrate, reaching out, pressing my palm against his forehead. “That’s okay.”

“So just strangers? Touching you?”

“Well, that, and some other things.” I count them off on my fingers for him. “I don’t like loud noises, like sirens, they make me jump. Textures can bug me too. I’ve cut the tags out of all my clothes since I was a kid, because I could always feel them and I couldn’t think about anything else if I was always thinking about how my tags itched.” Even thinking about it makes me twitch a little, feeling an unpleasant itch on my neck, even though I know there’s no tag there.

I go on, “And I say what I think, and people don’t like that either.”

“No, they usually don’t.”

“So Ma always gave me rules, that’s how she dealt with it, and when I follow those rules I’m fine.”

“Which is why your sister freaks out about a stranger in the kitchen. Because there isn’t a rule for that. And you don’t get out much.”

“I get out fine,” I say. “I mean, when Ma was alive, I didn’t go out much for things like groceries, because she could always do that. If I did go out, it was almost always uneventful.”

“Almost always?”

“One time out of ten, maybe, there was a problem. Like if I went down to the Korean deli. Someone at a parking meter would touch my arm to ask if I had change. Inside the store someone would squeeze past me to get to the ice chest in back. Things like that. Something would set me off. So most times it was nothing, but when it was something, it was awful. So she would go out instead, because it was easier, for both of us.”

“That sounds tough.”

“It wasn’t, really. I worked around it. We worked around it. I went to school and everything. Elementary, high school, college.”

“You graduated?”

“Almost. One more class. Oral comm. I could get through everything else. I’m very smart. I write very good papers.”

“I believe it.”

“But giving speeches is not my strength.”

“I believe that too. You don’t even look at me.”

“It’s not you,” I say.

“I know,” David says. “So what do you have?”

“Have?”

“Like a complex? A phobia? A disorder?”

“A personality,” I say.

He laughs at that, a soft laugh, a sound that ripples.

David says, “A personality. I like that. Listen, I gotta go, I’m starting a new job and I don’t want to make a bad impression.” He hooks his thumb toward the street, indicating his waiting bike.

“What job?”

“Bike messenger,” he says. “I used to do it before the accident, and Mom’s been hinting strongly that I should get back into it. And then after what your sister said yesterday, I realized, I really can’t just be between things for the rest of my life. I like biking, so, why not? And I’ll like the paycheck. Which reminds me, you forgot to pay me last week.”

“I did.”

He says, “And from the look on your face, you were about to forget to pay me this week too.”

“I did forget.”

“Well, if you don’t have it, you don’t have it,” he says, strapping his helmet back on. “No big.”

“No big?”

“No big deal. I mean, don’t make a habit of it or anything.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s do this,” he says. “With the new job I’m not sure I’ll be back next week, so I can’t just say I’ll get it then. Can you write me a check?”

“No, I don’t have a checkbook.” I realize I could go upstairs and
get the cash and pay him with that, but he’s already asked the question and I’ve already answered it, so it seems wrong to change the terms now.

“Can your sister write me a check?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Then why don’t you send it to me? Here’s my address.”

He bends down and tears the corner off one of the paper grocery bags, then scribbles a few words on it with a pen from his pants pocket. He sets it on the railing for me to take, and I tuck it into my jeans.

“Thank you,” I say.

David says, “Wish me luck.”

“Luck.”

Because I stand on the porch and watch his bike disappear in the distance, headed toward Broad, I am still standing there when Amanda’s car pulls up, with Amanda and the girls inside. She parks, and I beckon them up the stairs. I’m about to offer to carry their things in when I realize I need to carry the groceries in first. So I do that, and take a moment to put David’s address in a kitchen drawer so I don’t accidentally wash it.

By the time I get back to the front door Shannon is quietly hauling two little pink suitcases up the steps. One is covered with rainbows, the other with cartoon cats. They thump in near-unison each time she climbs a step. Amanda has hoisted Parker up on one hip and says, “Good morning, Aunt Ginny.”

Both girls echo, “Good morning, Aunt Ginny!”

“Good morning,” I say. “Shannon, let me take one of those suitcases, okay?”

She shakes her head, the dark hair whipping back and forth across her little face. “No, I’m balanced,” she says. “It’s not so hard.”

“I’ll hold the door open for you then, okay?”

“Okay.”

Once we’re all inside the house, Amanda sets Parker down, and the little blonde dashes to the back of the house, then back up to the front.

“Yes, please, do that, wear yourself out,” says Amanda, not too loudly.

Shannon sets the suitcases down at the foot of the stairs and says, “Is this okay?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” says Amanda.

Parker barrels at me and flings her arms around my legs and I realize, belatedly, I’m being hugged.

“Hi, Aunt Ginny!” she says.

“Hi, Parker.”

Then she runs off again.

Shannon says, “Parker loves you, Aunt Ginny. I love you too.” Then, like her sister, she hugs my legs. This time I’m prepared and can analyze it. The leg hug doesn’t bother me. It’s firm and decisive. And they’re so much smaller than me, they’re no kind of threat.

Amanda says, “Aunt Ginny loves you too, Shan. Why don’t you take your jacket off and put it with your suitcase, please?” Shannon nods and unzips her pink coat.

Amanda whispers to me, “It confuses them if you don’t say it back.”

Before I can answer, tiny running footsteps approach. Parker stops in front of us and says, “It’s Grandma’s house! Where’s Grandpa? Where’s Grandma?”

In the act of hanging her jacket on the coatrack next to the door, Amanda freezes. I see her go from a normal woman in motion to a block of ice in less than a second.

Shannon is the one who answers. “Remember they told us that Grandma and Grandpa went away. They’re not here anymore. There was an accident and they died.”

Parker says, “But I wanted to tell Grandma and Grandpa what I want for Christmas!”

“You can tell me,” I say.

“I want a puppy!” says Parker.

“No puppies,” says Amanda, coming to life again. “Not until you’re older. You girls are too young to take care of a dog.”