The Kitchen Daughter (27 page)

David finishes his chocolate. He rinses his cup and leaves it in the sink.

He says, “Okay, let’s do it. I’ve got nothing to lose. If you’re imagining it, fine, that’s that.”

“I’m not imagining it,” I say. “Besides, I told you I’d do it. I promised.”

“You did,” he says. “I heard you. So. I’ll buy the ingredients. I’ll bring them here. When?”

“Now?”

Shaking his head, he says, “Whatever power you have, whatever you can or can’t do, I don’t think you’re in any shape to try right now. Tomorrow. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.”

He lets himself out. I stay in the kitchen, cupping the mug with both hands, savoring the soft burn of the ancho. Even when the chocolate itself has gone cold, and there’s no more heat for my fingers, my belly is warm, my lips lightly stung.

Afterward, I cross through the rooms of the first floor. Hard to believe it’s still daylight. The noises from the street are soft, muffled. A siren whoops far off. In the living room, I notice something out of place.

David left the recipe for aji de gallina on the mantel, resting against a picture in a frame. It isn’t a family picture, not exactly. Amanda put most of those away, and they’re boxed up with the books and clothes, their fate yet to be determined. Dad used to take vacation pictures without us in them (“Let’s get one of the scenery”), and those are the ones I’ve kept in sight. So I can remember Charleston without having to look at my awkward, seven-year-old self, in lopsided braids. Boston without my ten-year-old tears. Christmas in Macon, all those lovely strings of lights that blinked in a precise sequence, without the family picture that didn’t have me in it because I couldn’t be pried away from timing them with Grandpa Damson’s stopwatch, even for a minute. Especially not for a minute. The interval timing for a complete cycle turned out to be fifty-three and a half seconds. It took me the better part of a day to figure it.

I read the aji recipe. It’s complicated and long. I don’t have most of the ingredients for it. Certainly not the yellow pepper, because it’s not regular yellow pepper. But as I do every time I look at a new recipe, I
sort it out, and analyze. Where would I get the aji? The Korean deli on the corner isn’t likely to have it. If Ma were here she’d look at the spice store in Reading Terminal Market, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s. Most of the other ingredients are easier. It doesn’t specify a type of rice, so Arborio should do, though what’s authentic is probably short-grain.

I am, in my head, already cooking.

I’m terrified of calling Elena’s ghost, but at the same time, I feel strongly that it’s the right thing to do. I can help, and I said I would, so I will. Besides, love is a powerful force. More powerful than reason. Even if that love, as strong as it is, isn’t yours.

I feed Midnight, then I decide to go out for a walk. I don’t want the walls to close in on me. I’ll go somewhere without walls. While I’m walking, the cold wind stinging my face, I try to imagine this situation from Amanda’s point of view. I try to put myself in her shoes.

She thinks I am a mess and that the only way to fix me, if there is one, is to get a diagnosis. When I told her that her daughter might be like me, she heard that as me saying that her daughter is broken. That upset her. She’s also trying to take on Ma’s role, to be the protector, to keep me safe. She isn’t thinking about how much protection can feel like imprisonment. She doesn’t know about Dad. It might help to tell her. She isn’t seeing things from my perspective, either.

I decide to walk to the garden. I’ve been avoiding it, but there’s no reason. It’s not going to remind me of Ma more than living in her house is. A block up on Tenth, a block over on Locust. When I get there, there’s nothing to see. Inside the fence everything is snowed over. I can’t even see the dirt, and if I could, I know it would be frozen. It is just a blank space with iron around it. Someone has opened a cupcake place next door.

I turn left and get back onto Spruce, and play an old game: looking for boot scrapers. Especially in this part of town they are everywhere, and with nothing else to look for, all my attention is on the ground.
Next to any old set of steps you might find one. They are all iron but in all other ways they vary. Flat, plain, snapped-off bars sticking up out of the sidewalk, or bowing, flowered scrolls that look like they should have broken years ago. All variations. No pattern.

I follow the sight of one boot scraper after the next, and turn, and turn again, losing track of the streets. That’s how I find myself on an unfamiliar corner, and I look up through an ironwork gate and catch sight of row upon row of low, dark headstones. A cemetery.

Headstones? Flowers? Coffins?
shouts Amanda in my mind.
Did you have to go and identify their
bodies?

No wonder she won’t talk to me.

What if she never does?

I speed up, veer away, turn at the first corner I get to, trying to get my mind to settle on some kind of food that will comfort me, meat loaf, gelato, pumpkin soup, cherries. I settle on the bitter intensity of espresso, a taste so powerful it wipes other tastes away. I imagine stroking the lip of the cup with a lemon peel, the Italian way. In sipping the imagined espresso everything slows down, my pace, my mind, my heart.

That calms me enough so I can at least get inside my own house and close the door.

I’m already heading toward the stairs to get to the closet but the noise stops me. I hear someone moving around on the ground floor. My first thought, oddly, is that David has decided to go ahead without me. That he thinks the magic isn’t in me, but in the kitchen. This is of course ridiculous. It is also not true. Then I think maybe Amanda has sent Angelica back to show the house to invading strangers again, but thank goodness, that isn’t the case either.

Gert is in the downstairs bathroom, on her knees, sponging out the bathtub. I can see her, at least part of her, through the doorway. The familiar sight helps me calm down. Gert is a constant. I can
depend on Gert. I call out “Hello” but don’t go in. I think it’s rude to stand behind someone while they’re on their knees. Especially in a small space.

I think of familiar things. I think of routine. I bring my laptop down to the dining room table and pull up Kitcherati to look for new recipes. Nothing that’s on a card in the kitchen. Nothing that has anything to do with ghosts. Certainly not the one recipe I know I have to cook to keep my promise. Just something I want to cook because it sounds interesting or delicious. The way I would if everything were normal.

While I click and read and click again, I hear Gert coughing in the other room, a deep, hard cough. It reminds me she’s older. Older people’s coughs sound different. It subsides to one cough every couple of minutes, then nothing.

I’ve bookmarked recipes for clementine cake, tarragon vinaigrette, and bacon-wrapped dates when Gert says, “Ginny, do you need this?”

I look up. She is holding the aji recipe. It must have gotten in the way of wiping dust off the mantel.

“Sure,” I say, putting my hand out. “It’s David’s, but I’ll hold on to it.”

She looks at it more closely. Reads it for real. “Not David’s. Elena’s.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Gert looks at the paper and folds it along the preexisting line. I notice for the first time how soft the paper is, how worn around the edges.

She says, “Ginny. Why is this here?”

“David brought it.”

“He has been here? He did not mention.”

“Yes, he has been here,” I say, trying to figure out how much I can tell her. I don’t want to tell her everything. David has a reason to believe. Gert doesn’t. She also has my sister’s phone number, and the last thing I need right now, literally the last thing, is for Amanda to find out I’ve been seeing ghosts.

“What is my son to you?” she asks.

“A friend,” I say. “He did me a favor. He gave me a ride. That’s it.”

“He is a good son,” she says. “I have told you that before. But I worry about him, I have told you that too.”

“Yes. He’s still having a lot of trouble with his grief.”

“He does not know what to do with it,” says Gert. “I do not want him giving it to you. You have enough grief of your own.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“Did he ask you to cook this?”

The truth is easier than a lie, so I say, “Yes.”

She says, “I cannot tell you what to do. But if I were you, I would not do it. He does not need reminders of her. He has reminders of her, everywhere. What he needs is not to be reminded.”

“Why?”

Gert hands me the paper, saying, “She was never good for him, from the beginning. And now it must be worse. She is gone. He must let her be gone.”

“Okay.”

She says, “Curiosity killed the cat, you remember.”

“I remember.”

“Good,” she says, giving a short, sharp nod.

After she leaves, I ponder the paper, and unfold it. I put it back where it was. I let it lie, propped up on the picture of Charleston, a pineapple-shaped fountain in a bright green park. A family vacation, but no family to be seen.

I remember the picture before the picture. Amanda and me on the right-hand side, all braids and braces. Ma in the middle, with a floppy hat shading her eyes. Dad on the left, too tall to match the rest of us, his right arm slightly blurred. He always set the timer and then ran into the picture, so more often than not, when the shutter clicked he was still in motion.

This picture, of course, has no family. But the family was there. Before.

I go up to my room to read. The piles of childhood artifacts are still sitting there. I don’t know what to do with them, if anything. I can’t deal with them right now. I don’t want to think about my smaller self struggling. Because it makes me think of Shannon struggling, and I can’t protect Shannon right now. I can’t make my sister listen. Not today. Probably not tomorrow. Once she has calmed down and is ready to listen, I’ll reach out to her again. And I’ll keep reaching out until we connect. Until she hears me.

Today all I can do is wait. And tomorrow, when David comes back, deliver a ghost.

W
hen David arrives, I am sitting at the dining room table looking over the aji recipe, a stack of books beside me. He lets himself in, and sets two grocery bags on the table.

“I have it all,” he says. “What are the books for?”

“I just like to cross-reference different recipes to see how things are going to behave,” I say. “Don’t worry, I’ll make it exactly like hers.”

“Is that important? For the ghost?”

“I think so. I made my dad’s recipe with teaspoons of something instead of tablespoons, and he didn’t come. But then when I made it with the right amounts, he did.” I think of him sitting on the stool, looking away from me. I don’t want to think of that.

“And can you bring him again?”

I shake my head. “It gets used up, I think. The magic. Whatever it is that tethers them to the original recipe in the first place. Brings them back.”

“And how long—how long do they stay?”

“As long as the smell stays, I guess. I don’t know how long you’ll have with her.”

“I don’t know what I’ll say, either, when she comes.”

I notice he says “when,” not “if.” One way or another, now he is convinced. I suggest, “Tell her you love her?”

“She knows that. She always knew that. I think I just need to tell her I’m sorry. That I know if it weren’t for me—”

“Maybe because of you she was the happiest she could have ever been.”

“Maybe,” he says. “We can guess all we want. Or we can ask her.”

He carries the bags into the kitchen and starts unpacking. Raw chicken on the bone. A bag of potatoes. A can of evaporated milk. A loaf of white sandwich bread in a plastic bag. Black olives, with pits. Walnuts, cheese, eggs, rice. A squat yellow jar, its label in Spanish,
aji amarillo
. While he counts out how many of everything is called for and puts the remainder in the fridge, I copy the instructions from the recipe in large black letters so I can be sure to follow everything exactly, and I put the original in a clear envelope and tape the envelope to the cabinet at eye level, where it will be safest.

David helps me set everything out, a roasting pan, a large pot, a small one, all the ingredients, everything in the right order. I’m not used to help. I can’t find a rhythm this way. It would probably be easier for me if I put my hands on each thing myself. But, I realize, it wouldn’t be easier for him. And this dish is for him, not me, despite my reasons.

“Are you ready for this?”

He nods.

I open my mouth to ask him if he’s sure. But we both know he is. So I don’t ask.

The recipe is complicated and time-consuming. Once I start the first step I do it all myself, just in case that matters. I slide the stool over a few inches to make sure it’s exactly where it has been before. David stands against the wall next to the shelves of cookbooks and watches in silence.

I put the chicken in to roast, without preheating the oven, because the recipe doesn’t specify preheating. I boil a pot of water that will serve for eggs and potatoes. Another pot boils water for rice. The time adds up. An hour for the chicken, twelve minutes for the eggs, the potatoes have to be boiled whole in their jackets so another forty-five minutes for them, half an hour for the rice. Some things overlap. Smells surge up and fade away, each in its own time, blending unequally. The raw, starchy smell of the rice beginning to cook gives way to the last sparkling golden waft of the chicken, its fat spattering and browning against the baking pan. I know it isn’t possible to feel someone looking at you, but I become conscious of David, watching me, in the minutes when there’s nothing to do. I want to reassure him but it would be empty. My work at the stove is the only reassurance I can give.