The Kitchen Daughter (29 page)

Sitting on his right, I have a closer look at his bruise. From the grape center it fades to green at the edges. The color changes a little over the contours of his face. It’s a deeper purple near the bone. From the core of the bruise, without meaning to, I look to the eye. It is a warm brown, with a little bit of dark gold in it. Milk chocolate, dappled with dulce de leche.

He grabs the wine bottle by the neck and drinks. When he sets it down I can see it’s half empty. “Unseemly, I know,” he says. “Middle of the day and everything. It’s just, I’m, you have no idea, I’m falling apart.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry she didn’t come. I don’t know what I did wrong.”

“Maybe nothing,” he says. “Maybe she didn’t want to come. I don’t know. Maybe it’s better this way. If I got that angry—Ginny, I’ve never been that angry before. I’m so sorry. If I’d hurt you—I’m just so sorry, I can’t even tell you.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” I say. “We both got very upset. You’re sorry and so am I.”

“Is it that simple?”

“Maybe it’s not really,” I say, “but let’s make it that way.”

The corner of the eye crinkles up, everything on the face shifts, it’s almost a smile. David says, “Let me pour you a glass, huh?”

“Just one.”

He looks around and says, “But one of us will have to get up for a glass.”

I reach out for the bottle. He hands it to me and I drink. The wine is much easier to drink than scotch. It has a pleasing bitterness, an interesting balance of sharp bite and sweet fruit.

David says, “Don’t fall in love, Ginny.”

“Why not?”

“It hurts too much. Honestly.”

“But there’s the good along with the bad.” I’m thinking of my parents, who loved each other, no matter what.

“I don’t know if the good was good enough,” he says. “I’ve had a year of bad. A year where I can’t even get my head above water. You think I’m depressed because Elena’s ghost didn’t come, but honestly, it’s made
me realize that I don’t know what I would have done if she had come. I wasn’t totally truthful with you, Ginny. It wasn’t just because I loved her that I wanted to see her. I had a question I wanted to ask her.”

“What question?”

“I wanted to know if she was cheating on me. Before. I mean, we’re both jealous people, I mean, we were, you know?”

He holds the bottle out and I take another drink.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Tell me.”

“You don’t know what it’s like,” he says. “You get so tuned in to another person, you notice even the slightest change. If she starts coming home at a different time than she used to. And she says she’s going for a bike ride but she doesn’t take her helmet. And she mentions this guy, this one particular guy, almost every day for a while and then never again all of a sudden. It might not be anything at all. But it might. And if you let that thought in, you can’t ever get it back out of your head again. You understand?”

I admit, “Not really,” and drink the wine.

He leans his head against the wall and says, “Hold on to that. I love that about you. You can still think the best of people. I wish I could be that way, I really do. But once you lose that, you can’t ever get it back.”

“How did you lose it?”

He says, “Innocence isn’t a set of house keys. You don’t just up and lose it one day. It’s a process.”

“What was your process?”

“Over time, I just stopped trusting people,” he says. “I got hurt too many times and I started to anticipate it. Expect it. And that applied to Elena too. I didn’t trust my own wife. What kind of person does that make me?”

“Normal.”

“That’s nice to think,” he says, and drinks again. “I thought
you could save me from myself, but that’s not your responsibility. I shouldn’t have put it on you.”

“I could try again. With the aji, I mean.”

He shakes his head. “No, don’t. I have my answer. If she was faithful to me, I’m a horrible person for suspecting her. If she wasn’t, I was an idiot to trust her. And either way, I killed her. I killed her! Not on purpose, but that doesn’t matter, if it weren’t for me she wouldn’t be dead. Regardless, I still have to live the rest of my life without her. I can’t stand it, I can’t.”

He is crying now. He grabs my hand, the one with the scar, and holds it in a firm grip. It isn’t an unpleasant feeling. He starts talking and the words spill out of him. He murmurs them into the palm of my hand.

He tells me about Elena. Little things. Important things. The smell of her skin, almost currylike. The beaten-up shoes she refused to get rid of because of all the places they’d touched earth. When they went shopping for a new bike the week before she died, the way she ran her fingers across the handlebars of every single one, in a caress. Her favorite Spanish word,
desafortunadamente
. The sound she made when the back of her neck was kissed. After he tells me that one he is silent for a full minute, maybe a little longer. It is not the pleasant kind of silence.

He says, “She deserved better than me.”

I tell him the only thing I can think to tell him, which is what he said to me after I left Amanda’s house. “Easy, easy. It’ll be okay.”

“It won’t be okay.”

“It might.”

David says, “It might not.”

I say, “No promises.”

He presses his face into the palm of my hand again and says, “I thought the problem was her. But the problem was me.”

I say, “Everyone thinks that. Everyone thinks they’re messed up. Everyone struggles. You’re normal.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. Come on, come upstairs, I’ll prove it.”

I pull on his hand to bring him upstairs after me. We climb.

In my parents’ room, he watches me while I move the red geraniums out of the fireplace and reach up into the chimney.

“What’s that?”

I say, “It’s called the Normal Book. I read it when I need to know that I’m normal. Because I am. You are too.”

I show him the window seat and gesture for him to sit down. I sit down next to him, book in hand. His head is down and everything about his body shows his sadness, so I reach out. Without thinking or weighing or planning. I reach out and stroke his hair, to soothe him, the way I always find most soothing. Fingertips at the hairline, smoothing the hair back over the top of the head, all the way down to the bare skin at the nape of the neck, in a long, unbroken movement. And I read to him from the Normal Book, telling him all the broad and wide and far-reaching definitions of the word
normal
, the way people use it as a placeholder, a code word, a Band-Aid. The way it means nothing, and everything.

I say, “See? Normal means a lot of things to a lot of people. You’re normal. Don’t worry. It’s okay.”

My hand is lingering at the back of his neck and he puts his hand over it to keep it there, and then brings his mouth down on mine, firmly. His lips are full and warm.

The first feeling is shock, but then another feeling crashes over it like a wave, blots it out. All my nerves are singing and all my wires are crossed. I am tasting and feeling but nothing that I am tasting or feeling is here. His kisses are honey. His tongue is like a ripe slice of mango, firm and slippery, irresistibly smooth. It’s hard to breathe. A soft, spreading warmth descends from my neck down my body to my toes, spreading out like milk in coffee, rolling in curls and waves and currents. Both of his hands are in my hair now, grasping.

I want to be closer so I push my body against his.

He leaps back as if scalded.

“Oh, God, Ginny,” he moans, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I tell him, but it’s too late for that, he’s out the door and down the stairs and the slam of the front door comes so quickly it seems impossible. I kneel on the window seat and look out the window of my parents’ room and see him unlocking his bike from the No Parking sign, moving so quickly he fumbles and drops his helmet onto the sidewalk.

I work to open the window, I’ve never tried this one before, I fumble with the latch. It rides open with a whoosh of cold air. I call to him from the window, “Wait!”

He turns and looks up at me and pain is written so clearly across his face it takes what’s left of my breath away.

Then he throws one leg over the bike and rides off, so quickly the helmet is still rocking back and forth on the sidewalk, unsteady, left behind.

I would say it was a bad idea, but it was never an idea.

I never thought about it before it happened. Now that it has happened, though, I can’t stop thinking about it. For that reason and many others, sleeping is out of the question. Cooking too. I can picture the wine bottle sitting on the floor of the kitchen. It can stay there.

I sit in the window seat and read one of Ma’s southern romance novels. The cover is barely cracked. The woman in the story falls in love with her neighbor, an older man. Her parents disapprove. There are scenes. There is disowning. There is forgiveness, and a tearful reunion. It all sounds unpleasant.

I am not a fast reader. Midnight curls up on the seat next to me for part of the night. Later she tires of that position and disappears. Before I’ve finished, the sun comes up. When I can see it’s light out I go outside and pick up David’s helmet from the sidewalk. I bring it in and set it on the dining room mantel, next to the picture of Charleston.

Then I nap a few hours, though the noises of the day wake me up from time to time. A car door, a horn, an alarm. Someone swearing at their lack of quarters. Gossiping nurses, a shriek of laughter. The last time I decide there’s no point in trying anymore. I get up, get dressed, make myself coffee. The coffee is to force me back into alertness, or something close to it. Making myself be awake is always a possibility, in a way making myself be asleep is not.

The helmet sits on the mantel in the dining room, white and webbed like tripe. I don’t know what to do about it. I can take it over to his apartment, but if he’s not there, that’s pointless. I can’t just set it on his steps and leave it. It hasn’t been that long since I showed up at someone else’s door unwanted, and I’m still reeling from that.

The bag of groceries is still on the butcher block. Potatoes and red onions and almonds and tangerines. It seems silly now. I felt so proud, like I’d achieved something. People do these things every day, all their lives. When I can do them with no fear, then I’ll have something to be proud of.

On the kitchen floor is the empty wine bottle. David, poor David. I couldn’t help him get what he needed. The ghost didn’t come. I didn’t keep my promise. Why did he kiss me? Was he just seeking comfort, responding to kindness? I don’t know what he was feeling, but I know what I felt. Some kind of intimacy, some kind of tenderness. At the time it felt like a breakthrough, something I’d never felt before. Connection. Acceptance. And what I feel now, I think it’s guilt. I should have pushed him away before the kiss even happened. But I didn’t. I was selfish.

I think about how sad he was, how overwhelmed. How he went so quickly from mood to mood. I always thought other people were more sure of themselves. When I think about Amanda, the way she wants to help me but can’t figure out how to do it, I realize she must be unsure too. David always seemed that way, but now I guess he isn’t. He isn’t acting sure.

David. I really don’t know what will happen next. But this will all unfold the way it will unfold, whether it’s yesterday or today or tomorrow. If David never speaks to me again, that’s what happens. For someone who didn’t even know him a month ago I find myself caring a lot. I learned the word
fatalism
at a young age and after I got over the idea that it meant something about death, I grew very attached to it. It’s like realism, but even more so. It’s also on a page with
fastidious
, and
fatback
, and
father.

I’ll feel better if I cook. Something that will completely absorb me, push everything else out of my mind.

Flipping through the recipe cards, I notice the yellow stain on the corner of Ma’s recipe for chicken and dumplings. When I was a kid I loved chicken and dumplings. She would open the can of Golden Mushroom Soup and it made a satisfying splat. The yellow stain reminds me of the yellow aji de gallina, how I was afraid it would ruin the recipes. It failed to bring Elena into the kitchen. David grabbed it out of my hand and threw it at the wall. I never got to taste it.

There is still plenty of
aji amarillo
left in the jar, and potatoes from yesterday’s bag. I open the refrigerator to look for the rest. Yes, olives, evaporated milk, chicken, bread, everything I need. David bought extra of everything. I know why. He was trying to be sure.

It’s always hardest to make something the first time. So much uncertainty, in any unknown recipe. Will the dough come together? How much liquid will the fruit give off? Will the potatoes be cool enough to peel by the time the sauce is thick? That’s part of why the recipe seems to go much more quickly this time, even though it takes just as long, nearly two hours. There are so many things to cook and to peel, to heat and to cool, to stir and tear and shred. I lose myself in it.

At the end, the aji comes together as it should, its yellows and whites correct, the black olives like punctuation. I lower my nose to the dish and inhale. It smells like creaminess. There’s a slight heat in the yellow pepper, a sweet note, and of course the blooming color.