The Secret of Everything (23 page)

   N
atalie could tell something was going on between her dad and the lady who took pictures of her salt. Tessa. He’d been in a pretty good mood till they came in and saw her, and now he kept looking at her and it made Natalie feel scared and sick to her stomach. Everybody kept saying that sooner or later her dad would “get over it” and fall in love again, but Natalie didn’t think so. He sometimes went on dates, which she knew because he shaved at night and put on aftershave before he took them to Grandma’s house. Nat even knew who one of the ladies was, Andy who worked in the supermarket, but she had a lot of boyfriends, so it was okay.

This lady was different. First Pedro, who was
her
dog, and now Daddy acting all weird. Natalie didn’t get it. Why would her dad even like Tessa? She was definitely not as pretty as Mommy. Not even close.

But he did. Grown-ups thought kids were so stupid. Natalie was not stupid. She knew lots of things grown-ups didn’t know she knew.

Vita came over to bring their drinks, just to chat, like always. Nat liked Vita best of almost everybody in town. She didn’t talk like you were a baby, and she sometimes saved special things
she cut out of magazines for Natalie. She put the drinks down on the table and said, “You guys excited about school starting?”

Jade raised a hand. “I am!”

“I’m not,” Natalie said. “I hate school.”

“Is it third grade?”

Natalie nodded glumly, thinking of the classroom from last year, the smell of dust and pee and all those kids making so much noise and not a single one of them who wanted to be her friend. She especially, especially hated the days when they had parties, and room mothers would come in with cupcakes and cookies and drinks, the mothers all talking to each other in the corner, laughing. They did that after school, too, parking their cars and standing there talking in their shorts and sneakers, with their hair pulled back in ponytails. Everybody had a mother but her.

Plus there was the problem of friends. Back in Denver, she’d had three friends. Here, everybody lived so far apart that they all rode the bus to school and everybody had been friends since they were born, practically, so there was no room for Natalie. She didn’t like them, anyway, but she could think of lots of other things to do besides sitting in a classroom at some banged-up old desk, writing out math problems. “Booooring!” she said.

“Maybe not, though,” Vita said. “You learn fractions in third grade, don’t you? You need to know how to work fractions to be a good cook.”

“I guess.”

“How ‘bout you, Little Bit?” Vita asked. “You headed off to preschool?”

“I’m going to Mrs. Garcia’s school.”

“Good for you!” Vita touched Jade’s head. “Bring me your report card when you get all your A’s, kiddo.”

A girl came over then to take their order. Natalie had been trying to decide and trying to decide—she had a goal of eating every single breakfast on the menu—and finally chose: “I’ll have eggs Benedict, please,” she said.

“Are you sure, honey? Don’t you want pancakes or a waffle or something?”

“No,” Natalie said, and sat up as straight as she could. “I want to try the eggs Benedict.”

The girl still looked at Nat’s dad to see if that was okay. He nodded and she wrote it down, her fingers like a crab over her paper. Hannah did order the pancakes, because that was the right thing for a baby. Jade always ate the exact same thing: the fruit soup with granola sprinkled on top. It tasted pretty good, Natalie had to admit, but how boring would it be to eat the same thing every single time? And especially just because it was
pink?

After the girl left and Vita went over to sit down with Tessa, Jade started to babble about all the cool things she thought they studied in second grade (which she didn’t even bother to ask Nat about, even though Nat had that very same teacher and classroom last year), and their dad started staring again at Tessa, pretending that he wasn’t.

Natalie felt as if a volcano was bubbling in her chest,
bubble bubble, bubble bubble
. She played with the salt shaker, pouring a little tiny mountain out on the table, trying to ignore the bubbling. The salt shaker was a pretty one, with a pointed cap top and carved crystal sides that swooped down like a lady’s skirt touching the floor. For a little while she swirled and jumped the shakers across the table, pretending they were dancers. Pepper was the man and Salt was the woman, and they swirled around, curtsying and dancing to a song Natalie hummed under her breath.

The evil thought started to nag her—she wanted to take this salt shaker home. It would go so perfect with the salt cellar! She could save up and buy some Hakata roasted sea salt, which was very very fine, and put it in here, and save the red salt for the salt cellar.

When everybody was looking at something else, talking to each other, Natalie pulled the salt shaker off the table and put it in her pants pocket. Something cool went through the lava in her throat, and she said, “Can I get out, please? I have to go to the bathroom.”

Vince moved aside and Natalie scooted out, trying to act perfectly normal. Nobody looked at her at all, and she ducked into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. Feeling a dizzy happiness, she took the silver cap off the shaker and poured the salt down the sink so it wouldn’t spill in her jeans, then carefully screwed the lid back on and put the whole thing in her pocket. The white shirt poofed out just right over it, so you couldn’t see it at all, even if you were looking. Brushing her hair back, she arranged her face into a normal expression and yanked open the bathroom door.

And jumped about a foot. A woman from the kitchen stood there, with an apron wrapped around her body. She had tattoos around her wrists and hair that was choppy, all different kinds of lengths and two colors.

“Hi,” Natalie said, and turned to head back into the dining room, touching the lump in her pocket with one finger, ever so casually.

“Hold it,” the woman said.

“What?”

“Give it back to me and I won’t tell anyone.”

Sweat broke down Natalie’s back, and her mouth suddenly had too much spit in it. “What?” she said again.

“You know what.”

“I don’t have anything.”

The woman lifted an eyebrow and waited, palm open.

Natalie couldn’t breathe. Her ears sounded like she had a dishwasher going in each one, and for a minute she thought she might actually faint. She shot a glance down the hall, where her father sat with her sisters, and she thought about how humiliating it would be to have to look at her dad.

The woman squatted down in front of her. “Let me show you something.” She pulled up her pant leg, and there was a heavy black band around her ankle, with a black box attached to it. “You know what this is?”

Natalie shook her head.

“It’s an electronic bracelet, and it tells the police where I am every single minute, day and night. I never get to take it off. I have to sleep in it, even.”

Natalie didn’t say anything.

“I have it because I went to jail, and it was not a good place. It was a really bad place.” She looked right into Natalie’s eyes, and her irises were a pale color like a marble. “If you promise to give me that salt shaker and never do it again, I will not tell anybody.”

Trembling, Nat pulled the salt shaker out of her pocket and put it in the woman’s hand. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t know why I keep stealing stuff. I even prayed and everything.”

The woman stayed kneeling, bouncing the salt shaker in her hand. “Stealing a lot of things, are you?”

Natalie bowed her head. Nodded. Tears filled her throat, but if she cried, she would have to tell her daddy why.

“What if, next time you feel like taking something, you don’t, and come talk to me?”

Natalie looked at her.

“Right, that’s weird. I have an idea. I know a charm to help you stop. Come back whenever you can and I’ll leave it for you at the front.”

“Okay. I don’t know when we’ll be back.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m going to make it tonight, and it’ll be here whenever you want after that.” The woman stood and cocked her head toward the dining room. “Go on.”

Natalie ran.

Vince tried to give his attention to his girls, since it was supposed to be a treat afternoon. They were happy, coloring in the coloring books they brought with them, choosing crayons out of a giant box of ninety-six Crayolas he had for once remembered to bring with him.

Even Natalie, dressed up in the new outfit she loved so much, was relatively cheerful. She loved the eggs Benedict and devoured it with devotion in tiny, reverent bites, taking time to look at the food, the colors, the textures. She understood more about ingredients than twenty adults combined. She noticed him watching her. “Want a bite?”

“Sure.”

She carefully cut a triangle of egg, Canadian bacon, and English muffin, swirled with Vita’s very good hollandaise, and offered it up to her father. He bent and took the bite from her. “Mmmmm,” he said, nodding. “That really is fantastic. I love the mix of egg yolk and sauce.”

“Me, too!” she said, her eyes wide.

He rubbed her back lightly. His little eccentric. He wanted to protect her from the world that would not take her passions seriously enough. He wanted to shove them all off a cliff when they judged her appearance, which was as eccentric as her
approach to life. Eventually she would grow up and find her tribe and all would be well, but in the meantime she had to endure childhood. Tenderly, he smoothed a lock of curly hair from her forehead. “It’s so much fun to have meals with you, Natalie.”

“Thank you.”

When he glanced toward Tessa, he slammed right into her steady gaze, and he saw something stricken there, which lit flutters in his throat and set something burning down his spine. His lip throbbed, and he pulled it into his mouth, licking the swollen spot. He told everyone he had bitten it by accident, but as he tasted it, he felt her skin on his as acutely as if it were happening now.

Too much. He looked away. Hannah was struggling with the syrup dispenser and he lifted it for her, pulling back the sticky spout.

Tessa materialized at his side and put a napkin down on the table next to his hand. She said nothing, only stood there for a moment, her fingers on the paper, and then left.

He waited for a long, long minute, then picked it up. She had scrawled only two words:

When the girls had finished, Vince let Natalie visit the salt store and the cooking store next to it while he and the other two girls played beneath the tree in the plaza. It was so hot it didn’t feel like autumn was on the way, even though the humidity from last night’s rain had burned away to nothing. Heat hung in bars
of sunlight and in pockets close to the ground. Jade played jacks by herself on a relatively flat square of pavement, and Hannah chased a moth, fluttering white through a stand of dandelions. “I’m glad school is starting,” Jade said. “I’m getting sick of having nothing to do.”

“I bet.”

“Do you think I could have a cell phone this year?”

“No,” he said.

“Why not?” Her tone was calm and reasonable.

He shifted his position on the ledge. It was always a mistake to underestimate Jade’s fierce intelligence and ability to manipulate the world and other humans to her own agenda. He considered his reasons carefully before he spoke. “Because you’re going to be talking on the phone for the rest of your life, every minute of every day, and your voice will be worn out enough.”

She laughed. “Daddy!”

But it defused the request for now, and when he saw Natalie skipping across the plaza toward them, he stood. She said, “She let me taste the Murray River salt!”

“Cool.” When Vince had bought the hideously expensive red salt, he had a little talk with the owner, explaining Nat’s passion for food and ingredients—and her talent. “Encourage her,” he’d asked.

“Okay, guys, let’s go say hi to Grandma, then we can go home.”

His mother’s bookshop was around the corner from the main plaza, in one of the narrow archaic lanes that zigzagged away from the central square and into the more secretive landscape of the town. It was a long, deep affair, rambling through ten thousand square feet. The Quill and Page was known as one of the best independent bookstores in the country, and
Judy had built it from the ground up, pouring her love of all poetry and literature into the shop when he was a baby. To Vince’s knowledge, Judy had never had a boyfriend—only Vince and her bookstore.

Like many other independents, the Quill had been slammed hard by the Internet and Amazon and other avenues through which readers could get the hard-to-find and obscure titles that had been her lifeblood. She had developed some specialties that kept her afloat—collecting first editions of classics, tracking down the very rare, and, most of all, developing a social marketing program to make the Internet work for her.

“You guys look around. I want to find some new books to read before we go home.” They scattered to their favorite spots. Vince ambled down the fiction aisles, not sure what he was in the mood for. Something dark, maybe. Serial killers always made life look good.

Or not.

He pulled a book off a shelf here and there, flipping through, putting it back. This is what you missed on the Internet, he thought, turning a corner into a long set of stacks—the pleasure of discovering something you’ve never heard of, that was never in anybody’s sights, or maybe it was a big bestseller in 1974. Harold Robbins or Irving Stone. Maybe he’d read
Exodus
or
The Carpetbaggers
. That would be fun.

When he rounded the last aisle, he saw Tessa, leaning one shoulder against the wall, her head tilted as she read so that her glittery hair spilled down one arm in waves. Vince halted. As if she sensed his shadow falling on her, she looked up and stuck one finger in the book braced on her cast. He couldn’t see the title.

He wavered between turning around and walking away or
going forward. He had too much on his plate to add an irrational obsession with a woman who was leaving town in a couple of days. And yet, as if she were a magnet, he found himself moving toward her, his cells boiling the closer he came.