The Year the Swallows Came Early (14 page)

M
ama counted six aftershocks that evening when we got home, but I didn't feel any of them. With each one, she became more jittery.

“Did you feel that one, baby?” she asked me. “It was stronger than the last one.”

“No, Mama,” I told her. “It must be your imagination.” I was busy opening all the kitchen cabinets, checking for glasses that might have fallen over, and worrying about how Daddy was after the earthquake. “Do you want me to make you some tea?” I asked her.

“Who can sit and drink tea at a time like this?”
she answered, and huffed out of the room.

A second later she yelled to me from the living room. “I knew I felt a tremor last week. Remember the kitchen light? You thought
that
was my imagination too.”

I didn't answer her on purpose.

Frankie stopped in on us soon after. “Everything okay?” He peered through the front door. “I brought drinking water and the newspaper.” He held them up. “Looks like you were lucky. No damage?”

“I'm still checking,” said Mama, motioning him inside. “Will you help me move some of this furniture?” She showed him her emergency-procedure checklist. “Number five says to move collectibles and special items away from windows.”

“I doubt we'll have another one, but if it will make you feel more comfortable, then fine.” Frankie stepped inside.

I rolled my eyes to say sorry, showing him I thought she was not her normal self right now.

For an hour he helped her move furniture
around our house like they were chess pieces. And Mama was in a championship tournament, carefully directing each piece to the best spot.

When she was finally satisfied, I poured us all a glass of water from the jug Frankie had brought.

“Did you count our water-bottle supply in the garage?” Mama asked me, holding the glass of water in her hand as if it were precious metal.

“We have twenty-nine jugs,” I told her.

“Are they the large ones?” She waited.

“Yes, they're the large ones. The ones we got at the warehouse market.” I wondered how she could have forgotten this, seeing as how she'd made the entire staff at the market help us out that day.

“Good,” she answered.

“Says in the paper they're predicting another scorcher for tomorrow. I can't believe how hot it is.” Frankie opened up to the weather section of the newspaper and handed it to Mama.

“Do
not
give me another prediction about
anything
!” She held up her hand. “I don't wanna hear it.”

And then she did something that made me stop and stare at her, like she had taken my real mama and she was an impostor. She stood up like what Frankie had said was the final straw and she'd made up her mind. Then she grabbed the newspaper out of his hand.

Marched into the kitchen.

And
threw it away.

Frankie looked at me, his face wondering what was wrong.

I followed her to the kitchen. My body suddenly felt hot. “But how will you plan your days?” I asked her. “How will you know what to write on your lists without consulting your horoscope first?”

Mama gasped, like she couldn't believe I didn't already know her answer. Her neck was covered in new splotches. “These horoscopes aren't any good when they don't say anything about
unexpected events
or near misses with
death
!”

And her saying that, I knew she'd said everything.

That night for dinner, I made spaghetti out of the jar. But Mama wouldn't eat. Even after I heated it up for her twice. She said she had some thinking to do instead.

“I'm telling you, it's all this hot weather that brings on these quakes,” she said. “I hope we get a cooling trend soon.”

I explained to her again, like I always did, that there was no such thing as earthquake weather. That earthquakes just happened on their own.

And that this had been proven
scientifically
—by scientists.

But she pretended not to hear me.

T
he fog rolled in after 9:00 that night, and with it came a calming that blanketed our backyard and house, telling us,
It's over now, close your eyes and rest. Things will be better tomorrow.

We sat on lawn chairs while dampness collected around us. Next to me, Mama's hand tapped a slow rhythm of love onto mine. I told her everything I'd been holding back, and through the whole story, her face stayed soft. She listened calmly, every once in a while saying, “Oh, baby,” or “What else.”

After I'd confessed it all, she said, “Sometimes
things get sorted out in your head after a crisis.”

I wasn't sure if her sorting out meant forgiving Daddy, or giving up astrology. I hoped it was both.

“Do you think Daddy's okay?” I said. “I mean, after the earthquake?” I watched her face carefully, hoping she wouldn't be mad I'd brought him up.

Her mouth became tight. She sat for a minute, like she was deciding something, and then she said, “Actually, I know he's okay. I called the police station when we got home from the restaurant. Officer Miguel said they had no damage. Except for a metal file cabinet falling over in the office, and a shattered window. They were lucky, too.”

I looked at her in shock. “You
called
? Did you talk to Daddy?” It came as great news to me that Mama would think to check on Daddy. That it mattered to her if pieces of ceiling might have been crashing down around him, too.

Mama shook her head. “No, I didn't talk to him. But I asked Officer Miguel to tell him I called. And to let him know that you were all right.”

I smiled at her.

“I didn't want him to worry about you.” She sighed. Then she twisted her hands into a ball of knots so tight her knuckles looked as if they would come out of her skin. “Officer Miguel said the earthquake was a 4.8 on the Richter scale. Darn heat,” she said.

“Is 4.8 high?”

“Well, it sure
felt
high!” She stood up, looking like she was going to start worrying about something again. “But he said there were no injuries reported. Just minor damage. And that because José's Cantina is so old, the stucco ceiling was bound to come loose sooner or later.”

I shook my head, wondering just how old it was.

“He also told me your father's jail sentence is coming to an end. And in about a week he'll be out. Then he'll start serving his probation,” Mama said.

“What will he have to do?” I asked.

“The judge will tell him. Probably some sort
of community service.
And
”—Mama turned toward me, planting her hands on her hips like she was about to give me some sort of order—“he'll have to pay you back that money.” Her face was a mixture of anger and irritation. But there was also relief.

“It will be okay,” I told her.

Mama looked over my head toward the sea and sighed.

When she patted my shoulder, I knew it was her way of agreeing with me, without saying it aloud. That her patting my shoulder was equal to,
It will be okay
.

Finally at 10:00, she suggested I make scrambled eggs and toast because they went with our mood, which, she said, was uncomplicated and simple. I felt things seemed uncomplicated too. So I used my two-eggs-plus-
1
/8-cup-of-milk recipe, and they came out just right.

As I lay in bed that night, I started a new page in my cooking notebook. I made a list of foods that reminded me of things. I decided that it was
one thing to come up with perfect menus for situations, but also that certain foods could end up reminding people of things. Because from now on, scrambled eggs would always remind me of tonight, when Mama and I sat in lawn chairs in the fog, and I told her the whole story.

Like when people say, “Oh, this corn on the cob reminds me of the time we barbecued at Uncle Joe's last summer.” That sort of thing. Or like that test doctors do where they say a word, and you're supposed to say the first thing that comes to mind.
Dog, cat. Night, day. Scrambled eggs, talking.

My list:

Looking it over, I realized everyone's list would be different depending on their own memories.

I entitled it:
Foodology
.

Half the word coming from
food
, of course, and half coming from
astrology
. I decided that if you could look it up in the dictionary, it would say:
(noun) the study of food; the way certain foods remind people of things.

I knew if there were such a word, I would be an expert in foodology.

I
spent Sunday helping Luis and Frankie clean up the Swallow.

“We're lucky to have only sweeping and straightening to do,” Luis told us as he bent down to sweep a pile of broken glass into a dustpan.

He didn't bother to count the new cracks in the tile floor, which ran from the front door to the back counter and curved around the freezer section where he kept the ice and sodas.

He said nobody noticed those anyway.

“And also,” he said to me, “with everything that's happened, your supplies will be a day or
two late getting here. But we should have them by the middle of the week.” He smiled then like there was nothing else he'd rather say.

Frankie put me in charge of cleaning up aisle two, which was the cereal aisle, while he restacked cans of refried beans and soup, and organized boxes of rice.

I put the Corn Pops and the Frosted Flakes back into perfect rows on the shelf, thinking that the shop was a little like Mama's and my life. How sometimes it got messed up, and we had to straighten it out. But usually it turned out all right, even though we might have a crack in the floor. Or less money to remind us that it happened.

After everything was back in its place, Luis made us some of Aunt Regina's secret-recipe tacos and fresh lemonade, and told us to take a break. So Frankie and I sat on the yellow bench outside, eating our lunches and watching the morning fog lift off the harbor.

Gray-and-white seagulls hovered in the air by the jetty. In the distance a lone pelican flew over
the sea, following a long line of white foam.

“Frankie,” I said after a while, “I want to tell you something. I've decided it would be okay with me if my daddy came back after he gets out of jail. I miss him.”

Frankie set his lunch on the bench and looked at me, his eyes wide. “How can you forgive him so easily? He took that money from you and lied.”

“I know.”

“He
lied
to you,” he said again, like maybe I'd forgotten. “About taking that money.”

“You're right. But I talked to him on the phone. I can tell he's really sorry.”

“You
talked
to him? After everything he did?” Frankie looked away, like I'd slapped him on the face. And I could feel a funny stiffness between us that made him seem like he was all the way across that sea.

For a long time, neither of us said a word.

Finally I told him, “I know what he did was wrong. And I don't expect you to be nice to him or anything. But I hope you'll be respecting my
feelings.” I waited for Frankie to say something.

“It's really not that,” he answered.

“What then?”

He sat looking at the ground for a long time. Sidewalk ants hurried beneath us in a crooked line, marching over one of Marisol's sketches to gather on a sticky area.

Finally he said, “You got the biggest heart I know. After everything that happened, it seems like you should be mad, but…” He stopped and quickly wiped away wetness from his eyes with the back of his hand. I could tell he didn't want me to notice. Then he said, “Sometimes I wish I was like that.”

I knew he was talking about how he wanted to talk to his mama again, really talk to her. How it was like he was standing on a busy street and could see her on the other side. And all he had to do was figure out a way to dodge those speeding cars between them without getting hurt.

I moved closer to him and put my arm around his shoulders. I waited for a while. Then I breathed
in deep. The way Mama does so that everybody around her will get ready to listen. And I told him what I thought he should hear, the same thing Luis had explained about Mr. Tom being how he was without anyone trying to change him, and us having to decide that it was okay.

“People are just who they are,” I said.

A
fter a couple of months, the swallow babies started hatching. We'd listen to them chirp loudly from their mud nests, knowing that when they grew strong enough, they'd fly south past the equator to Argentina again.

The fog stopped coming in each day, and with the summer came the red tide, uprooted amber seaweed floating in the rolling waves for three weeks straight.

Luis adjusted the ferry schedule for the tourists who'd be arriving, and stocked up on things like Styrofoam coolers and sunscreen.

Pastor Ken practically had an ongoing slide show of his pictures from the annual mission trip to Mexico. I saw it four times. The afternoon he got his haircut I just happened to be in the salon. He told Mama that next spring break I'd be old enough to help out on the trip, and that it would be a good thing to consider. But I saw the strain in Mama's eyes when he mentioned they have no running water for showers or electricity for hair dryers. “It is not the kind of place where one worries about one's appearance,” he said, to which Mama looked utterly horrified.

Miss Johnson fixed up our classroom with all our most important projects for the end of the year. Five-paragraph characterization essays. Compare-and-contrast science dioramas. History Day projects. Watercolor paintings. Things people like to see.

I took all of Great-grandmother's stories to Ms. Dixon-Green, our librarian. She said they were a window to my family's history, and helped me bind them into book form so they could be
read easier. According to her, Isaac Asimov's
Foundation
should be kept under lock and key, and not thumbed through like an ordinary book. You would've thought I had brought in Isaac Asimov himself by the look on her face when I let her hold that book. But I still keep it next to my bed and read a little of it most nights. I have a feeling my great-grandmother would've wanted it that way, and that she didn't care so much about valuable things being used.

Frankie ran for next year's student council. And won. I could tell the idea of his mama coming back to live near him and Luis settled in because I noticed he didn't tear up her letters anymore.

Instead, he put them in a drawer by the microwave in the back of the Swallow. He hasn't let me see them or anything, but I wouldn't be surprised, because of the way he'd smile when each envelope arrived, if soon he'll be reading them to me aloud. He'll say, “Listen to what my mother wrote today,” and things like that.

Sometimes I'd see him reading one of her
letters while sitting on the yellow bench. I'd watch him unfolding the pages, reading them over again and again, like they were filling him up with something.

I imagine one day when his mama hugs him, he'll put his arms around her, too. That these letters she sends are paving the way to family dinners together. That maybe the next time Frankie sees his doctor, the doctor will say, “Frankie, I have good news. You have been miraculously cured of stomachaches.”

Marisol won an art award from the city council. It was written up in the newspaper along with a photograph of her. We all said that finally her drawings weren't going to waste on just us. And that soon everyone would know who Marisol Cruz was.

Daddy came back after serving all his time in jail. With longer than normal hair, which Mama would not agree to tend to. She kept insisting there were plenty of other professional stylists in her salon who are almost as talented as she was
who could give him a good cut. I think she'd cut his hair if we pushed, but Daddy said not to, that she'd had enough pushing from him.

He got an apartment close to our house. One that I can walk to.

We'd sit on the jetty rocks above the ocean most mornings before I caught the school bus, and have talks about the jobs he was lining up. And how he was going to get all that money back for me. I'd listen to him tell me his plans, and it almost felt like old times again.

“Probation is the time to make things right,” he told me. Like each word was the true wish of his heart.

Every day I remember what Luis told me about people being who they are, and that Daddy is trying his best not to gamble. I know this because he goes to meetings each Tuesday, which causes Mama to tear up. She says they are tears of happiness, though, and not to worry any.

I'm just happy to have him back. But I know he means what he says because he's never looked
so sure about anything before.

Even Mama agreed after a while that he was trying his best. And one night she let me invite him to have dinner with us.

I cooked everything. Even the dessert. Which was chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, of course.

I have started cooking again. Monday through Friday, I plan the menus for Mama and me. My notebook is stuffed full of recipes from Luis and his Aunt Regina, who has mysteriously taken to sending them in the mail to my house.

The strawberries Luis sells now all have white chocolate swallows drawn on them. I've just about got using the toothpick down. My drawings aren't anything like Marisol's, but people can tell they're birds. They say, “Oh look, chocolate-covered strawberries. And is that a little bird on there? How clever.” And then they usually buy one.

My savings account grows a little more each month. Mama says that soon, at the rate I'm
going, I'll have enough money to enroll in the first semester of cooking school. Knowing this makes me feel like the luckiest person on Earth, like twirling around the kitchen until I'm dizzy. Imagine being the richest person alive times a million. Well, that's me.

The night Daddy came to dinner, I let Mama help a little with the main course, which was corn-and-beef tamales. But I cooked the white rice for exactly twenty minutes, like it said on the box, and diced the tomatoes and peppers for the salsa.

Mama says that I am a mystery, that my talents are a gift most certainly not from her. Her eyes shine when she says this.

When I set the table after all the cooking was done, I put my plate next to Daddy's. Instead of the usual spot of Mama's plate being next to Daddy's.

Mama said she didn't mind. After all, Daddy and I still had a lot of catching up to do.

I knew he loved me when he brought me a
cookbook, something he'd never done before.

“This is for you, Eleanor,” he said, standing in the front door wearing his best shirt.

I glanced at Mama.
He called me Eleanor. Did you hear that?
my eyes said to hers.

“It's even got a recipe for breadfruit in it,” Daddy said. “Page seventy-four. See for yourself. There's recipes for those hard-to-cook things in there.” He looked at me then like he was seeing me in a new way.

There was not a speck of food left on anyone's plate, and I think it was due to more than just politeness because Daddy said, and I remember his very words, “After eating that dinner, I don't think you need any help from cookbooks. Move over, Betty Crocker,” he said.

And it felt better than anything, with his words in my head. And us all sitting at the same dinner table with this feeling floating around like the hour before your birthday party is about to start.

But out of everything that happened, Mama surprised me most of all. Because instead of
consulting the planets and stars every morning in the paper, one Sunday she decided to walk to church with me, Luis, and Frankie to listen to Pastor Ken. She stayed for the whole service without rolling her eyes or making a to-do list on the back of the bulletin.

And when we sang songs at the end, Mama stood next to us. I didn't hear her sing, but she did stand up. Like maybe she was thinking about singing as soon as she learned all the words.

So I made sure I said my prayers of thankfulness that night. For Frankie's mama, who'd be coming back soon, and for her sending him those letters that were filling him up inside.

And for Marisol getting her art award and being in the newspaper.

For Mr. Tom getting to his trailer on the island with the supplies Luis gave him.

And for Daddy coming back and trying his hardest to do things differently.

But mostly, I was thankful that I had everything I needed.

So many things happened that Frankie and I started calling it the year the swallows came early. But we both knew it was much more than that.

And when Frankie gave me a See's chocolate at the shop after school one day, I knew things were going to be practically perfect.

Because even though he'd picked that chocolate by pure chance, it just so happened that when I bit into it, I tasted soft
easy
-going caramel, and no coconut flakes.

“It's a good one,” I told him, knowing that later I'd add the word
caramel
to the list in my notebook. And that from that day forward, caramel would remind me of things going my way.

“It's nice and smooth,” I said.

Frankie just smiled.