Sparrow Road (5 page)

I opened up my eyes and wrote it down in one mad rush. Everything he told me. Word after word. I wrote so long a red writer’s bump rose up on my finger. One morning in the silence and the dream Diego promised had already arrived.

“It worked!” I told Diego. At five o’clock he’d come into the main house to help Mama with the supper. Lillian too. I stood beside him cutting Mama’s carrots. Lillian sliced mushrooms. Mama didn’t want the artists to help her in the kitchen, but no matter how many ways she said it, they still refused to leave. I could tell both of them were trying to welcome Mama, the same way they welcomed me.

“What worked?” Mama stopped her stirring. The smell of melted cheese and garlic drifted from her pot.

“What was or what could be?”
I said to Diego. “I tried it and my imagination went to work.”

“You make it the whole day without a word?” Diego winked, like he already knew I didn’t.

“Not quite,” I said. By lunch, Mama and I were chatting in our cottage, but when she asked about my writing, I kept the orphan to myself.

“What was or what could be?” Mama interrupted. “Is that what you were doing underneath that willow? Thinking of what was?”

“Sort of.” I didn’t want to explain it all to Mama; it was Diego I wanted most to tell. Diego, who knew how daydreams worked. I wished she’d go back to her cooking and let me talk to Diego by myself.

“I don’t think Raine’s imagination needs any help,” Mama said, concerned. “It already runs wild.”

“Oh, it’s really nothing, Molly,” Diego said, embarrassed. I could see that he was struck by Mama’s beauty—her mane of copper curls, her bright green eyes. Lots of men liked Mama, but Mama never had the time to like them back. “It’s just a thing I mentioned yesterday to Raine. While you were in town shopping. How we artists make it through the silence with our dreams.” He snuck another wink my way; I was glad he left out the part about the tower.

“Yesterday,” Mama scolded, “Raine shouldn’t have left the cottage. I hope she didn’t disturb your work.”

“Not at all,” Diego said.

“The children must be hungry.” Lillian looked at me like I was lost behind some fog. “They always need to eat.”

“Well, I certainly am hungry!” a woman bellowed.

“Josie!” Lillian clapped her tiny hands.

Suddenly Josie marched into the kitchen, her long, sure steps reminding me of the cowboys in the westerns Grandpa watched. Except in place of cowboy boots, she had on men’s black work boots, big and clunky, with heavy silver buckles that jangled when she walked. Her dress looked like a patchwork sack of scraps. A nest of neon braids framed her freckled face.

“You’ve come home!” Lillian said.

“I’ll always come home, Lilly.” Josie smacked a kiss on Lillian’s head. “Oh boy,” she said. “I’m beat. Two days of watching clouds drift really wore me out.” She gave a great big laugh.

“We have a brand-new orphan,” Lillian said.

“Fabulous,” Josie cheered. “We need more orphans at this place.” A wide gap flashed between her two front teeth. She gave my hand a forceful shake. “So you must be the long-awaited Raine O’Rourke.”

“I am,” I said, although no one ever called me long awaited.

“And that means you must be Molly.” Josie latched on to Mama’s hand and shook it hard. She towered at least two heads above Mama and she was sturdy as a tree. “I hear you took my job.” She slapped Mama on the shoulder.

“At last!” Diego laughed. “No more of your horrible carrot stew! These two came to our rescue from Milwaukee.”

“Milwaukee?” Josie whistled. “My oh my! How did Viktor find you in Milwaukee?”

“He just did,” Mama said abruptly. She waved the steam back from her face. Red fluster blotches rose up on her neck. “Right now I need to get this dinner served. So if the three of you could gather at the table—”

“Not served,” Josie said. She pulled a stack of plates out of the cupboard. “All of us will help.”

“Not anymore,” Mama said. “Viktor hired me. And please don’t put down plates for us.”

“No plates for you and Raine?” Diego frowned.

“The two of us will eat here in the kitchen.” Mama sounded like a servant. “After your meal has been served.”

“What?” I said. “We can’t eat dinner now?” Warm garlic bread was waiting in the oven. I’d been craving Mama’s tortellini since this morning. It was her specialty, the birthday meal Grandpa Mac requested every year.

“You eat with us or no one eats,” Josie ordered.

“Ladies, you heard Josie,” Diego said. “And you can see,” he joked, “I can’t afford to starve.”

Eleanor didn’t want us at the table and everybody saw it the second she sat down. “I see we have a crowd tonight,” she sniffed. In her straight black skirt and ruffled blouse she looked too formal to be here for Mama’s supper.

“Let me introduce—” Diego waved his fork in our direction.

“I know who they are,” Eleanor said.

“Raine and Molly,” Josie finished off the sentence. She yanked a hunk of warm bread from the loaf and dropped it on my plate.

“So Viktor won’t be joining us for dinner?” Mama’s hands were folded in her lap like she wasn’t going to eat.

“Never,” Josie said. “The Iceberg eats alone.”

“The Iceberg?” Mama said. “That isn’t very nice.” Mama hated mean names—even when they fit.

“It certainly is not,” Eleanor said. She snapped her napkin open; it was the same embroidered pattern someone had stitched for us. The towered house. The initials sewn in the corner. I looked around the table. There was one at every plate.

Josie nudged me with her elbow. “I sewed two sets, so you’ll have one at your cottage and one here in the main house.” The painted eggs, the tangerines, the golden glittered WELCOME. It
was
lively Josie who left that basket at our door.

“Thanks,” I said. “They’re beautiful. I’ll save one as a keepsake.”

“Well, they’re impractical for meals,” Eleanor said. “But charming, I suppose. Josie seems to have the time for crafts.”

“This is our summer orphan,” Lillian said.

“She’s not an orphan,” Eleanor corrected. “She’s the daughter of the maid. There are no orphans here. This is an artists’ retreat.” She shifted in her chair but she wouldn’t look at me. “I shall assume tonight is an exception. I hadn’t planned to have a child at the meal. I understood this summer would be spent among adults. Otherwise, my daughters could be here.”

“You have kids?” I blurted. I couldn’t picture someone as stiff as Eleanor with children.

“Eleanor has three young daughters,” Josie said. “All home with a nanny while she writes.”

“My husband’s in Chicago with the children.” Eleanor stabbed a piece of lettuce with her fork. She hadn’t even tasted Mama’s food.

“You left them for the summer?” I thought of how mad I was yesterday when Mama went to town. Except for work and school, and sleepovers I sometimes had with friends, the two of us hardly were apart. “Would you ever do that, Mama?”

“No,” Mama said. “I couldn’t.”

“Well, I have work that must be done without my daughters,” Eleanor said to me. “Not everyone can be a maid.”

“Mama is a singer.” I don’t know why I said it. Mama hadn’t really sung since I was little, not much more than lullabies or hymns. But once she did. I wanted Eleanor to know Mama was more than just a maid. More than a waitress. More than a summer cook. “Mama had a music scholarship to college.”

“You sing?” Diego grinned.

Mama’s face burned pink. “I sang.”

“In Amsterdam,” I added. I always thought Amsterdam made Mama’s singing sound important, even if she was just a young girl hippie singing on the street. A life I’d only seen in pictures. The boat where I was born. Me, a barefoot toddler twirling on the street. Mama with a guitar on her shoulder.

“Wow!” Diego said. “Amsterdam? How long ago was that?”

“Another life.” Mama blew a frizzy curl back from her face. Beads of sweat glistened on her forehead. “When Raine was very young.”

“A singer? How impressive,” Eleanor mocked. “So did you perform professionally?”

“No,” Mama said, “I didn’t.”

“Ah,” Eleanor said. “So it really was a hobby?”

Mama shoved her chair back from the table. “May I get anybody anything?” I knew she was going to the kitchen to scream into a towel. It was her waitress trick when she had a cranky customer.

Diego reached for Mama’s chair. “Molly, please don’t wait on us. Sit down and eat.”

“No,” Mama said. “I’ve already had enough.”

After that bad meal, Mama made us eat every supper by ourselves, alone in the big kitchen, with milk in crystal goblets and china plates and Josie’s hand-stitched napkins spread out on our laps. Mama tried her best to make it seem like she wasn’t just a servant. “It’s no different from my job at Christos,” she said whenever I complained. “I can’t sit with my customers.” But the artists weren’t our customers. Already that first week everyone but Eleanor treated us as friends. And it was the artists I wanted to sit beside at supper.

Still, every night at five o’clock Diego, Lillian, and Josie gathered in the kitchen to dice and cut and mash and mix. While we worked, the room filled up with stories. Josie told about the troubled teens she taught art to in Detroit, and Diego talked about his sons when they were young. The pranks they played. He said both his boys were grown up and gone, and that his wife, Sophia, died too early, so now he lived in California all alone. Lillian talked about the orphans or Viktor as a prodigy, her piano students, the St. Paul seniors’ high-rise that she hated. Sometimes I told a story from Milwaukee, but mostly I just listened, the way I did to all the folks who shopped at Grandpa’s store.

Mornings, while Mama planted flowers or hung laundry on the line, she let me wander Sparrow Road alone as long as I stayed near the main house or the cottage. Sometimes, when I was sure no one was watching, I’d sneak up the servants’ staircase, drag a chair over to the ladder, and climb up to the tower by myself. Of all the spots at Sparrow Road, the tower was my favorite place to dream.

From my spy perch in the sky, I could see Viktor strolling slouch-shouldered through the meadow or napping on a hammock in the shade. The Iceberg. He still hadn’t said a single word to me, not even a thank-you on those nights Mama made me deliver supper to his door. A job I hated, but Mama made me do it.

Other times, I spied Mama on the path to the infirmary, Viktor’s house and office, a place Josie said the artists wouldn’t be welcome, but it seemed to me Mama always was. Something about the two of them still struck me as too friendly. Except for Lillian, Mama was the only person Viktor gave more than a nod.

I sat down with my back against the tower. The little plywood lap desk Diego built me was propped up on my legs. I’d found it in the tower with a note that said,
Sweet dreams. D.
I pulled my sketchbook from my backpack and found an empty page.