The Summer Kitchen (36 page)

“How old is Rusty?” Mrs. Kaye asked out of the blue.

A fire alarm went off in my head. I couldn’t remember if she’d asked me that question before, or what I’d said. “He’s nineteen,” I answered, quick as a whip. It’s never good to say eighteen, because then everyone thinks you’re lying, just to be legal. I was afraid Mrs. Kaye wouldn’t believe twenty-one, because Rusty didn’t look much older than Christopher, just taller.

She nodded. “He must play basketball quite a bit, to have stayed so good.” Rusty’d just blown in a three-point shot from the end of the driveway.

“Nah, he doesn’t get the time anymore, since he’s working.” In a way, it was hard to believe that, just last year, Rusty was carrying his team right through the scheduled games. There was talk that, the way he was playing, this might be the year they’d win state, and if they did, there’d be colleges all over the place offering Rusty scholarships. If he could keep from flunking English, first. He had to write a paper about
A Raisin in the Sun
. He didn’t want to read it, so I read it for him and told him what to write.

“That’s a shame.” Mrs. Kaye watched Opal fall down in the driveway, then get up.

“Well, you know, you gotta do what you gotta do.” What else was there to say, really? You hit a point where some dreams just aren’t gonna come true. It doesn’t seem so important to read about
A Raisin in the Sun
when you are one.

“I’d have guessed there was more difference between your ages.”

I wasn’t really listening to Mrs. Kaye. I was thinking about
A Raisin in the Sun
. I didn’t much like the way it ended. The people got gypped out of their money, and they had to start over, and I thought that was pretty sorry. I wanted them to win the lotto, or find a wallet with a million dollars in it, or something. “Five years,” I said, and it took a full minute before I clued in to the fact that I’d screwed up big-time.
Seventeen,
the voice in my head hissed.
You’re supposed to be seventeen. Seventeen to nineteen, two years.
I laughed and added, “Seems like. Sometimes, Rusty acts about twelve years old.”
Twelve to seventeen, five years. Good math.

I didn’t look at Mrs. Kaye. When you say something and look at people right after, they know you’re wondering if they swallowed it.

We sat a while, and finally Mrs. Kaye gave a long, low sigh, her shoulders sinking with it. Folding her arms over her knees, she stared down the street, her eyes flickering like candles in the freckled light as the tree branches swayed apart and came together again. “You know, if we’re going to be in business together, I’ll need you to be honest with me.”

“Business together?” Out of the two sentences, that seemed like the least dangerous bit. Part of not having to lie is figuring out what things to talk about. Most people’ll let you take a conversation wherever you want.

“The free lunch café.” She nodded toward the house. “Holly and I have been talking about giving the place a name, trying to get some sponsors or grants, and going forward with it. We’re serving so many elderly people, and families with babies and toddlers, I don’t think school starting in the fall will make too much of a dent in the numbers here.”

“Really?” All the worry fell off of me like dead weight, and I felt like I could float right across the yard. “It’s not really a business if it doesn’t make any money, though.”

“Not so. A business delivers a product or provides a service. The reward doesn’t have to be monetary.”

“Monetary’s nice, though.”

Mrs. Kaye laughed. “True,” she said. “If we move forward with making this an official business and applying for grants and fellowships, we’ll need social security numbers from everybody.”

“Oh, sure. We’ve got those at home.” When we moved to Dallas, Rusty’d got a social security card from a guy downtown, so he wouldn’t have it happen again where the people he worked for found out he was seventeen. He could probably get me one, too. “You don’t have to pay me to work here, though. I know you need money to buy the food and stuff for the café.”

Mrs. Kaye squeezed my hand, then held it. “We’ll talk about that when we get further along. There are a lot of details to work out yet, but for now, I think we need to level with each other, all right?”

“ ’Kay.” Inside, the bird started beating my ribs. This was a trap—the talk about the café, the promises about working here, the stuff with the social security numbers, even Mrs. Kaye holding my hand. It was all a trap. No matter how nice people act, they always want to get in your business. . . . “There’s not a lot else to tell, though.” I tried to look like I wasn’t worried. “What you see’s what you get, pretty much.”

Mrs. Kaye gave me the look my sixth-grade teacher used to.
Crap,
I thought.

“Opal isn’t really your cousin, is she?” she asked, as Opal stole the basketball and ran away squealing while the guys pretended they were trying to get it from her.

My mind zoomed round and round like a screaming whistle on a string.
What should I say? What should I tell her next?
I thought about what Rusty’d said—
You can’t just take someone’s kid and keep it.
If Mrs. Kaye knew the truth, would she make us call CPS and tell them Opal’s mom had left her and not come around for, like, all the days Opal and me pretended to have the flu, and now another week since we’d been back at the café—almost two weeks altogether?

Mrs. Kaye’s eyes found mine. If I lied, she’d know it. “Well . . . no. She’s Rusty’s girlfriend’s kid, but the apartment only lets family be there, so we have to
say
she’s our cousin.”
Don’t look at her right away. She’ll know you’re making it up.

I felt her wrap my fingers between hers and hold them tight. From the corner of my eye, I saw her lean close. “How about the real truth? You can trust me, Cass.”

The bird pounded so hard against my chest, I couldn’t hear myself think. All I could hear was the beating. “Well . . . ummm . . . she’s not exactly Rusty’s girlfriend. I mean, they’re just friends, kind of. He’s, like, trying to help her out. Her boyfriend messed her up some, and she didn’t have anyplace else to go.”

Mrs. Kaye sucked in a breath, and I couldn’t help it, I looked at her. Her eyes were wide and she looked afraid. “Cass.” Her lips hung open a minute. “This doesn’t sound like something the two of you should be involved in. Things like this—domestic problems—can be dangerous. Even the police are afraid to get in the middle of domestic situations.”

I thought about Kiki’s boyfriend coming and beating on the door, and the little scars in Opal’s hair. If Mrs. Kaye found out about that, everything would be ruined. She’d call the police so fast, Rusty and me wouldn’t even have time to get the stuff in the truck for a start-over. “Oh, no, it’s okay now.” I rushed out the words. “They’re, like, broke up. He kicked her out, and they haven’t talked since then, and they’re not gonna. He moved away, I think. He’s a trucker, and you know they don’t ever stay in one place long. Once Kiki gets enough money together, she’s moving into her own apartment. She’s almost got enough now.”

Mrs. Kaye smoothed a piece of reddish blond hair away from her face, looking at me. “Are you kids on your own down there? You and your brother, and this Kiki, I mean?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. Mama’s always home . . . unless she has a treatment.”

The phone rang in Mrs. Kaye’s pocket, and I was never so glad for anything in my life. She got up and walked to her car to talk. She didn’t look happy, and when she came back, she said she and Christopher’d better head home.

Before she left, she handed me a card with her cell phone number on it. “I want you to keep this where you can find it.” She looked me straight in the eye. “If there’s ever a problem, you call me. Night or day, all right?”

“All right.” I got up off the porch and tucked the card in my pocket while she told Christopher they had to go.

I didn’t bother reminding her that we didn’t have a phone.

Chapter 21

SandraKaye

“Dad’s home,” I informed Christopher as we left Poppy’s.

Chris checked for oncoming cars, then swung into the left-turn lane and waited for a gap in traffic before speaking. I’d started letting him drive on our trips to Poppy’s—a silent sign of confidence, a bridge between the two of us to let him know I believed he wasn’t to blame for the accident. We’d probably never know for sure, now that the other parties had dropped their claims and disappeared. The sequence of events would always be their word against his, but officially the accident had been ruled no-fault.

Over the past week, there had been a strange and silent compact between the two of us, Christopher acting like the old Christopher, making his silly jokes, helping at the free lunch café, bringing the basketball goal from home and setting it up in the driveway so the kids could play, performing Frisbee displays with Bobo on the lawn while customers waited in line for lunch. He’d brought his guitar and started showing some of the older children how to finger the chords. He’d even begun to lure Monk, B.C., and a few other teenagers who showed an interest in the guitar and the basketball goal. Chris and Teddy had made plans to mow the grass in the park and put the merry-go-round back on its axle as soon as Rusty could procure the welding equipment from work again.

It was as if we’d been on an odd sort of vacation these past days, Chris and I. We were bank robbers on the lam, both of us aware that we were only stealing time.

“Did Dad call from the airport or from home?” he asked, squinting one eye, as if he felt something heavy over his head and was just waiting for it to fall.

“He got home about a half hour ago.”

“Great,” he mumbled, not sounding the way a son should when his father returns from a business trip. Perhaps there always comes a point at which fathers and sons have a collision of the minds, and Rob and Christopher had reached that point.

“You can talk to him, you know. If you have something to tell your dad, you need to get it out in the open.” More than once on our drives home I’d tried to encourage Christopher to open up about his future plans for medical school, his music, his feelings about Jake’s leaving, his issues with his dad. Chris didn’t want to talk about it. He was like a tourist overextending his credit card on vacation—if he didn’t discuss real life, it didn’t exist. Instead, he talked about the people we served at Poppy’s, the ways we could improve the place, how the kitchen could be renovated and expanded, the plan for cleaning up the park, his idea of getting some cheap guitars and teaching kids to play in the afternoons.
They don’t have anything to do all day,
he observed.
That’s why they hang around the streets and get in trouble.

Each night after Chris and I ate supper, he filled our house with music again. Life was relaxed and comfortable.

“Dad doesn’t listen.” A bitter shadow darkened Christopher’s eyes as he looked over his shoulder to change lanes. “He doesn’t care.”

It bothered me to hear Chris talking that way, even though I knew it was his reality, and I could understand it. Growing up, I’d felt as if I were an actor playing a part, and if I failed in my performance the consequences would be dire. I didn’t want that for Chris. “That’s not true. Your father cares about you very much. He just doesn’t know . . . what to do about it. He didn’t come from a very . . . flexible family. Certain things were always expected of him, and, in general, he set the same expectations for you two.”

How could I explain to Chris that Rob’s way—
our way
—of protecting the boys had always been to make sure they never deviated from the safe and steady path we’d planned? “You know how Grandma and Grandpa Darden are, and I can promise you they’ve always been much looser with you and Jake than they were with their own kids.” Even though they only flew in from Florida a couple times a year, Rob’s parents had always tried very hard to be good to the boys. “Grandpa Darden is a brilliant man, but he’s always been very distant and set in his ways. There’s never been anything touchy-feely about him. It worked out all right, I guess, because he and your father are a lot alike.”

The corners of Christopher’s mouth turned downward, and he blew a puff of air through his nose.

“You need to tell your dad how you feel, Chris.”

“Nobody can talk to him.” A muscle twitched in his cheek. He blinked hard, then rapidly. “Jake couldn’t talk to him.”

The comment surprised me. In Rob’s view, Jake had always been the perfect son. Smart, cooperative, easy to control, mild mannered. “Your father and Jake had a pretty good relationship. They wanted the same things.”

Chris rolled his eyes, his mouth a sardonic line. “Jake didn’t want to be premed. He didn’t ever want to go to medical school.”

Struck by the words, I jerked back against the seat. “What?” Never in Jake’s life had there been a discussion of anything else. From the time Jake was small, Rob had insisted on enrolling him in biology camps, accelerated courses, summer gifted and talented programs designed to introduce him to the study of science. Jake was a sponge, absorbing it all, always looking for something more to learn. “Jake never talked about anything else.”

“Jake just said those things to make you guys happy.” I had the sense that Christopher was finally being completely honest. “He stopped wanting to be a doctor when he was, like, in the fifth grade. He wanted to be a teacher. He always wanted to be a teacher. He wanted to go back to Guatemala and teach kids who were orphans, like he was.”

My body went limp, and my arm fell against the door, triggering the automatic locks, imprisoning the words inside the car. “Jake said that to you? When?”

“I’ve known it forever.” Christopher glanced at me, turned ashen at the look on my face. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Never mind.”

“It explains . . . a lot,” I choked out. My thoughts raced through the connections—Jake always playing school in his room as a child, setting up tables and chairs and forcing his little brother to be his student, doing his book reports on subjects related to Guatemala, volunteering at the rec center, where he could work with disadvantaged kids while he completed premed coursework, insisting on enrolling in educational theory classes that weren’t required for his major. And finally his leaving. He hadn’t gone off into the world to escape his grief over Poppy, or to find a new family. He’d finally broken free and traveled where his heart had been leading all along. He wasn’t wandering aimlessly; he was executing a plan.