The Summer Kitchen (38 page)

He drew upward, offended. “I don’t think that’s valid. Just because I’m not hovering around wallowing in it doesn’t mean I don’t feel it. Just because I don’t mollycoddle Christopher doesn’t mean I’m some kind of dictator who couldn’t care less about how he’s feeling or what he wants, or that we need to sign up for some kind of family talk therapy. Chris knows I have his best interests in mind. I want him to have all the tools he needs to be successful.”

“Your kind of success,” I countered. “Your definition.” My hands rose palms-up in a plea. “Rob, there are all kinds of success. Titles, and diplomas, and a six-figure income are only part of it. We shouldn’t be telling the boys to live their lives to keep up appearances, or to make someone else happy. It’s hollow. It’s meaningless.”

“That’s what I’m trying to fix!” Rob exploded, his face unchar acteristically passionate. “With the new job. With a new start for Christopher. He can leave it all behind. Nobody will know about the problems he had here . . . about the pills. We won’t have Poppy’s death and everything else pressing in on us.”

Shaking my head, I looked away from Rob, watched the last rays of sun disappear behind Holly’s house. How could I make him understand? “
Chris
will know. We’ll know. All the stuff that caused him to try pills in the first place will still be with us. We don’t need another artificial life in Baltimore or anywhere else. Chris deserves the chance to pursue a life that’s authentic to who he is. He’s trying to tell you that. He’s been trying to tell us that—he and Jake both have—but we haven’t been listening, and now Jake’s gone. I don’t want Christopher to be next.”

“This has nothing to do with Jake.”

“It has
everything
to do with Jake.” My voice had gone quiet. Even now, it was hard to force out the truth about Jake. Rob would be wounded to the core. He’d always thought of Jake as his pro tégé, an extension of himself, plucked from a grim future in a third world country and carefully groomed for success. “Did you know Jake didn’t want to go to med school? He wanted to be a teacher. He wanted to go back to Guatemala and teach. He didn’t run
away
from us, he ran
to
something he’d been keeping inside himself for a long time.”

Rob’s head curled upward and angled, as if he were trying to gain a view of something that made no sense. “Jake told you this?”

“He told Christopher.”

“When?”

“A long time ago, apparently. They’ve both been carrying it around for years. That’s why Jake insisted on the double major. He was preparing; he just hadn’t figured out how to tell us yet.”

Rob reeled, caught himself against the counter, crossed his arms over his chest and froze like a statue, contemplating the weight of the world. He shook his head slowly, his gaze scanning the cabinets, as if he were reviewing text in a file, trying to connect the clues, analyze the symptoms and come up with a cure that would fix everything.

Finally, I gathered my courage and breeched the silence. Now that we’d begun, there was no reason not to go all the way. “There’s something else I need to tell you.”

“Can it wait?” Rob was off center, suddenly exhausted.

“I think I’d better say it now.” Without allowing myself time to reconsider, I jumped into an explanation of the past weeks, Poppy’s house, the kids in the Dumpster, Cass, Opal, and Rusty, the café. Rob didn’t react other than to lift his chin and stare at me, his eyes glazed over through the entire story.

“I’m not sure what you want me . . . to . . . say,” he stammered.

“I don’t want you to say anything.” I wondered whether to be comforted or concerned by his lack of reaction. “I want you to come see the café. I want you to see the kids there, to look at how they live, everything they need. There’s so much work to be done. They not only need food, but also enrichment programs, medical care, dental care. Medicaid doesn’t pay for dental, and so many of the little kids have baby teeth just rotting out of their heads, and—”

“This is where you’ve been every day?” He pushed aside the cheesecake and rested his elbows on the island. “For how long? How long have you been doing this?”

“A few weeks.”

“A few
weeks
?” His mouth hung open. “Who knew about it?”

I swallowed hard. The truth would hurt him. “No one, at first. Then Holly . . . and Christopher.”

“Christopher?” His face conveyed surprise and then injury. “You’ve gotten Christopher involved in this?”

“Yes.”

“But not me.”

“It . . . took on a life of its own, Rob. You have to understand.” But the truth was that Rob was right. I had chosen not to tell him. He was justified in feeling betrayed.

“It never occurred to you to discuss it with me, particularly before you involved Christopher?”

“Chris needed . . . something. I thought this might give it to him.”

“Christopher needed his mother at home. He
needs
his mother at
home
.” Rob scratched an eyebrow roughly, watched me with his fingers pressed to his temple. “We’re not in any position to take on something so complicated, especially now.”

“Why
not
now?” I countered, growing desperate. If Rob didn’t understand, what would I do, where would I go? “Why not
us
? We have resources, Rob. We have connections here that could be used—through our church, our friendships, the hospital. Right now, the café is feeding over sixty people a day. You can’t just stop feeding sixty people a day.”

He closed his eyes, then opened them again, as if he were hoping to wake up somewhere else. “Has it ever occurred to you that, while these people are willing enough to cash in on a free meal, they were surviving before you came there, and they’ll survive after you leave?”

The fire of indignation in my belly flamed up like kindling with a handful of dry straw thrown on top. “Has it ever occurred to you that they might have been hungry before we came and now they’re not? I don’t need a medical degree to spot hungry people, Rob. I may not be a doctor, but I’m not an idiot, either. I’d like you to consider that I am capable of doing more than washing clothes, and scheduling the yard service and the housekeeper, and running everyone’s errands, and making sure there’s sandwich meat in the refrigerator when you
happen
to show up to eat. Has it ever occurred to you that I might be good at this, and that this might be good for me? That it might be good for Christopher—for all of us?”

Rob’s eyes, a cool gold in this light, took me in, studied me. “I’ve never questioned your abilities. I’ve never questioned that you’re capable of doing anything you want.”

The statement took me back. “Really? Because you’re talking to me as if I’m one of your underlings, and I need you to guide and direct me. I need you to
support
me, Rob. That’s what I need. I need . . .” How could I describe what I felt—the sense that, somewhere between Mommy-and-me playdates and the high school banquets, I’d
become
the birthday parties, the school projects, the PTO, the booster club, the soccer snacks, the doctor’s wife. I
was
the job I did. I loved the job, but now the job was changing, pieces of
Mom
evaporating like fog on a bathroom mirror. The same sense of change that made Holly wonder if she wanted another baby whispered to me that now was the time to do something new, to do
this
. The young college coed who’d planned to become a teacher, to be the one who made a difference to children who needed help, was awakening like a time traveler frozen in suspended animation. I could feel her catching her breath inside me. “Jake isn’t here. Christopher’s almost grown. This could be good for us, Rob. It’s been good for Christopher and me. We talk about things . . . new things, instead of grinding the past into finer and finer pieces—instead of sitting here grieving over Jake and Poppy. It’s time to move forward. It’s time for something new. Isn’t that why you were considering the teaching job?”

For a moment, there was a spark of understanding in Rob’s eyes, as if I’d touched the part of him that wanted to break free, that felt as trapped as I did. Just as quickly, he closed the door. “Sandra, I’m all for your volunteering, or going to work, or whatever you want to do. I understand the psychology of a maturing home, but there are dozens of things you can do without driving to the seedy side of town and setting up a soup kitchen. There are things you can do here.”

“What if I’m needed
there
? What if this
is
what I’m supposed to be doing? We sit in that big church on Sundays.” I stabbed a finger in the general direction of Victory Fellowship, just out of sight over the hill. “And we talk about having a sense of purpose. Well, I’ve found it. I feel it in every part of me. Nothing that’s happened these past few months has been by accident. It’s as if I’ve been pushed out of the nest, pushed toward that house, toward those people. It’s as if I’ve been preparing for this all my life.” I thought of the dreams I’d held as a little girl, the spirit that my mother’s addictions had tried to crush in me.

“Sandra, there are social agencies set up to handle problems like this. Volunteer with one of them if you want to.” Rob’s voice was like my mother’s.
Don’t muss your dress, SandraKaye. Stay away from little black children. You’ll pick up the dialect. . . .

“I’ve done my research, Rob. I know this neighborhood. Economics, the rising cost of groceries, everything hits hard in a lower-income area like this. The community center had a summer feeding program, but the community center isn’t there anymore. The property was sold to a developer. New condos are going in just blocks away, but that doesn’t help the people who were there before. It only raises the tax base. They can’t afford to stay. They can’t afford to go. They can’t afford to live. Someone has to fill the gap.”

Rob stared out the window, his eyes narrow. “I’m sorry, Sandra. I understand economics and urban redevelopment. I understand that other people have problems, but burying ourselves in some quest for social justice won’t bring back Jake, and it won’t erase what happened to Poppy, and it won’t . . . keep Christopher out of the medicine cabinet. I’m not interested in trying to save the world. We’ve got all we can handle just trying to put our own lives back together.”

I could feel Rob pulling away, slipping through my fingers like sand. “Give it a chance, Rob. Come take a look—see what it’s about. I need this. I want you to stand behind me.”

Leaning forward, he sighed, combing a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “What, exactly, are you proposing?”

“First of all, I want to buy Poppy’s house from Mother. The café has to have a place that can’t be sold out from under us. Without a permanent location, we can’t even apply for grants, and—”

His gaze lifted in a way that struck me silent, that burned through the seed of hope I’d begun to nurture. “Sandra,” he said flatly, “there was a message from your mother on the machine. She just accepted an offer on Poppy’s house.”

Chapter 22

Cass

The minute I saw Mrs. Kaye get out of her car, I knew something was wrong. You can tell a lot by the way a person walks. She was only carrying a couple grocery bags and one of the metal pans we used in the café, but she moved like her body had an extra hundred pounds on it. She didn’t even wait for Christopher or Holly to get out—she just headed up to the porch with lines in her forehead big as corn furrows. Christopher didn’t look like he knew anything was going on. He shot a basket from right beside the car. Monk and his bunch had been hanging around on the street waiting for him to play a game of two on two and as soon as they saw him, they came like hogs to sooie, which meant Christopher wouldn’t be much help all morning. Working with him was about like working with Rusty—he didn’t stay on one track so well.

When everyone got out of the car, it didn’t look like Holly knew there was anything wrong with Mrs. Kaye, either. She was whistling, and she hugged Opal and me around a stack of paper plates.

Opal could tell something was different with Mrs. Kaye today, though—lots of times, it seemed like Opal had a feeling about things, even if she didn’t know the words to tell you. She knew when people were mad, or happy, or sad, or upset. Maybe she’d had to learn that to get by, living with Kiki and Uncle Len. She figured something wasn’t right about Mrs. Kaye, and she hung around by the door, looking up at her with a worried face.

It didn’t take Mrs. Kaye long to send me and Opal to the front room to set up tables. As soon as we were gone, Holly plunked a cutting board down on the stove so hard I heard it. “Okay, out with it already,” she said. “What in the world is wrong with you today?”

There was a long pause and then Mrs. Kaye turned on the radio by the door. I couldn’t hear what she said at first, for “Old Time Rock and Roll” playing on the radio. I got closer to the door, and then I picked up, “. . . want to say anything with Christopher in the car.”

“Well, it’s just us now.” Holly had the knife going. She could do it really fast, like a Japanese chef on the Benihana commercial. She could even talk while she did it, which, considering she always talked with her hands, didn’t seem like the best idea. She’d chop, sling the knife, chop, sling the knife, and once in a while point it right at somebody like it was a giant finger. “Hey, by the way”—the chopping stopped, and I figured she was pointing the knife right then—“I did a bunch of research last night, and I’ve got a stack of grant applications printed off, and I thought—” She cut the sentence off right in the middle. “Good Lord, San, what’s
that
look for?”

“My mother accepted an offer,” Mrs. Kaye told her. “She signed the papers yesterday.”

“The papers for what?”
Chop, chop . . . chop, scrape, chop.
“A new broomstick and a few dozen monkey men? I swear, San, one of these days you’re going to get up the guts to tell that woman off. What form of manipulation and guilt inducement is she into now?”
Chop-chop-chop.