by R. J. Jacobs
I look up when I realize the door to Ms. Parsons’s office is open again. I had nodded off, gone somewhere.
Ms. Carr says goodbye to Ms. Parsons but not to me. I don’t mind. Her shoes click past me down the hall.
Ms. Parsons looks at her watch. “I’m so sorry, Jessie. Please, come back inside.”
I rush past her and sit again in an armchair that is still warm from Ms. Carr. The fabric scratches my arms, but in a good, comfortable way, and Ms. Parsons closes the door, and the office is quiet, and I feel safe again. Outside, it starts raining. The hedges in the courtyard look sleepy and heavy, weighed down by the water. The rain makes the cars pulling in and out of the parking lot seem slower.
“I know that took a while,” Ms. Parsons says. She motions toward the paper bag sitting on the end of her desk. “I haven’t eaten breakfast yet and I’d planned to have my bagel after our meeting. If you don’t mind my eating while we talk, I’m happy to extend our time. You could probably use extra therapy time after having to sit in the hallway by yourself.”
She unwraps her bagel and takes a small bite. I can smell the peanut butter—like cream mixed with earth.
“Let’s just call this overtime, like extra innings in baseball. An overtime session,” Ms. Parsons says, hiding her mouth a little with her hand.
I look at her bagel.
“Jessie, did you eat yet today?” Ms. Parsons sets her bagel on her desk and holds up her index finger while she digs through her purse. Her throat moves as she swallows. “I’ll be right back. One minute, promise.”
Her door swings open and the squeaks and laughter and conversations of the hallway drift inside. In less than a minute she returns and closes the office door and it’s quiet again.
“Well, the most nutritious snacks in the machine were strawberry Pop-Tarts and a granola bar, so you pick.” Ms. Parsons smiles again. “Actually, have both. If you want to save one for later, that’s fine, too.”
I don’t bother trying to hide how hungry I am. It’s hard to explain, but I love the predictability of Pop-Tarts. I know just what to expect when I tear open the package. I finish both in less than a minute—once the sugar and strawberry flavors hit my tongue, I can’t help myself. It takes me even less time to eat the granola bar.
Ms. Parsons quietly chews her bagel. “I’ve learned something about you today. Now I know how you feel about strawberry Pop-Tarts .”
Kindness can break your heart. I bite my lip because I want to cry so bad.
Ms. Parsons lowers her voice. “Jessie, I want to talk with you about something Ms. Carr said while she was here.”
She brushes a poppy seed from the corner of her mouth. Her eyes look concerned and I feel like she is acting, but only a little—the way people have to act sometimes when they bring up bad memories for me.
The sugar has made my mouth water, but suddenly it feels dry.
“She reminded me about what the legal consequences would be if you got close to the James family again. I know that’s all behind you now and we’re focusing on the future, but since she mentioned it, I wanted to bring it up.” Ms. Parsons clears her throat just a little. “I don’t want to harp on it, because I know you understand. But that order of protection is permanent, and a condition of your parole. If it is broken, you would likely serve the full extent of your sentence, which is fifteen years in jail. You’re very lucky, in fact, to not have to be there now.”
I know I am. There are also times when I don’t know how to stop. Everyone underestimates me, but that’s fine. When it comes to the James family, I’ll be very careful not to be caught. I need them in my life. I can’t really explain except to say I’m harmless.
“We’ve talked before about how being alone for so long made you secretive, and that other people don’t always understand.”
“Yes,” I say.
“But you know that if you ever want to tell me something, you’re safe here. Okay? I’m on your side, always. Is there anything you’re keeping secret now? About the James family?”
My breath leaves me. I can’t lie and I can’t tell. I keep my face still as stone.
“No,” I tell her.
I can’t tell Ms. Parsons that I still follow Owen and Shelly James all the time. I can’t tell her about any of their things, their memorabilia, that I’ve bought online. I know I shouldn’t. I can’t explain why I do, except the feeling is a little like the way people describe reasons they volunteer, or attend church—they get something out of it but they have a hard time saying exactly what. Something like meaning, purpose, security, belonging—not one thing specifically. I know I come to those feelings differently than other people do.
I’ve had a different kind of life.
3
From Ms. Parsons’s office I go straight to my job with the catering company.
When I arrive, my boss, Ken, is standing over a table with his hands in his back pockets. He wears Elvis Costello–style glasses and sometimes sniffs in the way one of my old counselors would have called a “tic.” Either that, or he is allergic to something year-round. Today, as usual, he wears black Converse sneakers and a black T-shirt. He has spread receipts in different colors and sizes across a table and is punching buttons on a calculator.
“Oh, hey Jessie,” he says when he hears the back door close and looks up. Sighing a little, he sniffs. “Glad you’re here, there’s a fuck-ton to do before the party tonight and I’m stressing a little. You good?”
I nod at him, already turning on the faucet. The warm water runs loudly over my hands into the deep sink. “I’m good,” I tell him.
“I pulled the recipes and moved the veggies to the front of the walk-in. Holler if you have any trouble,” he mutters, then turns back around, pushing his curly, sandy-blonde hair out of his eyes. “I was worried about finding a new server for parties after Jessica left, but I’m not now. You got this.”
He makes a fist, pumps it. I would have guessed Ken was a surfer if we lived anywhere near the coast because of how he looks and his easy-going style. The previous server, Jessica, left the company to go back to school. She smiled at me sadly on the day she left and told me I would do fine filling in for her.
Ken hasn’t asked about my life outside of work since he hired me. “It takes all types in the restaurant business,” he told me once, rubbing at the tiny dagger tattoo on his hand. “I mind my own business. Some of the people with the worst reputations are the best in a kitchen. Not my concern. We play together, like a team.”
Or like a band, I thought at the time.
On the refrigerator door is taped a note where he’s written the recipe for what he wants prepped. I decide to take the list in order, starting with the bruschetta, and begin scanning the shelves for the ingredients. When I have everything I need, I close the refrigerator door with my hip and lay the ingredients out on the smooth, stainless-steel table.
The kitchen itself is a wonder of stainless-steel surfaces and clean lines. The walk-in refrigerator is a misty cavern. Ken isn’t shy about saying that he invested his life’s savings in the business, and it shows. He is here so often—always here before I arrive and almost always still working when I leave—that I’ve wondered sometimes if he actually lives in the storeroom. His drive makes me want to work extra hard—and makes me wish extra hard that nothing from my past will disturb the business. He is fair and kind to me and I want him to succeed.
Ken is also by far the best boss I’ve ever had. When I left foster care, I started by cleaning dog pens. I liked the dogs and they liked me, and I washed their pens with soapy water that smelled like bubblegum and like carpet. Three dozen barked in different voices, caged in a large room while the manager watched me clean and stayed far away, leaning back on his heels like he might take off running. His green shirt had a few holes that I guessed had been made by dog teeth. He was bald on top, but wore his hair in a terrible comb-over.
“After a dog bites, I don’t go near it again,” he told me once.
; He kept his distance from me too, and I kept mine right back.
Once, he called me to his office, closed the door, and said to me, “I know who you are.” For a few seconds, I thought my heart had stopped. His chair creaked as he rocked in it. His glasses were very low on his nose and he tilted his head back. After a minute, he rested his forearms on his desk and sighed. “Do you talk at all?” he asked.
Concentrate. “Yes, sir.”
He laughed like he didn’t believe me. “You say anything besides that?”
That was what my previous boss had been like.
Ken knows I’m generally uncomfortable around new people and events, which is why until Jessica quit, I’d only worked as a prep cook.
Ken calls from the other side of the kitchen, “Thanks for everything you do, Jessie. These events start with a ton of prep no one sees.” He steps closer and lowers his voice. “I wanted to say, too, that I’m also really glad you’re able to help out at the events. Jessica quitting put me in a bind. Until I find someone else, you serving has been a godsend.” Ken hesitates before adding, “Obviously, you know, if you wanted to stay on as a server …”
I shake my head and smile at him as I pull a knife from the drawer.
Ken smiles back and I go over the instructions again, because I like to plan the order in which I’ll prepare everything. I like … the word for being very specific … I like precise measurements at work just like I do in my apartment. I like the steady, repetitive movements of my hands and the way the knife flashes in the kitchen lights. I like the rhythm and the disappearing and the keeping my head down. I like the feeling of the textures in my hands. I work by myself but also have the safety of knowing Ken is just in the other room.
I don’t think he knows about my arrest. I think maybe he is too busy to have run a background check. Anyway, that’s my hope.
I slip on my headphones and start on the tomatoes, cutting the pieces into shapes that are just right—not chunks or slices so small they would fall apart. The music helps my hands stay on time. Each cut comes down to the beat. I still listen to country, of course, but since the arrest at the concert, I try to listen to all kinds of music. Today is seventies rock, the Eagles. A Peaceful Easy Feeling. Ms. Parsons had suggested different music would broaden my horizons, and I tend to agree.
I can pretend. I can dream I’ve never been in trouble. That it wasn’t me who stared at ceiling tiles in jail, listened to screaming fights from the showers, made myself very small under cold covers on my bunk.
But my favorite fantasy is that I was adopted years before. I imagine a mother and a father who pick my clothes off the floor and frown in ways that are really smiles, and that I live in a house that smells like cinnamon and feels like clean sheets. I let myself dream that I have a family, even though it hurts every time the dream ends.
But that has already happened to someone in real life. It happened to Finch James when Owen and Shelly decided to bring her into their lives. A picture of the three of them with their arms wrapped around each other was on the cover of every magazine for a month. Seeing them smile on magazine covers made my eyes sting like they do when I chop onions. Owen’s eyes had been glistening in those pictures too. I knew he wanted a child because he told Oprah so in a 2012 interview I found on YouTube.
“I think the time for that will come,” he said to her. “When the time is right for Shelly and her career, I know we both want to start a family. It’s hard to make the timing right with both of us so focused on work. Probably true for a lot of working families.” He motioned out toward the audience. Some of the women nodded.
Focus.
I bring my mind back to the kitchen after I nearly cut my thumb with the knife. I move through the chopping, find a bowl, and begin mixing all the ingredients for the bruschetta topping together.
Ken passes behind me. All I hear is the Eagles as his shadow darkens the concrete floor. He keeps his distance, as if he knows to, taps his watch, and gives me a thumbs up. I check the time, too. We’re getting closer to when we’ll leave for the party.
I don’t like actually working the events as much as preparing food, but this summer I’ve gotten better at it—learning to stay out of everyone’s way and remembering to smile and to take short breaks when I can’t breathe because of feeling overwhelmed. I’m still getting used to the idea that when I’m nervous I don’t have to run and I don’t have to fight—I can just step away for a minute until I feel okay enough to get through whatever it is I’m doing. Wearing a black uniform helps. We wear black hats, too—which I like because the brim narrows the input from the world, helping me to stay dim, especially when we begin cleaning up—picking up dishes and emptying trash. People hardly notice me then.
I finish the mixture for the bruschetta, set the bowl aside, and begin working on dough for dumplings. I like the pressing down, pushing my weight into the rolling pin. The song I am listening to fades out, then the playlist starts over again.
After a while, I look up and notice that the triangle of sunlight coming across the window ledge has lengthened, meaning the hour has gotten late. I check the ingredients list and realize I haven’t yet added the baking powder to the mixture, so I pull open the cabinet where it is kept. It’s so dark inside that I can barely read the label on top of the box. I can’t stop myself from glancing around, and my heart can’t help but sink before I slam the cabinet door closed.
My mind drifts to a house where I lived when I was eight or nine. A kitchen with a cabinet.
“Hey Jessie,” the oldest boy in the foster home said to me once, squinting at me, measuring me. “I bet you can’t fit yourself into that cabinet under the sink.”
The cabinet door creaked as he opened it. Inside was dark except for the dull reflection from the U-shaped pipe beneath the sink. A sprinkler went round and round outside the kitchen window over grass scorched the color of toast. Two kids—maybe five and six—were running through the spray in their underwear. Not an adult in sight on summer days—that was foster care. The boy put his hands on his hips, cocked his head, and smiled. Another boy appeared beside him. Both had blue stains on their white T-shirts that looked like Windex, but I had no idea what had made them. It could have been anything.
“I could,” I said, like a reflex to a challenge.
“Dare you,” the first boy said.
I rested my hand on the sink’s metal rim and the boys stepped back. The cabinet door looked like the entrance to a small, dark cave.
“Well?” the boy asked.
I ducked my head and bent my legs, dropped my butt onto the wood and slid my feet inside. Chemical smells made the air thick around me. I pushed aside bottles of I don’t know what— plastic that was lime green and rose pink. My knees against my chest, I could hardly breathe.
“See?” I said.
I reached my hand up for a grip to pull myself out, but the cabinet door closed across my knuckles. The sharp edge stung like a wasp. Laughter. I pulled my hand to my chest, gritting my teeth, my mouth filling with spit. I had the scar for years where it cut me.
I heard a scrape as something slid through the handles, locking the door. I banged against the cabinet but there was only more laughter. My heart sped up so fast it felt like it was growing inside my chest, pushing against my lungs, my ribs. The voices outside turned softer, then softer still. I heard the thwack of the kitchen door closing as the boys went outside, and my world became a seam of light and the smell of chemicals.
Later, I could hear them talking through the kitchen wall. Then other voices came from farther away and I knew after a while that everyone had forgotten I was still in the cabinet. I had to breathe in short sips of air for I forget how long. I was there until I fell asleep.
It was the foster mom who eventually let me out. She told us all how tired she was, how she didn’t want us playing around. “Someone could get hurt,” she said.
This happened three years before I went inside the closet, where I started to make up names for
everything—even emotions—just to pass the time. My heart knew kitchen cabinet as a mixture of forgotten, sad, angry, embarrassed, and afraid all in one.
But that’s over now. I’m living, like Ms. Carr said, “independently.”
And I’m working. After I cut out circles in the dough, I begin folding them around pieces of the mixture. I pinch tiny folds into the dough, working my fingers over and over until I can hardly feel. I go to the sink and am flexing my fingers under the warm tap when Ken appears holding a piece of paper in one hand and a pen in the other. He taps the pen against his ear. I tilt my head to let my right earbud fall out.
“Sorry, Jessie,” Ken says. “This is for tonight.”
My thumb finds the volume button in my pocket and nudges it down. Half the world’s noise returns. The world sounds so big when you’re not in your head.
Ken uncaps the pen and sets a form on the table beside where I’d just been working. I completed some of my high school classes, but I understand better when I am listening, not reading—especially legal language like what is on the paper. I read as much of the form as I can, but Ken’s expression tells me a lot of what I need to know.
“It’s basic, really,” he says. “It’s called a nondisclosure agreement. It just means don’t talk about who shows up or anything you overhear at the party. I know you wouldn’t do that anyway, but sometimes celebrities who come to these things want to be extra careful. Either that, or their management makes them hand them out. It’s just a formality. You know Nashville people are cool about being around musicians, anyway.”
I do know that.
Which musicians?
Later, I will look back and wonder if I already knew exactly who—if maybe their names had been right in front of me on that form and my eyes had somehow skimmed over them in the blur of my eagerness and imagination.
I press the pen down and print my name. Someday, I mean to learn cursive so my writing will look less like a child’s.
Ken takes the form back and winks a little. “Thanks, Jessie. ’Preciate it.”
