by K A Goodsell
Nat refused to admit that he wants to go to culinary school to my father—well, he hadn’t admitted to anyone in our family, but at least all the women “knew.”
“I really dislike you sometimes, but you pull your shit together when you make pancakes.” I sip my tea, awaiting a comeback from Nat.
An important fact is that waffles are okay, but pancakes? Pancakes I could eat all day. Pancakes are fluffy, cloudy goodness. They cut like butter, and I could probably shove at least four in my mouth at a time.
That skill was about to come in handy as I followed Nat into the dining room with his latest creation: a blueberry- and pineapple-puree pancake made with maple-infused batter. It was lazy and ingenious. He whispered that a few of the pancakes had liquor in them for a shock, and I should be sure not to put those on Mitzy’s plate—“Unless you want her to throw up everywhere,” he’d finished with a wink.
Nat had arranged the spiked pancakes on a green plate—a brilliant move, as Mitzy liked to tell us that “green is the color of goose poop, toads, and freshly cut grass.” And now that Nat had put the thought of vomit into my head, I had to agree it seemed a little gross.
As I moved into the center of the dining room, I glanced at all the framed prints and newspaper articles that showcased my parents’ accomplishments solving crimes through the morgue and new scientific breakthroughs in mortuary programs. They hung sporadically in the organized chaos of a gallery wall. My mom had gone on a Pinterest binge during a “staycation” a few months ago that resulted in a plethora of potted plants in recycled bean cans, re-purposed clipboards covered in fancy fabric, and the gallery walls, of which our home now had four.
Even a walk up the staircase to the second floor told the story of how organized our lives had been from birth. The walls are coated with school portraits, newspaper clippings of sports (Nat), drawings (Mitzy), and achievements in sciences (me).
The exterior of our bedrooms told a different story than the internal, a more personal layer of the ever-peeling onion of someone’s exterior life versus interior life.
My bedroom had nothing academic on the walls. Quite the contrary—one wall was a planning station for ancestry and research I worked on with my father. They plastered it with hundreds of Post-It notes, scraps of paper ripped out of my notebooks, and Polaroid photographs of gravestones.
The other wall evidenced my love for previous lives, with antique images collected from the early days of photography and a large map of Connecticut. Pushpins marked the cemeteries I’d visited and surveyed. I’d been collecting cemetery data for two years and wanted to study it in college.
Of all my walls, though, my pride and joy lived on the wall above my bed. I’d crafted my own gallery wall of antique photographs, each labeled with the name of its subject.
They weren’t all pictures of relatives, though some were Grimes family members. The faces in the photographs were the people who resided in Center Cemetery. As morbid as that may seem, it was amazing to put a face to a name you’d stared at your entire life.
Instead of walking into the cemetery, looking at a headstone and saying, “Good morning, Elaine,” before going on my merry way, I could picture Elaine Fleming. She was blond, had lighter skin, was a seamstress, and had four children with her husband, who died in a horrible farming accident I don’t dare speak about. He’s buried next to her. Stan Fleming had darker skin and brown hair. I’d gathered the information through research in the archives, ancestry websites, and talking to relatives who still lived in town. I could only imagine what fascinating information lay in other cemeteries. Each headstone signified a person who lived a life, some of which were extremely interesting.
Some also had some not-so-great ways of dying, including Randy McGovern, who was mauled by dogs because he smeared peanut butter on his neck before walking into a field. Why? No idea. There was no record. It happened during the depression of Pine Grove in the early 1900s, and clearly the dogs were hungry, too.
Dark, but interesting, and no one would have known about it unless someone did the research.
My space differed greatly from other people in our family. Nat’s bedroom walls were bare other than a few band posters and tons of sports medals. When he graduated high school, he took a year off to “find himself.” It had been three years and counting.
But like me, Nat had secrets lingering in his room. Underneath his bed were stacks of cookbooks from secondhand shops, aprons he bleached at the funeral home, and also Crocs. He’d never wear those puppies around any woman outside our family and denied their existence when he brought girls over.
Taking a radical turn in the opposite was Mitzy’s room, the typical almost-pre-teen lair. Thrown around her were books upon books about space and the study of stars. I think she’ll work for NASA some day. She could name almost fifty constellations visible over our house on a clear night.
As impressive as that sounds, Mitzy was just another product of my family. Our parents had raised us to find what we were good at early and grasp onto it tightly. My passion was forensic anthropology—I’d known how to calculate lividity and match a fingerprint before I entered fifth grade. Nat had always excelled at sports, and he’d played many well, but hockey was the ticket that got him scouted throughout high school until he blew his shoulder out playing. Mitzy had the stars, and I loved her interest in them. It was more whimsical to hear a six-year-old say things like, “The orbit of Saturn is approximately this distance,” than to hear someone the same age state, “With the level of blood that is pooling to the lower left quadrant of his back, I surmise that he died in the last ten hours.”
“I’m so hungry,” I said with a laugh as I watched Nat put down the green plate on the table and immediately pick up a pancake and shove it completely into his mouth. That confirmed it; we were related.
“Hi, hungry, I’m dad.” I rolled my eyes at my father, who folded down a corner of the paper to wink at me.
“If there’s one overused dad joke to rule them all, that is the one.”
My father laughed, pushing his circular glasses back up on his nose.
“It’s a dad’s rite of passage to tell whatever dad jokes he wants. You know that,” he told me. “Get over it.”
Nat walked back over to the table with another plate, this one blue to show that blueberries were in that batch.
“How are you dressed for the day already?” Nat asked me. “It’s nine in the morning.”
I looked down at my outfit, wondering what was wrong with it, and threw up my hands. “Maybe I have important things to do!” I exclaimed. “At least I’m not wearing the same sweatpants I’ve been wearing for the past week!”
It was true, though—he had on the same grey sweats he wore mostly when he was home. I gave him credit for changing his shirt, but it was always the same sweatpants even though he owned at least four pairs.
“Pancakes are done—how many does everyone want?” my father asked as he folded up the newspaper and dropped it on the floor next to him.
“I want five hundred!”
I turned around as Mitzy entered the room frowning. She was also in her pajamas: a long blue shirt covered with rocket ships.
“I think I’m finally on a lead to solving another case,” my father said excitedly, spitting out more breath than necessary for dramatic flair as he set the table. As the town coroner, my father took on small local cases, but he also worked on larger cases from cities around Connecticut. His specialty was cold cases with unknown or untraceable remains. Challenge accepted.
“That is music to my ears because then I can put someone in the ground,” my mother praised, matching his eagerness.
“What about not talking about this near pancake time?” Nat grumbled. “I’d rather not talk about how someone died this morning.”
“It’s my work, Nat,” my father said as he fidgeted a fork my mother had tweaked a moment prior. She resisted fixing it again.
“Just thinking since we’re home, I’d rather
not hear about that kind of darkness now,” Nat continued. “I just dug a massive hole for someone to be placed into later this morning, came home and changed back into sweats, and I’d rather sit down and decompress with some pancakes.”
“Poor Mrs. Lancaster,” my mother cooed as she shook her head, taking her seat at the table. “It’ll be hard later today to see everyone off at the funeral home.”
Mrs. Lancaster had been a heavy smoker who lost her battle with lung cancer earlier this week. She was a decent human being who would be missed, leaving behind Magic, a one-eyed cat now lounging somewhere in our living room. I heard Mitzy whispering his name from the other room. She knew she was supposed to leave him alone, which was why she spoke lightly, but her “whispers” were like muted yelling.
My parents eyed the green plate of pancakes suspiciously.
Nat noticed and pointed his spatula at my parents. “These specific pancakes have alcohol in them. We’re not trying to poison you.”
I heard them both “awe," in unison. “I hate to say this, but our son is a terrible human being,” my mother joked, but my father scooted in front of her. “Wrong, he’s a genius. Just what I needed this morning.”
Mitzy plopped down at the table and rested her chin in her hand. Her brown hair was a complete mess, put up in what I could only assume was two space buns the night before. Mitzy was one of the most restless sleepers. She could go to sleep looking completely put together and normal and wake up on the opposite end of the bed, her blankets across the room, looking like she survived a hundred-year blizzard.
“Am I the only morning person in this entire family?” I asked. “Everyone has such an attitude every single morning.”
Nat made a face. “Sue me for actually being a functioning human being who gets things done in a timely manner.”
Mitzy snapped her fingers at him with excitement but interrupted herself, putting her arms by her sides quickly remembering the family discussing we’d had about snapping fingers at someone after Mitzy watched West Side Story one evening. After that, she’d snapped at everyone to make a point, even if it was offensive. It had been three weeks, and finally she was looking less like an aggressive patron calling over her waitress at a trucker diner.
“Speaking of functioning human beings,” my mother said, looking at me, “are you excited to apply to colleges?”
My shoulders slumped. “Maybe if I ever get my letter of recommendation.”
“When were you supposed to get it?” Nat asked.
“The mayor told me he was sending it two weeks ago. I’ve already called twice to ask about it. I haven’t heard a word. I just wish that if he doesn’t want to send something, he would tell me.”
I thought back to the moment I asked Mayor Maynard for the letter of recommendation. He’d looked so excited to do it and said that he would have it done in a couple of days. I didn’t think I had done anything wrong in the meantime to upset him.
“Pine Grove has always been a complete mess of a town,” Nat said, rolling his eyes. “Almost everyone I asked to do letters or recommendations gave them like, a day before I needed them.”
I rolled my eyes back at him with exaggeration. “I’m sure that’s because you literally asked them that morning.”
Nat gave me a mocking look. “What do you even know? Not everyone can be the perfect planner.”
“I’m only a perfect planner because I know that I would fail so, so hard if I didn’t, like a literal face plant into the ground kind of fail. I would literally trip over my life and die.” It was true. I wasn’t the most graceful of people. The exact opposite, in fact.
“Still,” my brother said, like it was final. He did this a lot. Even with more serious things. We would debate something, and he would end it with just one word with a tone of obnoxious finality. Like he was supreme, and everyone else was beneath him. It was constant, and it drove me crazy.
“So, what is everyone’s plan for this weekend? Maybe we all can hit up a movie,” my father suggested, changing the subject.
“Hold on, nobody say anything!” My mother leaped out of her chair and grabbed the brightest blue chalkboard marker Michael’s sold. She was enamored with planning, highlighting, Post-It noting, and doing anything that had to do with knowing our plans.
I guess that’s where I got my Post-It addiction.
“We don’t need to catalog everything the kids are doing,” he noted.
“It’s superb to be organized, and it lets everyone know where everyone else is,” she responded, uncapping the marker with her arm poised in front of the family blackboard.
Nat leaned back in his chair. “It lets you know where everyone is.”
“Be calm, or she’ll start tracking your phones.” My father pointed his fork at us and winked. He wasn’t kidding, though.
I was about to say that I had no plans, but Nat interrupted. “Well, I’m having a bonfire, if that’s okay.” This was news.
“Were you planning to wait last minute to run it by us?” our mother asked.
“No.” He took a bite of the alcohol pancakes. “You’re going to the drive in tonight, though, right?”
Nat had a bad habit of doing that. That, and he would wait until something to distract our parents and not pay attention to ask them about doing things. They would almost always say yes, not paying attention to what he was asking. One of his nervous ticks, whenever he was trying to skate by on something, was playing with the hair on the back of his head. He would lift his arm all the way up, curling the surrounding hair of his fingers. It was like some massage to calm his anxiety as he asked and hoped for the best.
“It’s fine if you guys have a bonfire, but please, be safe. Your mother and I were planning to see a movie tonight. We trust you’ll make the right decisions and not do anything stupid,” my father told Nat.
Last week, my mother had whined about how we weren’t the “party” house even though I was sure she didn’t want to be the “party” house, and none of my friends even went to the “party” houses, anyway. But I had my group of friends over for a bonfire so she’d enjoy knowing all the kids were safe at her house.
“Great,” she said, marking down the event. “I’ll make sure we have snacks and stuff.”
“Can you see if Raimy is coming?” Nat chimed in, swallowing a piece of pancake. Raimy was my best friend and for the last few months had been dating Nat casually.
I nodded. “I’ll text her.”
My father roared, “Be smart and understanding, as you are the gentleman in the relationship.”
Nat rolled his eyes hard.
“You’d better get your eyes checked; they seem to be lazy and rolling around.” My mother’s burn was well played, and Nat almost spit out his juice with surprise. “What about you, Paislee? Elgort coming to the bonfire tonight?”
Crap. This was not meant to be a burn, but it felt like one.
“Actually—” I started.
“Actually, they broke up,” Nat interrupted through a mouthful of food.
I looked at him, hurt written all across my face. I had told him that in confidence. Not that I wasn’t going to tell my family, but I didn’t want to have the conversation in front of everyone the morning after it happened.
I scowled at him, and he grimaced while shoving a heap of pancake into his mouth. “Sorry, were they not supposed to know?” It was hard to make out exactly what he was saying with the barrier of food in the way, but I got where he was going. I think he was trying to be sincere this time.
“Actually, we never really dated,” I said, kicking him under the table.
“But you like him a lot,” Nat argued. He was enjoying this too much. “There isn’t a breakup without being together. You guys were literally together.”
“Wait, what happened? When did this happen?” My mother’s pen nearly dropped from her hand.
While I watched her reaction, my father wiped his face with a napkin. “I’m sorry, you were dating Elgort?” He didn’t seem n
early as upset.
“No,” I repeated.
“You need to understand that this could be a sensitive time for her, Max,” my mother said, shooting a hand out in front of his chest like a soccer mom who’d just slammed the on the brakes with a child in the seat next to her—a natural reflex to defend precious cargo from slamming head-first into the dashboard. Except it already felt like I’d slammed my face.
“I understand that. It’s important she’s happy,” my father piped in for parental points. “But I need to know when you’re dating someone.”
“I was just trying to keep them in the loop,” Nat said smugly. “Mom appreciates that.” I glared at him, realizing he was not being sincere. He was trying to take the heat off himself.
He could be such a jerk sometimes.
“Paislee, are you okay?”
Finally, there was a moment of silence again as they waited for my answer. Was I okay? How do you even answer a question like that?
Normally in a sticky situation like this I’d escape with the excuse of homework. But I was a senior now, which meant no summer reading, thus no savior to rescue me from an awkward conversation. I was a fairly self-sustaining and private person—not necessarily the tell-all type about my personal matters.
And yet, just this once, I spoke up.
“No—”
“No, you’re not okay?” Mom cut in.
I paused and squinted at my mother. “No, meaning I’m fine,” I quickly gathered my thoughts. “We were not dating. We’re just friends.”
“Is it because you’ve been so busy helping me with cases?” my father began. “We can cut those down if it’s interfering with social—”
“Whoa, whoa—” My mother’s arm extended again to shush him.
“No, the cases are fine,” I said, and with one glance my father knew I was telling the truth, calming his nerves. “We’re good here.”
She straightened her blouse before worriedly looking over at my father then back at me. “You two were inseparable this summer. You’d tell me if something was wrong, right?”
