The Secret Ingredient

by Stewart Lewis

  I go downstairs and sit on the couch. I try to figure out what to make for Lola, who is coming over for dinner. But the key is like this small vortex of heat in my pocket. A sign, a piece of something larger.

  As soon as he sees me, Bell can tell something’s up. He’s just here to change and leave for the restaurant, but he keeps stopping to stare at me, as if he’s trying to figure something out. I decide to tell him about the job, now that I have it for sure. He gives me a proud smile and a hug. Then he picks up one of my feet and cradles it in his palm—a tender gesture he’s always made—and says, “Working girl.”

  “Not that kind, Dad.”

  He smiles, puts my foot back down, and says, “Bravo.”

  After he leaves, I take the cookbook out of my bag. I open it to a random page. Next to a drawing of a woman singing on a mountaintop, there’s a heading that reads CONFIDENT CARROT CAKE. The note scrawled in the margin was probably once in black ink but has faded to brown:

  11/9/66

  Made this for you, Matthew, as it would have been your second birthday. For those few minutes I held you, before the doctors took you away, I thought I could finally give Mother what she needed. Little did I know, it would only make things worse. I still carry you in my heart.

  I look again at the inside cover. Rose Lane, 18, 1966. So she got pregnant at my age? I know people got married early back then, but was teen pregnancy normal? I try to picture a girl, maybe in a dress with a bold print, cooking carrot cake for the child she lost. Did her mother blame her? Hold it against her? How could you not love and support your own daughter? But I guess mine didn’t even have a chance. Does she still think about me?

  My thoughts are harshly interrupted by the door squeaking open, and for some reason I instinctively hide the book.

  In comes Lola with the scent of chlorine in her hair. She’s been swimming at her parents’ club pool.

  “You okay, Livie? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  “I’m fine. Just going to throw together a salad from what’s in the fridge, okay?”

  “Coming from you, Livie, it will most likely win some salad award regardless.”

  I go over to the fridge, grab a cucumber, and toss it to Lola. “Thin, like dimes.”

  “Right. You must tell me, though, how was your first day?”

  I start washing the lettuce and tell her about the little people. Then, trying to play it down as an afterthought, I fill her in on the return of Dish Boy.

  Lola stops chopping and says, “No!”

  I start to fry up slices of prosciutto while mincing some garlic for the dressing.

  “Yes. Crazy, right? We didn’t have time to do the screen test ’cause he had to go help his brother, Timothy, who has some problems, but we made a plan to go to the Griffith Park tomorrow.”

  “How frightfully romantic!”

  “I’m trying not to get too excited.”

  “Why did he disappear?”

  “He’s going to fill me in tomorrow. He acted like it all could be explained easily. Like, ‘I just took off for a year, pass the butter.’ ”

  I finish the salad—field greens, garbanzo beans, and feta cheese, topped with cucumber, shallots, and crispy prosciutto. It’s a weird combination, but it works. It’s like this entrepreneur who spoke at our school said—you must always keep your mind open; half of the world’s great ideas were born out of unlikely pairings. Dressings are the key to making salads sing, and usually all it takes is a really good olive oil, fresh black pepper, and high-end mustard. As we begin to eat, Lola is quiet, so I know it’s doing the trick. A quiet dinner table equals a good cook.

  When we’re almost finished, Enrique comes home smelling of whiskey. I can tell he’s buzzed ’cause his eyes, which are normally over-alert, aren’t focusing very well. Enrique isn’t the type to get drunk often, and the fact that he starts asking Lola about her earrings is beyond awkward. I tell Lola we should go and she quickly obliges.

  On our way down the hill to where Lola parked, she expresses what we’re both thinking. “Well, that was a bit strange.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “You know, it’s funny, when I first came to the States I didn’t know that expression, so when people said ‘Tell me about it,’ I used to take it literally, blabbing away.…”

  In spite of everything, we start laughing. Some little kids who clearly shouldn’t be out this late run by with sno-cones in their hands. Lola hugs me goodbye and gets into her black Mini Cooper. She tells me to call her the minute my date with Theo is over.

  When I get back inside, I lie down on the couch and think through the whole Theo thing, and how maybe it’s a sign, that he’s back in my life. There is also the key, still burning a hole in my jeans. I can hear the psychic in my head. Trust yourself.

  When Bell gets home, he doesn’t see me and goes straight into the kitchen. He grabs a tumbler and fills it with scotch. The sight of him sitting alone in the dark dampens my mood. I get up from the couch and go sit next to him. He jumps in surprise, then offers me an apple. I decline.

  He takes a long, slow sip and swallows.

  “Dad, do you remember when you let me have a sip of that ’ninety-one Bordeaux?” I ask.

  “Vaguely.”

  “It was your birthday. Jeremy had just graduated, and he had that really nice girl with him … Bridget? Anyway, I screwed up the skirt steak and was kind of mortified. You said it would be okay and let me take a sip of your drink. Papá showed up late but brought sparkling cider, and we all toasted, and I remember thinking, this isn’t about overdone skirt steak or ’ninety-one Bordeaux. It’s what we all are—together. We’re kind of like a machine of mismatched parts.” I’m not sure what to do for someone who has sacrificed so much for me, and I have no idea how to help him, but I’m improvising. “Remember, I have a job. And Jeremy’s getting an ice cream truck.”

  Bell looks at me like I’m a five-year-old telling him that my stuffed-animal army will protect him.

  “We’ll figure it out,” I say.

  He offers me the apple again, and this time I take it.

  When he hugs me, I hear something strange. A cough or some kind of whimper. I don’t care to admit it, but it’s most likely the latter. Bell is the architecture that holds our family up, and we can’t afford for him to crumble.

  When I was in fifth grade they had Bring Your Mom to School Day. Bell or Enrique could’ve come, but it didn’t feel right and I didn’t push the issue. In our classroom, we all had to play this game with our mothers, and the teacher pretended she was mine. It was the first time that I really felt not having a mother. I don’t remember the details of the game, but I know that it didn’t work. The mother had to know certain details about the child, and my teacher tried desperately to fill in, but it clearly wasn’t happening. When I got home that day, Bell was trimming the bushes in front of our bungalow. He dropped his shears and ran up to hug me, but I dodged his arms.

  “I had to have a mother, right, Dad?” I asked him.

  He gave me that look of concern that sometimes makes me warm inside but right then made me queasy.

  “Yes, of course, Ollie. You didn’t fall from the sky.”

  I wasn’t stupid. I had seen Annie. I knew that some kids were given up for adoption and that was just the way it was. But I felt hatred for Bell, like somehow it was all his fault, which of course it wasn’t.

  “What did they say? They must have told you something about her.”

  Bell ran his hands through his hair, which was even thicker then and completely black. “I wish there was something I could tell you, Ollie, but I’m in the same boat as you. I know nothing.”

  “What about her name?”

  He paused for a moment and looked up at the clouds. Then he kneeled down to my level and gave me that look of concern again.

  “She requested to remain nameless.”

  “Figures,” I said, walking past him and into the house.

  I went up
to my room and cried until it was time for dinner. When Jeremy came up to get me, he sat on the edge of my bed and scratched my back.

  “So it was mom day or whatever?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look at it this way, sis. We kind of get to run our own show, you know? The Dads are on top of it, but we don’t have a mother breathing down our necks.”

  He was right, but it still didn’t make me feel better. I loved my family, but it wasn’t fair.

  “I just hate how they always say ‘Get your mother’s permission’ or ‘Call your mother.’ It’s like I’m constantly reminded, you know?”

  “I know,” Jeremy said. “But maybe one day you can have a kid and be your own mother.”

  His logic didn’t really make sense, but it satisfied me for the moment.

  After dinner that night, we all played charades. It was so funny watching Enrique try to give clues to American shows he barely knew. And Bell and Jeremy would get so competitive. Mostly, though, we laughed.

  Now, lying on my bed at the end of a very long day, I listen to the empty house and realize that’s what we’ve been missing. Laughter. For as long as I can remember, Enrique and Bell would always laugh together. They would play tricks on each other, and do impressions, and to me it seemed like they were such a perfect pair. But how well do we really know our parents? With everything going on with my family now, would finding my mother help or hinder the situation?

  I think about Rose Lane, from the cookbook, how she and her mother must not have been close. I get it, the love between her and her mother was complicated, but there must have been something else. Did Rose betray her in some way? I can’t imagine the loss Rose must have felt. Still, she found inspiration to cook, and to write. She held her son for a few minutes, just like my mother must have done. Was that a blessing or a curse? Are they one and the same?

  I take out the old cookbook and hold it like the psychic did, as if she could never pretend to know its power. I flip to another random page. Next to a drawing of a woman jumping off a diving board, there’s a recipe called JOYFUL JAMBALAYA, and another handwritten note in the margin:

  1/14/67

  Kurt seemed to like it, but there is something as thick as the jambalaya between us. It used to be so easy, now it’s all so complicated. We never say his name. How could we?

  Kurt must be Rose’s husband. My mind starts to go full speed. What happened? Was she talking about Matthew? I don’t know why, but I can tell this Rose was a good person. Or maybe she’s still alive. Why was her mother never satisfied? I write my own note underneath hers:

  You did the best you could, and that’s all you can do.

  You can thin out the jambalaya with beef stock.

  Sometimes I like to hear people talking when I go to sleep. The words and meanings go away and it’s just a voice, someone else out there in the world. I turn on the AM radio, and through the little speaker comes a voice, female, and I drown out the words, imagining it to be Rose’s voice, telling me the story of how she met Kurt.

  … We met at a county fair. Kurt covered me with his jacket after it started to rain. I refused, told him I didn’t mind getting wet, and off we went, running through the storm, spellbound. When the rain stopped, we sat in waterlogged clothes outside the gates. We laughed for no apparent reason. From that point on, we were inseparable. We went to a diner and ate breakfast at midnight. I was always myself around him.

  CHAPTER 8

  On Wednesday, my second day of work, Janice tells me I’m two days away from getting paid. She’s paying me under the table. When I was younger and heard Bell was doing that with some of the dishwashers, I actually thought he meant it literally. I panicked when he plucked down some cash for one of them, right on top of the table.

  All through work I think about Theo, and the key in my pocket, and whether the psychic knew what she was talking about or if she was just lucky. When it comes time to leave, I go into the bathroom and, once again, apply a touch of mascara and some lip gloss. He better not stand me up again, almost exactly a year later. That would be pathetic.

  On my way to meet him at Griffith Park I stop off at Jeremy’s place. He’s not inside, but I hear his voice in the alley. He’s down there with Phil, and they’re looking under the hood of an ice cream truck. He’s really doing it. The truck is pink and brown, with a rusted bumper. It says ICY COLD in big block letters, but nothing else. At one point it probably said ICY COLD TREATS or something. Suddenly, I change my mind about saying hi to Jeremy, and I sneak by without being seen. I’m too excited about my date with Theo to concentrate on anything else.

  Back on the boulevard I notice the old art gallery. There’s never anything in it, except for three retro TVs in the window, usually playing cartoons. Today, however, two of them are just playing black-and-white fuzz, and the other is playing an old movie. The movie I don’t recognize, but the actress I do. It is unmistakably Julie Andrews. I look at her hair, her eyes—the only woman I’ve ever looked at and seen pieces of myself. I feel tears well up in my eyes, and I know: it’s time. Even if she doesn’t look like Julie Andrews, I’ve got to find out who my mother is. I take the key out of my pocket and hold it up to the glass.

  Griffith Park is filled with people walking their dogs, joggers, and what Bell calls “randoms”—people who look a little lost, or high, or maybe mentally unstable. I find myself smiling at everyone, which is not a usual thing for me. I’m not much of a romantic, but I feel an inexplicable happiness, like maybe everything is going to be okay.

  Theo is sitting on the stone wall by the conservatory. The buildings of downtown L.A. rise out of the sunset smog in the distance. Theo looks older somehow; I’m not sure why. But he is still “dead cute,” as Lola would say. I sit down next to him and we watch the skyline, layers of orange trying to fight through the gray. When the sky becomes drained of color and only the smog remains, he turns to me and says, “I’m so sorry.”

  I just look into his green eyes, which are swimming with remorse. He starts talking softly.

  “Everything came crashing down that day. My mother, she was going to send Timothy to this institution. She hardly spent any time with him. I basically raised him. I knew he would never last in a place like that. He was terrified of going. So instead, I faked out my mother and took him to my aunt’s house in Seattle. It was one of those moments, I can’t really explain it. I had to go. It was the only way. I knew you didn’t have a cell phone. Do you have one now?”

  “No. I suppose I will have to cave in at some point, but I’m trying to hold out.”

  He smiles a little funny, like he thinks it’s cute I’m so removed from mass culture.

  “Well, now Timothy and I are back home because my aunt sold her house and moved, and she’s got some of her own problems to deal with. But I called you at your house, Liv. Did Enrique give you the message?”

  “What? No.”

  “I really wanted to talk to you.”

  “I did too. I sat at the ninety-nine-cent store for like an hour.”

  He reaches out and pulls a stray hair off my face, and we stare at each other, wondering how the heck the universe brought us back together. We never really knew each other that well, but I’m glad he feels like he can confide in me. He wouldn’t say all that personal family stuff to just anyone.

  “You look great,” he says.

  I feel myself blushing, so I start to tell him about the restaurant.

  “Oh no.”

  “It’s pretty bad. Dad is in denial, I think. And Papá is just numbing himself with alcohol. It’s really sad. I remember when Dad first opened the place, and Papá was designing the menus … there was so much happiness there. Now you walk in and you can feel this sense of doom. Like the ceiling’s going to fall in or something.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Well, I’m working now, and Jeremy’s got this ice cream truck.…”

  Theo rolls his eyes, probably thinking about Jeremy’s big talk a
bout his band last summer. “Sounds promising.”

  Three large birds fly in perfect V formation right over our heads. I think of Julie Andrews on that small old TV, smiling so effortlessly.

  “Grace,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Those birds. It’s amazing, isn’t it? That they just spread their wings and boom, they’re soaring above the earth. That’s, like, the definition of grace.”

  “I guess that’s why we fly in dreams,” Theo says.

  He looks at me differently, like maybe I have changed since last summer. Of course I have. We both have.

  “I was so mad at you. I couldn’t believe you’d just take off like that.”

  “It was complicated,” he says. “Family, in most cases, comes first.”

  “So why did you call the house only once?”

  “I thought—I thought you had your reasons for not calling me back. Like you didn’t want to talk to me. And then I had my hands full up there. Timothy is not easy. You’ll see.”

  You’ll see. Does this mean we’ll be hanging out more? I try to diminish the smile that is spreading over my face. After a bit, we start walking. He takes my hand, and at first it seems clumsy, but then I relax into it, and I feel like I’m floating. I think of my earliest memory, walking in Venice Beach with one hand in Bell’s and the other in Enrique’s. They would swing me up every few steps, and everyone who walked by smiled at us. There were people on Rollerblades, hippies selling incense, punk kids with pierced eyebrows and pink hair … it was basically a circus. And there at the center, in the calm of the storm, were my dads and me. It was one of those perfect moments.

  “Do you believe in destiny?” I ask.

  Theo turns his soft eyes on me and says, “How do you mean?”

  I tell him about the psychic. I leave out the “young man” part.

  “Sounds like something’s definitely in the cards,” he says. “No pun intended.”