Dinner at Jack's

by Rick R. Reed

  Mary Beth. Sure, I had considered calling her, telling her I was coming. I knew she’d insist I stay with her and her high-school-sweetheart husband, Brad, and their adolescent daughter, Grace.

  And maybe that’s why I resisted even letting her know I was coming. My little sister, the one who’d always looked up to me as almost a father stand-in, now had a better life than I did. More luck in love. Happy. Settled. The American dream.

  Does it make me a shallow person to say I wondered if it would hurt to see their happiness, coming so soon after my own failure?

  Oh, shut up. You don’t know me.

  I had told myself I wanted to surprise Mary Beth, but I knew the real reason I had put off letting her know her big brother was back in town for good. It’s right there above—read up a few lines. I won’t repeat it.

  But should I really punish myself by staying in this dump? It was even sadder and more run-down than it had been in my youth, and that’s saying a lot because it was a pretty pathetic excuse for lodging even back then.

  I grabbed my phone from the cup holder in the console between Ruth and me and scrolled through my contacts until I came to Mary Beth’s.

  I waited breathlessly as I listened to the distant ringing, hoping she wouldn’t pick up, toying with the idea of hanging up before she did. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. Hang up. Wait. I pressed the button to end the call. Breathed a sigh of relief.

  The phone rang immediately, and Mary Beth’s face, all button nose and streaked blonde hair, came up on the screen.

  “Hey, sis.”

  “You called me? Just a minute ago?”

  I nodded, and when I realized she couldn’t hear that, added helpfully, “Yup.”

  Neither of us said anything for a moment or two. I hadn’t actually talked to my sister, other than a couple of Facebook “likes,” in the past six months. We were like that. Drifting and coming back together. Endlessly tethered to the other, we could always pick up where we left off.

  So I hadn’t told her about Ross, the breakup, and certainly not about the move back here. I thought I could do all that once I got settled in.

  “So are you here yet?”

  I laughed. The snort of mirth burst out of me more as evidence of surprise than delight. “What?” I asked, thinking I’d perhaps misheard.

  “Are. You. Here. Yet?” she asked, as if talking to a small child or an imbecile.

  And that did make me laugh, more in a funny ha-ha way. “Yes, I’m here. Dad?” I asked in what passed for shorthand between us.

  “As soon as you got off the phone with him, weeks ago.”

  “Why didn’t you call?”

  “I was giving you your space. Would you have wanted me to?” Once again, Mary Beth knew what I needed as well, and maybe even before I did.

  “I guess not. I wasn’t ready.”

  “So, I’ll ask, in the vernacular of the locals, ‘where you at?’” Mary Beth taught English at Fawcettville’s sole junior high school.

  “I’m sitting here in the parking lot of the Panorama Motel.”

  “Really?” she asked, chuckling, the surprise apparent. “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. Fifteen minutes, maybe.”

  “Are you looking to make a crystal meth purchase?”

  “That’s an odd question.”

  “Well, it’s kind of tweaker central. Everybody knows that’s where you go for meth, or as the locals call it, shards.”

  “Really?” It was my turn to be surprised. And almost like an omen, or talk manifesting itself as reality, a sketchy character, all skin and bones, flannel and torn denim and scruffy facial hair, opened his door to have the smoke he was lighting up. He stared pointedly at me.

  “Yeah. Everybody knows that.” She sighed. “So, if I assume you’re not looking to score, what the hell are you doing in the parking lot of the Panorama?”

  “I was thinking of booking a room?”

  “Shut up! In that dump? You want to get bed bugs?” She laughed heartily.

  “Well, no.” I paused for a beat. “I already got them. I just thought the views were pretty and it would be a nice place to hang my hat until I found my own digs.”

  Mary Beth snorted. “More like a nice place to hang yourself. Don’t stay there. Don’t be crazy. Or crazier than you already are. Come out here,” she urged, referring to her aluminum-sided ranch in the wooded neighborhood on the outskirts of town called, for no reason I could ever discover, Dresden. “I’ll kick Grace out of her room, and she can couch surf until you find yourself, as you put it, your own digs.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to put Gracie out.” The last time I’d seen my niece, she was a six-year-old with pigtails and saddle shoes. Or maybe I was recalling a Shirley Temple movie on TCM.

  “Get outta here! You’re family. And she won’t mind. Why? Because I say so! Besides, you won’t think I’m so nice when you see your digs here.” She laughed at her wit and mockery of my use of the ill-considered term. “You’ll be having Justin Bieber nightmares every night.” She laughed some more.

  “I can hardly wait.” I started up the car. We said our good-byes. I signaled, pulled out into traffic, and headed toward my sister’s.

  The motion awakened Ruth, who got herself up to a sitting position, snorted, and said, “I knew you couldn’t be serious about that place! What a dump!”

  Chapter 4: Everything-but-the-Kitchen-Sink Minestrone

  Everything-but-the-Kitchen-Sink Minestrone

  2 T extra-virgin olive oil

  1 onion, diced

  4 garlic cloves, minced

  1 cup diced potato (peeled or unpeeled, your choice; I like the skin)

  2 carrots, diced

  1 medium zucchini or yellow squash, diced

  1 cup fresh green beans, ends trimmed and halved

  1 t dried thyme

  1 t dried basil

  1/4 t crushed red pepper flakes

  1 bay leaf

  1 can (15 ounces) diced tomatoes in juice with Italian seasonings

  4 cups chicken stock

  4 cups mushroom stock (or all chicken stock, or use vegetable if you want to keep truly vegetarian)

  1 can (15 ounces) cannellini beans

  Salt and pepper, to taste

  Grated Parmesan cheese, optional

  Pesto, optional

  Heat oil over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic and sauté, stirring, for five minutes. Add potato, carrots, zucchini, and green beans and cook until the vegetables are just beginning to soften. Add the bay leaf, crushed red pepper, tomatoes, thyme, basil, and stock. Bring to a boil. Reduce to simmer for as little as 15 minutes and up to 45 minutes. (Longer is better, in my book, but keep it at a simmer and give it a stir once in a while.) Add cannellini beans and warm through. Taste and adjust seasonings if necessary with salt and pepper.

  Serve topped with Parmesan and a dollop of your favorite pesto. Serves 6-8.

  * * * *

  As I knew she would be, Mary Beth was more concerned about the state of the bedroom I would occupy than over making something for dinner. She was sweating when I pulled up in the driveway, still clutching an armload of teenage girl clothes under one arm while she opened the front door with the other. “Big brother!” she shrieked. The clothes dropped to the front stoop as she held out her arms.

  Smiling, I went into them and had to admit that it was good to feel her hug. It was too hard and too tight, and for the first time, I felt I was home.

  I helped her gather up the clothes, noticing their petite size and the predominance of fuchsia, which validated my initial impression that these were my niece’s clothes and not my sister’s, who favored flattering plus-size tights and sweaters and sweatshirts. Mary Beth led me inside.

  My brother-in-law, Brad, sat in front of the big-screen in the living room in a corduroy-clad recliner, a glass of red wine in his hand. I could hear the news, out of KDKA in Pittsburgh. Brad grunted at me and sort of half raised his glass, which, for Brad, qualified as
a warm welcome.

  “How you doin’, Brad?” I followed my sister through the living room and down a short hallway to what I assumed was Grace’s room.

  It was immaculate. If there had been Justin Bieber posters on the wall, Mary Beth had removed them. If there had been a ruffled bedspread, she had managed to get rid of that too in the short time elapsed between our phone call and my driving out here. Now the double bed was covered in a white duvet with a bright red Hudson Bay wool blanket lying across the foot of it. The vinyl mini-blinds at the room’s single window were drawn up, and in the dusky light outside, I could see that I hadn’t sacrificed a nice view when I left the Panorama. The window looked out on a forested ravine. Between the black silhouettes of maples and pines, the sun was just setting, pulling oranges, cobalt, gray, and purple with it as it descended.

  “Nice view.” I nodded toward the ravine.

  Mary Beth looked, almost as though she didn’t realize it was there. “Oh. Yeah. We worry Grace sneaks out that window.”

  She fussed, fluffing pillows. “I cleaned out one of her drawers for you, and let me tell you, that was no easy task. Between living in horror of what I might discover—birth control pills, crack, her Young Republicans ID card—and simply finding any available space, I was fit to be tied.” She eyed me after opening the single drawer I had been allotted and giggled. “She’s not really a Republican.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God for that. Crack and promiscuity we can deal with.”

  Mary Beth opened the closet door. “I tried, big brother, I really tried to get you some closet space for hanging, but good luck with that.”

  The closet was jam-packed with clothes so tightly, I wondered first how my niece managed to find anything and then find anything that wasn’t wrinkled. The shelves above were crowded with shoe boxes and a couple of American Girl dolls. Below, more shoes and stacks of Lucite storage boxes. God only knew what was in those.

  I wouldn’t snoop.

  “Where will Ruth sleep?” I asked my sister. “Is it okay if she’s in here with me?”

  Mary Beth cocked her head. “Ruth?”

  “Yeah. She’s in the car.”

  Mary Beth let loose a short titter and then shook her head. She scratched at an eyebrow. “Ruth, huh. Does this mean you’ve turned? Playing for the other team now, are we?”

  I glanced down sheepishly at the thick-pile beige carpeting and then looked back up at my sister. “What can I say? Sometimes you fall in love and gender just doesn’t matter.”

  “Really?” Mary Beth, for once, was speechless.

  “I should go bring her in.”

  “I’m dying to meet her.”

  I headed back outside, thinking I really should have kept in better touch with my family.

  Mary Beth stood at the front door, arms crossed, waiting. I opened the car door, and Ruth immediately hopped out. She took a quick look around, circled, then deposited a large pile on my sister’s front lawn.

  “She’s adorable,” Mary Beth called from the front door. “Just what I would have picked out for you.”

  * * * *

  Later, Mary Beth offered to run into Fawcettville’s downtown to Scafide’s to pick up pizza, which was her idea of making supper. I should inform you that pizza in this part of western Ohio was unlike pizza anywhere else I’ve ever encountered. For one thing, you didn’t buy a pie. You just needed to decide how many pieces you wanted. Pizzas were made by the Scafide boys on sheet pans in big industrial ovens. They were all the same: crust, red sauce, mozzarella cheese, and dotted with single slices of pepperoni, one per square. No other toppings available, and as far as I knew, everyone in Fawcettville accepted this as normal.

  On cue, Mary Beth asked, “How many pieces will you want?” She grabbed an oversized purse from where it lay on the maple kitchen hutch.

  “Aw, sis, pizza doesn’t seem like much of a homecoming dinner.”

  “Sorry to disappoint. If I let them, Brad and Grace would both live off the stuff. Neither of them has met a green food item they liked.” She leaned around me to call into the living room. “Brad? How many pieces you want?”

  “Six,” he called.

  She looked back at me and smiled, as though the matter was settled.

  “Did you forget?” I asked, questioning whether Mary Beth would even know my occupation.

  She cocked her head.

  “I’m a chef. Trained, and back in Seattle, I put meals on the table five nights a week for a fancy-schmancy gay couple on Mercer Island, plus did all their parties.”

  Mary Beth looked at me dubiously. “What? You wanna make supper?” She turned to pull open the refrigerator door and bent to peer inside. Her sigh didn’t hold out a whole lot of promise. “I don’t know if we have stuff to make anything. Maybe another night? We can go out to Walmart tomorrow and pick stuff up.” She closed the refrigerator and then dug in her purse for her keys. “You wanna come with? Grace should be home soon, and I know she’ll want to see you.” She shrugged. “At least see Ruth.”

  She glanced down at the tiled kitchen floor where Ruth was lying. Upon hearing her name, the dog looked up, expectant.

  “No. You just go sit down with Brad, have a glass of wine. My specialty is finding stuff in people’s kitchen and making something wonderful with it.”

  “Kind of like Chopped?” Mary Beth asked, referring to the Food Network competition where chef contestants took baskets of diverse and sometimes bizarre ingredients and made appetizers, entrees, and desserts out of them. Ross and I had never missed an episode. I frowned but nodded. “Yeah. Like that. Now shoo.”

  “Are you sure? I haven’t been to the grocery store—”

  I cut her off. “I’m sure.”

  She shrugged. “Well, okay.” She disappeared into the living room. I heard her whispering to Brad, “He’s gonna make us supper.”

  Something that sounded like whining came from her husband. She shushed him and whispered loudly, “Shut it. He’s trying to be nice.”

  Then the volume on the TV went up, bringing into the kitchen the theme music from Mike and Molly.

  I peered into the refrigerator with Ruth sniffing at my calves. “Get away, you. You already ate.” Earlier I had managed to find a piece of leftover fried chicken in a Tupperware bowl that I’d shredded for Ruth, adding a couple of chopped and zapped baby carrots. She loved it.

  Looking into the dismal contents of the fridge, I wasn’t sure I’d have the same luck feeding my sibling and her family. There really was very little here. I pulled open the crisper drawer and found a bag of ready-to-go spinach salad, half-full. I sniffed it, deemed it good, and set it on the counter to resume my quest. There was an onion, a jar of pre-minced garlic that I would normally shudder at, and wonder of wonders, a couple of zucchinis, looking a little shriveled but otherwise usable. There was also a small bag of red potatoes and, in the freezer, some corn.

  I checked the pantry, found a can of chicken broth, a can of diced tomatoes—they were even fire-roasted!—and a jar of pesto sauce. There was also the ubiquitous green can of “grated cheese” that again I would have normally shuddered at, but hey, desperate times…

  I found a few other things I would need among the stuff in the fridge, freezer, and pantry and pulled them out. I looked at the ingredients on the counter and knew what I would make with them, titled on the fly, Everything-but-the-Kitchen-Sink Minestrone.

  I found a cutting board and lined my ingredients up in front of it. The knives my sister owned were dull and cheap but would have to do, at least until I could unpack. I unearthed a Dutch oven from a cupboard near the floor and set it on the stove, then drizzled a little canola oil in it, and added a pat of butter. I’d need to buy sis some olive oil if we were to get along.

  I got to work.

  * * * *

  They all looked down dubiously at the steaming bowls of soup in front of them. Grace held her mass of dark curls away from her face and sniffed. She looked up at me as thou
gh I had told her she was the biggest whore at Fawcettville High, her brown eyes wide with hurt and indignation.

  “Smells good,” she said, in her soft but deep-for-a-girl voice.

  “You think so?” I smiled and lifted my spoon.

  “Not really,” Grace responded. She hadn’t been a bastion of friendliness toward me since she’d returned home from volleyball team practice.

  “Grace!” Mary Beth chided.

  Brad had his head bent over his soup. I was pretty sure he was snickering.

  “Okay, guys. I know this isn’t what you’re used to, but trust me. I work magic in the kitchen.” I shoved the bowl of grated cheese forward. “Top it with a little cheese and take a taste. I promise. You’ll love it.”

  Dutifully they passed around the cheese and heaped it atop their soup. I resisted the urge to ask if they liked a little soup with their cheese and waited to see their reaction.

  Mary Beth took the first bite. Chewed. Swallowed. And then she got it—the look. The one that says, “Oh my God, this goes beyond delicious. This is life changing.” Well, maybe not quite that last part, but damn close. And I am not exaggerating!

  “It’s really good. Amazing.” She tucked back in with her soupspoon. “You’d never know it to look at it.”

  She snorted, and I rolled my eyes. My sister was never one to be generous with compliments.

  Apparently her husband and daughter trusted her review, and they both lifted spoonfuls to their mouths. “The look” made its way around the table. Even Brad managed to crack a smile. “Wow,” he said softly, which for him was a five-star review.

  Sigh. If only my charm, my looks, my sense of humor had the same ability to win people over as my food. If that were the case, I’d still be happily married.

  Chapter 5: Meanwhile, Across Town: Grilled Cheese & Tomato Soup

  Jack hurled the bowl of tomato soup against the wall, where it shattered upon impact. Maisie thought the hot red soup running down the cabbage-rose-patterned wallpaper made the room look like a crime scene.