The Summer Kitchen

by Lisa Wingate

  Anyway, Teddy was fun. He knew a lot about plants, and he took time to show Opal little caterpillars and butterflies, which most adults wouldn’t bother with when they had work to do. He put a ladybug on Opal’s hand, and she giggled at it crawling up her arm. She squealed and laughed when it flew away, and it came in my mind that Opal didn’t laugh much. She was always kind of careful and quiet around people, like she was afraid they’d notice she was there. After the ladybug, we started pulling out clumps of grass and throwing them over our shoulders. Bobo chased them and beat them up like they were wild animals, and Opal laughed so hard she rolled on the ground.

  Once we had the grass out from around the rosebush, Teddy cut some pieces off it. His hands were big, and must of been thick as leather, because the prickers didn’t even bother him. Opal pricked her finger and got a little dot of blood, though, and I thought Teddy was gonna pass out.

  “Oh, got a boo-boo, Mama!” Teddy’s mama, the lady in the wheelchair, was back by then to pick him up, but she’d had the nurse get her out of the car, and come to look at the flowers. Good thing, because for a big guy, Teddy was sure freaked over a little blood. He took Opal’s hand and pulled her over to his mom’s wheelchair, so she could see the finger with the blood on it. Bobo got up from the shade to check what all the commotion was about.

  “Ohhhh, not so bad,” Teddy’s mom said, then she wiped away the blood with a hankie and smiled at Opal. “All better. Such a pred-dee girl.” Teddy’s mom talked kind of funny, and her mouth hung down on one side, but she was real nice.

  Opal just blinked up at her, like she didn’t have any idea what Teddy’s mama was talking about.

  “Say thanks, Opal,” I told her. “She said you’re pretty.”

  Opal got too embarrassed to talk, like usual, and she pulled the front of her T-shirt up over her arms so that everyone could see her belly.

  “Opal!” I yanked her shirt back down, so she’d know not to do that again. I remembered when I was little, I thought if I pulled my dress up over my head at church, people couldn’t see me anymore. My mama cured me of that, real quick. She spanked my butt, so I’d know I wasn’t invisible after all. “Go check on your caterpillars, okay?”

  Opal ran off to the steps, where she had a jar of caterpillars Teddy’d caught. She’d set them next to her doll and the little dishes we found in the back bedroom. There were also a pile of coloring books, a bucket of crayons that were too dried up to use, a couple puzzles, and a Candy Land game Mrs. Kaye said we could take home. Opal had a fit to bring it all outside, and Mrs. Kaye let her. All day long, Opal kept looking back at her stuff and checking on it, like she thought it was gonna disappear.

  Teddy’s mama decided they better get going after the bloody finger. I figured out that Teddy’s daddy, Edward, was at home, and they didn’t like to leave him alone too long because he had Alzheimer’s. I knew what that was. The waitress in the oil patch town had a uncle with Alzheimer’s. Old Bab, she called him. I met him once or twice. Old Bab could tell you the same story four times in a row and not even remember he did it.

  Mrs. Kaye looked at the work Teddy’d done and asked if he’d keep coming and get all the flower beds looking good, and clean out along the fence. Teddy said he would, and also, he wanted to get some seeds off the tall flowers out back, because he hadn’t seen any like them, ever. Mrs. Kaye told him the old train tramps had brought the seeds a long time ago, and they grew just like Jack’s magic beanstalks. Mrs. Kaye laughed and said they used to make dolls out of the flowers. On the back steps, Opal looked around to see if there was another doll hid somewhere.

  After Teddy and the rest of them left, Mrs. Kaye decided we better go on and fix the sandwiches, which was good, because I was hungry for sure, and it was after lunchtime already. We put together all the sandwiches, and bagged them up, and by then Opal and Bobo were sitting in front of the cabinet, whining for food. Mrs. Kaye said we ought to go out back and have a picnic, since we’d all worked so hard. So we did. We sat on a little bench by a big old tree stump and ate sandwiches and chips, and drank lemonade. Bobo got Opal’s first sandwich when she wasn’t looking, so we had to give her a second one. Then she started pinching off little pieces and throwing them in the air, and Bobo would catch them. She filled her little teapot and gave him a drink in a teacup, too. I let her do it because when you’ve got, like, twenty sandwiches and plenty of lemonade, it seems fine to give it to the dog.

  Mrs. Kaye watched her and smiled. “I’ll bet we played tea party with those dishes a thousand times,” she told me while Opal and the rag doll talked a blue streak. Mostly you couldn’t understand what Opal said, or what the doll said back, but they could sure carry on. Bobo sat there real quiet and watched, waiting for the next piece of sandwich to come his way.

  “If you crawl through the hollyhocks, there’s a little room inside where the old summer kitchen used to be.” Mrs. Kaye was looking past me toward the tall spikes of flowers that grew thick like a waving green wall with dots of color all over and honeysuckle twisted in between.

  That got me curious, even though there was another sandwich on the plate, and I wanted it. “Can I go see?”

  Mrs. Kaye smiled at me. She had pretty eyes that were a deep greenish brown out here in the yard, like the hollyhocks. “I’ll show you.” She stood up, and stretched out her fingers and wiggled them, and I put my hand in hers. It felt strange at first, holding someone’s hand, but then it was nice. Mama used to take my hand when we’d walk across the grocery store parking lot, and we’d swing our arms up and down real high, and she’d say, “To market, to market, to buy a fat pig. To market, to market, jiggedy-jig.”

  Then I’d say, “To market, to market, to buy a fat hog. To market, to market, jiggedy-jog.” And then we’d go along with our arms swinging and the sun shining down on our faces.

  I felt the sun on me when Mrs. Kaye and me walked to the hollyhocks. Once we got there, she slipped her hands between the plants, and pulled apart the honeysuckle vines and the hollyhock stalks, making a little tunnel.

  “Go ahead,” she said, and I stepped through. Mrs. Kaye came in behind me, and then the plants snapped back together again, and it was like we were in a little room about as big as our kitchen in the apartment, but with a rock floor, and tall green walls, and blue sky for a roof. It seemed miles away from everything, a storybook place, like Narnia inside the wardrobe.

  “Wow,” I whispered.

  Mrs. Kaye put her hands on the small of her back and turned in a circle. “This was our secret place. My friend Jalicia and I spent many an hour playing let’s pretend here.”

  “It’s awesome.” I stretched out my arms and twirled until the room and the colors spun. “Who built it?”

  “Well, years ago Poppy and Aunt Ruth had what people called a summer kitchen out here. Back in those days, some houses had little kitchen buildings in back, so when you did your cooking and canning in the summertime, you wouldn’t heat up the house.”

  I thought maybe she was pulling my leg, but one thing I’d learned about Texas was that it got hot, even in the springtime. On the truck radio one day, the weatherman said this was a unseasonably cool spring, and I about fell over laughing. “How come they didn’t just turn on the air-conditioning?”

  She chuckled. “They didn’t have air-conditioning. I can remem ber when lots of houses didn’t have air-conditioning.”

  “Seriously?” I looked at her and tried to decide how old she really was.

  Mrs. Kaye laughed again. “Yes, seriously. And, in case you’re wondering, I’m not that old.”

  “I wasn’t wondering.” My face turned red, so she could probably tell I was. “It’s really awesome in here, though. Maybe tomorrow I could, like, bring Opal in for a tea party.”

  Mrs. Kaye looked out at the wall of green for what felt like a long time, but she didn’t answer me. I got that twisty feeling in my stomach I used to have on the playground when I tried to get in on tag with Tamara Powell’s little snotty
group of soccer girls, and they told me to buzz off.

  She probably thinks you’re a doofy little pain in the butt. Dork. “I mean, if me and Opal are gonna come help with the painting and the gardens and sandwiches and stuff tomorrow, I just thought … well, she’s probably never had a tea party with anybody before—except the dog and the rag doll, I mean, but that’s not a real tea party.” I rolled my eyes, so maybe Mrs. Kaye would think I was doing it for Opal, but really I thought the secret room was cool.

  “I think that would be lovely,” she said, and I felt the air loosen up in my chest. “I think tomorrow we should all have a tea party in the summer kitchen for lunch.”

  “Cool. Awesome.” I heard Opal hollering for me outside, and I knew we needed to head out anyway. Opal and me had sandwiches to take back to the apartments, and besides, Rusty was supposed to come get Kiki at two thirty, and I figured we’d better be home before then. Rusty wouldn’t like it if he didn’t know where me and Opal were, and of course Kiki couldn’t tell him, since all she did was sleep. And we still had to stop by the bookstore on the way home to get Opal a new book.

  Opal hollered again, and I could hear her moving around outside the flower wall, trying to figure out what’d happened to us. “Hang on, Opal,” I said. “Here we come.” Mrs. Kaye opened the tunnel, and we climbed out. Opal clapped like we’d done a trick.

  Opal and me said good-bye, and got the bag of sandwiches and Opal’s doll and book and Candy Land game, and headed off. Opal didn’t even fuss about leaving behind the little dishes or the puzzles. So long as she could keep her doll, she was okay.

  On the way home, at the bookstore, we took a minute to show MJ how Opal had learned her book, and MJ said Opal was the best customer she ever had. Ever. That made Opal really happy, I think, because she wouldn’t leave until she sat there and had MJ read the new book to her.

  When we got back to the apartments, Angel, Ronnie, and Boo weren’t on the steps. Opal wanted to read her book, so I put her inside and told her to stay right there. The bedroom door was open a little, which meant Kiki’d been up, but she wasn’t in the bathroom, so I figured she was probably lying around in bed.

  I looked at the time and figured we had about thirty minutes before Rusty would show up, so I locked the door with the key and went out back to look for the other kids. They were down in the storm ditch, like usual. They had five little Mexican kids with them. As soon as Angel, Ronnie, and Boo saw me and the bag, they came running up. The Mexican kids hung back like they weren’t sure about me. But once they saw there was food, they came up, too. I gave them some, and they ran off with it, but in a minute they came back with more kids. They made a pretty good dent in the sandwiches. Angel, Ronnie, and Boo took a second one and unwrapped it, but a couple of the Mexican kids took a second one and, like, hid it under their Tshirts and stuff. I guessed they wanted to take it home, but they didn’t leave.

  “Some dude come to your apartment,” Angel said after a while. She stopped to lick her fingers, which was gross, because they’d been playing in the slimy water again.

  “Huh?” First I wondered if I heard her right, and then I thought about Kiki. If she was having some guy in our house when my brother was busting his butt trying to help her out, I was gonna kill her. “What guy? You mean my brother?” Maybe Rusty’d come home early today, and Kiki wasn’t even in the bedroom right now. Maybe she was already gone to work, which would mean Opal was alone in there, which wasn’t good.

  Angel smacked her lips and wrinkled her nose at me like Tamara Powell used to on the playground. “No. Some dude, like, bangin’ on yo’ door. Some big ol’ white dude with long greezy gray hair. You know him? He ask was anyone there, and we keep tellin’ him no, but he don’ believe it. He come back beatin’ down the door four time. He drive ’round the block a couple time, then he come back. Drive ’round, come back.”

  “What’d he want?” Long strings of hair blew across my face, so I pulled out the ponytail holder and started to gather it up again. It felt thick and damp in my hands, a little sweaty from the walk home.

  Angel wiped her mouth on her shoulder and took another bite of her sandwich. “He lookin’ fo’ you brother girlfriend. If she sleepin’ in there, she deaf, she cain’t hear that.”

  I had a brain flash of the way Kiki looked the night Rusty first brought her home. Her old man did that. He beat her up pretty good before he kicked her and Opal out… .

  If Opal was in the apartment alone right now, and someone came pounding on the door, she wouldn’t know what to do. She’d think it was me. If she could work the lock, she might open the door. Maybe she’d already opened the door… .

  “See? There he go again.” Angel pointed toward the road.

  In the gap between buildings, a dented red and white pickup with monster tires passed over the bridge.

  “He ga’ a big tuck,” Ronnie said, then called the man a word my mother would of busted my butt for.

  My chest got tight and lunch rushed up my throat like dirty floodwater, and I tasted what was left of the tea party. What if Opal opened the door? Maybe he’d grab her to get to Kiki. Maybe he’d hurt her. Maybe he’d take them both off and kill them and leave them in a ditch somewhere, and it’d be some sad, terrible story on the news tomorrow.

  My mind went haywire, and I had a flash of Opal’s little pink shoes dumped in the mud someplace.

  Dropping the sandwiches, I took off down the storm drain, my feet splashing through the puddles and the clogs wobbling with every step. I tripped where the cement was cracked, my foot twisted sideways, and I fell hard, my arm skidding into a patch of water and slime. My hand slipped when I tried to get up, and for a minute I was in one of those dreams where you want to run, you need to run, but you can’t.

  I have to get to Opal.

  Angel hollered at me from behind, “Hey, where you goin’? You want yo’ bag?”

  Kicking off the clogs, I scrambled onto my feet and took off again toward the gap between two of the buildings, where a gutter ditch ran through to the parking lot. My foot landed on a piece of glass, but I only felt it a little. All I could think was, Please, please, please, God. Please. I have to get to Opal. I have to get there first.

  Running through the gap, I couldn’t see anything but brick. I tried to listen, tried to think if I could hear the truck, or the man yelling or pounding on the door, but all I could hear was the air coming in and out of my mouth, and blood rushing in my ears, and my heart banging so hard against my ribs it felt like they’d bust. I saw the sunlight ahead at the end of the buildings. I ran toward it, and into it, and the pavement was hot under my feet, the tar sticky and thick.

  The wind caught my hair and blew it over my face. I quit running, pushed the hair away, and looked around the parking lot. The truck pulled in off the road, slow, like the driver was looking for something. He stopped near the Dumpster, the brakes squealing out a sound that echoed against the walls and filled the air for a minute before it died to just the engine rumbling.

  Across the street, Monk and his friends were hanging around in front of the convenience store. When the man got out and left the truck engine on, the wannabes started pointing and punching each other, like they were trying to get up the guts to come jack the truck.

  The man left the door open and went to get something from the back.

  I kept walking toward our apartment, acting like it was any other day and I was coming home from someplace.

  The ring of metal against metal came from the truck, and from the corner of my eye I saw the man start toward me with what looked like a crowbar. I swallowed hard as I passed Angel’s apartment. For once, I wished the Mexicans were having a party, or Charlie would come out to hassle me about the rent. He probably had his TV turned up so loud, Kiki’s boyfriend could bash me in the head and he’d never hear it. The wannabes would be the only ones who knew what happened, and they wouldn’t care.

  “Hey!” the man yelled.

  I stopped at the bottom of o
ur steps, put both hands on the rail and one foot on the step, so he couldn’t go past me without pushing me out of the way. Part of me said he wouldn’t do it—not right here in the daylight, and to some girl he didn’t even know. He probably just beat up his girlfriends. But part of me was knotted up like one of those shoelaces you’ll never get untied.

  I looked over my shoulder, like I didn’t know what in the world he wanted. Angel and Ronnie were standing in the shadow between the buildings. They must of left Boo somewhere. Angel watched me with her arms crossed over the sandwich bag and her eyes great big. If the guy did something, maybe she’d holler for the police, or run out to the street at least.

  “Where’zzz she at?” The man shook the metal bar at me. He stopped a few steps away, and I was glad, because I was trying really hard not to back up. He stunk of beer and cigarettes, even with the wind blowing. I hoped Monk would get up the guts to jack the truck. That’d get Kiki’s boyfriend and his tire iron out of here anyhow.

  “Where’s who at?” I gave him a snotty look, so he’d know he was bothering me, and I wasn’t scared of him.

  He called Kiki a bunch of sick names, then finally told me she better come out.

  I acted like I heard that kind of talk every day, but I wondered if he could see the hammer pounding inside my chest. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. My mind flashed a picture of Opal coming out the door.

  No, Opal. No. Don’t come out.

  “Kiki!” He staggered backward a few steps and the tire iron caught the sun. “You tell her ta geddd-out-here. You tell ’er if she’s with some … body … I’ll kill ’em both.”

  A new worry zipped in my ear and buzzed around my mind. If Rusty came home, he’d get in a fight with the guy for sure. Rusty was tall and he was a lot younger, but this guy was huge, and besides, he had a tire iron. Rusty’d be just stupid enough to take it on.

  “There isn’t anybody in there,” I shouted, pointing to the door I hoped Opal wouldn’t open. “Except my mama, and she’s sick in bed with cancer, and you’re bothering her out here with your stupid noisy truck. Go away!” The man kind of looked surprised, so I went with it. “You better leave right now, because the manager already called the police. My brother’s on the police force, so we go right to the top of the list. In about two and a half minutes, you’re gonna get arrested for about five different things. Leave us alone.”