The Summer Kitchen

by Lisa Wingate

  “It’s all right,” the crippled lady told me, drying the tears off Opal’s cheek. “Y’all come on into my place. We’ll watch for him, and I’ll make everyone some coffee.”

  I looked at Mrs. Kaye, and she agreed it’d be all right, and we all went inside. The social worker asked me to sit down at the table with her, so I did. Opal stayed in my lap, Mrs. Kaye and her husband sat on the sofa, and the lady made coffee. Her apartment was lots nicer than ours. Everything was clean, and she had pretty curtains on the window. The pretty curtains didn’t make me feel much better. I was scared about what was going to happen next, and I looked over at Mrs. Kaye.

  “It’s all right. We’re not going anywhere,” she promised, and I was glad she did.

  The social worker told me we didn’t need to worry about Uncle Len—Leonard Lee Cole, she called him—because the police had just picked him up. They didn’t have any trouble because he was asleep in his truck outside Glitters, and before he knew what was going on, he was face-to-face with five police officers, a dog, and a pair of hand-cuffs with his name on them. Kiki was in the hospital, in pretty bad shape, but it wasn’t life-threatening. “So there’s nothing for you to be afraid of here,” she finished. “We’re just going to talk for a while. I don’t want you to feel that you need to protect anyone, all right?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  She asked questions for a long time about Rusty and me, and how we’d ended up here. When I talked, she nodded and wrote things in her notepad, looking sad, like she’d heard it all before. She had mouse-brown hair with a few gray strands in it, tied up in a sloppy ponytail. She was wearing a wrinkled sweater, jeans that looked like they came off some eighties TV show, and socks that didn’t match. Her shoulders were round, like she spent all her time bent over her pad, writing terrible stuff in people’s files. I was afraid the sad look meant they were gonna haul me and Rusty away and separate us, so I asked. She stopped writing, leaned across the table, and held my hand. “We’re going to do everything we can to take care of you and your brother,” she promised, but when you don’t know somebody, you don’t know how good their promises are.

  “I don’t think Rusty’d want to have, like, foster parents and stuff,” I said, because I pretty much knew how he’d take all of this. “Not after living on our own so long, I mean. We been gonna try to find Rusty’s real dad, but we hadn’t had much luck.” The lady asked me for Ray John’s name, and I gave it to her, and she wrote it on her pad.

  “We have some options,” the lady said, and then she told me about a new place where brother and sister groups like me and Rusty could live in a little apartment, and we’d still be a family, but we’d have adults and a caseworker to help us out. Rusty could finish school instead of working all the time. “You wouldn’t have foster parents, exactly.” She pushed a flyaway hair out of her face and tucked it behind her ear, then smiled at me. “But there are house parents in the building, and we try to match each family group with a sponsor to help you with decisions, and financial planning, doctors’ appointments, school enrollment, and other things that may be a little harder to navigate without some grown-up assistance.”

  Mrs. Kaye piped up and said she’d be our sponsor. She glanced over at her husband, and he nodded, and said, “Of course we can do that. Whatever’s needed. But if the kids need a place to stay—”

  The social worker held up a hand and said, “Let’s just take it one step at a time.”

  I got a good feeling all of a sudden. I thought maybe Rusty’d even be able to play basketball or baseball again, and maybe he’d get a scholarship after all. He wouldn’t have to work so hard, trying to pay so many bills.

  Opal burrowed under my neck, falling asleep, and the good feeling left me. As soon as she was out cold, I pulled up her hair and showed the burns. “Opal’s mama knew about it,” I told her, and even with everything Kiki’d done, I felt bad. I remembered how even after Kiki was gone with Uncle Len for so long, Opal wanted to be with her the minute she came back. I guess, no matter what, it’s just natural to love your mama. “She left Opal here for a couple weeks to go off with her boyfriend, but then she came back. He beat her up again and she was kind of out of it, messed up on something. The guy showed up in the middle of the night and started banging on the door, trying to get to her and Opal.”

  “Who took care of Opal while the mother was gone?” The social worker looked up at me over the rim of her glasses. They were bent so her eyes seemed uneven.

  “I did.”

  “Was the mother aware there wasn’t an adult living in the apartment?”

  “She knew who was here.”

  “I see.”

  The questions seemed to run out then. We sat for a while, and she wrote on her pad.

  “When that guy showed up last night, she gave me her shoes so I could run away with Opal. She kept him busy so we could get out the door.” I wasn’t sure why I wanted them to know that. Maybe because Kiki was in a hospital bed somewhere.

  “Who did?” The social worker looked at the shoes, Kiki’s purple-and-gold glittery hightops, still on my feet.

  “Kiki did. So, she must’ve cared some. She’s just too messed up to be somebody’s mama.”

  The lady nodded and wrote a few more lines—about the shoes, I guess. I wondered if that would make any difference in what happened to Kiki and whether she got Opal back. Maybe I shouldn’t of said anything.

  “Rusty and me can take care of Opal,” I told the lady. “When we get one of those apartments like you talked about.” I held on to Opal tight.

  “One thing at a time, all right?” The lady smiled at me again. “Don’t worry.”

  “What’s gonna happen to Kiki?” I was scared to ask, but I was scared not to know, too.

  The social worker seemed to think about whether to give me a real answer, or just one that sounded good.

  “I can handle the truth. I’m not a little kid,” I told her, and she actually laughed a little.

  “I can see that,” she said. “To be honest with you, Kiki is in a lot of trouble. She’s been on parole for a meth conviction. She’s missed several appointments with her parole officer, and one of the conditions of her release was no further involvement with former associates.”

  I didn’t know why she was trying to put it so nice. “You mean she wasn’t supposed to be with anyone she’d do drugs with.” I figured we might as well say it plain, since it was Opal’s life we were talking about here. She needed to get away from Kiki for good. “Will Kiki go back to jail?”

  The lady tapped her pencil on the table, watching the eraser bounce off the wood. “Yes. I’m afraid she will.”

  “For a long time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Rusty and me can take care of Opal,” I said again. “We’re like a family now. She’s scared of people she doesn’t know.”

  “One step at a time.” I wished she’d stop using that line on me. That’s what adults say when they don’t want to give you a straight answer. “Right now we’re talking about what happened last night.”

  “Opal doesn’t take up much space.” I could feel the panic growing in me. I pictured how scared she would be if they took her off somewhere and gave her to strangers. What if somebody hurt her again? “Even if the apartment’s small, it’d be enough for us. She doesn’t have much stuff, either, and—”

  The lady held up her palm, then laid her hand over mine. “Let’s just stay calm, all right? The biggest thing you can do to help right now is to give me all the facts. We’ll make sure Opal is taken care of.”

  “We’ll make sure Opal is taken care of,” Mrs. Kaye said, breaking into the conversation, and I was glad she was there and on my side. “We want to do anything we can to help these kids. Whatever’s needed.” Both the social worker and me turned to her, but Mrs. Kaye was only looking at me. “Whatever it takes,” she said, and I knew she meant it. No matter what came after this, she’d be there. Being as she was a grown-up, and her husband was a docto
r, and they were rich, I figured the social worker would have to listen to them, and I felt a little better.

  Outside, Rusty’s truck rumbled up. I pictured how he’d look when he got out. He’d be dirty and bone tired, his hands black from loading shingles all night, his eyelids so heavy he’d sit down and fall right asleep. He’d be scared to death when he saw the police tape.

  I thought about how he used to come up Mama’s steps two at a time, whistling some tune he’d heard on the radio, his basketball under one arm and his backpack in the other. Mama didn’t want him to be worn out and weighed down with worry. She wanted a good life for both of us. She wouldn’t of liked the way we were now.

  The crippled lady went to the door and called to Rusty before he could get up our apartment steps. “They’re over here,” she said, and Rusty came to the door looking like he was about to have a coronary.

  “It’s okay,” I told him. “Some stuff happened last night, but we’re all right.”

  Everyone got up to meet Rusty when he came in the door. I just sat there looking through the opening, far into the distance, where the new day was burning off the last of the clouds and leaving behind patches of blue.

  In a little while, there would be more blue than anything else.

  I held Opal under my chin and went off to a mind place while the adults started telling Rusty everything that’d happened.

  I thought about Wildfire—how the girl ran off in the blizzard calling for her pony until, as far as everyone knew, she died in the storm, running after what was lost.

  All of a sudden, I knew for sure it didn’t happen that way. She didn’t die. Just when she couldn’t go any farther, when the cold and the wind got all the way into her bones, she saw a light off in the distance, through the snow and the dark. She finally understood that sometimes, when you’re too far away from your old place to get back to it, you have to head for a new place. She ran toward the light, and she found a home that was warm, and dry, and safe. All she had to do was reach out and open the door. When she did, just before she stepped into the light, she caught her breath and looked back over her shoulder. She knew Wildfire hadn’t run away, after all. He was running to something. Behind her, in what she thought was only wilderness, there was the path he’d followed. Even though she couldn’t have seen it through the storm, even though she never knew it was there, she’d been on that path every step she took.

  Chapter 25

  SandraKaye

  I heard the investment company planned to paint Poppy’s house yellow. The same color they painted all their rentals—a marker perhaps meant to let residents of the neighborhood know they were moving into the area, looking for deals. Sooner or later, the whole block would go, the old homes would be cleared out, and new housing complexes would be built.

  Some things are easier imagined than seen, so I didn’t drive by Poppy’s house after the sale was final. Even when Teddy, Rusty, Christopher, and a gathering of volunteers finished cleaning the park next door and reopened it, I stayed away from Red Bird Lane. It wasn’t so hard to do. There were a million details involved in securing a new place for the café, moving equipment, and getting set up.

  It was Teddy who solved the problem of finding our new home. In the midst of Holly, MJ, and me cleaning our supplies out of Poppy’s house and discussing the possibility of trying to operate from an empty portion of MJ’s building—with no kitchen, almost no parking, and no air-conditioning—Teddy popped into the conversation and said, “Pas-ter Al church got a kit-tchen, and lotta table, and chair, and …”

  The three of us looked at each other with our mouths open in a dawning eureka moment.

  “That’s perfect!” Holly gasped, one hundred percent positive, as always. The next thing I knew, she was giving Teddy a bear hug. He was so shocked he dropped paper plates all over the floor.

  When Holly released him, he stood snorting and laughing, his face turning red. “Pas-ter Al church got a kit-tchen and lotta table!” he repeated, and soon we were all headed to the little white church on the corner to find Pastor Al. Within a few days, we had a location for the café in the fellowship hall. Our new space came complete with a commercial kitchen, tables, space in the parking lot for basketball, and even a few church members interested in volunteering. We moved our equipment from Poppy’s house to the church, and I said good-bye to Poppy’s on a quiet day in early June, then I didn’t go back. It was too hard to think about what would happen there next.

  If not for the fact that a bit of mail came three weeks later, I never would have returned to the house at all.

  The note was waiting in the mailbox at the end of a perfectly ordinary day, when Holly dropped Christopher and me in our driveway. She waved as she pulled away, with Opal yawning and stretching in the back, her arms barely visible above the car seat Holly had saved in the attic all these years, just in case there might be one more little Riley, after all. As it turned out, the thought wasn’t so preposterous. One adult-child Riley moved out, and Opal moved in.

  Christopher trotted up our drive to tell his dad about the day as I walked to the curb to get the mail. I stood leafing through it, the afternoon sun warm on my hair. There were bills, advertisements, a newsletter from Family Central, where we’d started attending group counseling sessions on Tuesday nights. A tattered white envelope fell from my hands and drifted downward into the grass like a butterfly searching for a place to land. I finished skimming the outside of the Family Central newsletter, laughed at a cartoon of a teenager trying to coerce the car keys from his parents, then reached for what I’d dropped. The grass brushed my fingers as I picked up the envelope, turned it over, looked at the handwriting and knew instantly who’d sent the letter. The postmark blurred behind a sudden rush of tears, and I sank into the grass, blinking and reading the return address. Guatemala City, Guatemala.

  Inside the envelope were a carefully folded letter and two photos. I clasped the photos in shaking fingers, holding them like something fragile. A smile bloomed from somewhere deep inside me as I took in an image of Jake. He was laughing, holding up a soccer ball, with children all around him. I turned over the photo and scanned the neatly printed caption, undoubtedly meant to be read after the letter explained everything.

  Me at the school with the kids, it read. In the photo, Jake’s face was filled with joy, his dark eyes alive with light. Throughout the years, I’d seen Jake smile many times, but I’d never seen him look so completely at peace, so entirely in the moment.

  The second image was of Jake and a beautiful dark-haired young woman. They stood arm in arm in front of a waterfall that tumbled from the thick veil of trees. A rainbow had formed in the mist, encircling them.

  Waving the letter over my head, I ran toward the house, calling for Rob and Christopher. “It’s Jake! It’s Jake! Jake sent a letter!” I was breathless by the time I reached the kitchen and handed the photos to Rob and Christopher.

  Rob smiled and shook his head at the picture of Jake with the children. “Look at him,” he whispered, his eyes growing moist.

  Chris snatched the picture of Jake and the girl, turned it over searching for an explanation, then focused on the image again. “Forget about Jake, look at her.”

  We laughed together, admiring Jake’s new life. “There’s a letter,” I said, then unfolded the wrinkled sheet and laid it on the counter. The letter was written in pencil on notebook paper, the surface smudged and scrubby, as if Jake had composed and erased the text many times, trying to get it just right.

  Standing together, we read Jake’s note as a family, learned of his new life teaching at a school in Guatemala, and his blooming relationship with Gabrielle, whom he’d met at the school. He explained his reasons for leaving home, his deeply held emotion for his birth country, his need to go, and his inability to tell us about it.

  Mom and Dad, please know that I love you both, the letter ended. You gave me everything I needed to come here and try to make a difference. Chris, I miss you, dude. Shoot a thre
e-pointer for me. I’ll get home when I can. Write me. There’s so much I want to tell you about this place.

  I only wish Poppy could see it, but sometimes I know he’s watching. I think about you often. I love all of you.

  God bless,

  Jake

  I set Jake’s letter by the bed, let it rest there overnight, and felt his presence in the house again. Even though he was growing up, finding his own way, we were still a family, and we always would be. Families aren’t dictated by geography, or biology, or the chemistry of chromosomes and DNA. There is, in fact, no perfect science to it at all. There is only the tie of love, which, in the end, is all that matters.

  In the morning, I woke early to look at the pictures. Rob stirred as I reached for them. He wrapped his arms around me, and I snuggled in, letting the photos lie. For now, there were more important things to tend to. The first lesson Rob and I had learned in family counseling was that we were the most important thing of all. In order to give Christopher a stable, happy home, we had to be willing to set everything else aside and do the work it took to give him stable, happy parents. In the long run, it wouldn’t matter how perfect our life looked to the neighbors, or how well we kept up appearances, but it would matter whether or not we showed our son that it’s all right to be imperfect, to admit your mistakes and then move past them.

  When I left the house for the day, I took Jake’s letter with me, stowed away in my pocket like a secret passenger. As I passed the little white church, Teddy was already busy working on some new gardens around the fellowship hall. Today he’d brought Hanna Beth and her husband, Edward, and they were planting some daisies with their young nurse and her two little boys. Any time now, Rusty would drop off Cass on his way to the morning credit-recovery classes that would allow him to start next year as a high school senior. Cass would help Teddy, and make the coffee, and wait for me to show up. When I arrived, we’d spend some time checking her lessons from afternoon summer school before the others came.