Leo knelt down, patted me on the shoulder, and turned to his daughter. “Polly, this is my friend Roxie.”
“Hi,” she said, eyeing me up and down.
“Hah,” I said through my hands.
Leo smothered a laugh. “Oh boy, how ’bout we get you cleaned up?”
I nodded. Polly nodded. Leo tried to smother another laugh.
“Are you sure this is what you’re supposed to use? There’s not something else that actually came from the pharmacy? In a tube that says bee sting medicine?” I was sitting on the kitchen counter, next to a half-installed sink, with my leg perched on the back of a chair. I’d gotten stung on the inside of my leg right above my knee, and it was puffing up nicely.
“Baking soda and water is the best thing for a bee sting,” Leo soothed, mixing up the paste with his finger.
“Baking soda neutralizes the acid from bee stings, so it’s the best thing.” Polly tapped her finger against her lower lip. “Unless it’s a hornet sting—then you need vinegar. Did you know hornet and wasp venom is actually alkaline? The acid in vinegar counteracts the venom.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said, hissing as Leo’s finger dabbed the paste on my sting.
“Baking soda is good for lots of things around the house. You can use it to brush your teeth, and to clean pots and pans. Daddy uses it all the time. Especially on his hands when they’re really dirty,” Polly said, counting off the ways.
“It’s good for baking too,” I said. “Ever seen cake batter before it gets baked?”
She nodded. “My friend Hailey’s mom bakes all the time, and sometimes she lets me lick the beater.”
“Okay, so you know how it goes into the pan all gooey and flat?” I flinched as Leo patted another wad of paste on my leg. He mouthed “Sorry.”
“Yes,” Polly said.
“And after if comes out of the oven it’s taller, right?”
“Right.”
“That’s what baking soda does in a cake: it makes things rise and get fluffy. But its alkaline—you used that word earlier.”
“And I know what it means,” she said, rolling her eyes.
Wow. Tough crowd. I looked to Leo, unsure how to proceed with this one.
“Polly, what have I told you about rolling your eyes?”
“That it’s incredibly rude,” she sighed, looking in my direction. “Sorry I rolled my eyes, I just read a lot.” She studied me carefully. “If you say something else I already know, I won’t roll my eyes.”
Leo coughed. His shoulders were shaking a little too.
“Right, well, it’s alkaline and doesn’t taste very good. If you’ve brushed your teeth with it, you’ve probably noticed that. So if there’s baking soda in a recipe, the other ingredients have to counteract that—kind of like the way vinegar counteracts the alkalinity in hornet venom.”
After staring at me for a few moments, she said, “Dad, can I go play?”
“I’d like it if you’d unpack first,” he said.
She jumped down off the counter and started for the front door. “I did already.”
“And sorted the dirty laundry into piles?”
“Define piles,” she said, and this time it was me who smothered a laugh.
“Mounds of white clothes. Mountains of dark clothes. The definition of piles does not include shoving it all into the closet and covering it with a blanket.”
She headed for the stairs. “Right. On it.” As she ran up the stairs, her head popped back over the banister. “Sorry about your bee sting, Roxie.”
“Thanks, Polly.”
“But next time don’t kill the bee, okay? So goes the colony—”
“—so goes the earth. Yeah, yeah, I know,” I finished, rolling my eyes. Under my breath, I said, “They’re still assholes.”
She grinned, disappeared, and a few seconds later I heard a door slam shut.
Alone, finally, I turned to Leo, who was sitting there with an amused expression and a pasty finger.
“You can brush your teeth with that, you know,” I said, not meeting his eyes quite yet and leaning down to inspect his handiwork.
“I’ve been told.” He also leaned down. The skin around the sting was still puffy, but the fire had begun to cool under the baking soda paste. “How’re you feeling?”
“Blindsided. You?” My voice had an edge I didn’t like.
“Blindsided.” His voice had the same edge. “What are you doing here, Rox?”
“I came over to bake you a pie—” Omigod, the ingredients were still in the truck, in the hot afternoon sun! “Shit, I’ve gotta go get—”
“Whoa whoa whoa, just hold on a minute,” he said, stopping me from jumping down from the counter. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“There’s probably butter melting all over the front seat!” I tried unsuccessfully to jump down again. “It’ll be a huge mess.”
“I’ll get it—you stay here a minute. That paste needs to harden or it’ll run all over the floor.” He looked pointedly at the gooey paste. “Don’t move.”
I let out an exasperated sigh and tossed him my keys, then made a great show of not moving. Except for my eyes, which I rolled hard. A smile slipped out from him, and then he was gone. And I was alone in his house. With his daughter.
What. The. Hell.
The multitude of occasions he could have mentioned that he had a kid ran through my head like a newsreel. In the next reel, all the occasions where anyone in town might have mentioned this little nugget. Seriously, how could no one have mentioned this before?
And his daughter had just unpacked, which meant she’d been away. With her mother? Was Leo divorced? Separated? Still married?
Dread struck low in my belly as I wondered if I’d been sleeping with someone’s husband. But no—Chad would have told me if he was married.
“Bleagh,” I muttered, clutching my stomach. What a fucking mess. So much for summer flinging.
Just ask him.
Yes, I would do just that. But now I wondered what else Leo might have been hiding. Now that I thought about it, it seemed strange that I’d never been here. Everything had always happened at my house. Or my diner. Or my swimming hole.
I felt a sharp pang inside my chest as I thought about all the things I’d done with Leo, and wondered if it was all over now.
Get the intel.
Right. I took a deep breath, then looked around.
The house was as beautiful inside as it was outside. The chimney was the focal point of the entire lower level, stacked fieldstone with a gorgeous firebox made of deep green glass bricks. Rich chocolate brown wood floors, wide planked and shiny smooth. A two-story great room, anchored by deep built-in bookshelves, and comfortably plush couches and chairs scattered about in conversation areas. The kitchen, which was filled with high-end appliances and work surfaces made of stunning poured concrete, was wide and open; the island counter I was sitting on was big enough to seat six comfortably. The fridge, a Sub-Zero large enough to store a year’s worth of food, was covered top to bottom in schoolwork. Tests, homework assignments, pictures drawn with crayon and marker.
And pictures of the two of them were everywhere. Leo holding a tiny Polly, who was wrapped in a pink blanket, one clearly wailing and one absolutely beaming. Leo holding Polly by the very tips of her fingers as she took what looked like her first steps. Leo and Polly at the farm, her hands buried in the dirt with a flat of seedlings next to her, her very own spade sticking out of the earth. Leo’s face was split by a wide grin in every one. He was clearly over the moon for his daughter, and rightly so. She was a pistol.
Then I heard Leo come in through the front door.
“Butter’s soft, but not too bad. Fridge?” he asked, carrying in my bags and pie pan. I nodded. “Did you stay put?” he asked, his back to me.
“Yes, I stayed exactly where I was told to.”
He turned from the fridge, his expression warmed up some since he’d left. “Roxie, I—”
“Come on down,” he responded, eyes still on me. He offered me a sheepish grin, and I couldn’t help but smile back. That grin always got to me.
“I want to go see the pigs, see how big they got while I was gone, and—what’s that?” Polly had come running down the stairs, flew into the kitchen, and was now staring at the baking supplies.
“Roxie brought those with her. Something about a pie?” Leo answered, looking at me with a twinkle in his eye.
“Oh yeah—a pie,” I said. “Someone was promising me strawberries, so I thought I’d—”
Polly burst out, “I love strawberry pie. Can I watch you make it? Is it hard? Do you make your own crust? Sometimes strawberry pie has rhubarb, will this one? There’s a diner in town that makes cherry pie, but I really like strawberries better. Daddy has a new variety of strawberries this year called brown sugar strawberries. I haven’t tried them yet, but he told me all about them. Are you using those? Can I help? Can I—”
“Hold on there, Pork Chop, you’re talking a mile a minute. Let’s slow it down a little, let Roxie catch up,” Leo interjected.
He called her Pork Chop.
“Catch up to what?” she asked, totally unaware. “I can help, you know. After all, I’m seven years old.”
“Well, then, you’re practically driving,” I joked.
She looked at me seriously. “I can’t drive for another nine years.”
I blinked. “Of course.” I looked to Leo for help, but he was unpacking my bags. “Wait a minute—baking a pie here obviously isn’t the best idea.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Why not?” Polly echoed.
“Um, well . . .” I looked around wildly. “The sink! It’s out of commission, and you can’t bake without having running water. Beside the fact that . . .”
Leo had grabbed some tool, disappeared under the sink for thirty seconds, popped back up, and turned on the faucet.
“Right. Well—”
“You need strawberries, right?” Leo said, lifting a small bag from the counter and spilling the world’s sweetest, juiciest, most perfect brown sugar strawberries into a bowl.
“So, pie?” Polly asked, bouncing a little as she clapped her hands.
Oh, for Pete’s sake . . .
“So, pie,” I said, squashing my flight reflex.
Leo’s phone rang and he raised his eyebrows.
“Sure, go ahead,” I answered, climbing down off the counter and testing my leg. It barely hurt.
Leo had gone into another room, so I asked Polly, “Where does your—” Good lord, I can’t call him Daddy. “Where does he keep the mixing bowls?” She was only too happy to show me.
In minutes, we had an assembly line going on the countertop: bags of flour and sugar, measuring cups I’d brought from home, a cutting board, and my best paring knife. I decided to start with the crust, and put Polly to work.
“You know how to measure flour?” I asked as she dragged a step stool over to the counter.
“I know fractions.” She didn’t say duh, but it was implied.
“Right.” I may have also implied a duh. A point for her, though, for not rolling her eyes.
“Can you hand me the apron hanging next to Daddy’s?” she asked, pointing toward the hooks by the back door.
There was indeed a small apron and a large apron. All that was needed was a medium-sized apron to make it the perfect Three Little Bears house.
I limped over to the apron, realizing after a couple of steps that I didn’t need to limp. That baking soda had really done the trick. Since Polly was watching me, I turned the limp into a little sashay.
“Do you always dance when you bake pies?” she asked.
“You don’t?” I asked her right back, deadpan.
“I’ve never baked before.” She thought a moment. “I like the pie dance.”
I grinned and handed her the apron. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll tell you what goes into the bowl, and you can measure. I’ll cut up the butter since the knife is very, very sharp, but you can add it in when we’re ready. Deal?”
“Deal,” she said excitedly. “Where’s the recipe?”
I pointed to my head. “It’s all up here.”
We got to work, and after a while we had a bowl full of sliced strawberries with some lemon juice, another bowl filled with perfectly measured flour, salt, and sugar, and now Polly was adding my uniformly cut-up butter to the dry ingredients.
She questioned everything: Why was there salt in a piecrust? Why did the butter need to be so cold? She also seemed to appreciate the way I made each cube even and straight, all looking the same. Good girl.
“Okay, now press down on everything with this pastry cutter. It’ll mix the flour and butter together, and then we can add the ice water.”
“Ice water? In a pie?” she asked.
“Remember what I said about using cold ingredients for pastry dough?”
“The colder the ingredients, the flakier the crust,” she repeated, with my exact inflection and tone.
I had to smile.
“How’re we doing in here?” Leo asked, filching a strawberry from the bowl. I swatted his hand, making him laugh. As he ate the berry, he made a face. “Why are these so sour?”
“Because I haven’t added the honey yet. That’s why you can’t sneak a bite till the chef says you can,” I said, reaching for a jar of local honey.
Polly watched it all with wide eyes, then returned to her pastry cutting. Her little wrist turned over and over again in the bowl, her tongue peeking out the side of her mouth as she worked. I was suddenly struck by a vision of Leo doing this exact thing, when he was packing up a farm box on a busy Saturday.
“Bees make honey, you know. You sure you aren’t scared?” Polly asked with a cheeky grin.
I felt my face heat up.
“Can it, Pork Chop; quit making fun of Roxie,” Leo said. “Say you’re sorry.”
She looked down at the bowl. “Sorry,” she said, her voice meek.
“No big deal,” I answered, drizzling some honey over the berries. After tossing them a bit, I told Leo, “Try another one; see what you think.”
He closed his mouth around a berry. “Mmm.”
My cheeks heated again. The last time I heard him say mmm, he was enjoying something else entirely.
“My arm’s tired. Is this almost done?” Polly asked, rubbing her shoulder.
I peeked over her shoulder to look in the bowl. “Looking pretty good. See how those in the corner are the size of peas?”
“There are no corners in a bowl—it’s a circle.” She must have caught a glance from Leo then, because she changed her tone. “Oh yeah, pea sized. I see.”
“Make them all that size, and we’re good to go.” I began to tidy up. “A good cook always cleans as she goes.”
I got a big thumbs-up from Leo on that one. He seemed more relaxed than he was earlier, more at ease with having me in his home, and around his daughter. I wished I felt the same way.
Outwardly I was calm, but inside I was still coming apart at the seams. Processing. Thinking. Second-guessing. Imagining.
And as Polly concentrated on her pea-sized dough blobs, Leo and I had a silent conversation across the island counter.
What the hell, my face said.
Later, his face replied.
Oh, you can count on that, my face assured.
His face responded with either, We can talk later, or We can fuck later. Oddly, they both looked the same.
In the meantime, however, there was an After all, I’m seven years old in the room, and we had a pie to finish.
In the end, a pie was made. Polly was great with a rolling pin, and when the crust tore a little bit, which was normal, she listened patiently as I taught her how to wet her fingers and pinch and smooth it back together. She asked if, when that happened, if it was a good time to danc
e, and I agreed. So we paused for thirty seconds for an impromptu dance break, to Leo’s great delight. Polly didn’t understand why he laughed so hard, and told him, “Daddy, dancing helps sometimes.” How could he argue with that?
He stayed in the background mostly, fielding phone calls on occasion. I was getting the sense that his taking the day off was unexpected, and I wondered for the millionth time where Polly had been, and why she’d suddenly appeared. The note he’d left in my bed this morning referenced moving cows, gathering strawberries, and getting me green. Nowhere was anything mentioned about daughters piggyback riding.
After the pie went into the oven Polly went out to play, stopping just shy of the back door to thank me for letting her help bake. Now, alone in the kitchen with Leo, maybe I could get some answers.
“I’m hungry—you hungry?” he asked, turning away and rummaging in the pantry. Answers would not come quite yet, apparently.
“I’m not so much hungry as I am confused.”
“Confused?” he repeated, seeming to be determined to make me say it all. To put my shit right out there before he did.
“Confused, as in, what the hell, Leo? Why didn’t you ever tell me you had a—”
The front door slammed. “Can we go down and see the chickens? I want to see if they remember me.” Polly came running into the kitchen, and stopped just short of plowing into me. “I mean, when the pie’s done, of course.”
I knew my limit, and I’d just about reached it.
“You know what, I think I’m gonna take off now. Don’t worry, the timer is set, and remember what I said about seeing the juice bubbling up? When the timer goes off, if the pie is bubbling, it’s ready to come out. If not, just give it a few more minutes. You can help her check on the bubbling, right, Leo?”
“Rox—” he started.
I spun for the door. “I’ll get the baking stuff later. Nice to meet you, Polly.”
I all but sprinted for the door, hauled ass across the lawn, and was backing out of the driveway in the time it takes to say there she blows.
All things considered, I thought I’d handled it pretty well. Until I realized I’d forgotten my purse.
I slowed down to the speed limit. There was no way I was going back now.
Nuts Page 20
