The Summer Kitchen (24 page)

“I’ll have to wait until I can get Christopher to come help,” I said finally, and headed to the front of the house. When I turned the corner, a late-model Cadillac was pulling up to the curb. I thought instantly of the real estate agent. Maybe she was meeting a customer here. The idea cast a shadow that was long and thick as the car door opened, and I prepared to make excuses for the mess in the kitchen.

“Hello, lady!” I recognized the voice before the passenger emerged. He waved clumsily. “I comin’ and cut fo-wers. Gone cut some plants, ’kay?” Without waiting for an answer, Teddy began pulling gardening tools from the car and aligning them on the sidewalk.

“Oh.” After Chris’s accident, I’d completely forgotten about having made arrangements for Teddy to come work on the flower beds.

The front passenger window rolled down, and Hanna Beth waved, her fingers curled. “Hel-lo. Nice day . . . to-day.”

“It is,” I agreed, as their driver exited and joined Teddy on the curb.

Today, their nurse was a tall woman with mahogany skin and an accent that sounded South African. “Teddy would like to inquire as to whether he might work today, Missus. He did come yesterday as arranged, but no one was at home.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here yesterday morning,” I apologized, thinking that, actually, the timing of Teddy’s arrival couldn’t have been better. Teddy was tall enough to reach the burglar bars without a stepladder, and he looked strong. “But, yes, I would love for Teddy to work today. Actually, I need some help with the window bars. I wonder if he would mind doing that? I was trying to take off the old padlocks and make sure the latches are in good working condition, but with all the rain this spring, they’re rusty.”

Teddy eyed the house. “Ho-kay,” he said amiably. The nurse made arrangements to pick him up in a couple hours, and Teddy followed me to the backyard. On the way, he assessed Aunt Ruth’s overgrown flower beds. “Gone need lotta work,” he predicted. “Gotta cut the rose, and thinnin’ the iris, and the daisy, and cuttin’ the myrtle . . . ohhh, is a hollyhocks. Lotsa hollyhock!” He admired the living walls around the old summer kitchen. “ ’N’ honeysuckle. Them taste good.”

“Yes, they do,” I agreed, thinking of all the times my childhood friend Jalicia and I had slowly drawn out the centers of honeysuckle blooms and touched our tongues to the stems to harvest the sweet, tiny drops of nectar.

“I’ll see if there’s a pry bar in the shed,” I said, and Teddy followed me, helping to pull open the door after I unlocked it.

He surveyed the interior with interest as the scents of oil, grease, and damp earth wafted out. With a gasp of appreciation, he took in the pile of broken iron furniture, rakes, shovels, rusted fencing wire and posts, garden hoses, the remains of an old swing, several lawn mowers, and countless other items in Poppy’s treasure chest of might-be-useful-someday items.

The mess was even worse than I’d remembered. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to find anything in here.”

“Is a shob-bel.” Slipping into the shed, Teddy grabbed a shovel near the door and set it outside. “Good shob-bel,” he pointed out, as if to prove to me that we could find
something
in the shed.

“Unfortunately, what we need is a pry bar,” I told him. “But that is a good shovel. It might come in handy with the flowers.”

Teddy worked his way past the tangle in the doorway.

“Be careful. There’s no telling what might be . . .”

“Got wheelbarrow . . .” Teddy’s voice rose from the darkness of the interior. “And spread-der . . . and some pots . . . and cutter, cut them rosebush back. . . .”

The girls and Bobo came out of the house as Teddy continued his safari.

“Who’s that?” Cass asked, standing beside me. Bobo didn’t wait for an explanation. Putting his nose to the ground, he followed a scent trail of who-knew-what into the shed.

“Got dog,” Teddy announced.

“That’s Bobo,” I called, then added to Cass, “Teddy’s here to do the yard. The flowers need some work.”

“Oh.” Cass shrugged. “ ’Kay. You want me and Opal to go back inside and try the latches again?”

“Let’s see if we can find a pry bar first. Otherwise, I think we might just have to give up for now. This project is going to require some tools.”

“ ’Kay.” Cass listened with interest to Teddy’s description of the shed’s contents. “Can I go in there?” she asked finally.

“I don’t think you’d better. There might be rats.”

Cass lowered a brow at me. “I’m not scared of rats. They had ’em all over the place when Mama worked at the plant.”

“Or snakes,” I added. Actually, I could imagine a myriad of reasons not to enter the shed, which was why I’d left it alone all this time.

“I’m not afraid of snakes. You just need to make noise and they go away. A lady told me that in Marfa. She’d lived there all her life, like, where there’s rattlesnakes and stuff.”

Turning to look at Cass, I laughed. “Is there anything you
are
afraid of?”

“Not much,” she said, and I laughed again, because I could have predicted that would be her answer.

Chapter 14

Cass

It was pretty fun, helping at Mrs. Kaye’s house, even though we ended up pulling weeds instead of painting, when it seemed like painting would be better. Pulling weeds was something to do, anyway, instead of hanging around the apartment. The dude with the slow elevator, Teddy, was cool, too. Back when I was real young, my mama had a brother who’d got his head banged up in a motorcycle wreck when he was a teenager, and he was like that. We used to go visit him at the nursing home. I’d forgot what ever happened to him, but now I guessed he must of died sometime, and Mama just didn’t make a big deal of it to us.

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.