“I’m pretty sure I was using two hands.”
“I won’t tell anyone.” He pulled the strings tight, but not too tight. Dora could feel Con’s breath on her neck. She turned quickly to grab the flour. “Thanks.”
Con settled into his chair again as if Dora hadn’t just flinched away from him. He was smiling.
Dora reached for something to say. “Mimi loves biscuits” is what she came up with. When Dora had lived at home, it had been her chore to make biscuits for dinner, two or three times a week.
“She told me yours were the best.” Con smiled. “I can’t wait to taste them.”
“Wait, didn’t you say that your brother is a chef? I’m never going to live up to Mimi’s hype.”
“My brother is a fancy chef. His biscuits are either flecked with seaweed, or the size of marbles and suspended on codfish foam. I think your biscuit rep is safe.”
“Well, we’ll see.” Dora bent over and put them in the oven.
Con laughed.
“What?”
“It’s just you, in that dress, and an apron, making biscuits. It’s like I stumbled into the 1950s.”
Dora stood up straight, suddenly self-conscious. “You know, I don’t really dress like this. Not back at school. I just didn’t bring any clothes with me, and Mimi had . . . has . . . this closet for me. . . .”
“You ought to dress like that every day. Forever.” Con looked taken aback at his own vehemence. “I mean, it looks really good on you. Not like a costume. More like . . . you. And—did that sound skeevy? Because I wasn’t trying for skeevy, I was trying for reassuring.”
“It’s okay. You hit reassuring.” Dora smiled. “I just don’t feel like the me you think this makes me look like.”
“Well, you ought to. Those dresses make you look like you know what the hell you’re doing, and I think you do.”
“Well, if you and the dresses think that, I’ll just ignore my screaming inner panic.”
“You do that,” Con said. “Just hit the ‘mute’ button on your inner-panic remote.”
“Got it.” Dora sighed. “The worst part about dressing like this is that Mimi’s wanted me to wear these dresses for years, and I feel terrible that she isn’t even seeing me in them.”
“For what it’s worth, Mimi talked about you
all
the time, and never mentioned your clothes.”
“That’s because she hated my clothes, I think. I mean the ones I actually wore, not the ones she put aside for me.”
Con shook his head. “It’s her own fault. I bet if she had ignored what you wore, you would have been dressing like that since 2005.”
Dora laughed. “Probably. When I was very little I used to play dress-up in her clothes all the time. Once I put my foot through a 1930s chiffon gown, and Mimi never said a word. But when I hit junior high and Mimi started dropping hints . . . I balked.”
“Has any junior-high kid responded well to hints? And I bet if Mimi had shown an utter lack of interest in your eventual vocation you’d be the president by now.”
Con put his elbows on the table and rested his chin in his hands. He looked directly at Dora. “What do you want to do? I mean, grad school, sure, but grad school for what? And I promise Mimi didn’t put me up to this; I’m just curious.”
“You know, ‘I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.’”
“Oh,” Con said. “
Say Anything.
”
“Nice.”
“I know my eighties cinema. And it’s impressive that you can recite that from memory. But . . . that kind of pre-empts a lot of jobs. And you don’t seem to mind the store, I mean, mind minding the store. That’s selling things that are bought or processed.”
“It’s different with Mimi’s store. The clothes might be bought but they’re not processed. I feel like it’s not so much selling as it is matchmaking. It’s like arranging for pet adoptions. People who come into Mimi’s store are looking for some kind of connection with something.”
“A connection with something beautiful,” Con said.
“Yes, exactly.” Dora felt like she couldn’t meet his eyes. She started slicing the ham.
“I don’t know who brought us a ham. Some friend of Gabby’s, I think. Thanks for helping us eat it—who said ‘Eternity is two people and a ham’?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to start saying it now. My mother always gets one for Easter, and I feel the same way. I eat ham sandwiches until I start oinking.”
Dora looked at the plate of sliced ham. “This meal needs something green,” Dora said. She threw some lettuce in a bowl and sprinkled cherry tomatoes on top. “There. Green and red.”
Dora had just put the plates on the table when the oven timer and Con’s phone buzzed simultaneously.
Con looked at the screen and grimaced. “You mind if I take this? It’s Mrs. Featherston.”
“Oh, sure. No problem.” Dora started mixing the dry ingredients for the cookies. They could go in while she and Con ate and still be cool enough to take to the hospital. She could hear Con’s voice as a low murmur from the other room. He had a nice voice, she thought. Not deep, but rumbly. She thought about him tying her apron strings again, how warm and safe he’d felt, behind her. She shivered.
“Dora?” She jumped, hearing his voice, as if he’d known what she’d been thinking. “I’m so sorry. . . . I can’t stay. Mrs. Featherston put her thousand-dollar handbag on the wet sealant on her new counter-tops, which I’d not only told her not to touch but fenced off with strips of bright-blue tape at six-inch intervals.” Con rolled his eyes. “So now I have to go smooth it out—if it can be smoothed out—and settle the ruffled Featherstons.”
“Oh, no!” Dora felt her eyes get hot. Was she going to cry over every little thing now? She gave herself a little shake. “Can I at least make you a couple of ham biscuits to take with you?”
Con grinned. “I’d like that. I’d be really sorry not to have a chance to try your biscuits. Can I get them with mustard?”
“Of course.” Dora felt her face get hot, and was glad her back was to Con. She rummaged in the fridge for the mustard.
Dora put the biscuits together in record time, wrapping them in a paper towel.
“This looks delicious—thank you.” Con smiled. At the door he paused. “Good luck today, at the hospital.” He took a Murphy Fine Construction card out of his pocket. “Call me if you need anything.” He looked stern. “That’s my cell. Call anytime. I mean it.”
“Yes, sir,” said Dora. She gave him a mock salute. “Thank your mother for the flowers for us, please?”
“Will do.” Con paused. “And I’ll try to stop by the store tomorrow, if I can. Just to see how you’re doing, and to hear about Mimi.”
Dora watched him walk out to the truck. She wasn’t hungry anymore. She put the ham and biscuits away. She didn’t feel much like making cookies, either, but the butter was already soft, so she made them, mechanically. She didn’t even taste the batter.
The last sheet was coming out of the oven when Gabby came home.
“Smells good in here,” she said. She nabbed a cookie off the cooling rack. “Ooh, still hot.” She stopped. “These must be for the nurses, aren’t they?”
Dora nodded. She had felt dull and blah since Con left. “That’s okay—there are plenty. Go ahead. Did you get your errands done?”
“Errands?” Gabby looked puzzled for a minute. “Oh, sure.” She looked mischievous. “I got everything I needed, and a bit more, I think.” She gestured down to the cooling cookies, which Dora had started packing into an old Tupperware. “You want my help with those, honey?”
“I’m okay, Gabby,” said Dora.
“Well, I’ll just grab a sweater, and then we can head on over.”
• • •
On the way out, Dora made a slight feint towards her own car, but didn’t push when Gabby offered to drive. “The parking guy there knows my car, so if we stay a little longer than we plan we won’t get a ticket.” Dora leaned back in her seat, the cookies warm on her lap. For once, Gabby didn’t seem to want to talk, and they rode in silence.
The hospital was busy and bustling. It made sense that Sunday would be a busy day. But Mimi’s room was quiet. She didn’t seem to be awake. Gabby grabbed for the box of cookies.
“I think I know the nurse on duty,” she said. “I’ll go drop these off while you sit with Mimi, so they know where they came from.” She scooted off.
Dora sat down in the too-familiar chair by Mimi’s side. She reached out for Mimi’s hand, and took a deep breath. If she pretended they were talking at dinner . . .
“The store’s going well. Maux is doing inventory. I rearranged the jewelry case, but we can put it back if you don’t like it. I also sold a bunch of stuff, including a dress with a secret life.” Dora paused.
“I didn’t know about the secret lives. Maux knew. And a few of the customers knew, too. Did you write them?”
Mimi’s eyes were still closed. Dora felt a sudden urge to ask Mimi to blink once for yes, twice for no. But Mimi was probably asleep.
“I think it’s funny that the dresses know more of their history than I know of mine,” Dora said. Her voice sounded overbold in the quiet room.
“I’ve been thinking about asking you about my parents. I know you don’t like to talk about them, but I’d like to know something about what they were like. Where was my mom from? Where did they meet?”
Mimi’s eyes stayed closed. The beeping from the machines stayed steady, her only response.
Dora squeezed Mimi’s hand, gently.
“It’s not like I feel you weren’t enough, Mimi. You were more than enough. Are more than enough. I just wish I could know.”
Mimi hated a lot of words. She didn’t like the word “moist,” even when it was about cake; a Duncan Hines commercial could make her gag. She hated the word “hapless”—“What’s a hap, and why should I care that you don’t have one?”—but didn’t feel the same way about “feckless,” which she used more frequently than perhaps she should: all dogs, most men, their newspaper delivery boy, the governor, Dora’s American-history teacher who misplaced one of her college recommendations; they were all feckless. Mimi hated the word “quality” without a modifying adjective. “Everything has a quality, and most of it is bad,” she’d say. She also hated the name “Jerusalem,” for no apparent reason, but Dora suspected it had to do with some far-off, long-ago forced hymn-singing.
Dora didn’t mind any of those words (and secretly loved “hapless”). Dora only hated one word, and that word was “orphan.” Dora didn’t remember her parents, had not even realized she had once had parents that were now missing until she was four, maybe five. There was Dora, and there was Mimi, and that was what the world was like. When she saw other families, they seemed crowded and unwieldy; how were you supposed to get anyone’s attention, with all those people hanging around?
Of course, school introduced the word and the word’s problems. At Happy Hours Preschool they drew pictures of their families, for proud display on a bulletin board. Dora drew herself, of course, and Mimi. They were eating ice cream, which Dora felt was a masterly touch: how could Mimi refuse a trip to the ice-cream parlor after seeing them so happy together, eating ice cream?
Stupid red-headed Adam (who went on to plague Dora all through elementary school before his parents mercifully relocated to Atlanta) was the first to point it out. “Where’s Dora’s mama and daddy?” Miss Angela blanched. “Dora lives with her grandmother, Adam,” she announced, in the same tone she used to announce that their classroom rabbit was going to stay at Amber’s house over break. “But
where
are Dora’s mama and daddy?” persisted Adam, who had always shown remarkable staying power on those topics Miss Angela liked least, such as why they were having apples for snack again, and what had happened in the bathroom.
“I don’t need a mama or a daddy,” said Dora, who was carefully adding sprinkles to her ice-cream cone—if you were going to invoke ice cream through art, there was no sense in not going all the way. “Only stupid people have mamas and daddies.” Dora thought Adam was stupid, and everything he had was stupid, from his stupid red tennis shoes (blue was so much better) to his stupid toy truck. So, if he had a mama and a daddy, they had to be stupid, too.
“Dora,” said Miss Angela, warningly. “Stupid” was a word that Miss Angela hated.
Adam only got louder.
“Where is Dora’s mama?
Where is Dora’s daddy?”
Adam, reeling from the introduction of a baby sibling, was having some adjustment difficulties.
“Adam,” said Miss Angela. Then the
o
-word happened. “Dora is an orphan. She doesn’t have a mama or a daddy. It is not kind to talk about it.”
Not kind to talk about it.
That was the phrase Miss Angela used to talk about Evelyn’s foot brace, and the stinky man who sometimes wandered down the street shouting and drinking from a brown paper bag. Dora blanched. She was a stinky person now? She was a person that it wasn’t kind to talk about, for some reason? And there was a special word for it, too? Evelyn didn’t have a special word. The stinky man didn’t have a special word, at least not one that Dora knew. It was too much to take.
Dora stood up and threw the entire shoebox of crayons at Adam.
“I am not an orfin!”
she shouted. Adam sat covered in little flakes of crayon and crayon paper. The red had gone into his open shirt collar. Miss Angela was stunned; the rest of the class was delighted. Every single one of them had wanted to throw something at Adam since school had begun.
Miss Kristin, the assistant, ran over and began fussing over Adam, who realized that it would be in his best interests to start crying. Miss Angela took Dora to the kitchen room. Dora sat on the chair you sat on when you needed a band-aid, and Miss Angela crouched beside her.
“Dora, you know we don’t throw or hit in our school. I understand that Adam was talking about things that might make you feel sad, or angry, but we don’t throw things at people who make us feel sad or angry.”