The Summer Kitchen (2 page)

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To those who serve
and those who are
served—
may we all see
that we walk in the
same circle.

Acknowledgments

The Summer Kitchen
was inspired in great measure by real-life events, and so there are some real-life people to whom I owe a debt. To begin at the beginning, thank you to Judith for showing up at a book signing, telling me about The Gospel Cafe, and then being so kind as to take me there to see it for myself on a rainy spring day. To Sherry, Marsha, Curtis, and John, thanks for sharing the place with me and for taking time to answer questions and contribute ideas for the story. To the great folks in the kitchen, thanks for putting up with me as I learned the routine and asked more silly questions. May the sweet light of grace continue to shine down on you and your little blue house as you fill hearts and stomachs. To Ladelle Brown, thanks for sharing the story of your sandwich ministry. The tales about your “kids” helped to give faces to the children of Blue Sky Hill and to bring them to life.

On the practical side of things, my gratitude goes out to the fine folks at New American Library for doing the hard work that turns stories into books and dreams into reality. In particular, my thanks to my editor, Ellen Edwards; to Clair Zion and Kara Welsh; to all the folks in marketing and publicity at the Penguin Group, who bring the books to the shelves; and to Megan Swartz for being a great publicist. Thanks also to my agent, Claudia Cross, at Sterling Lord Literistic.

Closer to home, I’m grateful to my family and my community of reader friends, without whom none of this would be possible. Thanks to Sharon Mannion for tireless proofreading and to Janice Wingate for keeping up with newsletter lists. Gratitude also goes out to Ed Stevens for tireless encouragement and endless technical help with YouTube videos and other mind-boggling projects, and to Teresa Loman for being a hilarious long-distance gal pal and for starting my official fan club on Facebook. With you in it, any club would be a hoot, girlfriend!

Last, thanks once again to readers far and near who keep me writing and give my imaginary friends new mind places to travel to. Thank you for passing the books along to others, and for taking time to send notes, good wishes, and encouraging words. These adventures would be nothing without wonderful people to share them with.

May some measure of the joy you’ve given me be returned to you in this story.

Chapter 1

SandraKaye

Part of me says,
It’s just a house. It’s wood, and brick, and stone, nails and tar paper, weathered red shingles, a few of which are missing now. It’s only a ramshackle old place that was never anything fancy.

With luck, developers will buy it and wait for revitalization to take over the block. A quick sale to a speculator would be the easiest way. . . .

The voice that says this is logical. It makes sense. It’s only telling me what I already know.

Which raises the question of why those words are so hard to hear.

There’s another voice, one that’s smaller and quieter, timid yet persistent, like a child with something to say.
This is more than a house. This is the past. Your past. . . .

I’ve wondered time and again if those are the voices anyone would hear when saying good-bye to a treasured childhood place.

It’s nothing but a burden,
I told myself as I stood in the driveway, waiting for the real estate agent to arrive.
Maryanne was right. You should have done what she wanted.
If I’d let my sister have her way, the house would have been put on the auction block, contents and all. In Maryanne’s view, the little bit it might bring wasn’t worth the effort of getting an agent and waiting for a buyer. It wasn’t as if Mother needed the money from her inheritance of the place. It wasn’t as if anyone cared what happened to Uncle Poppy’s house at all.

Anyone other than me. When the one person who always loved you the most dies a violent death, it’s hard to know what should come after. There is no road map for what should be done with the possessions left behind and the memories cut short. Mother had let the house languish for months on the premise that it wouldn’t
look good
to dispose of it while Poppy’s murder was still unsolved. Now that the Dallas Police Department had finally admitted the case might never be closed, six months became the socially acceptable benchmark. It was time to
cut our losses,
as Mother put it.

The words stuck in my chest, too hard to swallow even now that the real estate agent was on her way. The idea of tossing this place out like an empty shoe box seemed a betrayal of Poppy and Aunt Ruth, whose breath inhabited the fading pink house even now that the contents had been sold, the porches swept, the leftover junk piled at the curb. There was nothing more to do here but hang out a sign and let go. Yet the reality remained impossible to face. Standing in the drive, I expected that the front door would creak open, and Poppy would hobble out in his bowlegged shuffle. He’d smile, and wave, and tell me to come in for coffee. The last six months would be nothing but a bad dream, a nightmare from which we’d awaken all at once.

Turning from the door, I stared down the block. There was no way to be comfortable with the silence here, no way to make peace with the painful ending of Poppy’s life. I could go back a thousand times and wish I’d acquiesced when Mother and Maryanne wanted to move Poppy to a nursing home two years ago, after Aunt Ruth’s death, but wishing it wouldn’t change anything.

Checking my watch, I paced back and forth across the driveway. The real estate agent was a half hour late. Around me, the neighborhood had slipped into the filmy shade of evening, and even though it was warm, gooseflesh rose on my arms as a group of adolescent boys passed by on the sidewalk, their oversized shorts sagging beneath T-shirts in colors that were probably carefully selected to identify a group.

One of them kicked a plastic flowerpot from the edge of the estate sale rubbish pile. A flash of anger, hot and sudden, caused me to cry out, “Stop it!” The boys turned my way, and I fell mute, staring at them. In a few years, would they be the ones jumping an eighty-nine-year-old man whose only mistake was to have cashed his social security check before dropping by the convenience store for a gallon of milk? “Leave that alone,” I hissed, and hatred welled inside me. How dare those boys touch Poppy’s belongings. How dare they touch anything that had been his.

Shrugging, the closest one kicked the flowerpot again, then stepped around it and left it in the street. “Yeah, you in my neighborhood now, lady,” he muttered with false bravado, and his friends laughed. “You betta take yo’ butt back home befo’ dark.”

“Yeah, get in that Caddy and mojo on outa here,” another added, then slipped in a string of expletives without venturing a glance back at me.

I stood by the driveway, trapped between good sense and a blinding need to confront them.

This isn’t the way,
I told myself.
They’re just boys. Just little boys trying to impress each other, trying to act like men.

Poppy had always loved the kids in the neighborhood. For years, he’d fixed their bikes, patched leaking tire tubes and aired up deflated basketballs, tack welded the wheels onto broken skateboards, wagons, and tricycles. He probably knew those boys when they were younger. . . .

A new red Mustang passed them on the street, and they whistled at the blonde behind the wheel. She ignored them as she pulled into the driveway. “Kids,” she said as she stepped from her car. A high, quick laugh punctuated the sentence, and she rolled her eyes in a way meant to indicate that the boys were harmless. “I heard they’re trying to get some summer programs started up to keep young people off the streets when school gets out.”

“That’s good,” I said, but I didn’t ask who
they
were. I didn’t care. I wanted to be done with this meeting, get in my car, go home, and put a diet frozen dinner in the microwave. Rob was working ER tonight, and Christopher would be out with friends, studying. They’d both get home late, the usual routine. It was easiest for all of us, a way to avoid the fact that Poppy wouldn’t be calling to check in, and Jake wasn’t in his dorm at Southern Methodist University, but somewhere on the far side of the world, searching for a birth family he didn’t know anything about.

Nothing was the way it was supposed to be. The little pink house shouldn’t have been dark and silent. Poppy and Jake should have been inside with a bowl of popcorn, watching the Rangers play ball and cheering so loudly their voices would echo into the front yard. The two of them had loved to watch baseball together almost from the moment we adopted Jake and brought him home from Guatemala. Jake, silent and scared in a universe of strangers, had instantly latched on to Uncle Poppy. We supposed Poppy looked like someone Jake knew before—a grandparent, perhaps, or a worker in the orphanage.

Jake was always Poppy’s favorite. Even after Christopher was born, there was still something special between Poppy and Jake. They never went more than a few days without seeing each other.

Now it hurt to remember that. . . .

The real estate agent introduced herself, and we shook hands. My cell phone rang as she returned to her car to rifle through the backseat for paperwork.

I answered the phone, and Holly was on the other end. I should have known it would be her, checking to see how things were going. Over the years, we’d shared everything from pregnancies to caring for aging relatives. Together we’d celebrated all the major firsts of motherhood—first steps, first tooth, first day of school, first date, first car, first high school graduation. But now there was a vast, dark place we couldn’t inhabit together. Poppy’s death and Jake’s disappearance were on the fringes of every conversation, waiting to slip in like a fast-moving storm and throw dampness over everything.

“Where
are
you?” Holly never beat around the bush. She was quick and to the point, which made her great at managing a family and running a part-time catering business. “I just drove by. Your car’s been gone all afternoon. You’re not out at Poppy’s house alone again, are you?”

“I’m meeting the real estate agent,” I said, ignoring Holly’s need to be everyone’s caretaker. With six kids around the house, mothering came naturally to her. “I wanted to get the last of the yard sale junk out to the curb before she came. She’s here now, though.”

Holly coughed indignantly. “You should have called me. I told you I’d come with you anytime you need to go down there.”

“I know you did, but there wasn’t much left to clean up—a few flowerpots, some picture frames and whatnot. I’m just going to leave those boxes of dishes in the cellar, and the big roasters. Whoever buys the place can deal with them.”

Holly wasn’t about to be sidetracked. “You shouldn’t go over to that house by yourself, SandraKaye.” I knew Holly was serious when she used my full, properly Southern, double name.

“It was broad daylight. Anyway, I thought the real estate agent would be here, but she was late.” The truth was that Holly was probably right. Rob didn’t want me coming here by myself, either. The neighborhoods south of Blue Sky Hill hadn’t quite made the turn to revitalization yet. As the new residents uphill started neighborhood watch programs, put in expensive surveillance systems, and demanded greater police protection, the less savory elements of the area were forced to frequent new territories. During the estate sale, we’d engaged a private auction firm experienced at operating in older parts of town. They’d come with security attached.

“I don’t care if it’s high noon,” Holly complained. “You know what can . . .” She swallowed the end of the sentence, and I pictured the blood draining from her face as we both realized she’d inadvertently pointed out that, just blocks from here, on what should have been a perfectly ordinary Dallas evening, Poppy’s attack had proven that lives could collide in an instant, with painful consequences.

The real estate agent closed her car door and headed my way with a clipboard.

“Listen, Holly, I’d better go so we can knock out the disclosure paperwork while there’s still enough light outside.”

Holly sighed. “Does the real estate agent have anybody with her?” By
anybody,
she meant anybody six feet tall and burly.

“No. It’s just her.” Watching the agent stagger across the lawn, her high heels sinking into the grass, I cupped my hand over the phone and added, “She could probably poke someone’s eye out with those stilettos, though.”

Holly chuckled. “You’re out of there by dark.”

“Yes, Mother.”

Holly gave the word an indignant cough. We both knew I could be on the south side of Chicago and my mother wouldn’t be calling to make sure I was all right. “Don’t insult me, but I mean it. By dark, okay?”

“I’m forty-nine years old, Holl. I can handle this.”

Holly sighed. “Call me when you’re done?”

“All right. I’d better go now.” The real estate agent, Andrea, was already beginning to move around the house with her notepad. I tucked the phone into my pocket and joined her on the tour.

My mind filled with memories as I considered the reduction of family history to meaningless tick marks on a real estate disclosure sheet.