Julia’s Kitchen (11 page)

Lots of love,

Roz

Marlee read over my shoulder. “When's your mom's birthday?”

“Today.”

“Oh, Cara, I'm sorry.” She put her arm around me and gave a tight squeeze.

“Thanks,” I said, glad that Marlee understood.

“It's kind of cool, though,” Marlee said, “that we put this basket together on her birthday. Do you think she knows?”

“Oh, she knows.”

“You sound so sure.”

“I am. I can't explain it, but I am.”

Marlee grinned. “Well, good. Then I'm sure, too.”

I slid the bracelet onto my wrist and ran my fingers over the engraved words. I loved it. I had been meaning to call Roz for some time now. I would do it tonight.

Marlee and I put the basket together, cushioning the cookies in colorful tissue paper. But just as I was about to tie off the cellophane wrapping, Marlee said, “Wait! We forgot something.”

“Huh?”

“The quote. The little saying. Like Roz said at the funeral. Your mom always put one in each basket.”

How could I have forgotten that? Of course. But what would we say? Marlee and I started throwing ideas around.

“Welcome to the world?”

“Girls rule and boys drool?”

“Sugar and spice and everything nice?”

“Girls rock?”

Nothing we thought of sounded good to both of us. Finally, I said, “Let's look in my scrapbook. Maybe we'll see something there.”

We paged through the book, studying the photos as we went. At last we found it. The perfect quote. It was from one of the pages I'd taken out of Janie's journal. Marlee wrote it in her best handwriting with little hearts and swirls around the edges. I had to laugh, thinking of how out of context the quote was. Janie had been talking about the start of the soccer season. “Ready or not … here I am! A girl like nobody you've ever seen before!”

The basket was complete. The sky was clear blue. I didn't have to worry about rain, after all.

And my worries about taking the bus? A complete waste of energy. It was as easy as the lady at the bus company had said it would be.

Marlee and I stood in front of 1414 Baer Avenue, a small green house with white shutters. My heart pounded so loudly, we probably didn't need to ring the doorbell. But we did, and a second later the door opened.

I held the basket out in front of me, but all of a sudden I couldn't speak. The lady who answered the door must have been Renee's daughter. She seemed to be the right age, and she held a tiny baby in her arms.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Uh … uh…” I stammered.

“Delivery. From Julia's Kitchen!” Marlee said.

“Mom!” Renee's daughter called into the house. “Do you know about a delivery from Julia's Kitchen?”

I couldn't take my eyes off the baby. Little wisps of blond hair framed her pudgy face, and her eyes were steel blue-gray. She looked so content in her mom's arms. So cuddly and sweet. I thought about God. He must have helped create her. I realized that's another thing he does—he helps make babies.

Just then Renee walked up to the door, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She had a huge smile on her face, and she opened the door wider, saying, “Come in, come in. Let me see that basket.”

Renee took the basket from me, and we stepped into the foyer. “Mmm, mmm. They smell delicious,” she said.

Renee and her daughter looked into the basket.

“Oh, look at those cute cookies with your name on them,” the daughter cooed to Julia. “Mom, did you order this? How sweet.”

Renee smiled even wider.

Looking at the three of them together—Renee, her daughter, and the baby, Julia—reminded me of a fairy-tale storybook. I felt an ache in my heart. I missed Mom and Janie. I would always miss them.

Renee handed Marlee two twenty-dollar bills and said to both of us, “Thank you so much for delivering the basket. You can keep the change. And please tell Julia it looks great.”

How I wished I could do exactly that. “Thanks,” I said. “We will.”

I didn't say much on the bus ride home. I felt let down after all the excitement. I thought about Mom and Janie. Marlee tried to talk about what we could do with the forty dollars. She wanted to spend it on music and scrapbook supplies. I couldn't even think about spending the money yet.

Marlee got off the bus close to her home, and I got off near mine. As I opened the door to the apartment, I heard the phone ringing. I figured it was Marlee, calling to make sure I was okay.

“Hello?” I said.

“Hello?” said a voice I didn't recognize. “Is this Julia's Kitchen?”

I took in a sharp breath.

“Yes,” I said. “How may I help you?”

eleven

That's how Marlee and I got into the cookie business.

When people called for Julia's Kitchen, I didn't tell them they had the wrong number or that Julia's Kitchen was no longer in business. I took their orders. We delivered a couple of baskets each week, and the orders kept coming.

We told Mrs. Rosen it was easier to do our homework at the apartment, away from Max and his friends. Mrs. Rosen wasn't wild about us spending so much time unsupervised, but Marlee reminded her that we were eleven, going on twelve. Soon we'd be able to baby-sit. We were certainly capable of hanging out by ourselves for a few hours every day.

And we did do our homework. Quickly. Because as soon as we finished it, we baked, or packaged, or delivered baskets for Julia's Kitchen. We made some serious money, too. We took in about $60 a week. After paying for supplies, we split our profits fifty-fifty. Marlee loved counting the money. And she loved spending her share. She bought tons of scrapbook supplies. I saved mine. I didn't want to spend it on just anything. I wanted to use it for something special, something meaningful. I wondered if there was some way the money could honor Mom and Janie's memory. For now I hid it all in Mom's jewelry box.

Dad didn't have a clue what we were up to. I made sure by buying a few super-sized boxes of Popsicles. I threw out the Popsicles and used the empty boxes to store the cookies. Since Dad hated icy treats, I knew the cookies were safe. And I didn't have to worry about Dad picking up a phone call for Julia's Kitchen because he was never home during the day, when those calls came in.

I still wished Dad and I could have a better relationship, but I didn't think about it every day anymore. Nana would call sometimes and tell me how worried she and Papa were about him, and that would remind me of how things were. But then I would look at my bracelet and tell myself this was my journey. This was my path. Dad's spending all his time working or watching TV was simply part of my journey. If his own mother couldn't help, there was nothing I could do about it, just as there was nothing I could do about finding out what had really happened in the fire.

I was coping, and lately I hadn't even had much to say to Mrs. Block in our weekly sessions.

*   *   *

On the first of April, a Thursday, a storm woke me with blasts of thunder. The rain came down in sheets. The sky was dreary gray, lit only by flashes of lightning. It rained like that all day.

After school, Marlee and I raced to my apartment. The wind snapped our umbrellas inside out the minute we walked outside. So we ran and laughed the whole way home, getting soaked. When we reached the building, we looked as if we'd been swimming in our clothes. We were completely drenched, and I, for one, was frozen.

I stood under a small overhang by the front door, looking for my key, while Marlee danced in the rain, her arms raised and her mouth open in a wide grin. “I'm singin' in the rain,” she sang, splashing in the puddles.

“You're crazy!” I said. I finally found my key in the bottom of my backpack, but my hands were shaking and slippery from the cold rain, and I dropped the key in a puddle. Just as I reached down to get it, I noticed a cat, shivering next to the wall.

It was him! The Sport look-alike. The one I thought I'd imagined all those weeks ago.

“Marlee, look!”

Marlee stopped her song-and-dance routine and saw where I pointed. “Oh! The poor thing,” she said, leaning down to pet him.

“Don't scare him away,” I said. But already I could see the cat wasn't going anywhere. He nuzzled his head into Marlee's hands. I opened the door as fast as I could, and Marlee picked the cat up and brought him into the warm safety of the apartment building lobby.

“That's the cat I told you about. Remember?” I couldn't believe he was real. And right here! As if he'd been waiting for me.

“The one that cried outside your door?”

I nodded and moved closer to pet the cat. He purred softly in Marlee's arms. I rubbed under his chin, and he stretched his neck up, loving my touch.

“I wonder where he's been,” Marlee said. “He doesn't have a collar.”

“I don't know, but he's mine now. I'm adopting him.”

“Really? But what if he belongs to someone?”

“Look at him,” I said. “He's skin and bones. I'm telling you, this is a stray.” I took the cat out of Marlee's arms and held him so I could stare into his eyes. They were pale green with specks of gold. Maybe I'd name him Goldie. Or Rain.

We went up to the apartment and changed our clothes. I tried to dry the cat off with a towel, but he preferred to sit by a warm air vent and lick himself clean. I opened a can of tuna, spooned it into a bowl, and placed it on the kitchen floor along with a dish of water. The cat sauntered over and ate as if he had always lived here.

“Now, don't get used to tuna, little guy,” I said. “Tomorrow I'll get some regular cat food at Snyder's.”

The cat looked up at me and sneezed.

“You should name him Sneezy,” Marlee said.

“I was thinking Goldie or Rain.”

“How about Cookie?”

“Too girly. He's a boy cat,” I said.

“Well, Goldie's kind of girly, too.”

Lightning flashed outside. A second later, thunder crashed, and the cat jumped straight in the air, hair standing on end.

Marlee and I laughed, and at the same moment we both said, “Thunder!”

The cat had a name. He dashed under the sofa and curled up in a ball. Marlee and I lay down on the floor, peeking in at him. He stared back, eyes glowing.

“It's okay, Thunder. It's just a big noise,” I said softly.

Thunder stared at me, blinked twice, then closed his eyes and went to sleep.

“You have a cat,” Marlee said.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling warm all over. “I guess I do.”

Marlee and I spent the rest of the afternoon baking. I wanted to stock the freezer with lots of different cookies so we'd be ready for any order that came in.

At six o'clock, I figured it was just about time to clean up. Marlee was pouring brownie batter into a pan. A batch of peanut-butter cookies was almost ready to come out of the oven. I was washing the bowl that I'd used to mix the cookie dough. And Thunder had repositioned himself on a kitchen chair closer to the heat of the oven.

At that moment, the apartment door opened and Dad walked in.

My heart jumped into my throat.

“Mr. Segal!” Marlee said, running to the archway that separated the kitchen from the rest of the apartment. She spread her arms out wide, trying to prevent Dad from seeing into the kitchen. “What are you doing here?”

I stood at the sink, staring at Dad. There was no way to hide what we were doing. Dad could see and smell everything. Pots and pans. Measuring cups. Flour. Sugar. Baskets lined with cellophane. And the smell. That sweet smell I had been so careful to get rid of every other time we had baked—it wafted through the apartment, giving away all our secrets.

“I live here,” Dad said, answering Marlee's question in a monotone voice. “The bigger question is what are you two doing here?”

I felt trapped and defenseless. Yet, I had to admit, I felt something else, too—relief.

“Oh, that's easy to explain,” Marlee said, talking fast. “You see, there's this big bake sale at school, and not everyone could make something, so Cara and I volunteered, and we got started baking, and—well, it's not like we bake all the time or anything—it's just for this bake sale. You know, we're raising money to save the, uh, rain forest? Yeah, the rain forest, that's what the bake sale is for, and so—”

“Marlee, stop,” I said.

Marlee's mouth hung open. Dad looked at me. I felt Mom inside of me, like an electric current pumping through my veins. I didn't know how Dad would react, but I was ready for anything. I was tired of keeping secrets. And I was tired of not knowing his. I took a deep breath. “Dad, Marlee and I have been keeping Julia's Kitchen alive. That's why we're baking.”

Dad looked stunned, as if he'd been slapped. He walked past Marlee into the kitchen and sat down at the table, his coat still on and dripping wet. Marlee looked from me to my dad and back again.

“How long?” he asked.

“For about five weeks,” I said. I didn't smile, even though I felt like it. I was proud of myself. But I didn't want to push it with Dad. I wasn't sure what he was thinking. I could tell he was trying to figure it all out.

Just then the oven timer buzzed, and I calmly took the cookies out of the oven. I felt Dad's eyes on me the whole time.

Dad must have realized he was still wearing his coat, so he took it off and laid it across another kitchen chair—the one Thunder was sitting on. Thunder hissed and bolted from under Dad's wet coat, dashing for the safety of the sofa. Dad jumped up from his chair in surprise. “What was that?”

Shoot! That was not how I wanted to introduce Thunder to Dad. But maybe Thunder would take his mind off the baking.

“That's … uh … Thunder,” I said. Then, quickly, “Can we keep him?”

Dad looked around the apartment, as if making sure he had entered the right unit. Then he shook his head, cleared his throat, and said in a calm and sure voice, “No, we can't keep him.”