Leftovers (7 page)

“Do we have any cookie cutters?” I ask.

Victoria stops in her tracks, jogs across the kitchen and pulls open a cupboard full of all sorts of dusty kitchen junk. She rummages around a bit, finally extracting two cookie cutters: a Christmas tree and a snowflake. “‘Tis not exactly the season,” she says, handing them to me anyway.

“They'll do,” I reply, switching the oven on to preheat and pulling out several cookie sheets from the drawer underneath.

“Those aren't chocolate chips,” Victoria says, sidling up to me and peering over my shoulder at the dough. “They're
green
. Is that a—”

“It's a pea.” Now run off, would you? Next to being ogled myself, I hate having what I'm doing ogled.

Victoria's nose wrinkles. “Mmm...interesting. Does this recipe have a name?”

“Mmm...Judy's...Doggie Delights?”

“Gotcha,” she laughs, and with a spin, a wave and a swoosh of her red ponytail, Victoria's out the door. (The rest of us humans may have descended from primates, but Victoria and Sullivan descended from Tasmanian devils.

An hour later, forty-eight trees and fifty-six snowflakes are cooling on the counter. They are crispy but not burned; crunchy, just the way Dr. Fred says a good dog treat should be. He's totally into plaque busting.

Brant saunters in on break from his dog chores, grabs a bottle of water from the fridge and—

“Brant! Don't!”

Too late. He pops a snowflake into his mouth.

“Bleckkkkk! Ewwww! Ickkkkk!” A horror movie plays out across his face.

I laugh. I've been doing that more and more lately— laughing. I feel so surprised when it happens, embarrassed almost, like I've let out a loud unexpected fart.

“Sarah-ha-ha, you forgot to add the sugar,” Brant tells me.

“No, I didn't.”

Sucker for punishment, he bites into another cookie, a Christmas tree this time. He pulls the remainder of the cookie away from his mouth and squints at it. “Is that...a carrot? And what's this other chunk?
A green bean
? You made
vegetable
cookies?”

“I didn't make them for you.”

“Did I hear someone say...cookies?” Nicholas hurries through the kitchen door, wiping dirty ribbons of sweat from his face with the hem of his T-shirt. Sniffing the air like a hungry bear, he reaches over my shoulder and snatches a Christmas tree from the tray. He takes a bite. “Mmmph...not bad, Sarah. But...well...” He sucks crumbs
off his top teeth. “Not very good either.” But he swallows the cookie anyway and stuffs three more in his pocket for later.

Brant tosses what's left of his snowflake out the screen door to Judy. From the kitchen window, I watch Judy drop the rawhide, sniff the cookie tentatively, then suck it up like a turbocharged Shop-Vac.

Amen.

Nicholas and Brant leave to get back to their dog duties, muttering as they stomp down the porch stairs about how they hope I get back to making banana bread and apple crisp soon.

When they've wandered back to the dog barn, I prop open the kitchen door and step out of the heat of the kitchen onto the shady porch. I close my eyes and turn my face up into the stiff river breeze that blew this morn-ing's smog downriver. Fresh air flows through my hair and down my neck. It may be the only moment of quiet, and the closest thing to a shower, I'll have time for today.

My break has lasted all of fifteen seconds when a cold nose nudges my hand. I open my eyes and peer down at Judy. Stringy beige remains of the rawhide chew are stuck to her neck and front paws. Snowflake cookie crumbs are stuck to her nose. I untie her from the porch railing. “I knew you'd like my cookies,” I tell her, giving her ears a good scratch.

Judy barks and shoves past me into the kitchen where she knows by smell that there are more snowflakes. Risking being trampled to death, I lunge in front of Judy and grab a
snowflake cookie off the tray before she can jump up onto the counter to help herself.

“Judy! Sit!” I yell, trying to sound like what the books call “enthusiastic and authoritative.”

Judy sits. The sound of her big butt plunking onto the kitchen tile is like...music. (Percussion, but music nevertheless.)

I give Judy the cookie. She gobbles it up and immediately tries to leap up on the counter for another.

I block her again, bracing myself for the thud and subsequent bruising as Judy hip-checks me into the counter. “Judy, sit,” I command.

Judy sits.

I give her a cookie.

Judy sits again. This time without a command.

I give her another cookie and throw my arms around her hairy bulk. Over Judy's smelly shoulder —what the hell has the rotten mutt been rolling in now?—I see Dr. Fred standing in the kitchen doorway, grinning from ear to ear. He applauds as if Judy and I are rock stars.

“Victoria ran into me—literally,” he explains. “She told me you were baking,” he adds, giving me a thumbs-up. “Good work.”

Hot with embarrassment, I mumble thanks and turn my back on Judy just long enough to put a half-used carton of eggs back in the fridge.

Bad move.

In the five seconds it takes for me to shove the carton in and slam the fridge door, Judy has lunged up on the
counter and scarfed down at least another dozen cookies from the tray on the counter. Dr. Fred just stands there busting a gut laughing. In response, Judy gives Dr. Fred and me a “joke's on you” flick of her tail as she bounds out the unlatched screen door, down the porch stairs and onto the field, her back end dancing across the island in cookie-induced euphoria.

Okay, so Judy's not a one-session wonder dog. But at least I know she isn't stupid either. Judy has issues, but she also has...potential.

It's food for thought.

Late the next afternoon I am back in the kitchen, this time making dinner. Chicken fajitas with homemade salsa.

Down the hall in his office, Dr. Fred is whistling “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” as he tabulates the week's food receipts.

He and Nicholas have just returned from the weekly grocery run. I sent them over to town two hours ago with a three-page shopping list. (A list pared down, I might add, from my original nine-page “wish list.” Victoria told me that I needed to keep my menus within the Camp Dog Gone Fun food budget and the limited selection at the local No Frills. I'm not sure how many ground beef and macaroni miracles I can perform in one summer, but I'll give it a shot.)

Nicholas is in the kitchen too, tossing bags of apples and pears into the crisper and glowing with pride. Dr. Fred, the optimist, believes it's because Nicky resisted shoplifting during his so-called adult-supervised outing.

Ha.

“Look what I stole,” Nicholas whispers to me. He reaches a hand down the back of his baggy jeans and extracts roughly fifteen packs of Trident gum from the waistband of his underwear. “Maybe I can keep off the weight I've lost here at camp.” (Nicholas always says “at camp,” like Camp Dog Gone Fun is a flipping Boy Scouts retreat or something and he'll go back to his grandmother at the end of the summer with a Dog Grooming badge or a carved wooden key chain in the shape of a bone.) “Brant said if I start lifting weights too, that I'll really be able to
wow the hot babes
when I start high school this fall.”

Brant's advice isn't worth two steaming Chihuahua turds. “You won't wow
any
babes if you end up in jail,” I tell him.

Taylor traipses into the kitchen and reaches over Nicky's head for a bottle of water. “Not unless your idea of a hot babe is a hairy, tattooed, drug-addicted ax murderer named Bubba,” she says, chugging down her water quickly and wiping her chin with her wrist.

“They don't put you in jail for stealing gum,” Nicky sneers.

“They will if you keep getting caught,” Taylor tells him.

“Or if you start filling your Fruit of the Looms with iPods and jewelry,” I add.

Nicholas reaches into the crisper and pelts a red grape at my head. “Well, Miss Mario Andretti, at least I never stole a car!”

“Fuck off, Nicky,” I say, but I can't help laughing and whipping the grape back at him. He ducks, catching it in his mouth.

“Ten points for Captain Underpants!” he shouts. “Hey, Sarah, did you know that if you write your name backwards, it spells
harass
?”

“You won any spelling bees lately, Nicky?” Taylor laughs, chucking her water bottle into the recycling bin and heading back outside.

“You want a stick?” Nicholas asks me, holding out two open packs of gum. “You like spearmint or cinnamon?”

I take one of each. What the hey.

Nicholas finally goes to hide his stash in his cabin, and I enjoy about thirty seconds filled only with the sizzle of chicken strips browning in a pan before Sullivan crashes through the kitchen door, his big feet bare. I glance out the kitchen window and spot his red-and-green-plaid high-tops strewn on the field. “Stepped in dog you-know-what. Be back in a flash.” He makes a beeline through the kitchen to the rec room and then pounds upstairs to his room.

He's back in less than a minute, wearing enormous black flip-flops that look like scuba flippers. He leans against the dishwasher, watching me chop onions and mushrooms and peppers.

“Don't slice off your fingers,” he warns. “It's a fact that lefties like you, Sarah, are fifty-four percent more likely than right-handers to have accidents with tools.”

“Where do you come up with this stuff?” I ask.

“Oprah did a show on left-handedness one day when I was off sick from school. She's a leftie too.”

“So was Jack the Ripper,” I say, giving the chicken strips a toss in the pan.

“You look like Martha Stewart,” Sullivan remarks.

I reach around Sullivan for the garlic press. “Martha got sent to
real
jail.”

Sullivan's ears turn the color of the red peppers on the cutting board. “No, no. That's not what I meant. You look like...who's that other woman...the one with the funny accent...she used to be on
TV
too...Julia Child?”

“She's dead.”

“Sorry, I mean—”

“And she was
old
. And
fat
.”

“I just
mean
...you look like a real chef.”

“Genetic mutation,” I say, cringing at the compliment. Not everyone in Riverwood knew my father,
the
Ian Greene of Sarah's Bistro, but still, his “unfortunate” demise was written up in all the regional newspapers. Local tragedy, blah, blah, blah.

Sullivan smacks the side of his head. “Right. Your dad owned that restaurant up in the city. By the way, sorry about what happened...you know...to him.”

“Don't be,” I say, blinking hard. I mean it—and then some. But the damn onions are making my eyes water. I sure hope that Sullivan doesn't think I'm crying over my father.

Like
that
would ever happen.

Here's something you should know: if my father hadn't given me one huge, skin-crawling reason to hate his guts for all eternity, there were a million small reasons why I loved him.