Legacy (5 page)

Totally intimidated, I tried to focus on the sandwich. What did I love about it, I asked myself. It was good bread, okay. And I liked celery, although I couldn’t honestly say I
loved
it. I suppose a tuna somewhere had given its life for this sandwich, and I knew a few vegans who could work up tears over that, but still . . .

“No, no, no!” She snatched the plate out of my hands and propelled me toward the swinging doors leading to the dining room. “Come with me.”

At 3:30 in the afternoon, the place was still pretty empty. The old man I’d seen during my first visit here was sitting at a corner table across from his dog, who seemed to be communicating with a series of grunts, growls, and some occasional muffled barking. They both appeared to be
having a good time, absolutely engrossed in whatever strange conversation they were sharing.

“That’s Mr. Haversall and Dingo. They come in every day now,” Hattie said. “But
this
is your customer.” She led me to a sour-looking man wearing glasses and a pinstripe suit.

“It’s about time,” he said. He took one look at the sandwich I’d made, and threw down his napkin. “Oh,
please
,” he moaned. “You’ve got to be kidding. A
sandwich
? What sort of scam are you running here? I suppose you’re going to charge me as much for that . . . that
snack
as you would for a steak.”

“That’s right, sir,” Hattie said pleasantly.

“Well, I’m not going to eat it.”

I looked over at her, appalled. She gave me a wink. “That would be up to you, sir.”

“Well. I
never
!” He made a move to stand up, but Hattie stopped him.

“Just hold up one second, before you go,” she said. “Katy, take his hand.”

“
What?
” the customer and I both shouted at the same time.

“Just do it.”

His hand was slippery and wet and clammy, just the way I thought it would be. Gross. Out of sheer obnoxiousness I clamped down on it until he gave up with a disgusted
tsk
and a flutter of pale eyelashes. Hattie was doing the same thing to his other hand, I noticed.

“Isn’t this special,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

“Do it now, Katy,” Hattie said. “Love.”

Love? Yuck. I didn’t want to give love to this cretin. I didn’t want to give him jack.

“Do it. Clear your mind.”

“Just how long is this session going to take?” the man demanded. “I’d like to include it in the police report.”

“Oh, brother,” I breathed.

“Katy!”

“Okay, okay,” I relented. What a stupid job this was turning out to be. “Love, huh?” I took a deep breath.

“Any day now,” the man sneered.

I cleared his voice from my mind, along with everything else—the noise in the restaurant, the words I was thinking, even the feelings that were passing through my mind like scarves floating on the wind. Then into this emptiness I envisioned a big red heart that burst open, filling the space with flowers.

Okay, hearts and flowers, I know this was all very corny, but it was the best I could do on the spur of the moment. Anyway, after that I zeroed in on the heart. It was hollow now, showing scenes from the man’s life. I watched him being beaten by some impossibly huge man—I guessed it was how whoever-it-was had looked to him when he was small. I saw a young woman laughing at him and pointing at him as if he were a freak. In fact, the word
FREAK
popped up and bounced around inside the heart like a screen saver. In the next scene, an old sick woman turned her back on him as he tried to put his arms around her. I saw the woman dying, and this man burying his face in his hands, alone in an empty room.

“Oh,” I whispered. I was beginning to understand.

And then it happened: My own heart sort of
shivered
, and then it opened up, too, like a flower, and something shiny and warm poured out of it into his.

“You should have had this a long time ago,” I said, before I even knew I’d spoken.

The man’s hands were cold and trembling. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, but the harsh words didn’t fit his voice, which cracked with uncertainty. He cleared his throat. “Well, I suppose a sandwich wouldn’t hurt. You’ve taken up so much of my time that I’m really . . .” He looked at me with eyes that were filled with sorrow, a dam that had burst. “. . . hungry . . .”

“Take it,” I said. “It’s what you need.”

A slow smile spread across Hattie’s face. “We’ll leave you to your lunch now,” she said, and we all let go of each other’s hands.

We were almost back in the kitchen when Hattie poked me in the ribs with her elbow. “Good girl!” she rumbled.

“Wow.” I shook my head. “I don’t know where that came from.”

“No?” Her eyes slid sideways toward me.

“Is that what you put in
my
tuna sandwich?”

She laughed. “Oh, no. You needed something different. Very different.”

We both pushed open the swinging doors with our hips at the same time. Hattie moved on; I didn’t. The door swung back, nearly knocking me over.

He
was there, in the kitchen, standing in front of me with a crate of lettuce in his hands.

Satan.

Well, almost. Peter Shaw. Actually, he didn’t look exactly malevolent, only surprised. Maybe as surprised as I was.

“Oh, Peter,” Hattie said breezily. “This is our new helper, Katy.”

“Kaaaay,”
crooned a voice from behind him. It was a child, maybe ten or eleven years old, sitting in what looked like an oversized high chair.

Something was wrong with him. His head lolled to one side. His eyes were crossed. His mouth hung open, and a line of drool ran down the side of his chin in a rough red gully. There were a few broken crayons on the tray in front of him, and a piece of paper with a drawing on it.

“
Kaaaay
,” he repeated, thrusting the drawing toward me.

Hattie dabbed at the drool with a tissue and put her arm around him. “That’s right, honey,” she said, giving the boy a kiss on the top of his head “This is Katy, our new friend. Katy, this is Peter’s brother, Eric. He lives here.”

At the sound of his name, the boy kicked his legs and clapped his hands together. The drawing fell on the floor. I picked it up. And gasped.

It was a drawing of birds flying over a lake, and might have been drawn by Michelangelo. The water shimmered. The crayon-colored sky looked so real that I could almost feel the wind moving. The birds themselves were magnificent, each tiny creature muscled and feathered, each sparkling, living eye minutely different from all the others.

“This is unbeliev—” I began, but Eric was twisting around in his chair, shrieking and kicking furiously.

Peter grabbed the drawing out of my hands and smoothed it out in front of his brother. “Leave him alone,” he said.

I backed away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that he’s so . . .”

“Brain damaged?” Peter spat. “But then, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”

“I . . . I . . .” I didn’t know what to say.

“Hush, Peter,” Hattie interrupted. “She doesn’t know any such thing. Katy, dear, you go cut six tomatoes into slices, and take out some basil. I’ll show you what to do with it in a minute.”

I scurried away to the large walk-in fridge, stealing glances at Eric and Peter from behind my shoulder.

“Why
her
?” I heard Peter ask as I retreated.

Hattie didn’t answer him.

By the last week in October I was an old hand in Hattie’s Kitchen, part of a three-person crew including Hattie, myself, and my new buddy Peter Shaw. Unlikely as it was, Peter and I managed to stay out of each other’s way as we knocked ourselves out to prepare for the annual community Halloween party. Apparently it was an old tradition in Whitfield, as well as the anniversary of the opening of Hattie’s, so Halloween was a big deal all around. We spent the week before cooking and freezing enough food for at least two hundred people, and that didn’t even count the salads and fruit and sauces and desserts that would have to be made fresh. Since there were only sixteen tables in the dining room, I had no idea how we were going to accommodate everyone.

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Hattie said, laughing. “There will be plenty of room, you’ll see.”

I didn’t know how that would be possible, but I’d learned not to doubt anything Hattie said.

It hadn’t taken long for me to get used to my job. Every day there’d be a new recipe for me to try, usually with some weird component as part of the mix: An antique silver spoon, a handful of rose petals, the branch of a willow tree, a string of glass beads. Even the music she played, I discovered, went into the food. Once Hattie had me cry real tears into a pot of bean soup. That wasn’t easy. I don’t like to cry. Still, for the sake of the menu, I worked up a few drops.

Also, she was always making me think or concentrate on some emotion or other. “Pick it out of the air,” she’d say, as if things like curiosity and courage were just floating on the breeze, waiting to be snatched up and then tossed into a salad like slices of cucumber.

Everything we did in the kitchen seemed to be infused with some sort of strange spirituality. Strange, but good. Nobody ever left Hattie’s kitchen feeling sad or mean or wishing they’d never been born.

Not even me.

So I just went along and did whatever she told me. If Hattie wanted a custard full of perseverance, I gave it to her.

Besides, most of these “spells”—that’s what I called them, anyway—were variations on the love bomb I’d given the cranky man in his tuna. Crazy as it seemed, love was becoming my specialty.

Sometimes I wondered if what I was doing really was as magical as it seemed. I mean, I wasn’t chanting incantations or burning toads’ tongues, but I could actually
feel
the love I was putting into that food.

Or I thought I could feel it.

I asked Hattie about it once, if what we did had anything to do with magic.

“There is magic in everything,” she said in her low, warm voice. “You just have to be able to see it. And to see it, you must first believe that you will see it.”

Getting ready for the Halloween party was so hectic that I hardly had enough time to read my emails or to do any of the other solitary things that my life used to revolve around. It was as if suddenly my whole world got
bigger.
But it was even more than that: It was as if all my senses were becoming heightened. I could smell the fall air in the food I cooked. I could touch the living heart of a pumpkin or a butternut squash. I could taste the very stars in a sprig of carrot tops. I could hear the song of the sea in the oysters that Peter and I shucked open by the hundreds.

We had arrived at an uneasy but workable truce. That wasn’t hard, really, since most of what he did was on the outside—pulling up weeds and rotting stalks from the herb garden, driving Hattie’s truck to the docks for seafood, bringing in crates of produce from the market, hauling out the garbage. On the occasions when we’d have to work together, we were usually too busy to do much talking, anyway.

And Eric was always there, drawing those fabulous pictures with his crayon stubs on the backs of paper placemats. I’d never met a sweeter kid in my life. He was irresistible. Every time he held out his little stick-arms to me and yelled “Kaaaay!” I melted. I think I got more hugs from him during our first week together than I’d had in my entire life up till then.

And every time was a weird, unique, and wonderful experience. Eric was all elbows and ribs and flailing head. Whenever I’d go near him, he’d get all excited and kick out his skinny legs, usually connecting painfully with some part of my anatomy, while at the same time grabbing me anywhere he could—my hair was a popular spot—and then crush me to him like his favorite teddy bear.

No one had ever held me like that, as if my being with him were simply the greatest pleasure he could imagine. Or maybe I was just projecting.

At first Peter made a big deal about my not going near his brother, but Eric just insisted on bringing me into their circle, and in time Peter backed off a little. It was a strange quartet, Hattie and Eric and Peter and me. Strange, like everything else in Whitfield.

Halloween didn’t start out auspiciously. Eric was sick, so Hattie had to divide her time between his room upstairs and the kitchen which, even at ten in the morning, was a complete nuthouse.

“Of course this would happen on the biggest night of the
year
,” Hattie muttered as she carried a stack of pie crusts to the side counter. “Katy, we’ll need ten pumpkin, four French silk chocolate, two lemon meringues, and two banana creams. Peter, you start on the vegetables. There’s a list on the table. I’ll get the bread into the oven.”

In place of the usual music, all I heard was the clattering of pans as I gathered the ingredients I needed for the pie fillings.

“I need a roll of parchment!” Hattie cried.

“Coming up.” I dropped what I was doing and dragged a
stepladder over to the cabinets. Above the canned goods were dozens of industrial-size rolls of foil and plastic wrap, plus smaller oblongs of wax paper, storage bags of various sizes, take-out boxes, doggie bags, and a variety of liquid containers with lids. “We’re in luck,” I said, spotting the one remaining roll of parchment. “Hey, what’s this?”

There was something behind it, stuck in the corner. From my vantage point on the stepladder it resembled a flattened tree, but when I pulled it out I saw that it was a wall hanging of some kind, with a frayed leather cord that had been snapped in two.

Under the dust and grime I could tell it was really a beautiful thing, a miniature garden trellis filled with climbing dried wildflowers. Along the bottom were some tiny pumpkins flanking a wooden sign with “Hattie’s Kitchen” painted on it.

“Look at this,” I said, scrambling down with it in my hands. “It’ll be perfect for tonight. We’d just have to fix the—”

I don’t know what I said after that. I felt a rush in my head as if everything was speeding up and slowing down at the same time. When I looked back down I was still holding the wall hanging, but it was perfect. No dust. No dirt. I touched it and turned it over, examining it on all sides. It looked brand new.
But how?