Pinch of Love (9781101558638) (5 page)

“My dad drops me off at school before he goes to work,” she says. “He works for lawyers. He's going to be a lawyer someday, too, when he's all done with lawyer school. That's where he goes at night. And on Saturdays.” She scratches at the windowsill and loosens a stuck acorn cap, which falls and lands in the yard without a sound.

“Hey. Want to know why I was baking yesterday?” I ask.

“Cuz baking is awesome?”

“Come on down here and I'll show you.”

Ahab follows me as I retrieve
Meals in a Cinch with Polly Pinch
from the little powder room under the stairs. Back outside, Ingrid waits in her yard. Her backpack looks like it weighs as much as she does. She's dressed for school: tights, Uggs, denim skirt, snorkel coat with electric blue faux fur brimming the hood, and the big red hat. I pass her the magazine over the fence. She regards it at arm's length, as if to confirm it's really hers.

“The mailman put it in the wrong mailbox,” I explain. “Anyway, there's a dessert contest. Check out page forty-eight.”

She studies the pullout page, tracing Polly's face with a finger. “Whoa,” she says. “Snap. Did you read this? The grand prize is that you get to meet her on
Pinch of Love Live.
The new, live version of
Pinch of Love.
”

“And you win twenty thousand dollars,” I say.

“Yeah, but you also get to
meet
her. Polly
Pinch.
”

“Ingrid?” Garrett yells from inside. “Where are you?”

She flashes me a conspiratorial smile. One front tooth is bigger than the other. Instead of stuffing the magazine into her backpack, she chucks it at me. “Keep it. Just for today.”

Somehow I manage to drop it. I grab after its slippery pages, but it flutters and slides down against my coat.

“See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya,” she calls before darting up the steps.

I pick up the magazine, shake it to remove the snow, and find the contest details.

“WHAT DO YOU THINK, Cap'n?” I say. “Twenty thousand dollars. The exact amount Nick mentioned in his e-mail. The exact amount he wanted to raise for the Katrina survivors. It's got to mean something, right?”

Ahab sneezes, trots up the back steps, and whines. I let him inside. “Arr. Yer loony as a chigger in a rum barrel.”

I'm on my way upstairs when, from the second-floor landing, through the nonstained-glass window, I spy Garrett and Ingrid leaving the house. He tosses a long wool dress coat and a briefcase into the passenger side of his pickup. Ingrid climbs into the second row of seats, and he buckles her seat belt. They make a game of kissing: She pretends she doesn't want to be kissed. He acts nonchalant, looking all around, apparently whistling, then swoops in for a kiss. He gets her twice on the forehead and once on the cheek. She giggles and giggles.

He gets in the driver's seat. Behind him Ingrid puts her head down; she's reading a book. Before he backs out his driveway, he adjusts his rearview mirror and looks right at me.

Balls.

I step away from the window, but he waves—a single flick of wrist, just like the other day—so I wave back.

His truck rumbles away, and I know there won't be any distractions for a few hours. So I transport the turntable and the milk crate of Gladys Knight and the Pips albums from the bedroom to my office, not far down the hall. I do not glance—not even once—at Nick's oven present on the floor.

Nick's g.d. present.

I set the turntable on a little chair next to skeletal Hank. Soon Gladys sings about being high on the wings of things and having a song in her heart.

I straddle my saddle stool and tilt my drafting table toward me. The sun shines on it, making it as white as a field of snow. I sketch on fresh paper, reaching every now and then for my eraser and for different pencils, which are organized by color and stored in little bins that slope upward like prayer candles in a church.

I draw for hours, getting up only to change the Gladys albums. At one point I ask Hank to switch the record, and I imagine him behind me, performing the task as agreeably as a butler. But when I turn around he's of course just hanging there, slack jawed.

Just like every other Friday, at quarter past one the mail truck parks in front of my driveway (not in it, of course, because I haven't shoveled). My bell rings—wheezes, really, in the sharp cold.

I let Russ in. He high-fives me with one hand, passes me my mail with the other. Ahab sniffs the envelopes, decides they're nothing special, and curls back up on the couch.

“Anything going out?” Russ asks.

“Not today.”

His face is red and his fingertips are white, and a few minutes pass before he stops shivering. I make a pot of coffee. We split a large toasted tuna-fish grinder with extra cheese, which he brought from Orbit Pizza, and a bag of potato chips.

Russ eats without removing his fingerless gloves. He chews and talks simultaneously, listing every employee of the Wippamunk Post Office. “I like Paddy. Did you know he wears a toupee? Tammy is funny sometimes, but she thinks she's smarter than everybody else. Steve? Can't stand the guy. Never shuts up. Ever. Hey, this is off the subject, but did you know France got a kitten? She wants you to go over and meet it. Thing's cute as hell, but it made me sneeze twenty-two times in a row. France counted. . . .”

I let him do all the talking, as usual; it's easier to listen. I don't mention that it's hard to be around France because she reminds me, in particular, of Nick's last night in Wippamunk, when he went to photograph a gruesome car accident. France was at the accident scene, too, and when Nick got home he told me about the blood and shattered glass reflected in her flashlight beam. I don't like to think about all that.

When Russ finishes eating he unfolds a small bundle of butcher wrap and drops a hunk of roast beef into Ahab's elevated dish. He gallops into the kitchen at the sound and swallows all the meat in about two seconds. “Compliments of the great Greeks at Orbit Pizza,” Russ says. He belches and gets up to leave. “Why do you think dogs dig me so much, Zell?”

“Must be the wifebeater undershirts.”

“I bet you're right.”

I walk him to the door. “Can I ask you something serious?” I say.

He shifts a little and glances out the window. The sunlight catches flecks of yellow in his blue eyes and accentuates his crow's feet. “Hit me,” he says.

“Well, during The Trip, did Nick ever mention a present for me? I mean, a present he was maybe going to give to me when he got back?”

“No, babe. He never mentioned it.” Russ puts a hand on the door. “Are you talking about the present in your oven?”

I nod.

“You mean you haven't opened it yet?”

“I can't.”

“Do you need like a crowbar or something? I can bring one over and pry it—”

“No. I mean, I
can't
open it.”

“Oh.” He looks around the room a bit, avoiding my face. He doesn't know what to say; I can tell.

“Thanks for lunch,” I say.

“You bet. Don't forget to feed Hank.” He cuffs my shoulder like he's my Little League coach.

When he's settled in the mail truck, he calls, “You okay?” just like every Friday. “Right as rain?”

“Right as rain.”

He grins and drives off.

I go back upstairs. I reset Gladys. I draw.

 

 

IN THE AFTERNOON Ingrid rings my doorbell to retrieve
Meals in a Cinch with Polly Pinch.
Garrett waits in the truck.

“So,” she says when I answer. “Come up with anything? For the Desserts That Warm the Soul contest?”

“Not yet. I mean, it's only been twenty-four hours since my last experiment, and—”

Garrett waves Ingrid toward the truck. “Come on, boo-boo,” he says. “Don't make me late for class again.”

“What about dinner?” she calls.

“We're stopping on the way. Let's go. You can read your magazine.”

She rolls her eyes. “I've got to go.”

“Thanks for lending me
Meals in a Cinch,
” I say.

She nods and jumps down the steps, clearing all four.

 

 

BY LATE EVENING the cross section of my healthy artery is an eerie Martian landscape with gum pink walls. In my rendering, a small me could slip headfirst up the darkening arterial tunnel, right into the heart, which floats disembodied in the background. It's not some two-humped cartoon Valentine heart. It looks like a real human heart. Bulbous. Gelatinous. Impossible.

I sign my initials—RCR, for Rose-Ellen Carmichael Roy—in tight dark pencil in the bottom right corner. I spray the paper lightly with fixative and watch as it dries.

 

 

IT'S A DARK TUESDAY AFTERNOON, and I return from the grocery store armed with flour, baking soda, and baking powder.

Baking powder equals baking
power.

Ye Olde Home Ec Witch be g.d.'d. I'll perk up my spirits, and I'll win this contest.

Gladys Knight and the Pips: check. Camouflage apron: check.
Empty
oven preheated: check. Ahab leaning against the legs of a kitchen stool, winking his eye-patch eye: check.

In the big bowl I combine sugar, egg, and vanilla extract. I add butter, a handful of flour, and three envelopes of instant cocoa. I mash a banana and four mini–Milky Way bars left over from Halloween and add those. I sprinkle in some baking soda and baking
power.

Stir, stir, stir. Slap some grease on a baking sheet. Drop heavy dough in haphazard columns. Set timer.

Ye Olde Home Ec Witch would
not
approve. I picture her scowling over her bifocals at me as I take a seat on the floor, close my eyes, and snap my fingers like a Pip. Soon I feel Ahab's chin resting on my head, so I reach up and scratch his neck. I sing along: “Why don't you—make me the woman you go home to—and not the one that's left to cry, and die?”

Grunting, Ahab reclines next to me and drops his head on my thigh. I open a mini–Milky Way, take a bite, and offer the rest to him. Dogs aren't supposed to eat chocolate, but he loves it, and besides, a little won't kill him. He chews lying on his side. He doesn't even bother to lift his head.

The window above the sink frames Mount Wippamunk. As I gaze at it, a Memory Smack wallops me, and I submit, let it sweep me away: high school Nick on the chairlift. He swung his left boot freely over his snowboard and belted “Welcome to the Jungle,” and my back hummed with the vibration of his voice. In the chair behind us, France—six or seven years before she would become Officer Frances—pelted the back of Nick's head with an ice ball she formed from the chunks clinging to her safety bar. “Shut up,
re
-tahd!” she yelled.

Nick turned and grinned his famous wide grin.

I slip into another, more recent ski-themed Memory Smack: Nick and I lounged in the Mount Wippamunk base lodge in front of the wood-burning stove. Our sopping-wet jackets and pants hung from hooks on the wall. Rain slashed the windows. But we didn't care about the foul weather; we got in some good runs.

He sipped steaming cider from a Styrofoam cup. He wore a battered wool sweater—one he had since high school.

“This is the life, right here,” he whispered. His hot hand sank into my hat-head hair. His light brown eyelashes fluttered. His breath was sleepy, whistling waves. “Someday that'll be us,” he said. He gestured with his cup to the wooden
Family of Skiers:
life-size statues of a mother and father, two little kids between them, heading off to the lift line. Their faces suggested that anticipatory thrill of the first run of the season.

“That'll be us,” said Nick. He admired the strange, happy wooden family. “Soon we'll get started on our family. Except we'll have more than two. We'll have enough kids so that our whole family can be one big soccer team.”

“How many would that be?” I asked.

“Nine, plus you and me makes eleven. There are eleven players on an official soccer team.”

“Nine kids?”

“Sure.”

“Yeah. Right.”

The timer dings: real time, real place. Still on the floor, I reach over and open the oven. Zell's Banana Cocoa Milky Way Cookies form one giant gray spongy puff, like the brain of a large mammal. Some brain drips onto the floor of the oven and sizzles.

First my Flourless Peanut Butter Treats nearly burn the house down. Then I create this quavering, inedible lump. I think of Polly Pinch on the cover of
Meals in a Cinch,
those teens gathered around her, happy and unified, as if about to burst into a spontaneous, harmonized version of “Peace Train.” Polly brings the whole world together with a smile and a Bundt cake, that cover seems to say.