The Summer Kitchen (11 page)

“Ook?” Squirt was standing there watching me with my book in her hand. She held it up against her face and peeped over it, looking worried.

“All right.” I wiped my cheeks on the way to the sofa, and we sat down to read. It was halfway through the morning before the lady next door put the kids out, and they started making a racket. I figured as long as they were making all that noise, Squirt and me might as well head on down to the Book Basket and maybe the Just-a-Buck. On the way back, we could go to the convenience store and get something for lunch with the change from the bottom of the jar. Something cheap.

“Let’s go get a new book.” It went through my mind that Squirt was gonna need clothes, and everything was in a ripped trash bag in my room. With Kiki. Through the crack in the door, I could see her spread out across the bed, her arm bent back like it’d landed that way. That had to be uncomfortable, but she didn’t seem bothered. It was creepy, watching someone so passed out she didn’t even move when I pushed the door open and it squeaked. I’d heard her tell Rusty she was taking some kind of pain medicine for the cracked ribs, and it knocked her out. Flopped out in the bed like that, she looked like the dead bodies on
CSI,
except she was breathing.

I didn’t want to go in there with her, but I needed shoes for Squirt.

I pushed the door some more, then looked at Kiki. She sure didn’t seem worried about what her kid was doing right now. It wasn’t fair that crappy people got to stay around and raise their kids, and good people didn’t, sometimes. I’d wanted to ask Pastor Don about that at Mama’s funeral, but the room was full of people she worked with and stuff. They were all looking at Rusty and me with sad, worried faces and telling us how sorry they were, and whispering behind their hands about what would happen to us now. Then creepy Roger made Rusty take me on home before the room cleared out and I could get to Pastor Don. I wanted to tell him Rusty and me shouldn’t go home with Roger. He acted weird when Mama wasn’t around. He was always rubbing my shoulders with his big nasty hands, and trying to get me to sit by him on the sofa, and watch movies and stuff. I was afraid to be with him in the house.

Since I didn’t get the chance to talk to Pastor Don, I told Rusty on the way home. He said to get my things together, because he’d already made up his mind we weren’t staying there. We left that night when Roger was sound asleep.

The feeling of sneaking past Roger’s bedroom came back when I went in with Kiki. Rusty and me had put all our stuff in trash bags to get ready to leave Roger’s house. It was only in the dark that we realized the trash bags were noisy.

Kiki’s bag made a racket as I dug through it, trying to find Squirt’s other pink sandal. Squirt climbed around on the bed, and Kiki stayed as still as death.

I got your kid up, fed her, read her a book, and watched her all morning.
I didn’t bother to say the words anywhere but in my mind. Kiki wouldn’t hear, anyway.
Now I’m gonna get her dressed and haul her around town with me. Sure, no problem
. I dumped out the bag.
You can pay me later.

From the bottom of the trash bag, a little necklace with letter beads spilled out.
O-P-A . . . something.

“’S mine!” Squirt said, and hopped off the bed. She grabbed the necklace, then closed both hands over it when I tried to look. “My-mine.”

“Ssshhh,” I whispered, because I really didn’t want Kiki to wake up. “I just wanna see the letters. I won’t touch it. I promise.”

Squirt thought about it, rocking back on her heels, blinking at me.

“Come on . . .” I sounded like creepy Roger, trying to get me to go with him for ice cream. Squirt looked like she was thinking what I always thought about him: You can’t trust people who act way too nice for no reason. Finally, she opened her fingers, one by one, just enough so that I could see the beads. O . . . P . . . A . . . L.

“Opal?” I said. “That’s your name? Opal?”

Closing her fingers over the beads again, she nodded and stuck a thumb in her mouth.

“That’s, like, an old lady name,” I said, and she just blinked at me. “All right. I guess you can be Opal.” I went back to looking through the pile. “I sure wish I could find your other shoe, because right now it looks like you’re gonna have to hop to the Book Basket on one foot.

Opal scrambled around the other side of the bed, lifted the covers off the floor, and came up with a tennis shoe that didn’t match the sandal in my hand, but at least it was for the opposite foot. “Tshooo, tshoo!” she cheered.

“Yup, that’s a shoe.” Even if Opal was hard to understand, she understood me real good. I was gonna have to be more careful about what I said around her.

“Come ’ere,” I told her. “Let’s get dressed. You’ll be cool with two different shoes, right?”

Opal made a squeaky sound in her throat, then followed me into the other room, and laid down on the floor, waiting for me to get her dressed. “Stand up, for heaven sakes,” I said. “You’re not a baby. You’re a big girl.”

“Big gul,” she echoed. “Popal big gul.”

“Right. You’re a big girl.” We talked about what a big girl she was while I put her in the cleanest thing I found in her bag—a pink sun-dress that was too big for her, and two pink socks that didn’t match. The shoes were a great finishing touch. One pink sandal, one purple tennis shoe. “Perfect,” I said. “You look like Hannah Montana.”

“Anna banbana!” Opal cheered, swinging her hands until she lost her balance, stumbled sideways, caught my hair, and almost pulled it out.

“Ouch!” I squealed. “Hold still!” I said it louder than I meant to.

Opal stopped moving and stuck her thumb in her mouth, then pulled her chin into her neck and ducked away like she thought I was going to smack her.

“It’s okay.” Was Kiki the reason Opal acted that way? The idea made a shudder go down my back. I was glad Kiki was sound asleep.

“Come on,” I said, then took Opal into the bathroom and fixed her hair into two ponytails, which wasn’t easy because I don’t know anything about black-girl hair, but it was pretty cute when I got done. At least she was dressed and it looked like someone had tried to clean her up.

Opal followed right behind me while I got a little money, my book, and the key to the front door. She grabbed the hem of my shorts, and hung on like she was afraid I was gonna leave her behind, then she choo-choo-trained along behind me out the door.

The parking lot was empty, but I could feel someone watching us. The Mexicans were all gone to work by now, and as far as I could tell sweaty Charlie slept until noon before opening the office, so it was probably the crippled lady. She never came out, except when the Dial-a-Ride showed up for her. Then she’d take it somewhere, and when she came back, she’d go right inside and shut the door. She sat at her window and watched a lot, though.

I stepped back and looked down there, and her curtain moved.

The kids from next door came out near the Dumpster and ran to the other side of the parking lot. They disappeared into the breezeway between the two buildings across from ours, scampering off like little mice looking for a place to hide. I wasn’t sure why at first, but then I heard something hit the Dumpster, ringing it like a big drum before bouncing off the pavement. A basketball. Looked like the gangbangers were skipping school today. Great.

“C’mon, Opal,” I said, then opened the door and pushed her back inside. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of those stupid gangster wannabes, but I was worried they’d scare Opal. “We’ll go in a minute,” I told her, and locked the door to wait.

Chapter 7

SandraKaye

As I exited the interstate near Poppy’s house, I turned the car radio on. “Another clear day ahead,” Jim, from
Metro Morning with James and Jim,
predicted. “The unseasonable cool spell continues, with a high of eighty-one, then cooling toward evening as a weak storm front pushes into the metro area, bringing lower temperatures overnight, but only a slight chance of rain.”

“That’s good news for the freegans conventioning in town,” James remarked. “You catch that on the news, Jim? If you sign up, you get a free demo.”

James chuckled, lowering his tone like a voice-over announcer. “
Dumpster Diving for Fun and Profit,
” he joked. “Considering what they pay us here, it might be a good idea.”

“Ever wonder who caters the food for a freegan convention?”

“I don’t know, James, but—”

I turned off the radio before James and Jim could illuminate the details of professional Dumpster diving. Holly had already clued me in well enough.
They go hunt for food in Dumpsters . . . to see what they can discover that’s still consumable . . . yuck!

They hunt for food in Dumpsters. . . .

Hunt for food . . .

I passed the apartment complex with the crumbling white stucco walls, looked over, watched the Dumpster go by, but the vision stayed with me. I pictured the children climbing among the broken bottles and Wal-Mart sacks full of soiled diapers.

They weren’t playing. . . .

The image was clear now—the little girl holding a wad of foil, the boy turning over a Hostess Cup Cakes box. . . .

They were looking for food.

My stomach roiled as I neared the little white church across from Red Bird Lane. It sat quiet and pastoral in the shade of a towering oak tree, a place out of keeping with the rundown buildings up and down the street. When I was little, I’d attended a neighborhood potluck there with Poppy and Aunt Ruth. There were tables full of casseroles, salads, and desserts. Was it possible that, now, just down the road, children were looking for food in trash cans?

In Poppy’s driveway, I sat with the question circling in my mind. I could call the police, or CPS—someone official to check on the kids, see what was going on, get help and services for the family if needed. . . .

There were organizations set up to handle situations like this—Meals on Wheels, food pantries, summer lunch programs. . . .

Weren’t there?

If I called someone, how long would it be before action was taken? Tomorrow? The next day?

What if nothing came of it? The headlines were full of stories of kids who slipped through the cracks of an overburdened, underfunded social services system, kids who were living in desperate, dangerous situations.

I sat with my fingers on the car keys, thinking of the groceries in the back.

You can’t just wheel in there and start handing out food to someone else’s kids, Sandra. Kids should be taught not to take food from strangers, for one thing.

Just call someone . . .

That’s why cities have social services. . . .

But even as I tried to convince myself, I knew that if it were as simple as making a phone call, someone would have done it already. Those kids were hungry today, and they had been yesterday, and any number of days before that.

I took the groceries into the house, let Bobo into the backyard, laid out some clean newspaper in the kitchen, and started making sandwiches.

This is crazy
.
You can’t just go down there. . . .

But I kept making sandwiches. I couldn’t help thinking of the story the nuns had told us about Jake wandering alone in the marketplace, just three years old. He’d come so close to disaster. If someone, a stranger, hadn’t intervened, there was no telling what would have happened to him. If passersby had minded their own business that day, if everyone had looked the other way, he could have ended up in the hands of dangerous people and been sold into a life so terrible I couldn’t bear to imagine it. When he was brought to the nuns, he was so hungry he would have gone with anyone who would give him food.

Those children down the street
were
Jake. Different country, different faces, but they could have been my son, all those years ago. If I didn’t have the courage to help now, I didn’t deserve Jake at all—I didn’t deserve to have him home, ever.

I finished the sandwiches and put them in the car before I could try once again to talk sense into myself. I considered bringing Bobo for moral support, but he was covered in wet dirt from nose to tail. “All right, buddy,” I said, before heading out the yard gate. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes, call out the National Guard.”

Bobo barked and went back to digging in the dirt.

On the way to the apartment complex, I engaged in an ongoing mental dialogue about the wisdom of what I was doing. No telling what sort of people lived in a place like that. Hadn’t the woman I’d driven home from Wal-Mart confessed that she was afraid to step out her front door? Hadn’t Holly and I decided that the strip mall across the street looked like a place where all sorts of unsavory activities might go on?

It’s just a bag of sandwiches, Sandra. You’re not moving in. You’re just dropping off some sandwiches. It won’t take long.

What could possibly go wrong?

I thought of Poppy, of what had come of a simple trip to the store. A lot of things could go wrong. Life could change when you least expected it—the minute you let your guard down, made some seemingly harmless decision.

Maybe you were meant to see the kids in the Dumpster. Maybe all of this is happening for a reason.

It was an odd thought, a paradox in a voice that seemed to come from some boldly determined part of me I didn’t even recognize. The voice of my mother arose to beat it down.
Who do you think you are, Mother Teresa? If there were a grand plan here, why would anyone choose you, of all people?

I pushed her out of my head as I drove into the apartment complex. The area around the Dumpster was deserted, as was the parking lot. With the car idling, I tried to decide what to do next. There was no sign of the children, no way to know where they might be.
I could leave the sandwiches by the Dumpster. They’ll find them, if they come looking.

This whole thing was a stupid idea.