Chapter 8 Dinah
Dinah
The smell of the morgue still hangs from my hair when I walk into the middle of a standoff in my mother’s kitchen. It’s Isabel’s birthday, and I know if I look in the fridge, there will be a three-layer carrot cake, because that’s Izzy’s favorite.
I set my gift, an iPhone rapid charger wrapped in metallic-blue paper with a white bow, on the counter next to a red gift bag that is definitely from Marci, who is too stingy to use more than one piece of tissue paper in a bag.
I glance inside it. A book. A horrible gift for my dyslexic sister, even though Izzy will gush over it.
“I’m telling you that something’s off.” My brother, Sal, stands in the middle of the black-and-white-checkered tile, both hands on his hips, shoulders knotted back like he has a broomstick stuck through his elbows. “What is it? What aren’t you telling us?”
My mother’s house is a split-level ranch that was built in the ’70s by our father, which means there isn’t a single plumb line or outlet that doesn’t occasionally spark.
I ease around Sal to steal a fried drumstick off the pan on the stove.
The theft earns a slap on my arm from our mother, who quickly follows up the action with a kiss on my cheek.
“Ma, you’re not getting away with this.” Sal gives me a one-armed hug while glaring at our mother.
“Oh, shush, you’re paranoid!” She brushes him off with a wave of her hand and squeezes through the gap between the pantry door and the left end of the counter.
I watch her waddle toward the long dining table, and I try not to focus on her weight, which is getting worse each year.
The obesity, paired with her refusal to take her blood pressure medication, is why she’s been to the ER twice this year.
It’s a stress point in our already strained relationship, so I’ve stopped asking her about it.
“I’m not paranoid,” Sal seethes. “Dinah, help me out with this. You can tell when someone’s lying. You got that detective’s intuition.”
“It’s true,” Marci says, my sister’s stick-thin body perched on the stool beside her brother, her forearms on the pale-yellow countertop. “Dani can always sniff out a lie.”
Our eyes meet across the kitchen, and I know the statement isn’t about the past, but it still feels like it is.
“You’re calling your mother a liar? That’s what my life has come down to? Forty-two years of raising you, and you call me a liar.” Mom yanks the dish towel off the wall hook in disgust.
She’s definitely lying. Sal’s right about my intuition. I can spot deception at a hundred yards.
“He isn’t calling you a liar.” Izzy, who tenses at the mere idea of conflict despite being raised in a hot vat of it, pulls out a chair at the dining room table. I roll my eyes at her predictable support and catch Sal doing the same.
“Oh, bullshit,” Sal insists. “Iz, don’t let her play this ‘woe is me’ routine. That’s a woman chest-deep in deceit. She thought she could sneak it past us, lie straight to our faces, and we wouldn’t notice.”
“They’re chocolate chip cookies, Sal.” Mom sniffs. “The same ones I’ve been making for thirty years.”
I spot the cooling rack and take one of the crispier cookies, noticing that Sal hasn’t let his suspicions stop him from eating at least six of them.
“They’re tiny, flat pancakes of lies,” he says, pointing to the pan of cookies as if it is a defendant in one of his jury trials.
I bite into the cookie and lean against the counter, my gaze connecting with Eric, Marci’s husband, who hovers on the edge of the kitchen.
You’d never know that he had been a soccer star in high school.
That muscular, athletic build is now hidden beneath an extra forty pounds and a receding hairline.
I look away and realize Sal’s right. There’s something off about the taste.
I bet it’s nutmeg, an ingredient Mom’s tried to sneak into her baking with increasing frequency despite our family’s abhorrence to any sort of change in the status quo.
Steven could go to jail, Izzy could be an alcoholic, I could be childless—but if the fucking tomato paste she uses in her spaghetti switches, our family implodes.
“Then don’t eat them,” Mom huffs, and when she collapses into the seat next to Izzy, the corners of her mouth tweak in a tiny smile. She knows damn well Sal will eat them. We all will.
That’s the thing about her cookies. They are like Joe: imperfect in many ways but still irresistible.
My phone buzzes against my hip. I pull it out of the clip and open the text, which is from an unrecognized number.
It’s Freddie. Got a copy of the autopsy results. Can we talk?