Chapter 9 #2
“I wanted to bring something special for everyone, not just ice,” I said.
“And if I go over to one of my sister’s houses, they’ll get involved.
‘Oh, Grace, be careful with that knife when you’re chopping the chocolate.
Here, I’ll do it,’” I said, quoting any of them.
“‘Grace, are you sure that you cooked that long enough? I don’t want to get sick.’ And it was just the one time with the chicken.
No one would get sick from a b?che de Noel unless I did use those mushrooms under the snow next to the barn, which I won’t. Mine are meringue.”
“I don’t know much about cakes, but I’m pretty sure that you need consistent temperatures to bake them. Can you get that with an outdoor oven?”
“Didn’t the pioneers eat cake?” I asked him. I didn’t remember seeing that in a history book, but I hadn’t actually read many of those.
“I would bet that they weren’t trying their workworn hands at a b?che de Noel,” he answered, and I did have to concede that meringue mushrooms were probably not part of the frontier life. “What about going over to your mom’s house to use her kitchen? Does she intervene when you cook?”
“No. She ignores me,” I said. “But she’s making the turkey and she’s insisting on doing it in her own oven instead of at Juliet’s house, even though JuJu’s ovens are brand-new and Mom’s was passed down from my grandparents and takes at least a day to heat up.
She won’t let me touch it because she can’t risk it getting broken.
Everyone I know, everyone with a working kitchen that doesn’t have rats, is busy with holiday stuff themselves and I thought this might work. ”
“But maybe not.”
“Maybe not. You’re right about the temperature, because I would probably end up with a chocolate-colored brick or a pan of goo.
” It would have provided some entertainment for my family but that was all.
“I was thinking that an oven would be fun for you later, too. You could have a party and cook things if it wasn’t snowing. ”
“In the summer,” Theo suggested. “That would be fun. I would invite Regina but she already told me that she doesn’t eat food made outdoors because she’s afraid of contaminants.”
“She could never, ever eat at my friend Edgitha’s house. Edgitha not only cooks everything on a spit in her yard, but she also stores it all outside, too. She doesn’t believe in refrigeration.”
“That’s extremely dangerous.”
“I don’t eat with her either,” I said. Not after the first time, when I’d been sick for three days.
It had been a terrible idea to try her homemade mayonnaise.
“Anyway, now that I remember Edgitha and her spit, I don’t know how I was thinking that I could make a cake outside.
It’s a terrible idea and I don’t think I would have ever pulled it off. ”
“Maybe you jumped into it a little quickly, but I love the idea of having an outdoor stove. Or oven, or whatever it was going to turn out to be.” We had finally made it back to the house and he opened the door for me.
Keon had repaired the furnace again and the air was warmer than the temperature outside.
“I love the idea of making a Christmas cake, too,” he continued.
“Those mushrooms sound very interesting. I mean the meringue ones and not the ones next to the barn. I wouldn’t eat those and I would recommend that you don’t, either.
” I had figured, which was why I’d stopped digging there.
“What smells so good? Did you make dinner, too?”
“Without Nicola,” I said. “No videos this time, but I definitely used the refrigerator.”
“I guess we couldn’t use this camp stove for a cake,” he mused as he leaned over the wok and inhaled. “That wouldn’t work.”
No, probably not—but his use of the word made me think about his job. “Your office is closed tomorrow. Are you going to catch up on medical stuff here instead?”
Theo looked at me and hesitated. “I should take the day off.”
“Yes, you should. You really should, just for once.” I filled a plate and handed it to him, and then took the other for myself. That was the sum total of his tableware. “In your new kitchen, you’ll have a dishwasher and cabinets, so you could have as many plates as you like.”
“Hundreds,” he suggested, which was certainly his prerogative. I was thinking more in the eight to ten range, but he’d have plenty of space for more. “I’ll also have a working oven, and a stove with more than one burner. That’s a lot better than what we had in the house where I grew up.”
“So this was all normal,” I suggested, gesturing around at where the mess had been and where emptiness remained instead of cupboards and appliances.
“It wasn’t quite as bad as the cabin before you and your family stepped in, but yes, it was always a mess.
My parents weren’t only bad at running a business,” he said.
“They were also bad at running their lives, and my sister’s and mine, too.
Sometimes I would pretend with her that we were camping or explorers, because there were a lot of days when we didn’t have… ”
“Go on.”
But instead of continuing the thought, Theo said something else.
“There’s really no point in talking crap about them.
They made poor decisions and they did things in a way that I wouldn’t choose for myself, but they loved us.
They were sorry when there wasn’t food in the refrigerator because they’d had to pay a vet bill, and they regretted that they weren’t able to bring us on trips or buy nice things.
Like a b?che de Noel,” he suggested. “There were never any meringue mushrooms in our house. And I was always plenty pissed about the things I was missing out on, rather than being glad about what I had.”
“You didn’t have food,” I pointed out. “You shared milk for your cereal.”
After a moment, he shrugged. “That’s true. I shouldn’t focus on only the bad but I also shouldn’t gloss over it, because the truth is in the middle. I can recognize that they made a lot of mistakes with how they raised us, but they tried.”
“What were the mistakes? Besides the lack of food and the squalor,” I added.
He hesitated again. “There was nobody watching us since there was always so much work to do around the farm. There wasn’t such an age gap between me and my sister and I didn’t do a good job like Nicola, so she got into trouble.”
“Like what?” I asked. I was so interested in this conversation that I’d forgotten to eat anything that I’d cooked, and he tapped my plate with his chopsticks. We had so many pairs after all our Chinese takeout meals that we used them for any type of cuisine.
“She started running around with some pretty wild kids. As she got older, she became one of the wildest ones and it led to her doing all kinds of stuff. She took off for weeks at a time and she was drinking a lot and using whatever was available. I know she was also dealing and getting paid for sex to finance that lifestyle, too.”
“How old was she?”
“When she started running away?” He had to think.
“The first time was when she was eleven. She didn’t get too far and the police brought her back home.
But she was smart and she learned from that.
She figured out how to go farther and how to hide better.
” He sighed. “The families of some of my patients have been calling and emailing me a lot, because it’s the time of the year that really makes you think about the people you’ve lost. That’s why Pen has been on my mind.
Penelope,” he explained. “I never called her that, though, just Pen.”
I thought of the old Valentine cards I’d found in his bedroom when I’d cleaned it out, the years and years of loving messages between his grandparents. “That was your grandma’s name,” I said, and he nodded.
“My mom named us both after her parents. She was mad at them and she was stubborn, but she missed them, too. She might have thought that honoring them would bring us all closer, and actually my grandpa was very touched that I was another Theo. He got tears in his eyes when he talked about how my sister had been Penelope.” He didn’t get tears himself, but his face changed and froze a little.
Now I tapped my chopsticks on his plate. “You need to eat, too.”
“Right.” He did take another bite and he was done talking about his family. “Regina mentioned that you stopped by the office today. Is the aquarium ok?”
“It’s great. I wanted to tell them about a job interview I had that didn’t go well. I told the fish and also Regina and Pinar,” I explained.
He waited and then said, “You could tell me.”
“No, because it’s my problem and I realized that if I talk about it, then everyone tries to solve it.
I don’t mean the fish,” I clarified. “They don’t do anything and I’m not sure that they even listen.
Anyway, I’m going to solve all of this myself, including my job, and my housing. And my oil leak, and my b?che de Noel.”
“I could imitate the fish and keep my mouth shut.”
I eyed him.
“You didn’t offer a solution when I said that I was sad about my sister,” he remarked, “because there isn’t one, and I wasn’t asking for that. You only listened.”
“My sisters want to jump in. Everyone does, which is the same as if you see a car on fire on the side of the freeway. You want to jump in to help but it’s actually better to stay at a distance.”
“I don’t think that you’re as bad as a car on fire,” Theo told me, and he smiled. “What happened at the interview?”
I ended up telling him about it and he looked at my revised résumé, too, but he didn’t criticize.
He did note that I’d removed a lot of jobs, because he’d seen the previous version when I’d answered Regina’s question checklist in the interview to work at his office.
He liked the paper I’d printed it on this time, and he liked what I said about my affinity with fish.
“That’s a good point,” he noted, tapping the “Skills” section.