Chapter 31
— Chapter 31 —
On my next day off, I start a big pot of soup to simmer on the stove and then clean the kitchen floor so we can re-grout those loose tiles. Lenny Juice rides around on my shoulder while I scrub, chattering in my ear. I feed him bits of apple when I stop for a snack. The weight of him is comfort. I even like the scratch of his creepy little feet through my shirt. My mother would never have allowed a rat in her house, so Lenny keeps me from slipping into memory.
“Hey, Aunt Frey!” Aubrey shouts as she opens the front door.
“Hey, Aunt Frey!” Shray calls too, their voices only slightly staggered.
“In here,” I say. “Did you eat?”
Shray hugs me when he walks in the kitchen. “You’re just like my dada,” he says. “Pushing food on everyone.”
I have always been confounded by my sister, but the idea that anyone anywhere wouldn’t like Shray makes absolutely no sense—that he’s lovable is verifiable fact. When we first met, the day after I found Aubrey in the basement, he hugged me hard and said, “Oh my god, Aunt Frey! You’re real!”
Shray is wide-eyed and curious and constantly moving, so tall he has to hunch over to get chummy with people, like a sunflower following the light at the end of the day. His hair is dark purple this week, sprayed stiff like a halo of chaos. It was light blue the last time he was over. He wears black eyeliner like Aubrey. Today his red lipstick is ever-so-slightly smudged at the bow of his lips, and he looks even more beautiful for the imperfection. He’s a brilliant artist, so I trust he knows this, and the smudge was intentional. I want to tell him he reminds me of Robert Smith from The Cure, but I’m scared he won’t know who I’m talking about and I’ll feel old.
“I would be honored to be anything like Dr. Singh,” I say, hugging him back. “Do you want some soup?” I feel proud to be able to offer food. I paid the insurance bill two weeks ago, and it cleaned me out. But Carlos keeps sneaking extras in my take-out shift meals, so I am able to be generous with soup.
“What is this?” Aubrey asks, raising her left eyebrow at me as I add three ladlefuls to each bowl. I’m certain she learned that expression from Jam.
“Pasta e fagioli,” I say.
“Huh?”
“Pasta fazhool?”
She shakes her head like I’m talking gibberish.
“Italian bean and pasta soup. Your mom never made this?”
Aubrey laughs. “My mom tries to pretend she’s just as WASPy as my dad’s side of the family.”
“My mom did that, too, sometimes,” I say. There was a mix of pride and shame twisted around our Italianness. Babbo was barely first-generation American, born three months after his parents left Positano and landed in Brooklyn. Nonna came from Naples when she was two. They were raised to be American in public, Italian in the privacy of their home, and didn’t teach their children to speak their native language except for expressions like agita and ah fanabla! that couldn’t be translated to the same satisfaction. They had a sauce kitchen in the basement, but when they threw a neighborhood party, they barbecued chicken and hamburgers and made potato salad. No one would have served fazhool to a guest, and I find delight in breaking that rule.
“Can we eat outside?” Aubrey asks. It’s one of those weirdly warm April days that feel like summer, even though we could get snow tomorrow if the weather changes her mind. We take our bowls out to the patio and line the damp furniture with old beach towels.
“No joke, Aunt Frey,” Shray says. “This does taste almost exactly like the vegetable soup Dada makes.”
I’m delighted that what I threw together qualifies as real soup. I didn’t use a recipe, just tried to visualize what Nonna tossed in her stockpot when I shadowed her in the kitchen as a child. I wasn’t sure if I could trust my memory, but it is pretty close to her fazhool.
When we’re done eating, Shray helps us chip out the old grout and loose tiles. I use Step’s power drill to make holes in the cracked one that won’t budge, and Shray pries the little pieces up. Aubrey mixes mortar in an old Cool Whip container from Step’s stack in the basement. I don’t understand how my parents ever ate so much Cool Whip, but the little buckets come in handy.
“Wow, I love this,” Shray says, spreading the mortar on the new tiles while Aubrey and I smear it into the open spaces on the floor. “It’s like… good in my brain.”
I hadn’t realized I felt the same way, but I do.
We have to wait two hours for the mortar to set before we grout. Aubrey says she has math homework and goes upstairs, but Shray follows me while I sweep up broken tile and put Step’s tools away. He’s quiet and curious, studying everything on the workbench. “No one in my family builds anything,” he says, sounding wistful.
“No one taught me how to build anything,” I say. “But I wish I’d learned.”
“You’re learning now.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Shray looks at me like he’s about to say something, then shakes his head and looks away. “Can I have this?” He picks up a triangle of scrap plywood.
“Of course.”
Shray sits at Step’s workbench arranging shards of broken tile on the wood, sharp ends pointing outward like a star. “Will it stick if I use the rest of the mortar?”
I think about it for a second. “Let’s try this.” I take the smallest gouge from my great-grandfather’s chisel set and score the wood in a crosshatch pattern to give the mortar more surface area for adhesion.
Shray spreads the mortar on the wood and rebuilds his design. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he says. “I just like doing it.”
“Good a reason as any,” I tell him.
We dig through the depths of Step’s workbench, finding rusty washers and bolts and a half-empty bag of white aquarium gravel. He fills in the space around his broken tile star with swirls of rust and stone. While he’s working, I pull another triangle of wood from the scrap pile and use Vili’s tools to carve a star, surrounding it with swirls to mimic Shray’s design.
“I love it!” Shray says when he looks over to see what I’m doing. “We should get Aubrey to make one out of… something. So it will be like a triptych.” His eyes are bright and his energy changes the air around us. It reminds me of sitting on the piano bench next to Jam while he worked out a melody.
The last time Shray was over, he and Aubrey used a roll of butcher paper Jam swiped for them and drew the Creation of the Sun, Moon and Plants section of the Sistine Chapel in bold lines and polka dots, as if it were a Lichtenstein. When we hung it in the living room so Shray could take pictures, I asked if we should get better lighting or find a more professional way to hang it, but he said the shadows and sagging paper and dirty blue carpet were the point. “It’s a statement on the loss of grandeur in the post-postmodern world,” he said with a gleam in his eye, as if the pomposity of his description was also part of the point.
“Aubrey says you’re going to art school,” I say while carving deeper channels into my swirling galaxy.
“Hopefully. My father isn’t sold on the idea, but Dada is wearing him down. I want to go to RISD, if I can get in.”
“Of course you can!” I hate that Shray has any doubts about himself or his work. “Your art is exciting. Like, you’re playing with history to say something new. That’s not just being good at drawing or painting. Your work has actual depth and perspective. They’d be stupid not to take you.”
“Wow. Thanks, Aunt Frey.” Shray grabs a handful of aquarium gravel, shaking it in his cupped palm. “You always surprise me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, most people are like… I can kind of figure out what they’ll say next. Like it’s a play I’ve read before.” He talks slowly, as if he’s clarifying his observations by expressing them. “But it seems like you have five more thoughts than you say, and you skip ahead without making me slog along. So, I can’t predict you.”
I laugh. “Well, thank you? I think?”
“It’s definitely a good thing,” Shray says with gravity. “Aubrey does it too.” He’s quiet for a while, working with each tiny piece of gravel to find the best side.
I carve little specks between some of my bigger swirls, carefully brushing the sawdust away so it won’t get stuck in Shray’s work. Even though he keeps the lid on the Cool Whip container when he’s not using it, the mortar gets stiff and we have to mix more.
“Can I tell you something?” he asks while we’re hunched over the laundry sink trying to get the consistency right.
“Sure.” I wash the mortar splashes off my wrist.
“Yesterday…” Shray’s voice shakes. When I glance over, his eyes are teary.
“Oh, sweetheart,” I say. “Are you okay?”
Just then we hear Aubrey running down the stairs to the main floor, her footsteps right overhead as she ambles into the kitchen.
“Hey, where’d you go?” she calls.
Shray leans close and whispers, “Yesterday Carter Barrett tried to…”
Aubrey opens the door to the basement. “You down there?”
Shray freezes, then shakes his head. I don’t know why he doesn’t want Aubrey to hear, but I trust him. He loves her.
“Yeah,” he calls back. “We have a project for you!” He looks up and swipes under his eyes with his index fingers so his makeup doesn’t run. He takes a deep breath and fakes a smile as Aubrey walks downstairs.
We pretend we were just talking about the triptych. Shray finishes his section while Aubrey searches through Step’s scrap for the right piece, then sands down the splintered edges. I try to stay in their conversation, but my head is swarmed with all the ways Carter Barrett might have tried to hurt my niece.
“It’s strange,” Aubrey says. “How Step kept collecting all this stuff and never did anything with it, and now that’s what’s left of him.”
“Migh-tee Ducks!” Shray says, thumping his palm against his chest. “You’ve hit a new level of morbid.”
Aubrey laughs. “Sorry. I just—sometimes I forget what happened and this is my normal. And then sometimes it’s like… Step’s not coming back to use this wood. He’s over. They’re done.” She looks at me. “Sorry.”
“You’re not wrong,” I say. “And I have the same kind of waves.”
“How are you supposed to…” She pauses. “How are you supposed to deal with the fact that you could live to be a hundred or for five more minutes?”
“Woah,” Shray says.
It feels like the weight of her question could crush me the way the tire of a monster truck would flatten a soda can. I’ve never thought about the living to a hundred part, because I’m only ever trying to make it through the next five minutes. But that’s a depressing thing to tell a kid.
Shray holds up his finished galaxy. “Make art?” He grabs my triangle and holds it next to his. My carving is better than I expected it to be, all the little gashes in the wood adding up to depth and movement. “Make art with people you love?”
And I think it’s the best answer anyone could have.
Aubrey hugs Shray and I wrap my arms around both of them.
“Deal,” I say.
“Yeah,” Aubrey says. “Deal.”
Aubrey decides to use paint pens on her plywood triangle. “Then our triptych is all stars in different mediums and the balance is right.”
She sets up at the dining table while Shray and I start grouting in the kitchen. I’m trying to think of a good excuse to call Shray out of the room to finish our conversation, when he tears a flap off the cardboard grout box and smears it with grout. Using the point of the trowel, he writes:
At locker. A → bathroom
I nod. He erases his words with the flat part of the trowel.
Said I’d meet her.
He erases again.
Carter → girls b-room! Stopped him!!!
He looks at me, eyes big.
Aubrey gets up from the table. Shray scrapes the grout away, pretends he’s about to smooth it into the tile gap.
“I think I need Q-tips,” Aubrey says. “My fingers aren’t cutting it.” She holds up her hands as she walks past us, showing off dark blue and purple smudges.
“Was Aubrey freaked out?” I whisper as soon as I hear her feet hit the stairs.
“She didn’t see him,” Shray whispers back. “I caught up as he was about to open the door and I was like, ‘Bro! That’s the girls’ room!’ Carter pretended he was confused, but I know he saw Aubrey go in there. And he’s like, not a nice kid. I hate the way he looks at her.” Shray sighs as if telling me has allowed him to let go of some of the weight he’s been carrying, and I’m caught by a mix of honor and pressure that I’ve never felt before.
“And you don’t want to tell her?” I ask.
“I’m scared of making things worse,” he says. “But I’m not sure what worse is.”
I’m not sure either. And I don’t know how I’m going to carry Aubrey three years into the future—to the day when she’s finally free to walk away from all of this—if everything could fall apart in five minutes.