25
Grease: Refers to applying fat to a roasting tray or cake tin to ensure food doesn’t stick.
2010
The days are a clichéd whirlwind passing in the kind of memory-erasing obscurity akin to Queenie B’s most destructive days.
Regina has barely enough time to bathe and sleep at the end of every long day, let alone fall from her precarious perch.
But it’s getting easier.
She’s learning, applying old lessons of organization and perspective. As long as she keeps things simple, she can get it all done.
Troy and Petunia help as a strange, unwholesome tag team; one or the other is always drunk, and thus annoying-yet-harmless fixtures in this corner or that.
Gladys watches over them like a fussy hen, though the Burger Queen doesn’t venture out after dark unless Troy accompanies her.
Regina worries that Gladys doesn’t eat during those dinner services Petunia’s on duty.
If there is a silver lining to their insobriety, it’s that they serve as a reminder of all Queenie had been, all Regina fought. One day soon, she has to find more reliable help.
The holidays come and go in that same whirlwind.
Regina is glad for that; she doesn’t like to think about Julian opening gifts on Christmas morning, bought and wrapped by the woman he now calls Mom.
Not that Queenie had ever bought the gifts he opened while she sprawled on the couch or floor, nursing a hangover.
Regina remembers few Christmas mornings, but she holds on tight to those she does, hangover or not.
New Year’s Day—that day of always-days—brings fewer homeless and destitute in for breakfast.
She sets out only hot and cold cereals, puts up pots of coffee and hot water.
For lunch, sandwiches.
Dinner, more sandwiches and a big pot of—what else?—soup. She’s been working so hard. Regina deserves a day that she doesn’t have to spend with exhaustion.
The whole day is slow.
Dinner service is over by six thirty, and though her doors stay open until eight o’clock, as always, she’s able to prep for the next day.
Tomorrow will be easier, especially if her tag team shows up.
Tonight, Regina is cooking herself something special, something not one pot or leftovers. She’s already bought the necessary ingredients.
Seared and basted filet mignon, butter-poached lobster tail, roasted fingerling potatoes with horseradish, and fresh spinach wilted in olive oil with garlic.
Simple ingredients demand perfect execution, and Regina doesn’t disappoint herself.
It’s been a long, long time since she’s eaten fare so fine; she doesn’t dare go to a restaurant.
The preparation and consumption fill her soul with an almost-forgotten joy. She weeps. It’s not just food. It’s the all. The everything. It is art. Her art. Living without it has starved her core, and that will lead to nowhere good. Regina reaffirms her vow to ply her art as dedicatedly as she feeds the homeless and destitute. Privately, where no one will guess she’s anything other than a soup kitchen cook.
Cleaning up, she takes care with every lovely glass and dish.
She puts them away with a reverence she’s not felt in her kitchen downstairs where everything is serviceable.
Durable.
Part of her feels slightly guilty about keeping such opulence to herself, but, like the meals she’s vowed to create, Regina understands these fine things also feed her artist soul, the one she sacrificed on the altar of excess but will now honor and respect.
Nine thirty.
Her kitchen is clean.
Regina doesn’t watch much television, in part because she fears what she’ll come across.
Accidentally. On purpose. It’s better to avoid the pitfalls of vanity and—worse—truth. Maybe, one day, when some of the shame has mellowed into wisdom, she’ll be able to watch herself, watch Queenie B, in all her former infamy.
She bought herself an electronic reader for Christmas, but hasn’t opened it yet.
No time.
Now she fetches it from under the Christmas tree.
Setting it up is simple. She downloads a few books, chooses one, and shoulders into her comfy armchair. A flick of a switch, and the gas—never woodburning—fireplace glows.
Regina wakes to the sound of a car alarm somewhere outside.
Not hers.
The Durango is parked in the garage, behind a chain-link fence.
It’s after two. By the percentage of the book read, she’s been asleep almost since settling into the chair. It’s okay; there will be other nights like this one. She’s promised herself.
Taking the e-reader to her bedroom, she opens the drawer of her bedside table but stops short of putting it inside.
The bible she’d gone to Marco for all those months ago stares back at her.
Under it, the unopened envelope of the-end-of-everything papers likewise shoved away and forgotten—not forgotten; never.
Fortified by the food, the fire, her resolve to do better, be better, Regina sits on the edge of her bed, takes out the bible, the envelope.
She opens the bible, takes from it the recipe clipping, then sets it back between the pages.
Thumbing to the frontispiece, she finds the names.
Her family of strangers. The habit of love fills her. The wanting and wishing. Things that had never been or could be.
There is her name.
Birth date.
Baptism.
Chicken pox. The entirety of her identity, scratched and fading in her mother’s long-dead handwriting. She takes the pen from her crossword puzzle book atop her nightstand. Under her name, she writes—
Regina Benuzzi marries Osvaldo Balcazar October 14, 1989.
Divorced December 13, 2004.
And under that—
Julian Osvaldo Balcazar . . .
His birth date.
The surgeries she can remember, which aren’t many, not because they hadn’t been, but because so much of that time was a blank.
Under what she can remember, she writes what she can never forget—
Parental rights relinquished to Osvaldo Balcazar April 27, 2006.
Adopted by Fernanda Balcazar née Colón May 28, 2007.
Regina puts the unopened envelope of papers she signed making all that so, back into the drawer.
On top, the bible.
She closes the drawer on that part of her past, will probably never open it again.
There’s no point. There never will be. She gave him away. Her son. To a woman she doesn’t know. A woman Oz met while visiting Queenie B, during a stint in a rehab she can’t pry from all the others. A woman whose husband ended up dead, DUI, while Queenie and Oz were in Bova making a go of it.
There’s no scotch or bourbon or vodka in her home, but there is wine kept for cooking.
A boogeyman, a tightrope.
“If you wouldn’t drink it, don’t cook with it.”
An old mantra she’s spoken to countless television cameras and devotees.
The wine she keeps is very good.
Head hanging, she balls the edges of her comforter into fists.
Almost five years since the bottle of vodka she took to bed after signing those papers giving up her son.
Not even Julian’s adoption had sent her toppling again.
This couldn’t. This remembering. If she caved now, she was lost forever.
Do better.
Be better.
Growling low, a dog cornered, Regina bolted from the edge of her bed.
Into the kitchen.
To the pantry.
She takes the open bottle of wine from the shelf, uncorks it. The scent. Oh, the aroma! Pouring it in the hot pan, basting her filet with it, she hadn’t hungered. Not like she does now. Intoxicating. Irresistible. Regina puts the uncorked bottle to her nose. She breathes like drinking. Her eyes water.
Winging it across the kitchen, Regina roars.
The bottle of excellent wine smashes on her Carrera counter, splashes on the Brazilian teak floor.
She punches the pots and pans hanging from their rack, flings lovely dishes and cups.
Regina smashes and rages as she used to when wasted and out of control. It frightened her then, even if only shadows—and pictorial evidence—of such tirades haunted her. It frightens her now.
Surveying the destruction, hair in tangles around her face, body quivering with rage spent, Regina takes deep breaths until she can do so without shuddering.
She turns her back on the carnage of her kitchen.
Tomorrow, the stains will be set, but she doesn’t, in this moment, trust herself to clean up without putting her lips to the floor and slurping up what she can.
Regina shuffles to her bedroom, strips to nothing, and climbs in between the expensive sheets of her expensive bed.
“If money can fix it, it’s not a problem.”
Another of her mantras.
She has plenty of money.
Whatever she’s ruined, she can fix.
All she knows is, if she doesn’t find her own oblivion now, it’ll find her in ways she’ll never recover from.