Chapter 11
DANIIL
The kitchen smelled like potatoes browning in butter.
Grandma stood at the stove in the apron with the small cornflowers on it, the wooden spoon in her right hand, her left hand resting on the handle of the pan like she was reminding it to behave.
Grandpa sat at the table with one of Rhea's school dresses across his knee, working the tacks out of the hem with the flat blade of his little knife, careful, slow, the way he did everything.
The radio on the windowsill was low. Some old song with horns in it.
The light coming through the window over the sink had that early softness to it, the kind that made the wood of the cabinets look warmer than wood had a right to look.
Three months. Three months and a handful of days.
That was how I counted now. I counted by what I had. The mug in my hand. The plate Grandma slid in front of me without asking. The small clean sound of Grandpa's knife working a tack loose from cotton. I had stopped counting by what I didn't have. There wasn't a number for that.
"Sit down, son," Grandma said, without turning.
"I'm sitting."
"You're standing by the chair. That's not sitting."
I sat. She set the pan down off the burner and came over and put her hand on the top of my head the way she did every morning, then went back to the stove.
She'd been doing that since the third week.
The first two weeks she'd just been quiet, watching me from the doorway like a person watches a stray cat that might let itself be kept.
Grandpa pulled another tack out. He set it on the saucer beside him. There were six tacks on the saucer.
"You're going to wear that knife out," I said.
"Knife's older than you are," he said. He didn't look up. "Knife's fine."
I drank the coffee. It was strong the way she made it, which was strong enough that I'd had to learn to like it. I'd learned. The list of things I'd learned to like in three months was longer than the list of things I remembered liking from before. The list of things from before was empty.
The hallway floor creaked. Rhea came around the corner with her phone in her hand and her chin set the way she set it when she'd been thinking about something on the way down the stairs and didn't want to lose the courage of it before she could say it.
Two short braids. The blue dress with the little white dots, over jeans, the way she always wore it.
Both front teeth still gone. She'd been working on those teeth for a year now.
She didn't say good morning. She climbed onto the bench next to me without asking, set the phone face down on the table, and put both her elbows on the wood like a person about to make a sales pitch.
"Brother Pete," she said. "Can we go to the mall?"
I set the mug down.
"I don't know where the mall is, Rhea."
I said it gently. I didn't know where most things were. I'd built a small life out of the streets I could name and the turns I could remember and I'd stopped feeling bad about the ones I couldn't.
Grandma didn't turn from the stove.
"Don't push your brother. He hasn't been to the town that far yet."
Rhea leaned closer. Both elbows still on the table. Her chin almost touching the wood.
"Please. I'll show you everything. The fountain. The store with the candles. The arcade."
She had never asked me for a thing. Three months and she hadn't asked me for one thing.
She'd given me a name on the second day when I couldn't name myself.
She'd told me Pete sounded like a brother's name and that had been that.
She'd let me sit at the end of her bed when she was sick in the second month and read her a chapter of a book about a horse I didn't know I could read out loud until I was doing it.
She'd told everybody at her school I was her brother and she'd dared them to say otherwise.
Grandpa lifted his eyes from the dress. He looked at me. Then he looked back at the dress.
"Pete. You sure? You might not be all the way back yet."
"My head's steady. The doctor said I was healed enough at the last visit." I looked at him until he looked up again. "Thank you both for asking me before you let me go."
Grandma turned from the stove. She crossed the floor and bent and kissed the top of my cheek, then my forehead. Her hands smelled like soap.
"You deserve the second life God gave you, son."
"Enough drama," Rhea said. "Let's go, brother."
I laughed. It came out of me quiet. Smaller than I expected. Not the laugh of a man I used to be, because I didn't have a man I used to be. Just a sound I gave to the girl because she'd earned it.
Grandma packed us two sandwiches in foil. Grandpa put a folded twenty in my jacket pocket and pretended he hadn't. Rhea held my hand all the way to the end of the gravel drive and didn't let go until the bus pulled up at the road.
The bus was almost empty. She got the window seat and put her face against the glass and didn't take it off until we'd been moving twenty minutes. I sat with my elbow on the back of her seat. Outside, the trees were still in the bare part of the year, the branches showing every bone they had.
A man across the aisle was sitting with his hands inside his jacket. He had the jacket zipped up to the throat. He didn't move his hands the whole time I watched him. I watched him for two stops before I caught myself watching him and looked at the floor.
That's the thing my body does without asking. That. Right there.
I'd noticed it before. I noticed it carrying groceries in from the truck and looking at the tree line first. I noticed it the day Grandpa had dropped a hammer behind me and I'd been turned around with my hand at my hip before the hammer hit the floor.
The hand had gone for something that wasn't there.
I didn't ask what had been there. I knew not to.
I looked at Rhea instead. She was breathing on the glass and drawing a heart on the fog with one finger. She wrote her name inside it. Then she wiped it off with her sleeve so nobody would see.
The mall was a wide flat thing with a parking lot the size of a field.
Inside, the floor was tile and the lights were the long bright kind and the food court smelled like fried oil from a hundred feet off.
Pretzel cart on the left. A fountain in the middle of the atrium with pennies all over the bottom.
The water sounded the way water sounds when someone is paid to keep it sounding that way.
Rhea's hand went straight into mine.
"That's the candle store. That's the place with the pretzels.
That's where they had a Santa last winter.
That's the one that sells the leggings, don't go in there, they'll think you're somebody's dad.
" She pointed at each one without breaking stride.
"That's the bookstore. They have a cat. He doesn't like anybody but he likes me. "
"He has taste."
"You don't have to say that, brother. I know."
We stopped at the ice cream counter on the lower level. She climbed up on the little step kids climbed up on and peered at the names of the flavors written on the chalkboard above the case. Then she looked at me sideways. The look had a thing behind it.
"Brother," she said. "Do you have money?"
"You dragged me an hour on a bus and you're asking me this now?"
She shrugged. She scratched the back of her head with the kind of sheepish twist seven-year-olds did when they'd been caught.
"I forgot to factor that in, brother."
"You're lucky I've been saving from the side jobs."
She threw both her arms around my middle. Her face went into the front of my jacket.
"Thank you, brother. You're the best."
Two scoops for her, the pink one and the green one.
One for me, the brown one she'd decided I liked.
I paid in singles out of the side pocket where I'd been carrying my mall money since the night before.
She watched the woman behind the counter pile the scoops too high and her face went serious with concentration.
We sat at one of the round tables by the railing. She kicked her feet under the chair and ate her ice cream from the top down. I ate mine slower. It was good. I noticed I liked it, the way a man notices things about himself when there is very little of himself left to notice.
"Tell me one thing about your life before," she said, around a mouthful.
"You know I can't."
"I know. But tell me one thing anyway. Make it up."
I thought about it. I let it come on its own. Nothing came on its own. So I gave her something gentle.
"I think I had a sister. I don't know why I think that. But I think I did."
She nodded like that was an acceptable answer.
"Then we're trading up. I'm a better sister."
"You are. By a mile."
She grinned with the gap of her front teeth. Ice cream on her chin. She didn't wipe it off and I didn't tell her to.
The arcade was upstairs at the back. The lights were red and blue and the bells were going from every direction and somebody's pizza was warming behind a glass case in the corner. I fed a five into the change machine. Tokens fell into the metal cup with the small heavy music tokens make.
We played the basketball game first. The little hoops moved on a track. She got two in. I got two in and then I missed three on purpose and she watched me miss the third one and narrowed her eyes.
"You're letting me win."
"I'm not."
"You are. Brother. I see you."
"Then win without my help."
She did. She made the next four. I gave her the strip of tickets and she folded it into her pocket.