Chapter 16
Outside the city, we drove through streets of old adobe houses, most of them in dire need of repair. The reddish stucco needed to be reapplied, little spider-vein cracks crawled up the wall. This was the kind of neighborhood I understood, where I felt at home.
Lincoln parked by one expansive, more recently renovated one. It took up nearly a whole block—a hodge-podge of houses stuck together like a 3D-quilt. Light glowed from the windows in the old house. As we walked in, mold and cleaner piqued my nose. It needed a coat of paint, some woodwork repair. A few walls had been ripped out to string together several of the adobe houses. The original floorboards were sanded down to the tongue and groove and squeaky. In some rooms, VCT tile was glued to the ceiling as well as the floor. Faded cotton curtains hung in deeply recessed windows.
The front room of days past was now the reception area. A tall desk sat in front of a dark wooden staircase. The lady at the front desk, with a golden tag on her shirt with Esperanza on it, smiled brightly at Lincoln, recognizing him. How she kept her smile in an abysmal place like this was beyond me. But the high ceilings were nice. She finished her conversation with someone and then focused on us.
“They are all ready and waiting for you in the room. Not as many as last week. A few of the girls got the flu. A bug is going around here. It’s all I can do to keep spraying everything down.” Despite the unpleasant topic, Esperanza still smiled. “Who’s your friend?” She gave me a sly smile from the side of her eye.
“Esperanza, this is Gabby. She’s here to check out our program.”
“Welcome, welcome! You can go on ahead in there.” She pointed down the hall.
We crossed the hall and pushed open a heavy wood door with a dormer at the top into a classroom-type room. Maybe a lunchroom? One large table dominated the space with metal folding chairs all around the perimeter.
One young girl in her teens had a daughter clinging to her leg while she scrolled on her phone. Another large woman had two little boys about four and two hanging off her while she talked to a lady next to her. The lady next to her was older, no kids hanging off her, gray in her hair, worry lines deeply creasing her face.
It was familiar yet unfamiliar at the same time. My heart bled for the girls, wondering what their story was, why that at this age they were here. Where were their parents? Did they kick them out of the house? Did they have extended family? I knew that even if something happened to me, my family would always be there for me. What was Lincoln here to give them?
Not family obviously. What was he doing?
I felt awkward and kind of stood by him as he placed the box on the table and greeted the girls. “Marissa, how are the boys?”
Marissa nodded her head—or tried to, since one of the boys had his chubby little two-year old arms around her forehead, hanging down behind her back. A four-year-old was trying to catch him, which produced a chorus of screams from the toddler.
“Bexton, quiet.” She reached up and gave him a little swat. “That was right in my ear.”
“Eugina, you look lovely today.”
A hairnet held Eugina’s graying curls.
“Hey, Rachiid, what did I say about that phone? If it comes out in class, I get it.”
Rachiid half smiled and slipped it in the pocket of her pink hoodie, then slid her hands down her legs to retrieve her daughter. The other young girl had a baby and bounced him on her lap.
“Hello, are you new?” Lincoln addressed the girl next to Rachiid.
“Yeah, I’m Balsa. She invited me.” She stuck a thumb toward Rachiid.
“Welcome, Balsa. And is this your daughter?”
“Yes, sir. Tabby.”
“Welcome, Tabby.” The girl just stared at him with large eyes then went back to plucking her mother’s shoelaces. Lincoln clapped his hands. “All right, let’s get started. Who remembers what we talked about last week? Who did their homework?”
I couldn’t believe how comfortable he was up there, talking with all these women. I felt stupid, like I was on display.
“Who’s your friend?” Balsa asked.
Lincoln’s eyebrows perked up, turning to me. So, he was a little nervous. He’d forgotten I was here.
He smiled, cocking his head in a most attractive manner. “This is my friend Gabby. She heard about you and wanted to meet all of you and see what we do.”
“Hello, Gabby,” came Rachiid.
I smiled and trembled at the same time. I gave a little wave, my armpits pinched to my sides since I was sure I was sweating buckets.
“Okay, Gabby, meet Euginia, Marissa, her boys Tomatz and Paul, then Rachiid and her daughter, U-nique. Then we have Rachelle and Jacqueline. Balsa and Tabby.”
This was a whole level of getting out there I never thought possible. Growing up as lower, lower middle class, show-goat people, I never gave much thought to others. I had a home and a family who loved me. What if it hadn’t had them? Would I be in a place like this?
I was ashamed to have been so self-absorbed, of being self-centered, unable see that others fare much worse.
In our house, junk covered every flat surface; mail, papers, coupons, bills that needed to be paid. With my mom gone, Dad struggled being both, and then when he was home, he retreated to his computer. Now I realized it was to escape all the chaos of the house without Mom.
Bryan wasn’t any help. He probably created most of the mess. I tried to clean it up, but it wasn’t much fun. It was easier to retreat to my room, pretend chaos didn’t exist. I’d spend the night when with friends occasionally.
My friends’ houses were so different. Neat, tidy, food in the fridge. Heck, the fridge was clean and wasn’t full of rotting Chinese takeout cartons, the freezer not filled with frozen pizza.
The other difference I noticed at my friends’ houses was the cleanliness. Although I’d always get yelled at for not hanging back up my towel, for leaving my dirty clothes on the floor, for leaving toothpaste marks on the hand towel with an embossed T on it. Did I wish everything in my house matched? That the walls were clean and in repair? And goat hair didn’t cling to my dirty clothes? No sheets hung up in the windows as curtains?
What I liked the most at my friends’ houses was they made the bed with matching sheets and a coordinating bedspread and skirt. Artwork adorned the walls, not oily footprints and greasy head marks on the wall behind the beds.
I liked to sit down at meals together, with a table set with plates and forks and knives and spoons, even if we didn’t use them. There were pretty dishes for things, not just a pot of macaroni we all scooped from with our forks. A tablecloth and even—gasp—napkins!
Did I yearn for decor? In fall it was pumpkins, winter it was hearts and snowmen, the summer, flags. Even if we’d had that stuff, it would’ve gotten lost amongst the debris, Dad’s cords from the many laptops people had given him to fix or keep or resale if he’d been ambitious enough to do it. Instead, they sat around gathering dust, cluttering the tables, chairs.
I tried to focus on Lincoln’s presentation, but the reality of just how different I was from him hit me. He didn’t know I was like them.
“Who did their homework?” he asked.
“What was it again?” asked Rachiid, leaning back against the wall.
“Find a recipe.” Lincoln pointed to her.
“Oh, yeah,” she said, cracking a smile. “I found one.” She took out her phone and started scrolling.
“Anyone else?”
Silence.
Lincoln stood back at the table. “Food is highly emotional. Can you think of a dish that your mother or grandmother made?” A few nods. “Think of one of those.”
Opening the door, Esperanza sneaked in, leaning against the window. “My grandma made tamales. But they are a lot of work. Usually you get together with family at the holidays and spend time in the kitchen mashing the masa and boiling the meat.”
Lincoln smiled and pointed at her. “Okay, tamales are a lot of work. I don’t know if we could pull it off in here. Perhaps something else? Come on, be easy on me.” He grinned.
Esperanza grinned too. “She made enchiladas with salsa verde.”
“Great, did you find a recipe?”
“I’ll look one up.” She produced her phone.
“My mother made the best fried chicken,” Euginia said, smacking her lips. “And mashed potatoes, and creamed corn.”
“Do you have recipes for that?”
“I’m not sure she ever used recipes. They were all here.” She placed her hand over her heart.
“Could you find one similar?” Lincoln wasn’t giving anyone a pass.
“I don’t have a phone with Internet.”
“Remember these?” he asked, extracting cookbooks out of the box. “Gabby, want to help her? Everyone, if you don’t have a recipe, look up one in these.”
Stepping up to the table, I opened the cookbooks. These were the ones I saw him checking out at the beginning of the year. Understanding dawned on me.
Flipping through the colorful pages of casseroles and pastas, a sort of mourning bubbled up in my heart. My mother didn’t live long enough to pass down any recipes. Did she even like to cook? Did she cook at all? Bryan or Gayle might know. A weird yearning tingled my nose, and I had to wipe a tear away before anyone saw.
The women pored over the books, looking at pictures and making smacking sounds.
“I have a recipe,” Marissa said with a heavy accent. “I don’t have it written down. “But it’s a traditional dish in my country. I come from Poland.”
“What’s in it? We’ll write it down together.”
Behind him was a white board, but after checking the tray, he shook his head when he found no markers. “I’ll need to bring some markers next time.”
So instead he grabbed a piece of paper. “I’ll be the scribe. Okay, what’s in it?”
“First you start with—what is the word?” She placed her thumb and forefinger at her temples to think. “Buraki. What is the word?” She looked up again. “You know, red, sweet.”
Lincoln struggled to catch it.
“Root.”
A red, sweet root. “A beet?” I asked.
“Beet. Yes. Two beet, then one white root.” She held up her fingers.
“Potatoes?” I offered.
“Yes. Then carrots, and cabbage? Cabbage. You can make it easy. One hour. Very healthy.” She crossed her hands over her lap.
“Should we make this next week?” Lincoln set down his pen.
Marissa smiled wide.
Lincoln handed her the paper. “Write it down here.”
Marissa stared at him. “Don’t write in English.”
“That’s okay, write it in Polish, and we can translate it.”
“Let’s do one every week,” Euginia said. There was a certain kind of excitement in the air.
“Okay,” Lincoln said. “But there is a catch.” The women collectively almost groaned.
Rachiid shook her head. “Man, there’s always a catch.”
“We have to make a shopping list of what ingredients we need. So look through your recipes, make a list of what we need to buy, then we need to go to the store and buy them.
“We’ll do this every Wednesday—write out and plan what we want to eat for the next week. Step one: make a menu. Step two: list the ingredients. Step three: buy them. Since we are not together everyday, we’ll just plan what we want to eat for the next four meetings.”
“We have to buy them?” Balsa tensed.
Lincoln held up a finger. “Whoever is cooking their dish must buy one ingredient for the meal. Just one. I’ll buy the rest.”
Relaxing her shoulders, Balsa grinned. “But don’t forget or else we won’t have a complete meal.”
For the rest of the time, we planned which week we would eat what. The women were excited to have an emotional memory attached to each one. Each decided on an ingredient. Marissa would bring carrots next week.
Lincoln demonstrated a recipe from his family—rice with bell pepper and spice. I’d never eaten anything so delicious. We ate and laughed some more and then our hour and a half was up.
Esperanza escorted us out of the room and back to the front door.
As we stepped out into the night, I smiled at him, even in the dark.
“That was really awesome.” He had no idea how weirdly connected I felt to my mother. I wanted to know what she cooked, if she cooked. I made a plan to call Gayle or Bryan and ask. I debated whether to tell Lincoln this new revelation. I didn’t want him to know where I came from. He’d see me as one of his non-profit women.
He held the box of books in his arms. “It’s only a drop in the bucket. There is so much need and we only get an hour and a half every week.”
“An hour is an hour.”
“Yeah.”
“And I can see some real benefit.”
“Oh?”
He really deserved to be with someone like Marie, who already had it all figured out and was helping others. What could Lincoln possibly see in me as a friend? How could I even tell him I didn’t know how to cook? I was one of these women. “It’s nice of you to do this.”
“You think so?” He placed the box on his car.
“Cooking is passed down from mother to daughter.”
“Most of the time. If I can connect them with food from their heritage, it strengthens them. Helps them form an identity—cultural or familiar. A connection. Maybe they won’t feel so alone.”
I studied my shoes. No one, not even Marie, knew my secret. “I never really learned to cook.”
“Really?”
I glanced up. “Oh, I can reheat canned soup or bake frozen pizza, but I don’t know how to cook anything from a recipe.” I pointed to the cookbooks.
“How come?”
My heart ached. A lump lodged in my throat. “My mom died when I was young.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” His voice was gentle, sincere.
I didn’t know how to respond so I let the silence grow between us. Sometimes flashes of her crept into my mind, but I think they were more influenced by the pictures than by actual memories.
“How old were you?”
“Six.” A tear tickled my cheek. “It’s been me, my sister, my brother, and my dad all these years. Strong male influence.” Wiping the tear, I chuckled. I started thinking of my dad, wondering if he was okay. All alone since the kids moved out. I sent him texts and tried to call him, but he wasn’t a big responder. I didn’t realize so much time had passed in our conversation.
“You want to learn?”
“Huh?” I faced Lincoln.
“To cook?”
I cracked a grin. “I certainly get sick of eating undercooked macaroni.”
“I shall teach you.” He raised his chin.
My heart did a little stutter. “Really?”
“Sure. We can start tomorrow.” He opened the car door with a beep of his keys.
“Not tomorrow.”
“Oh, yes, you’re doing something super secret.” He lifted the box into the backseat.
“Where did you learn?”
“My grandma was a Home Ec teacher back in the day. She taught my mom who taught me.” Crossing his arms over his chest, he leaned back on his car. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s all worth it. When I first started coming, they really didn’t like me. Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing any good.” He glanced back at the building.
“‘We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.’”
“Who said that?” He snapped his gaze on me.
“Mother Teresa.”
He cracked a smile, leaning against the car. “She’s right.”
“So what else do you teach?”
“You mean besides cooking and menu planning? The second part of the series is actually learning how to create a budget, stick to a budget, and to give.”
“Give?” What could these women possibly give?
“Yes. No matter where you are, you need to have a thankful, generous heart. I call it returning gratitude.”
I couldn’t imagine being so poor yet being asked to give. “These people are living on a fixed income, food stamps or less even. How are they going to give?”
He thrust out his arms. “They don’t have to give a whole lot, but returning thanks is beneficial in so many ways. It helps us think about someone else who might have it worse and appreciate what we have. And besides, I didn’t say they have to give monetarily. They can listen, help, or give of themselves.”
“Most of these women are giving and giving. How dare you think they need to give some more!” Annoyance bit my language.
But Lincoln wasn’t put off. “True. Most of what they do is for themselves and their children. But doing something for a stranger will make them happier.”
At first I wanted to defend my point. Memories roiled inside me that I hated to remember. Dark moments. That little girl who lost her mother. All the confusion. All the pain. I hurt for her. I stared at my shoes. Chest pains squeezed my lungs. I could barely speak. “It was so hard without a mother to show me, you know?”
When I was seven, I woke early on a Saturday to make my dad toast. Toast was my favorite meal. He’d been so sad after Mom passed, I thought I could do something for him, brighten his day. I did it all myself, finding the crumb-studded toaster, not even aware that there were little weevils living at bottom of the crumb tray. I found this out later. I pulled up a chair to reach the butter sitting on top of the fridge, left out. No cover. I cooked the bread, scraped the toast with a mostly clean knife I found on the side of the sink. I felt triumphant handing it to him on the last clean plate which wasn’t a plate, but a saucer. His face crumpled in disgust before he spat out that I’d spread too much butter on it, knocking the toast, butter-side down on a really hairy, nasty carpet. I felt slapped in the face. It hurt.
I couldn’t tell Lincoln this. I didn’t dare glance up to see his expression. Every joke about myself covered up years of hurt and pain. Tears stung my eyes.
Lincoln didn’t reply. He gathered me in his arms and let me cry into his chest. I cried for my mother who never taught me to cook, or dress, or brush my hair. For my father’s pain. But most of all for a little girl, clueless and giving, the little girl who still had so much to learn.
“I don’t want you to think I’m selfish. It’s just that all growing up I had to take care of myself first, because nobody else would. I was so busy taking care of myself, I didn’t have time to care for others. I know what these women feel like, at least in some measure. More than you do, Lincoln.”
“I’m sure you do. I’m sure you do.” He rubbed my back. Lincoln was so full of love for everybody. And everybody loved him. The ladies greeted him with smiles in that room. When I was with him, I knew he cared for me because he listened to me. He was a true friend.
But if he knew my secret, would he still care for me? Even if he didn’t come from the same background, would we still be friends? I could never, ever tell him I came from near-poverty. I wouldn’t want him to see me like these women—a project.
He finally placed his hands on my shoulders and faced me. “This is why I want you to win. I want you to win the trip to DC so you can help me persuade the chairs at the national level to invest in these women. You can do it. You have the people skills and the persuasiveness.”
I blinked. He had faith in me. I wanted to win, too. To see Mikaela and to beat Beau. “All right. Let’s plan.”