Chapter Twelve #3
“She makes great macaroni and cheese. She never buys the packet stuff; she makes it from scratch. Which is sometimes a shame, because I like the packet stuff. Homemade is never as orange, have you noticed that?” Flo finished the last bite of her hot dog.
“Thanks for volunteering me to cook,” I scolded her as we walked home.
“I picked the macaroni and cheese because it’s your best,” Flo told me kindly. “You don’t want to scare him off.”
“I don’t want to… what?”
“Well, he’s the only guy in town who isn’t old or gay.” She gave me a knowing look. “And you like his muscles and his lobster rolls.”
“Florence! I’m not looking for a man.”
“How often do you meet a man who can also fix your front door? You don’t want to look a horse gift in the mouth.”
“Gift horse,” I corrected. “And where on earth do you get these ideas?” I muttered as I followed her up our front steps.
“Suni and Alison.”
I groaned. I’d have to remind them again to stop gossiping in front of Flo.
“I’m going to start sorting those records,” she said, heading happily for the back porch.
Still, at least she wasn’t anxious about school on Monday anymore.
While we’d made the kitchen livable over the last week, we hadn’t completely cleared it out—most of the drawers were still jammed with stuff.
I needed a cheese grater to make dinner, but the drawers seemed to hold everything under the sun except a grater.
If I didn’t find it soon, I’d have to hunt through my own stuff, which would be a pain, as I had no idea which box mine was in.
I swore under my breath, wishing Flo hadn’t asked Jake Abernathy to dinner.
I could hear Jake and Flo out on the porch, messing around with the record player he’d dug out from the parlor. It was a 1950s thing in an aged, yellowing case, with built-in speakers.
“You knew the lady that lived here, didn’t you?” I heard Flo saying as I hunted. Her voice carried through the open kitchen door. “The lady that lived here before us, I mean.”
“I did,” he said shortly.
I wondered if he knew where she kept her cheese grater.
I’d found rubber bands, paper clips, a host of salt and pepper shakers, bundles of pens and pencils, and another cat.
This cat was a pepper shaker, a smooth little porcelain tabby with three holes in the top of its head to shake the pepper out of.
I put it aside for Flo to add to her collection.
“How did she live here with all this stuff everywhere?” Flo asked.
“With difficulty,” Jake grunted.
“She was a hoarder, right? I read about hoarders on Wikipedia. And there’s a whole TV show about hoarders. I watched some clips on YouTube. It’s sad. Was the lady who lived here sad?” Flo asked.
I eavesdropped, curious about Marly, the lady responsible for all this mess. I finally found the cheese grater in an old bread box. As well as an ancient calculator that was out of battery. Nothing surprised me in this house anymore.
“No one’s sad all the time.” Jake sounded philosophical. I peered out to the porch and saw he was bent over the vintage record player. “She just had trouble letting things go.”
“How come?”
“Well, I don’t know. Maybe all these things reminded her of times when she was happy. Or maybe they just made her feel safe. Or—” He made another grunting noise as he fiddled with something. “Maybe she just liked stuff, you know?”
“I don’t know,” Flo said firmly. “I’ve never had room for stuff before. I’ve never even had my own room.” And, to my horror, I heard her start to describe our life in a way that made it seem sad and small.
“All three of you always slept in the same room?” Jake asked, sounding surprised.
“All two of us.”
“No, I mean, when your dad was there.”
“My dad wasn’t there. He’s in Seattle now, but before that he lived in Shadyside in an apartment with four other guys. They were nice enough, but they sure drank a lot of beer.”
I winced.
“Mom wouldn’t let me stay there overnight, which Dad said was understandable and I shouldn’t be mad at her for. But I did get mad at her. They had so many gaming platforms and they had all the good cereals.”
“What are the good cereals?”
“You know, the kind moms hate. Lucky Charms, Cap’n Crunch, Apple Jacks, Cocoa Puffs, Honey Smacks, those ones.”
“That’s sugar, not breakfast.”
“That’s why they’re good.”
“They’ll make your teeth fall out.” I heard him rummage around in his toolbox. “You’re better off eating eggs.”
“Mom makes me Quaker Oats a lot. They’re only good with honey, though.”
I listened to Flo complain about my food choices as I chopped broccoli for the macaroni and cheese. She hated when I put broccoli in it, but after hearing her complain about my oats to Jake, I was putting in extra.
I remembered all those school breakfast programs I’d crept into as a kid.
Plastic trays with cartons of milk, chewy bagels.
The best days were when there was a little plastic cup half full of cut-up strawberries.
I remembered the shivery, exposed feeling of arriving at the school on no sleep, sitting hunched over my plastic tray, wishing I was at home with my mom but glad to fill my empty belly.
After school I had watched reruns of Bewitched and Happy Days, shows where kids sat down at tables while their mom poured them orange juice and handed them plates of scrambled eggs and crispy bacon at breakfast time.
My mom didn’t do that. If she was home and we had any juice, she’d drink it straight out of the carton, standing at the open refrigerator in her T-shirt and underwear.
I did make Quaker Oats a lot for Flo, mostly in the winter on those dark sleety mornings when it was hard to leave bed.
I made them the old-fashioned way, in a saucepan, and they were creamy and hot when I poured them into her bowl.
The sight of her spooning them up made me so happy I had to turn away so she didn’t see me tearing up.
She didn’t know how much those oats said.
“I like oats,” Jake admitted, making me feel like he could read my mind.
“It’s grandma food.”
“Yeah, so? I like my grandma.”
“I don’t really know my grandma—she’s in Cincinnati but I’ve never been there. I met her once when I was three, when she came to visit my dad, but I don’t really remember it.” As far as Flo knew, she only had one grandma. “Mom says I’ll get to see her at Dad’s wedding this November.”
I checked the instructions as I struggled to get my countertop oven preheating. I glanced at the big black range and tried to imagine cooking the mac and cheese in it. You could lose a whole roast turkey in that monster.
Once the macaroni and cheese was in, I dipped out to the porch with the bug spray.
“Looks like it’s the moment of truth. Which record do you want to try?” Jake asked as I sprayed Flo liberally. He was on his knees in front of the vintage player, so they were about the same height.
“This one,” she said, picking the first one off the closest pile.
“Dean Martin Sings?” He turned it over in his hands and slid the record out of its sleeve. “You a Dean Martin fan?”
“I doubt it,” she said, completely oblivious to me. “But I won’t know till I try, right?”
I watched Jake gently lower the record onto the ancient turntable. His baseball T-shirt stretched tight over his shoulders and back and I felt a not-unpleasant swirl in my belly. Flo wriggled forward until she was bending over his shoulder.
“Don’t scratch it,” Flo warned. “You’ll damage the value.”
“And the music,” he said dryly.
The needle dropped and there was a familiar scritch-scratching sound I remembered from when Tim and I lived together.
Brassy music sounded faintly from the little holes in the case.
Flo twiddled a little black knob and the trumpets soared, a little fuzzy-sounding.
“High five, kid, we did it.”
As Flo energetically slapped Jake’s hand, I felt an odd weakening. It was a wave of feeling that was unfamiliar to me, an eddy of something sad and sweet and bright and sharply pleasant. Oh God, was I about to cry?
“I might just pick some flowers for the table,” I said, turning away. What was wrong with me?
I grabbed a pair of garden shears and a basket from the laundry, where Wayne had left a neat little collection of tools for me, and headed out into the garden.
Dean Martin’s whiskey-warm and lazy voice was crooning, “Who’s your little who-zis?
” as I passed the big white wedding tent full of culch on my way to the garden.
I could hear Flo laughing at the silly lyrics of the song as I picked the late roses, which were fat and old-fashioned and highly perfumed.
I sheared off wands of lilacs too. Around the outbuildings were thick beds of hydrangeas, all in pastel shades of pink and green and palest purple, and I snipped with abandon.
There were thickets of small daisies everywhere, and taller wildflowers whose names I didn’t know.
I cut armfuls of everything, not knowing what was weed and what was wildflower, and not caring.
It was all beautiful. And cutting flowers stopped my tears.
“Is there still a garden left?” Flo asked, her eyes widening when I came in with my overflowing basket.
“I doubt she even made a dent in it,” Jake said. His blue-green, marble-glass eyes were amused. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, the denim of his jeans outlining his strong thighs.
“Look, Mom, we have Beatles albums! Jake says they’ll be worth a lot!” She held up Rubber Soul.
“I said they might be worth something.”
“Can I get you something to drink now that your work is done?” I asked Jake, as Flo took the needle off Dean Martin and swapped him out for the Beatles. She was treating the records like they were made of glass, which made me smile.
“Sure.” He uncoiled from the floor. I was painfully aware of his closeness. That smell of wood shavings and sea salt curled around me.
“Um…” I tried to pull my thoughts together. They were scudding about like clouds in a strong wind. “Beer? Or iced tea?”
“Whatever you’re having is fine.”