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The Summer Kitchen

By Lisa Wingate

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Part of you says, It’s just a house. It’s wood, and brick, and stone, nails and tar paper, weathered red shingles, a few of which are missing now. It’s only a ramshackle old place that was never anything fancy.
With luck, developers will buy it and wait for revitalization to take over the block. A quick sale to a speculator would be the easiest way...
The voice that says this is logical. It makes sense. It’s only telling you what you already know.
Which would make you wonder why those words are so hard to hear.
There’s another voice, one that’s smaller and quieter, timid yet persistent, like a child with something to say. This is more than a house, it insists. This is the past. Your past…
I’ve wondered time and again if those are the voices anyone would hear when saying goodbye to a treasured childhood place.
It’s nothing but a burden, I told myself as I stood in the driveway, waiting for the real estate agent to arrive. Maryanne was right. You should have done what she wanted. If I’d let my sister have her way, the house would have been put on the auction block, contents and all. In Maryanne’s view, the little bit it might bring wasn’t worth the effort of getting an agent and waiting for a buyer. It wasn’t as if Mother needed the money from her inheritance of the place. It wasn’t as if anyone cared what happened to Uncle Poppy’s house at all.
Anyone other than me. When the one person who always loved you the most dies a violent death, it’s hard to know what should come after. There is no road map for what should be done with the possessions left behind and the memories randomly cut short. Mother had let this house languish for months on the premise that it wouldn’t look good to dispose of it while Poppy’s murder was still unsolved. Since the DPD had finally admitted that the case might never be closed, six months became the socially acceptable benchmark. It was time to cut our losses, as Mother put it.
The words stuck in my chest, too hard to swallow even now that the real estate agent was on the way. The idea of tossing this place out like an empty shoebox seemed a betrayal of Poppy and Aunt Ruth, whose breath inhabited the fading pink house even now that the contents had been sold, the porches swept, the leftover junk piled on the curb. There was nothing more to do here, but hang out a sign and let go. Yet the reality remained impossible to face. Standing in the drive, I expected that the front door would creak open, and Poppy would hobble out in his bow-legged shuffle. He’d smile, and wave, and tell me to come in for coffee. The last six months would be nothing but a bad dream, a nightmare from which we’d awaken all at once.
Turning from the door, I stared down the block. There was no way to be comfortable with the silence here, no way to make peace with the painful ending of Poppy’s life. I could go back a thousand times and wish I’d acquiesced when Mother and Maryanne wanted to move Poppy to a nursing home two years ago, after Aunt Ruth’s death, but wishing it wouldn’t change anything.
Checking my watch, I paced back and forth across the driveway. The real estate agent was a half-hour late. Around me, the neighborhood had slipped into the filmy shade of evening, and even though it was warm, gooseflesh rose on my arms as a group of adolescent boys passed by on the sidewalk, their oversized shorts sagging beneath T-shirts in colors that were probably carefully selected to identify a group.
One of them kicked a plastic flowerpot from the edge of the estate sale rubbish pile. A flash of anger, hot and sudden, caused me to cry out, “Stop it!” The boys turned my way, and I fell mute, staring at them. In a few years, would they be the ones jumping an eighty-nine year old man whose only mistake was to have cashed his social security check before dropping by the convenience store for a gallon of milk? “Leave that alone,” I hissed, and hatred welled inside me. How dare those boys touch Poppy’s belongings. How dare they touch anything that had been his.
Shrugging, the closest one kicked the flowerpot again, then stepped around it and left it in the street. “Yeah, you in my neighborhood now, Lady.” He muttered with false bravado, and his friends laughed. “You betta take yo’ butt back home befo’ dark.”
“Yeah, get in that Caddy and mojo on outa here,” another added, then slipped in a string of expletives without venturing a glance back at me.
I stood by the driveway, trapped between good sense and a blinding need to confront them.
This isn’t the way, I told myself. They’re just boys. Just little boys trying to impress each other, trying to act like men.
Poppy had always loved the kids in the neighborhood. For years, he’d fixed their bikes, patched leaking tire tubes and aired up deflated basketballs, tack-welded the wheels onto broken skateboards, wagons, and tricycles. He probably knew those boys when they were younger…
A new red Mustang passed them on the street, and they whistled at the blonde behind the wheel. She ignored them as she pulled into the driveway. “Kids,” she said, as she stepped from her car. A high, quick laugh punctuated the sentence, and she rolled her eyes in a way meant to indicate that the boys were harmless. “I heard they’re trying to get some summer programs started up to keep young people off the streets when school gets out.”
“That’s good,” I said, but I didn’t ask who they were. I didn’t care. I wanted to be done with this meeting, get in my car, go home, and put a diet frozen dinner in the microwave. Rob was working ER tonight, and Christopher would be out with friends, studying. They’d both get home late, the usual routine. It was the easiest thing for all of us, a way to avoid the fact that Poppy wouldn’t be calling to check in, and Jake wasn’t in his dorm at SMU, but somewhere on the far side of the world, searching for a birth family he knew nothing about.
Nothing was the way it was supposed to be. The little pink house shouldn’t have been dark and silent. Poppy and Jake should have been inside with a bowl of popcorn, watching the Rangers play ball and cheering so loudly their voices would echo into the front yard. The two of them had loved to watch baseball together almost from the moment we adopted Jake and brought him home from Guatemala. Jake, silent and scared in a universe of strangers, had instantly latched onto Uncle Poppy. We supposed Poppy looked like someone Jake knew before--a grandparent, perhaps, or a worker in the orphanage.
Jake was always Poppy’s favorite. Even after Christopher was born, there was still something special between Poppy and Jake. They never went more than a few days without seeing each other.
Now it hurt to remember that…
The real estate agent introduced herself, and we shook hands. My cell phone rang as she returned to her car to rifle through the backseat for paperwork.
I answered the phone, and Holly was on the other end. I should have known it would be Holly, checking to see how things were going. Over the years, we’d shared everything from pregnancies to the struggle of caring for aging relatives. Together we’d celebrated all the major firsts of motherhood—first steps, first tooth, first day of school, first date, first car, first high school graduation. But now there was a vast, dark place we couldn’t inhabit together. Poppy’s death and Jake’s disappearance were on the fringes of every conversation, waiting to slip in like a fast-moving storm, and throw dampness over everything.
“Where are you?” Holly never beat around the bush. She was quick, and to the point, which made her great at managing a family and running a part-time catering business. “I just drove by. Your car’s been gone all afternoon. You’re not out at Poppy’s house alone again, are you?”
“I’m meeting the real estate agent,” I said, ignoring Holly’s need to be everyone’s caretaker. With six kids around the house, mothering came naturally to her. “I wanted to get the last of the yard sale junk out to the curb before she came. She’s here now, though.”
Holly coughed indignantly. “You should have called me. I told you I’d come with you anytime you need to go down there.”
“I know you did, but there wasn’t much left to clean up—a few flowerpots, some picture frames and whatnot. I’m just going to leave those boxes of dishes in the cellar, and the big roasters. Whoever buys the place can deal with it.”
Holly wasn’t about to be sidetracked. “You shouldn’t go over to that house by yourself, SandraKaye.” I knew Holly was serious when she used my full, properly southern, double name.
“It was broad daylight. Anyway, I thought the real estate agent would be here, but she was late.” The truth was that Holly was probably right. Rob didn’t want me coming here by myself, either. The neighborhoods south of Blue Sky Hill hadn’t quite made the turn to revitalization yet. As the new residents uphill started neighborhood watch programs, put in expensive surveillance systems, and demanded greater police protection, the less savory elements of the area were forced to frequent new territories. During the estate sale, we’d engaged a private auction firm experienced at operating in older parts of town. They’d come with security attached.
“I don’t care if it’s high noon,” Holly complained. “You know what things can…” She swallowed the end of the sentence, and I pictured the blood draining from her face as we both realized she’d inadvertently pointed out that, just blocks from here, on what should have been a perfectly ordinary Dallas evening, we’d been shown that lives could collide in an instant, with painful consequences.
The real estate agent closed her car door and headed my way with a clipboard.
“Listen, Holly, I’d better go so we can knock out the disclosure paperwork while there’s still enough light outside.”
Holly sighed impatiently. “Does the real estate agent have anybody with her?” By anybody, she meant anybody six-foot-tall and burly.
“No. It’s just her.” Watching the agent stagger across the lawn, her high heels sinking into the grass, I cupped my hand over the phone and added, “She could probably poke someone’s eye out with those stilettos, though.”
Holly chuckled. “You’re out of there by dark.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Holly gave the word an indignant cough. We both knew I could be on the south side of Chicago and my mother wouldn’t be calling to make sure I was all right. “Don’t insult me, but I mean it. By dark, OK?”
“I’m forty-nine years old, Holl. I can handle this. I imagine we’ll have to finish going over the inside after dark.”
Holly sighed. “Call me when you’re done there, Okay?”
“All right. I will. I’d better go now. She’s ready.” The real estate agent, Andrea, was already beginning to move around the house with her notepad. I tucked the phone into my pocket and joined her on the tour.
My mind filled with memories as I considered the reduction of family history to meaningless tic marks on a real estate disclosure sheet.
Tic… torn screen in the bottom left corner of the bay window. Poppy’s spinster sister, Great Aunt Neva, lived in that room, years ago. Her lanky gray cat came and went through the tear in the screen. We all pretended we couldn’t see it. I was never sure why.
Tic… loose floorboard on the porch, just left of the door. Jalicia, a little girl from two streets over, and I played dolls under there. The loose board was our periscope hole. We watched for signs of my mother, or Maryanne. If a car rolled up, we’d slip out the side beneath the oleander bush and run around back to part ways. Mother didn’t approve of my playing with a black child. Sooner or later, I would begin to pick up the dialect, and then where would we be? Being freckle-faced and cursed with my father’s curly, fly-away strawberry blond hair, I had enough drawbacks already. Maryanne, who had been blessed by my mother’s first husband with normal hair and no freckles, added that Jalicia knew way too much, for a nine year old—about sex, in particular. Mother hated that the neighborhoods at the base of Blue Sky Hill were going mixed. There was a time in Dallas, she said, when people stayed with their own sort, even in the working-class neighborhoods.
Mother spoke the words working-class neighborhood as if she hadn’t come from one, as if she hadn’t grown up just down the block in my grandparents’ house, where the yard was always scrappy with unmowed weeds, and the holly bushes covered the windows like a shroud. If not for her fortuitous third marriage to my stepfather, she probably would still have been living in the shadow of Blue Sky Hill.
Tic… Dent in the iron portico post, where Aunt Ruth backed the car into it when she learned to drive, after Poppy’s heart attack.
Tic…. A crumbling rock foundation in the backyard…
“What in the world is this?” Andrea asked, studying the square of vegetation that grew around the old foundation.
“There was a summer kitchen, back before the house had air conditioning. They did their cooking out here, so as not to heat up the house. After they tore the building down, Aunt Ruth planted flowerbeds around the foundation.” Surveying the rectangle of sandstone peeking from beneath a tangle of hollyhocks and honeysuckle vines, I smiled at a memory. The hollyhocks were already taking over, forming the green walls of a living room. On long summer days, Jalicia and I had created dolls from the hollyhocks blooms, turning them upside down, then adding buds for heads and rose petals or dwarf mums for hats. A miniature cancan of hollyhock dancers performed summer shows atop the back fence, where in the old days Aunt Ruth had fed tramps off the train. The wanderers had scratched a symbol on the gate post, a house blessing of sorts, a sign for the lost, that this was a friendly place.
Aunt Ruth told stories about those traveling men, still struggling to find the way home from the war. She said if you looked hard enough, you could still see the house blessing, even years after the train stopped running, and the men were gone, and the post had been painted over.
Jalicia and I sometimes stared at the post, imagining that we could see the carving there. We tried to decide what the symbol for a friendly place would look like. We decided on a peace sign, like the ones the hippies wore, with a smiley face in it.
I wondered if the lost men of yesterday needed a friendly place as much as Jalicia and I did…
Andrea tapped her pencil against the clipboard, frowning. “I guess we could call it a raised garden,” she mused, and then we moved on, the remains of the summer kitchen now a sales point.
Filling out the rest of the disclosure sheet didn’t take long. It all seemed fairly clinical, the way Andrea spoke of it. She was surprisingly fast and efficient, no time for sentiment. She wasn’t certain developers would be interested in the house, particularly with everything else on the street still privately owned, but she had sold some properties a few blocks away to a development company, so a speculative buy was a possibility.
“Developers take places as is, which makes things easier,” she said, as we stood in the kitchen, marking off leaky pipes and flickering light fixtures.
“That’s good,” I said, studying the doughnut of fingerprints on the cabinet where Aunt Ruth kept kiddie cups acquired long ago in boxes of Trix, Bisquick, and Tide. An antique dealer had bought the cups at the estate sale, the gleam of a tidy profit in his eye. I wished the cups had gone to someone who would use them.
Squinting at the fingerprints, I wondered if some of them were Aunt Ruth’s, or Poppy’s, or Christopher’s… or Jake’s. I felt sick all over again. I didn’t want someone else to wash away the fingerprints.
“Those could use a coat of paint,” Andrea observed when she noticed me looking at the cabinets. “But people shopping in this price range don’t expect much.”
I contemplated the idea that painting the cabinets would be preferable to washing them. Sealed between coats of paint, the fingerprints would remain forever. It was an odd thought, considering that we’d just been discussing the house being torn down for development.
“I think I’ll get some paint and do that tomorrow,” I heard myself say. The words seemed to come from outside, as if I were in the box seats at a theater, hearing them spoken on stage.
Even Andrea seemed skeptical. She made a note on her pad, then shook my hand, and we started toward the door. Before stepping out, she eyed the darkened street. “I’ll come back tomorrow and put out a sign,” she said, then hurried to her car and got in. She waited until I’d locked the burglar bars on the front door and made it to my car before she backed out and wheeled away.
Looking at Poppy’s place in the glare of the headlights, I felt regret settling over me like a wool blanket, itchy and uncomfortable, not right for the season. Everything in me wanted to go back—two years, ten, twelve. I could be that young mother again, driving to Poppy’s house with the boys strapped in the back, the two of them fighting about who touched whom, while I threatened that, if they didn’t straighten up, I’d turn the car around and we’d go home instead of visiting Aunt Ruth and Uncle Poppy.
I never did, of course. Jake and Christopher knew I wouldn’t.
Closing my eyes for a moment, I tried to imagine myself back in time, tried to replace the wool blanket with a new suit of clothes and make it a reality. I could almost hear the boys in the backseat…
A car alarm sounded nearby, and my game of imagination popped like a balloon, the sound jerking me upright. I called Holly to tell her I was headed home. She didn’t pick up, so I left a message, then drove away, feeling strangely numb, disconnected like a ghost not really in this world or the one I was headed to.
Around the corner, the boys who’d passed Poppy’s house earlier were bouncing a basketball against the side of a crumbling one-story building that housed income-assisted apartments. A teenage girl with a long blond ponytail stepped from the end apartment and hollered at them as I waited for the car ahead of me to make a left turn into a deserted strip mall.
A police car passed in the right lane, slowed as the officer surveyed the activity . The girl on the porch and the boys froze in place, their postures deliberately casual. As the cruiser disappeared down the street, the boys picked up their basketball and moved on.

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