My grandma smiled, a sad and tight smile. Then two tears slipped down her cheek and into the dough.
My mother, my sister, and I put our arms around her as two more tears slipped in, too.
“Oh no, Grandma Gisela!” Lucy said, crawling over the counter and hugging Grandma. “Don’t cry!”
“Grandma Gisela!” Stephi emptied her pockets. “Here. You can have all my rocks.”
Kyle said, “I am not understanding this situation, but I do understand that when someone you love cries, you give them a hug.” He hugged Grandma. Patted her back. Three times. Then he wrote something in his Questions Notebook and said to Chloe, “I have a lot of troubling and confusing questions here, Mother, for which I will need your wise counsel.”
“I know, brainiac, I can tell,” she said. “It’ll set your neurons on fire, but we’ll talk later.”
My grandma patted Kyle’s cheek, leaving flour there, then went back to kneading the bread, her white hair swaying, her tears adding the salt we needed. “One thing you all need to remember, though,” she said, “I love you. I love you all so much.”
* * *
My grandma didn’t say more that night. It was enough. We talked and laughed and ate the chicken tortilla soup with sour cream and chips that I made. Chloe brought salad in a bag. She’s not a fanatic about cooking like me, and neither is my mother. I definitely get my semi-obsession with cooking from my grandma’s genes.
Chloe said, “I made an appointment to get these knockers taken down a notch. Also, I’m going to start dating. I know there’s a lot of love in this two-hundred-pound woman and I, as a tough-talkin’, hip-rockin’ Montana woman, want to share it with someone.” She indicated her boobs with her pointer fingers. “They’re ready to get on out there again, but I have questions.”
Kyle reached for his Questions Notebook again and adjusted his glasses, waiting.
“How do you date?” She threw her arms out. Kyle scribbled. “How do I get asked out on a date? Why do I have to wait to get asked out? Why put the power in the man’s hands? Why does he get to control the relationship from the start? I don’t have to prove myself to him or hope that he likes what I’ve got, or be good enough. He has to prove to me that he’s good enough. None of this, am I woman enough for him? It’s ‘Is he man enough for me?’
“I’m going to ask men out if I think they’ll be able to handle me as I need to be handled, and see what they say. Hell, Teddy and I met in Iraq. Talk about not romantic. Sand. Guns. Bombs. But love bloomed like an explosion, and we heard enough of those. We didn’t date in a traditional sense. Too many AK-47s around. But he acted like a total man when I told him I wanted to have dinner with him in the cafeteria and then, if he had time, I wouldn’t mind slipping myself into his bunk for some bunking.”
Kyle scribbled away. I don’t think my sister even noticed.
“I saw a man who I thought could handle all of my womanliness when I was up in Telena, and I walked straight up to him after seeing this tall drink of Montana water and I said to him, “My name is Chloe and I think someone like yourself can handle someone like me. How about dinner?”
My grandma sighed. “Oh, my dear Nutmeg.”
My mother said, “Way to take charge.”
“And he said . . .” I prompted.
“He said, ‘Lady, are you asking me out?’ and I said, ‘I sure am. I’m a feminist and I don’t think men need to have the power in this dating game anymore so I’m taking the power,’ and he said he right liked that idea but he was married and had five kids.”
“And then you said . . .” my mother prompted.
“I said to him, ‘I don’t mow other women’s grass, so I’m going to continue on and get myself a few straight shots at the bar,’ and he said, ‘Thank you for asking me out. You made me feel better. I’ve got a stressful job, my mother’s ill, and the five little ones need a lot of attention and I’m flattered, ma’am. I am. If I was single, I would have said yes,’ and I said, ‘Thank you, too, you tall drink of Montana water,’ and I went to the bar and had a cry into my vodka. Dating is not going to be fun. I’ll probably meet a lot of donkey men, but I’m a shootin’ woman with love to give.” She shimmied her top half, and we laughed.
My mother talked about a patient of hers who came in with worms, which was fascinating to Stephi and Lucy but not appetizing, as there was chicken in the soup, which made me think of flesh.
“Fire Breather knows how to eradicate worms,” my grandma drawled, patting my mother’s hand.
I talked about my job as a chef and how I might serve Larry up one day on a platter.
Kyle discussed astronomical physics until his mother said, “Kyle. I think that’s enough for our brains tonight. Remember don’t yak on and on for long periods of time.”
“Thank you, Mother. I forgot. I apologize.” We told him he didn’t need to apologize at all, his knowledge was impressive, but he opened his Questions Notebook and made a note about not yakking on and on.
Lucy talked about how she found herself in another fight at school, and Stephi said she was wearing her raccoon hat to school tomorrow and she was going to wear a tutu over her favorite cat sweatpants and if a boy bugged her she would throw her “throwing rock” from her rock collection at him.
Then we ate brownie sundaes and hugged and went to our separate homes.
I stood on the log cabin deck that night and looked toward the towering, snow-covered Dove Mountains. The night was clear but freezing, so I had on two jackets and my boots over my pajamas. My pajamas were at least ten years old, but I liked the little white lambs on them. Chloe had given them to me.
A star shot through the night. Falling stars are one of the many things I love about being in the country. The city lights cover stars up, but when you’re out in the country, no lights on, you can see the full glory of the universe. When someone tells you there are billions of stars out there, you believe them, because you can imagine it.
The stars had been especially bright and twinkly on Jace’s ranch. It was peaceful. So peaceful. Until.
* * *
Monday I took the girls to school, volunteered in their classrooms with an art lesson, and met several of the other mothers. I smiled, chatted, liked them. I had had to promise the pig boar, Larry, that I would work Saturday morning in exchange.
I volunteered so that my girls could have play dates with their girls. I don’t know much about parenting, but I do know, from Chloe and Annabelle, that you have to meet the other mothers and there’s a whole tricky social dynamic at school. I did know a number of the parents at the school, as I went to school with them, or they or their family members were patients of my mother and grandma, or I knew them from town, so that helped a ton. They didn’t know at first that Lucy and Stephi were mine, because they had a different last name, McDaniel.
The girls still felt they had “no friends,” and thought the other kids thought they were “weird and dumb,” but I was hoping that when the other mothers realized they were my kids and I was unlikely to abduct their precious children to Siberia, they would encourage their sons and daughters to play with Lucy and Stephi.
It’s what a helicopter parent does, tries to engineer social stuff at school for their kids, but I was broken by the girls’ tears and abject loneliness, and if I had to helicopter around for a while I would.
So there.
* * *
I had a bit of time before I had to be at Larry’s, so I drove alongside Jace’s white fence into the country. I stopped and got out of my truck, the sky blue and wide, a cold, white blanket over the countryside. In the distance was the hill with the view of magical sunsets that will make you feel like you’re in a painting.
Maybe I would go there soon.
* * *
She called me.
When I listened to her voice mail, all I heard was laughing for about a minute. This twisted, high-pitched laughter that made my spine tingle and my fear skyrocket.
Her words were short.
“Hello, Olivia. I’ll see you soon. Won’t that be lovely?”
* * *
I can be overly emotional, and I cry too easily now and then, but I also deal with a latent anger that claws itself out of me at times.
My anger is one of my many faults.
My first experience with true fury came after my father left us when I was ten, Chloe eleven. He was an emotionally absent man when we were growing up. He worked as a pharmacist and had no idea how to be a father. One morning we had breakfast with him in our blue farmhouse, scrambled eggs and toast, and the next morning, a Saturday, he was gone.
He walked out of our lives. There was another woman.
His leaving was devastating. No hug, no good-bye. He was simply gone. It was a blow, as if he had hit us with his treasured red sports car, a ridiculous car to have in Montana because of our winters.
I remember peeking in at my mother, sitting on their bed, reading a letter, which I later learned was the letter he left her. She read it, stood up, walked to the window, and stared out, her arms crossed. After a couple of minutes, she shredded the letter and sent it down the toilet. There were no tears.
My mother told us the truth that morning in my and Chloe’s bedroom in our farmhouse. It was summer, sunny and warm. My father’s desertion brought ice into our home that day.
“He’s not coming back?” Chloe asked.
“He will come back to visit with you two, but he won’t live here again,” our mother said, an arm wrapped around each of our shoulders. “He’s divorcing me, but he’s not divorcing you, that’s important to remember. He’s your father, he’ll always be your father, and he loves you both very much.”
“But why did he leave?” I asked.
And there my mother hesitated. She was careful not to talk much behind my father’s back when we were growing up, but she also believed in the truth, as she told us later. Was she to lie to us? Was she to make up some fairy tale that our father was helping orphans in Africa and that’s why he wasn’t here?
And why, she asked herself, should she lie to protect him and his egregious, selfish actions? Why was the burden on her to soften this up and make our father appear better than he was? Plus, we would find out the truth when we were older, and then we would know she had lied. We would have one parent who abruptly abandoned us and another parent who fogged and deceived our perceptions of our own reality, and she knew it. She would also not downplay or minimalize what he’d done, which would not validate our pain. Mary Beth believed in honesty. She believed we were better off knowing the truth. So she told us the truth.
“Your father has a girlfriend. He is going to marry her. She lives in Las Vegas. He has been seeing her on his business trips when he’s not here.”
I remember the silence in our bedroom. That silence shook, intense and suffocating, as I stared out at that bright, bright sun. I sat absolutely still, my mother’s words penetrating, one letter at time, then the full word, then the sentences and the meaning behind it. When I finally understood the enormity of what happened, I stood up and threw a framed picture of him and me across the room. It made a hole in the wall. Chloe stood up, put her hands on her hips, and yelled, “Damn him!”
I picked up a jewelry box he had bought me on one of his trips to Vegas. Showgirls were dancing on it. I lifted it high above my head and smashed it. I threw a blue and pink paperweight he had given me straight through the window. Luckily the window was open.
I turned and ran out of our blue farmhouse. I ran and ran and ran until I couldn’t run anymore, and a neighbor, Mr. Buckley, who lives seven miles out of town, drove me home. He found me sitting on his fence.
That’s where the anger started.
My mother, grandma, Chloe, and I had always baked cakes together for Martindale Cake Therapy, and the night my father left I made a simple chocolate fudge cake. The next night I made a white cake with pink peppermint frosting. The third night I made a lemon cheesecake.
Later, when I was a teenager, often rebellious and wild, surely because of the abandonment and anger issues I had, after I snuck out at night, to drink beer or party, I came home and baked. When I missed my father and I thought the hurt and rejection would explode inside of me, I baked. When he missed Christmas and my birthday and Chloe’s birthday, I baked. When he never came to visit, I baked. Baking occupied my mind, my hands, and I could forget.
I branched out to cooking. My mother gave me cookbooks. I went through an Italian stage. For weeks, all we ate was Italian. Then a Japanese stage, French, Hawaiian, Mexican, Spanish. For some reason I had to cook my way around the world. It was as if sifting flour, stirring batter, dumping berries in a pie, rolling out a crust, watching bread rise, and boiling noodles took some of the anger away from me. It was art, in a culinary sense, and art is always healing.
I finally made it back to traditional American food. My mother loved that I cooked, so did my granddad and grandma. The three of them were always busy at the clinic, helping people, so to have dinner made at night, well, they were thrilled, especially my hard-working, compassionate granddad, who was more of a father to me than my father had ever been. He said, “Olivia. You are making heaven in that oven. Can’t wait to eat that heaven tonight.”
When my father did return, five years later, he came back for a day with a new wife, not the woman he left my mother for, my mother told us, and two kids—one three years old, one four. They were our half brothers. It felt like we were getting kicked in the teeth. Chloe and I met him at a restaurant.
His wife, much younger than him, was from the city and wore pancake makeup with blue eye shadow. Her perfume had rotted. She wore fancy/slutty clothes, and her shirt was unbuttoned so low her boobs were half out. Our father was wearing a suit.
He hugged us, smiling, motioning for us to sit in the booth with them. “So great to see you two again. How are you?”
He was trying to be the proper pharmacist. Pompous. Proud of himself. As if he hadn’t deserted his children. It hurt to see him. Hurt like we were being stabbed in the chest.
“This is your new mother, Pam.”
“She’s not our new mother,” I said.
“We have a mother,” Chloe said.
Awkward. New Wife frowned at us.
Our dad reprimanded us. “Please show better manners.” He turned to New Wife and muttered, “Their mother . . .” and shook his head, as if our disgrace of a mother was responsible for our poor manners. “I’m sorry I haven’t seen you girls much over the last two years.”
“Five,” Chloe and I corrected him.
“You haven’t seen us in five years.”
New Wife frowned again, this time at our father.
He waved his hand as in, whatever. “Your mother didn’t let me see you. She told me I couldn’t come. She took custody of you.”
“That’s a lie, Barney,” Chloe and I corrected him, together. We called him Barney, not “Dad.” He had not acted like a dad, so he didn’t get the title. Our granddad was our dad.
“She never said that to you,” I said.
“I heard her telling you, on the phone, to come and see us anytime,” Chloe said. “Many times. And you didn’t.”
“You walked out on us,” I said.
“You didn’t even say good-bye.” Chloe gave him a disgusted look. “Barney.”
“You didn’t say good-bye?” New Wife said. “You didn’t tell the girls you were leaving their mother? You said that their mother was verbally and physically abusive to you and that your girls agreed you had to leave for your own safety.”
“Never,” I said. “Our mother is a doctor. He was the one who would have temper tantrums like a baby and stomp out and slam the door. Do you still stomp, Barney?”
“Nope, Second Wife,” Chloe drawled. “That’s another lie.”
“Yes . . . yes! I said good-bye to the girls,” Barney stuttered to New Wife. Our half brothers started crawling into their mom’s lap. “Their mother was . . . was . . .” He couldn’t meet our ey
es.
“Our mother is the best mother on the planet Earth,” Chloe said, stabbing a fork into the table. “Don’t criticize her, or I’m going to use my karate skills on you.”
“There was no good-bye when Barney left,” I said to New Wife. “None. Here one day, gone the next. Off to see his girlfriend in Vegas.” I turned to Barney. “Was she a hooker?”
New Wife glared at him. “What girlfriend? I met you five years ago. You said I was the first after your marriage.”
“There was no girlfriend,” my father said, flushed. “Only you. I left my marriage because I couldn’t stay with my ex-wife, who is crazy and is mentally . . . disturbed, that which . . . uh . . . she hides from everyone else. Hides it. She’s disturbed.”
Chloe and I laughed.
“Try another lie, Barney,” Chloe said, still stabbing that fork but edging closer to his hand.
“Barney, you didn’t even send Mom money for us, either. Ever.” I gave him a disgusted look, too.
“I did!” He pulled on his tie.
“You didn’t,” Chloe and I said together.
“You said, Barney,” New Wife said, impatient now, suspicious, “that you make huge child support payments to their mother and that’s why you don’t have much money.” Her eyes narrowed.
“I do make payments,” he said, his voice faltering, but that pompous note still rang through. “When I can.”
“No, you don’t,” Chloe and I said together.
“Mom said the girlfriend’s name was Bambi,” I said. “Like the deer.”
“Bambi Nugent?” New Wife leaned toward him, her face scrunched in anger. “You said you had only met her twice.”
“Barney didn’t call us on our birthdays, and neither did Bambi,” I said.
“Or Christmas,” Chloe said.
“You said”—New Wife was getting more and more angry—“that you called the girls all the time.”
“He’s gonna lie to you, too,” Chloe said to New Wife. “He lied to my mother. He took a lot of trips when he was married to her. He said it was for work. It wasn’t for work. He was visiting his Las Vegas girlfriend.”