“You’re confusing,” Stephi said, shaking her head again. “Want a rock?”
“I don’t get it. That wasn’t in English,” Lucy said. “Can we see the paintings, Kyle?”
“These will be our most treasured works of art, Kyle,” I said. “I know it.”
“Thank you for your confidence, Aunt Olivia.” His hands flapped at his sides. Then stopped. “I am feeling some anxiety about the result. Mother told me that the background of the pictures should be a place that Lucy and Stephi enjoy, hence this log cabin with the red door, the sun weather vane, and great granddad’s lasso. I added the Dove Mountains and the Telena River in the background for both. Further, I inquired of Lucy and Stephi, individually, what their favorite flower was and included each.”
“I understand that part,” Stephi said. “I told you it was tulips!”
“And my favorite flowers,” Lucy said, “are roses.”
“Correct,” Kyle said. He took the brown paper off. The paintings had been framed by my sister.
Lord almighty. Lord. Almighty.
The paintings were about twenty-four by eighteen inches, and they were exquisite. The girls were beautiful. Huge smiles, long blond curls blowing slightly in the wind, the log cabin in back of them, the mountains and river beyond that. Stephi was holding a bouquet of red, purple, and yellow tulips in front of her, her red headband on, and Lucy was holding wild red roses, her ponytail high on her head with a pink ribbon.
They were simply stunning.
“Wow,” the girls said. “Wow.”
Stephi pointed at her picture, her voice hardly above a whisper. “Do I look like that, Kyle?”
“Yes. It is an exact portrait.”
“And I look like that, Kyle?” Lucy said, turning to him. “That pretty?”
“Yes. As I said, this is an exact portrait. I simply painted you and added the flowers. Now that you have an accurate picture of your appearance, hopefully you will realize that the girls at school have presented you with a falsehood.”
“Kyle.” I wiped away tears.
He became alarmed, his face tightening. “I can’t read your expression when you cry, Aunt Olivia. In fact, Mother said I can’t read anyone’s expression accurately, hence I continue to work on this deficiency with her. Have the paintings caused you sadness? Do you not like them?”
“I love them! They’re happy tears, Kyle.”
The girls hugged him tight. “I love them, too, Kyle! I love you, Kyle!”
And Lucy said, “Kaila is stupid.”
“Megan is mean,” Stephi said.
“Kyle, they are perfect. You are a talented artist. Thank you so much. We’ll have to hang them up immediately.”
He nodded. “I am happy that you’re pleased.” He turned to the girls. “Kids have been mean, aggressive, and physically hurtful to me in the past, and it’s best to know that when they are mean, they are usually telling untruths. Sometimes it is appropriate to explain to them that what they’re saying is false or unsubstantiated. Sometimes, depending on how many kids are there at one time, it’s best not to say anything at all. I must leave and return home.” He checked his watch. “I am now four minutes late.”
“But what about dinner and Chutes and Ladders?” Stephi whined.
“Yes, I want to play Chutes and Ladders with you,” Lucy said.
He paused. “I can have dinner and play one game of Chutes and Ladders, then I will stay up approximately one hour and thirty minutes later tonight in order to complete Tuesday’s study of Michelangelo. Tuesday is also vacuuming night.”
We ate while they played Chutes and Ladders, then Kyle left under a chorus of thank-yous and good-bye hugs. He allowed the hugs, his eyes skittering away from ours, then left.
“I love Kyle,” Stephi said.
“He’s nice and weird,” Lucy said.
“Yes. Nice and weird,” Stephi agreed. “I love my painting! I’m not ugly!”
“And I don’t have a turnip nose,” Lucy said, pointing to the nose on the painting. “See?”
* * *
“We’re going out to see Belinda Bianchi today, Rebel Child,” my mother told me.
It was Saturday afternoon. The girls were with my grandma. She wanted to teach them how to make her grandma Ida’s apple chocolate trifle. The girls were thrilled. They almost pushed me out the door of the farmhouse and ran back in. They like cake and they like blood. What can I say?
I climbed into my mother’s truck. She was on the phone with another doctor about one of their joint patients. “Now, you listen here, Shelby, with both ears. You know as well as I do that Skeeter Lyons is not a compliant patient. He’s a son of a gun and he does his own thing, but you are not to treat him with the condescension that you did yesterday, that is not the way to get a patient better. Yes, I heard about your condescension from two nurses.”
I lay my head back on the seat as she pulled out of the driveway. It’s tiring being stressed out, and I was stressed out. I had gotten a call from the state telling me that my motion to adopt was still on hold. I called my attorney and had a meltdown. Apparently, the girls’ mother, still in jail, had an attorney now, too. We were at legal war, and I sure wasn’t confident that I’d win.
My mother drove through the snow, coming down harder every minute, through Kalulell, and out to the highway. My personal panic point with blizzards kicked in and my hands shook as I sipped coffee out of a mug. I was on anxiety overload.
“Young woman,” my mother snapped to the doctor on the other end of the phone, “you may have a fancy-pants degree from a highfalutin university back east and a student loan the size of my horse’s ass, but you have a lot to learn about people. You put on your thinking cap real quick and open your mind so you can better serve your patients. Patients come with all sorts of problems that are not simply physical and treatable with buckets full of medications and operations and extremely poor bedside manners from doctors like yourself.
“They have personalities, problems, and attitudes. You work with them. You don’t shove your new drugs, your biases about their economic status and intellectual capabilities, and your cold analysis down their throats like bullets down a gun.
“I will call you on Monday, and I hope you’ll have done some hard thinking about our mutual patient or you and I are going to butt heads like two bulls and everyone in this state knows who will win. You will work with me cooperatively on our patient, Skeeter, you will be compassionate toward him, and you will not use that patronizing tone of voice again, young woman.”
My mother hung up and took a sip of her coffee, completely unfazed after telling someone off. No one messed with her patients. They had top-notch care, or you heard from my mother. And that went for everyone—from the patient who lived outside in a tent during summer and the richest bazillionaires from Silicon Valley who had vacation homes here and had been treated by her and Mrs. Gisela, “who understands the importance of natural healing.”
I was with my mother at her clinic when she told one bazil-lionaire of a high-tech company, “You’re rich, but you’re stupid, Caleb,” because he was making bad decisions that would eventually ruin his health. She told him what he had to change immediately, when to take his medications, and how this was going to go down for him in a bad way if he continued to be a noncompliant patient. “You get your head out of your colon now, young man.”
He blinked at her, cowed, then said, “Next time I think I want to be treated by Mrs. Gisela. You’re scary.” My mother rolled her eyes and said she was going to treat him to a “scary knuckle sandwich” if he didn’t follow her directions.
Which made her telling Shelby the doctor off all the more ironic.
“How is Belinda?” I asked.
“I’m concerned about her because she almost cut off her arm with her buzz saw. I forced her to stay for three nights in the hospital so I could keep an eye on her, but then she snuck out. Pulled the IV straight out of her arm, didn’t bother to change, and walked out to her ca
r in her hospital gown and boots. I have to make sure that it’s not infected.”
“So we’re going out in a mini snowstorm because Belinda won’t come to the clinic?”
“Belinda doesn’t like to be away from her cats.”
I had a long drink of coffee. I wished I’d added whiskey. “Will the cats be upset if she’s gone long?”
“Apparently, yes. They have feelings.”
I laughed and spit some coffee out, and my mother laughed, too. “Those darn cats.”
We slid in the snow, the truck going to the right. “Dang,” she said, when her coffee sloshed.
“We’re going to get stuck,” I said, my voice wobbling, as my mother straightened the truck back out. “I hope this doesn’t turn into a blizzard.”
“No, we’re not, and no, it won’t. Look out the window, Olivia,” she said, with some impatience. “Does it look like a blizzard? No. You must overcome your fear of blizzards.”
“No. I like my fear of blizzards.” I kept drinking my coffee, even when we went sideways again when we turned onto Belinda’s road. Belinda’s shabby home, with a porch that seemed to be sliding off the house, came into view. “She’s a cat hoarder, isn’t she?”
“Yes. But I’ve been here before and, trust me, no cats have ever been treated so royally, so I don’t need to call the humane society. Now, you respect those cats, Olivia.”
We trudged up to Belinda’s door in our thick hats and coats, the snow heavy, my mother carrying my granddad’s black medical bag. Today she was wearing brown cowgirl boots with a white lace design on the front. “If we do get stuck going back into town,” I said, “I hope you know I get the blue sleeping bag.”
“Why don’t you quit worrying, Olivia? Put some cement in your spine, some guts in your intestinal tract.”
My mother keeps sleeping bags, hand warmers, extra jackets, food and water, flares, a shovel, chains, flashlights, etc., in the back of her truck. She also keeps wine. Says it’ll warm the body up in a snowstorm. She does not mess around with the weather out here, neither do I, but she’s not scared of it.
Belinda’s home was a semi-shack. It was long and low, the blue paint chipping off. Smoke was coming through a chimney that was missing bricks.
I turned my head to the left. “The house looks better if you tilt your head to the left.”
“The house is better inside.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.” I gently tested the stairs of the porch before putting my full weight on them. My mother knocked and Belinda opened the door, scowling. Belinda was about seventy, could have been eighty. Maybe ninety. Hard to tell, and I forgot to ask my mother. White hair, ponytail. She was wearing a sweater with an embroidered black cat. She has a doctorate in history and used to teach at an Ivy League college.
“Hello, Belinda.”
She scowled further. “Hello, Mary Beth, Hello, Olivia. You didn’t bring Gisela? That’s a shame. She knows all about herbs and how to heal the body naturally. But it’s still a pleasure to see you both. It’s right kind of you two to come all the way out in this snowstorm. It’s almost a blizzard out there, isn’t it?” She opened the door and stepped back. “I know you’re here to check my arm, Mary Beth, and I’m glad of it. I might be having a small problem with it. However, the larger problem I have is that you made me stay in the hospital. The food was gross and awful.
“The doctors and nurses kept waking me up to check my arm, telling me I was lucky I wasn’t dead, blah blah. Using all these medical terms.” She scowled even more. “Then they started talking to me in a loud voice, as if I’m deaf. Do I seem deaf? No, I don’t. So I shouted back at them, ‘I’m not deaf, quit shouting.’ I prepared us some lunch. Please sit down.”
In we went. My mother had told me years ago that Belinda didn’t mean to be so scowly. “It’s her face,” she told me. “It scowls. I’ve known her for four decades and it’s always been like that.”
Cats.
Everywhere. I sneezed. My mother discreetly opened a window. To Belinda’s credit, her house was immaculate. My mother was right, the outside and inside were not comparable. The inside had been remodeled. The downstairs was one huge room. Down the hall it appeared there were three bedrooms. Couches with cats. Cat pillows, cat curtains, cat pictures. And everywhere those carpeted cat climbers.
I counted fourteen cats.
“Snuffles and Mr. Temper are in the back room having a nap. Belly and Crackers are talking in my bedroom. But come on in and meet everyone, Olivia, your mother has already met them. Here’s Dr. D, and Tulip Rose, and Sir Franklin, and Sophia Loren, and Robert Redford, and the tabby there, that’s Frizzy Bear . . .”
* * *
We were back in the truck in an hour, the snow coming down like a white blanket. Not a blizzard, but I didn’t like it. Belinda had made us lasagna and hot bread and minestrone soup. We ate with only three cats on the table watching us. One was linked around my legs, and another in my mother’s lap. At one point a cat jumped on my shoulders.
“Get down, Tiger Lilly!” Belinda swatted at her, scowling.
Belinda’s arm was healing nicely. I examined my mother’s work. Dang. She was awesome. My mother re-dressed her arm, gave Belinda more instructions about keeping still and made sure she was taking her medications. Belinda said, “I have all the help I need with my cats here. They’re healing me.” She leaned toward me. “Ruthie told me awhile back that she saw Jace with you at your grandparents’ log cabin one night when she was cleaning her gun, so I thought you two got back together, and I was happy about that news. Sheryl Lalonski’s parents told my cousin Rowe that you were a couple again, but then I heard you two were living separately from Alina Hines’s second cousin, Torey, who lives out your way. I hope things work out for you two. He’s a cat lover, in his heart, I can tell.” She thumped her chest. “And so are you. Cat lovers should love together.”
We got stuck in the snowstorm/blizzard at one point and had to get out of the truck and put on chains.
“Ha, I beat you, Mom.” We always raced to see who could put the chains on faster.
“By one second.”
At another point we hit ice and white-knuckled a 360-degree turn. “Whoa, horse,” my mother said.
“Shoot.” Panic point: Blizzard.
We had a hard time seeing the road, but we kept going, with my head out the window guiding my mother. A car had gone off the road into a ditch, and we used a chain to pull them back out. It was a grateful family from town. “Thank you, Mary Beth. Thank you, Olivia,” the mother, Orelia, called out.
“I need to come in and see Mrs. Gisela for some advice on herbs to heal my stomach,” the father, Morty, said to my mother. “Do you know her schedule for next week?”
“Glad you and Jace are back together!” Orelia shouted at me as they pulled away.
We let them head first back into town, trailing to make sure they got home safely.
Sometimes there is too much excitement when I’m with my mother.
I saw Jace’s white fence on the way back down to town. It brought a deluge of memories. I peered up at the hill through the snow. Memories there, too, amidst the magical sunsets.
* * *
“Let’s make soup,” Chloe said. “I need soup with vegetables and broth to build up my hormones.”
“Why do you need to build up your hormones?” I handed Chloe a cup of peppermint tea and a plate of tea biscuits dipped in chocolate and sat down with her at my granddad’s dining room table. I ran a finger over a few marks and scratches. I remembered him telling me one time that he had sewn up a man who was attacked by a bear in 1955 right on this table. The man lived to 98. My granddad had also taken a bullet out of Sherm Alias’s shoulder when he was shot by a cattle rustler right here, too.
“I think hormones running fast through your body gets the ya ya working at fast speed.” Chloe dipped her biscuit in the tea. “I need the hormonal boost. I need to speed mine up. I think men can sense it.”
“Fast hormones?”
“Yes. You should be chasing after hormones, too, because of your man, Jace. He’s a hormone booster, I can tell.”
“I’m not with Jace.” Only in my daydreams.
My sister banged her fists together. “Not now. You could be soon, sister.”
“I don’t think so.” I didn’t want to talk about Jace. I’d talked to my grandma, mother, and Chloe about him since I returned, but it was emotional, there were no answers or solutions, and I didn’t want to talk about him again. They had hugged me, and we’d made cakes to heal through Martindale Cake Therapy.
“Let’s make a soup recipe out of Grandma’s cookbook, Chloe. I saw a recipe in here the other day. Where was it?” I thumbed through the old, dry pages. “Ah. Here it is. Esther’s Onion Soup. Munich, Germany, 1938.” I went on the Internet to translate the recipe from German into English. “I love how Esther, our very own great-grandmother, made the recipes look so delicious with her drawings. See, she’s drawn onions, salt and pepper shakers, and an apple that she used in the soup. Look at that daisy in the corner. The leaves are in the shapes of hearts, and she wrote Esther and Alexander.”
“I have a hankering for this onion soup now.”
“I wonder what caused that brown stain in the corner here.”
“Hmm. I don’t know. There are a lot of mysteries in this cookbook. The recipe calls for beef stock. Maybe it’s the beef stock?”
I held the cookbook up, and salt fell out of the crease. “Wow. Do you think that was the salt she used?”
“Had to be. No one has used this cookbook besides us in decades.”
I had to sit in wonder at that. Salt. From my great-grandma, Esther Gobenko. Right on my granddad’s table. “I wonder what happened to Esther. I assumed she died in the concentration camps.”
“Probably.” Chloe’s face was drawn. “She was Jewish. She lived in Munich, Germany, and the date here is 1938. In fact, there are no recipes written by Esther or Ida after 1940, including the recipes that are taped onto the back pages.”