Three
Raining again. Darkling though it is only early afternoon. After Pastor Jeff left this morning, Nora and I had only an hour of quiet before Mab and Monday arrived home red, breathless, muter than I am. We looked up alarmed when they slammed into the kitchen, hair untamed as tigers, cheeks the same color outside as in.
“Where have you been?” Nora toppled her chair when she stood. Mab shot us warning eyes, but Nora either didn’t see or didn’t care. “What happened?”
Monday kept her eyes on the ground and rushed past us to her shoeboxes of homemade card catalog. She wedged herself between them and the wall, a tiny space she fits in only by mashing knees to shoulders, thighs to breasts, and started flipping through the cards, but way too fast to read.
Mab looked tired and fed up and possibly scared. She met my eyes and shook her head. Then she went to our room and slammed the door.
Now Nora, who has learned again and again not to push these daughters, is baking bread, baking cake, baking tarts: sugary things, sweet things, any things to keep her hands busy, muttering under her breath, earbuds in deep as sunken treasure.
Someone paying less attention than I do, than I have to, might think Nora bakes to feed her fellow citizens. Her attempts to help run up against so many walls she’s like a mouse in a maze. She can’t keep Chris Wohl off drugs or give his wife Leandra her right side back, and she can’t give the guys she abets in the bar a reason not to drink too much, and she can’t give Bourne’s citizens fresh water or fresh history. But she can bring them all cookies. And that is also love.
But that’s not why she bakes.
Or you might think she bakes because it’s something she can control. She couldn’t protect her husband or her friends, her neighbors or her town or her daughters, but through precise measuring and careful assembly and attention to detail, she can make muffins that teeter at the serrated edge between sugar and butter, pillowed perfect sweetness you taste at the sides of your tongue like an afterthought, like you imagined it but imagined it vividly. If you’re careful, and she is, muffins are entirely in your control.
But that’s not why she bakes either.
Nora bakes because baking doesn’t involve water.
Before a cow becomes a hamburger, it drinks a dozen gallons of water a day. Before a chicken and a bunch of onions and carrots become stock, you have to add a potful. Fish made it their home. Vegetables and fruits have to be rinsed in it before consumption, and that’s a lot of bottled water literally down the drain.
Whereas what’s wet in a batter is probably nothing more than melted butter and whipped eggs. The water that made the wheat that made the grain that made the flour happened so far away as to be another planet. So to ensure our good health, to keep us well and strong, Nora insists we eat cake. Cake and cookies, muffins and crumbles, danish and donuts and croissants. Some Saturdays she feeds us nothing but brownies and a multivitamin. When she relents, we have dinner from a box or can.
Timeworn wisdom prescribes food whole and unprocessed, slow and locally grown, low on sugar and light on butter. But Nora loves us, and if she boils boxed macaroni and cheese in bottled water then adds yellow beans from a can and bakes a cake, nothing involved has anything to do with our river or our soil. We all choose the terms of the desperate bargains we make with the powers that may be, which baseless beliefs and decaying wisdoms we cling to, and which we discard as superstition or sorcery or the ravings of misguided zealots. Which is to say: it may not make sense all the way, but it makes sense enough.
Some days Nora has to tear coffee cake into tiny pieces and feed it to me like a bird. Or she sits on a bag of potato chips and places the crumbs on my tongue where they dissolve one at a time. Some days that’s all my system can manage. Some days I subsist on the smells from her oven alone.
That is what I am doing all afternoon while my sisters stew, sitting and smelling as our mother cooks, redolence as nourishment. And then the doorbell rings.
On the front porch, soaking and sorry, is a boy I can only presume is River Templeton.
Mab is right that he looks exactly like his grandfather, so much so that Nora seems barely to be breathing.
Mab is right that he is perfectly attractive and whole-looking.
Mab is right that there is something deeply unsettling, and not unexciting, about how new River Templeton is, how odd it is to see a person you have never seen before.
Nora can’t get her breath back.
River can’t decide what to do with the panting, speechless adult whose pasted-on greeting smile is falling slowly past shock to scorn.
“I’m, um, here to…” River stammers. He peers around Nora, for help presumably, for a hint as to what to do next, but sees only me, stares, looks away, stares again. Nora pants.
“Is, um, does Mab live here?” he tries. “Or Monday?”
It’s that “or” I think that does it. It is pity and newness and his cheeks covered in rain and his hair soaking tendrils down his face, but mostly it’s that “or.” Like either girl would do as well as the other. Like maybe Mab and Monday don’t even live together. Like maybe we three are three and not one. With that one tiny word, all at once, I am in love.
Just so you don’t get the wrong idea, I am not usually so easily beguiled. The Kyles both wooed me for years, but I remained unenthralled, probably because their displays of affection mostly manifested as wrestling with each other, and a girl wants wit as well as charm. At least this girl does. Technically, I went to the fifth- through seventh-grade dances with Rock Ramundi, but really everyone just stood along the walls and felt shy of one another. Rock and I still text sometimes though. It’s not Abelard and Héloïse as far as passionate correspondence goes, but then she was cloistered in an abbey whereas I am only cloistered in Bourne. The point is I’m not one of those girls whose head is turned by every boy who shows up at her house, though not that many boys do show up at my house, but nor am I a total newbie to the tangles of the heart.
But before I have a chance to process my own alarming and probably misguided emotions, I have to deal with Nora’s.
“It’s you.” She finds her voice finally, but it’s dreamy. She sounds awed, wonderstruck, but I know it must be something else.
“It is?” he asks.
“Come in,” she says, still dreamy, like she can’t believe it. “Come in.”
He wipes his feet, but it’s only a gesture because he’s dripping all over the entryway. He looks all around at everything except for me. And there’s not a whole lot else to look at. Books everywhere. A scratched kitchen table, mismatched chairs. At the moment, and most moments, the kitchen is buried beneath a mudslide of dirty mixing bowls, baking pans, wooden spoons, and measuring cups, plus the pastry knives, flour sifters, whisks, and rolling pins which mostly just stay out for there’s no place to put them away because the cabinets are full of books. But beneath all that, somehow, you can still make out stained countertops, cheap linoleum, cabinets without handles, drawers without pulls. Through the doorway into the living room, there’s matted, worn carpet the uneven but unrelenting gray of winter skies, a faded sofa roughly the same non-color, an upturned packing crate masquerading (unconvincingly) as a coffee table, Monday’s lumpy yellow recliner, which hasn’t reclined in years, leaking stuffing onto a pile of romance novels. There’s a fat old TV on top of the plywood bureau that holds Nora’s clothes right there in the living room since it doesn’t fit upstairs. Our house smells like a bakery but looks like a thrift shop. We have none of the grandeur of the library, none of the glory or the soaring space, none of what his family must have with which to fill it either. Only the books. And here, they are out of place.