They were to be married within a year from her death. She’d purchased a dress already, and he showed it to me, a simple taffeta thing that hung in a spare closet all alone, light blue because, as Nicholas said, “She was too much of a nonconformist for white,” saying these words not in any sort of carping way, but in a romantic way, as if Kelsey’s nonconformity was one of the reasons he loved her. Talk about sad. They had booked a hall for the three-hundred-plus guests they hoped would attend. They were still undecided on where to go for their honeymoon, a toss-up between Romania and Botswana. “Kelsey had no need to lie on a beach in a bikini,” Nicholas says. “That wasn’t her thing,” he tells me, and I say that I know.
I don’t know. But I’ve seen the gothic photo, the head-to-toe black, the albino skin, and so I can assume.
“It’s been a long time, I know,” I tell him, “but I just heard about Kelsey. I’m so sorry. We’ve been out of touch for years. I knew I probably shouldn’t, but I had to stop by and express my condolences,” I say, and then he leads me to his glass-top kitchen table and tells me about her peanut allergy.
“How’d you find me?” he asks. It isn’t censorious in the least bit. He’s curious.
“A friend of a friend,” I say, knowing how vapid it sounds.
“Was it John? Johnny Acker,” he asks, and I say that it was. This couldn’t be easier.
“I thought so,” he says. “He’s the only one I remember from Kelsey’s grammar school days. Hard to imagine they still kept in touch after all those years.”
“You’re telling me.”
There are photos of Kelsey in the flat. The same jet-black hair and smoky eyes, the same ashen skin, but in these photos, the gothic look has been toned down a bit. There’s an edge to her still; that goes without saying. A whole lot of morbid black in her attire. And yet, no skulls and crossbones, no fashion corsets or creepy black Victorian boots. Nothing steampunk. Nothing emo. Just dark. In the photos, Kelsey and Nicholas stand side by side beside the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon, on top of Pikes Peak. They look like opposites: he prim and proper, she anything but.
They also look to be in love.
“I got a call from her roommate,” he goes on to explain as tears fill his eyes. I almost ask, Esther? but stop myself in time. “‘Something is wrong,’ she said to me on the phone. ‘She’s not breathing. Kelsey’s not breathing.’ I knew right away what had happened. I said, ‘Find her EpiPen. She needs her EpiPen,’ but all she said was, ‘It’s too late. It’s too late, Nick,’ over and over again. Kelsey was already dead.”
And now it’s me who begins to cry. I’m not usually all weepy like this. I don’t get choked up. But I’m so overcome with emotion—anger, fear, sadness—that this time I do. I want to sit Esther down before me and demand of her: What have you done? How could you do this to Kelsey?
“I’m sorry,” Nicholas says with a pat to my hand. He rises from the table and finds me a tissue. “This is hard on you, too. I forget sometimes that I’m not the only one she left behind.”
“She’d eaten peanuts,” I infer when I finally gather myself well enough to speak, and Nicholas says, “Yes,” and then, “No,” settling finally on, “Peanut flour.”
He tells me about the recipe. The soy sauce. The rice vinegar. The peanut flour. A meal I’ve eaten so many times before. And I have this memory of Esther, coming home from night school, feeling all worn out. Tired. Her voice all Hannibal Lecter—like, saying, The dill weed goes here. And the peanut flour goes here, while banging those two items inside the kitchen cabinet, the buff-color flour dusting the countertops. She’d been upset that I had borrowed her dill weed. That’s what I thought at the time. There was no doubt about it in my mind, but now I’m not so sure. Perhaps it hadn’t been about the dill weed, after all.
“It was just a mistake, then. A horrible accident,” I say, and he says yes, with a hint of doubt in his tone, that it was. A mistake. A horrible accident.
But was it?
“They’d been drinking,” he says. “Margaritas. They’d both had too much. Kelsey’s roommate, she said she always swapped the peanut flour with all-purpose flour for Kelsey. Always. But not that night. That night she forgot,” and again he says, “They’d been drinking.”
He says the word mistake, but still, I get the sense that even he doesn’t believe it. Her EpiPen, he says, was always in her purse. Always. Except that that night it wasn’t. That night, the EpiPen was nowhere to be found.
Esther had added peanut flour to the recipe and for that reason Kelsey Bellamy was dead. There was no antidote to be found; the EpiPen had simply disappeared. “One mistake is one thing, but two mistakes...” His voice trails off. I know what he is thinking. He’s thinking Esther killed his fiancé, which is the same thing I’m thinking, too.
“Kelsey never went anywhere without her EpiPen,” he says.
“You never found it?” I ask.
“No,” he says.
He leaves me with this: “Her name,” he says, had they had the chance to get married, “would have been Kelsey Keller,” and he smiles sadly—evocatively—and says how she always thought that was hysterically funny. Kelsey Keller.
I smile. “That sounds just like Kelsey,” I say, citing her swell sense of humor, as if I actually know.
Alex
I spend the day at work, watching through the windows as Dr. Giles’s clients come and go. Each time the door squeals open, there he appears in the cottage door frame, happy as a lark, a droll little smile on that face of his as he shakes their hand or pats their back, and welcomes them inside.
And then he closes the door and pulls the blinds, and I’m left wondering what they’re up to on the inside.
I make note of the fact that it’s women mostly and the occasional teenage or preteen girl who come to see Dr. Giles. Some I recognize; others I don’t. Some live in town, but others come from far away, parallel parking their cars on the street before looking both ways and dashing across to the office of Dr. Giles, PhD, Licensed Psychologist, like a member of high society slipping through the doors of the town’s adult store, hoping no one sees.
Today, Pearl comes to the café, but only for a short time. She appears and almost as quickly disappears, but in the few, fleeting minutes that she’s there, she takes her place at the window and, out into the street, she stares. She orders coffee this time, only coffee, and sips introspectively while staring through the glass at the world on the other side. I watch her from a distance. I stare at the back of her head. I count the measured sips of coffee, the way she returns the mug to the countertop with care, setting it down so it doesn’t spill or clang. I take in the color of her skin, the prominent metacarpal bones that push through the thin skin as she lifts the coffee mug to her lips and sips. She doesn’t stay long. I watch from a distance, finding it impossible to divert my eyes. I don’t want to ruin the moment.
In time, Priddy tells me to get to work. I pass by, moving a foul dishrag in haphazard circles upon the dirty tables, moving closer and closer to where Pearl sits. Red brings her the check, and there, from two tables away, I watch as Pearl roots fruitlessly around in the canvas bag for money to pay the check. When her hand comes up empty, I dip into my wallet and produce a five-dollar bill.
“It’s on me,” I say before she has a chance to say that she can’t cover the fare, laying the money on the countertop and stepping back.
“Oh, no,” she says, “I couldn’t,” but still, her hand leaves the bag without a single bill. It makes me feel warm all over, knowing I’ve helped her in some small, insignificant way. Her face reddens, and she’s ashamed to admit she has no money to her name, nothing save for three quarters she finally digs up at the bottom of that bag. Three measly quarters, seventy-five cents.
I shrug my shoulders. “It’s nothing,” I say.
But it’s not noth
ing. I’ve done something good.
“You’re a good friend,” she says to me then, her hand grazing the margins of mine. And then, when I say nothing—because I’m too staggered to speak, because I’m stricken with a sudden onset of aphasia and I’ve lost the ability to speak—she goes on. “We’re friends, right?” she asks of me then, and this time, it’s me who blushes. “You and I. We’re friends.”
I’m not sure if this last part is a question or not. Is she asking me, or telling me? Is she telling me that we’re friends?
I nod my head. I say that we are. Or maybe I don’t say it; maybe I only think it. I don’t know. Either way, we’re friends. I feel the need to write it down, to take a picture, to seal the deal with blood—something to prove that this is real. Pearl and I are friends.
And then Priddy ruins it all by calling my name, pointing to a round table that needs to be cleaned. I look away for ten seconds at best, and when I turn back, Pearl is gone, just like that, my five-dollar bill left behind beside the check. On the countertop I find an empty pink packet of Sweet’n Low, assuring me that she was really here. Pearl. She isn’t a dream as all common sense would have me believe. She’s real.
We’re friends, right? You and I. We’re friends.
And then later in the day, when Priddy finally gives me the A-okay to go home, I don’t go home. I stick around outside the café, killing time on a plastic-coated steel bench—hands and ears turning red from the cold, my nose beginning to drip, waiting and hoping for Pearl to return, hoping she’ll pass by en route to an appointment with Dr. Giles, or maybe stop by the café again to see me.
But she doesn’t stop by the café. She doesn’t go to see Dr. Giles.
I’m not ready to go home. And so instead I hover on the bench and watch as the mailman meanders down the road in his unwashed truck, collecting and delivering the mail. He’s in no hurry. It’s late for the mailman to be out, nearly dusk. But this is the time of year that everyone moves more slowly. There’s no rush to get things done. People walk slower, they eat slower, they talk slower. Life becomes just one big waste of time until spring arrives and then suddenly everyone is in a rush.
I watch as a stray calico cat prances down the sidewalk, past an overflowing garbage bin about to spill over with trash. A storeowner plucks dead mums from a ceramic pot outdoors and fills it instead with evergreen picks and plastic holly berries for the holiday season to come. Ms. Hayes, who owns the novelty and greeting card shop, is getting ready for Christmas already when Thanksgiving hasn’t yet come.
As the sky starts to darken and night slowly creeps in, I give up. Pearl isn’t coming, not tonight, anyway. But still, I’m not ready to go home. I don’t want to go home.
And so I rise from the bench instead and plod across the street, gathering Ingrid’s mail from the copper mailbox and into my hands. I knock on the door of the Cape Cod home. “Ingrid,” I call, my voice elevated so that she can hear me through the thick wooden pane. I rap my hand on the door again, for a second and then third time in a row, and call out again, “Ingrid, it’s me. Alex Gallo.”
Inside, through the door, I hear the TV, volume turned loudly so that she can hardly hear a thing. I press the doorbell and listen as the chimes announce my arrival, the fact that I’ve been standing on her front stoop now for a whole four minutes, freezing my hindquarters off. I bobble up and down in place, trying to keep warm. It’s not working. I’m cold. I peer down at the stack of mail in my hand while I wait: the Clipper Magazine, bills, a monthly home decor mag, some misaddressed envelope from the Department of State, not meant for Ingrid but rather a lady named Nancy. Nancy Riese. I groan; the mailman is getting lax these days. Just last week, Pops and I got the Ibsens’ mail, and the week before that, the Sorensons’.
When Ingrid finally does open the door, peering first through the side glass to make sure it’s me, she’s pleased by the sight of the mail in my hands. “You dear,” she says to me, seizing the stack of papers from my hands. She stands before me in a striped azure blue apron, holding a pair of kitchen shears. She’s been making dinner. I smell something warm and delicious and homemade coming from inside the home, where the TV blares, loud and livid, the voice of Emeril Lagasse, that distinct New Orleans timbre and the well-known catchphrases (Bam!) telling us how to cook.
But then, Ingrid says, “Come in, come in, come in,” pulling me with a spare hand by the white shirtsleeve and into the foyer of her home where she makes haste of closing and locking the door, peering out the window, again, to make sure I’m not in pursuit, that the wind hasn’t followed me inside.
I follow Ingrid’s trail into the kitchen. There she stands before the stove, stirring whatever mélange she’s cooking up tonight. I smell garlic and onion and oregano.
And then I make the mistake of telling her that it smells delicious, and she says to me, “Stay,” and it isn’t so much a question or an invitation even, but rather an edict: You will stay.
“Oh, I can’t,” I sputter quickly. I want to eat whatever it is Ingrid is whipping up—something that doesn’t come from a box or a can—and yet I can’t. I shouldn’t. “My father. He’s at home.” And I leave it at that, too ashamed to say the rest, that he is likely shit-faced or passed out on the sofa from drinking all day, that he probably hasn’t eaten a thing since I left for work this morning. That I have to hurry home before he decides to make himself dinner, warming up an oven he’ll forget to use. It’s not the first time it’s happened.
“There’s plenty here for your father, too,” Ingrid tells me as she reaches into her white kitchen cabinets and begins withdrawing dishes in sets of two. “We’ll save him some. I’ll send you home with a Tupperware that he can warm,” and it’s then that Ingrid assures me I can stay. I should stay. And before I know what’s happening, she’s ladling a serving of some kind of pasta—complete with tomato sauce and mushrooms and angel hair—into a bowl for me; she’s pouring me a glass of milk, too. Just like a mother should do. Not my mother, but a mother. I don’t ever remember my mother cooking for me. But she must have, right? She must have.
There was a time after my mother left that I clung to mothers—other people’s mothers—unremittingly. Years later, I’m sure that Freud would have had a thing or two to say about it, but at the time I didn’t know any better and I didn’t care.
When I was just six years old, I left home alone and wandered down to a playground a few blocks away. Pops was home, but Pops was drunk. He had no idea I’d gone. There at the playground I tagged along with a little boy about my own age, one whose mother sat on a nearby park bench and watched us play, but when the time came for the little boy to go, I tried to go home with him. When he ran after his mother and grabbed her extended hand, I ran, too, and grabbed the other hand. She didn’t push me away; she didn’t say, Don’t touch me.
It was then that the woman realized for the first time that I was all alone. Where do you live? she’d asked, and I asked instead if I could go home with them. She told me no, but her eyes were kind and attentive, and yet hoping like some little lost puppy that I’d just go home.
It wasn’t the only time something like this happened.
“Eat,” Ingrid says to me, staring down at the table of food set before us, and, “Please. There’s too much for me. I can’t let it go to waste. You will stay, won’t you, Alex?” she asks with a bit of humble supplication as I stand before the kitchen table, eyes on the food she’s set out before me, quite certain I drool like a hungry dog. Looking into her eyes, I’m reminded again how sad they are. Ingrid has sad eyes, lonely eyes. She blames the wasted food for the reason I should stay, and yet the real reason is this: she’s alone. She has no one to talk to, no one other than the celebs on TV to share this meal with her, and a one-way conversation with the television set is more than just sad and lonely; it’s pathetic.
And so I sit and I eat. I eat the pasta first, followed by pea
ch cobbler with vanilla ice cream on the side. I’m cajoled into a game of gin rummy. It’s so hard to say no to Ingrid, and as time goes on, I find that I don’t want to. I don’t want to go. Before I know it, Ingrid and I are watching the TV from where we sit—at the kitchen table, with our dinner dishes cast aside to the edge—old Jeopardy! reruns, and we’re calling out the answers in tandem. Who is Burt Reynolds? she exclaims, and me to the next question: What is Provence? And then she reaches for a deck of cards and starts to deal. Ten for me, ten for her.
This is what it feels like to be part of a family.
Most of my evenings I spend alone. Well, not really alone but rather with Pops, which is essentially the equivalent to being alone. We sit in the same room sometimes, but we never talk, and sometimes we don’t even sit in the same room. Friends are gone; girlfriends are nil. I, like Ingrid, spend my evenings in the company of the TV when I’m not following the town shrink home from work or sneaking my way into an abandoned home.
I offer to stay and help with the dishes after Jeopardy! and gin rummy are through. Ingrid tries hard to refuse. “You’re my guest,” she says, but I insist, standing before the stainless-steel sink, watching as it fills with opalescent dish soap bubbles, which I pop one by one with an index finger. And then I submerge the dishes and start to wash. In the drying rack, the dishes quickly accumulate and clatter, a tower of saturated dishes amassing quickly so that when I set another on top, they slip, threatening to fall.