Chapter 5: Who Finds Peace in His Own Home

I hopped down the steps two at a time. Beth was sitting in the living room. She saw me on the landing and turned red, “Were you faking being sick? What the...” She paused and looked between the grandmother and GG.

I laughed, “No, I never said I was sick. Just needed some time to process.”

The grandmother spoke with a hint of annoyance, “You’ve missed 8 meals.”

“I’ll cook dinner as recompence.”

As I stepped down into the living room proper, Beth reached for a paper grocery bag, “I brought soup.”

I took the bag and looked in and sure enough there were three tins of chicken noodle soup, “How about I show you how to make the real thing?”

I set about the basics; boiling chicken, chopping vegetables, etc. I admit I was surprised that Beth wasn’t useless in the kitchen. She took over sautéing the vegetables without a prompt from me. Mindy joined us soon after and ended up sitting on the counter next to the sink.

She and Beth got along very well for some reason. They chatted about dance, and some historical bio that Beth was reading. Around the time I added the noodles Mindy asked, “Why were you keeping your chef skills a secret?”

“I wasn’t. I just haven’t had much reason to cook since ‘mealtimes are not negotiable’ and the grandmother feeds us three a day.”

Beth cued in, “Did your mom teach you this?”

I about cracked the wooden spoon I was using to stir when I heard the question. I took a breath before answering, “I started to sneak out of the row house when I could make the jump to the plum tree. A few houses down the lane there lived an old Italian woman who’d married an RAF pilot after the war. She taught me a lot of things. Cleaning, sewing, how to cook, and how to play the piano.”

Mindy was smiling, “Mrs. Cecilio Smith.”

“Yes. Why don’t you two see if the GG and the Grandmother will be joining us or if they want to wait till the proper time.”

Dinner was good. Afterwards I was urged to play the old church piano in the corner of the living room. Most of the sheet music was hymns, but I found a couple of classical pieces and a decent number of etudes. Beth and Mindy practiced various dance moves center of the floor.

After a few hours I headed upstairs and found Beth at my heals, “What’s up?”

“I want to see your room.”

“Not much to see, but okay.”

I showed her the simple attic room. She bounced around the room looking at the various bits of ugly, white-painted furniture. She asked, “This doesn’t look like you. Did you pick anything in this room?”

“Think it was Mindy’s old stuff. Not sure. Not fond of the white paint.”

“You don’t have a television.”

“Yeah. Have a stereo though and I’ve gotten in the habit of watching Jeopardy and Murder, She Wrote with the grandmother. I check the paper on the off chance they play a match, but so far no luck.”

Eventually we went out to the roof to sit. She sat about six inches to my left, “So, Mindy told me why you were upset. Are you going to have to move?”

“I hope not, but if I do it’ll be to the Heights, so I won’t have to leave the squad.”

“So, Doz? You gonna tell me why seeing your mom put you in a three day funk?”

I looked at her and shook my head, “Sorry, Darling. We’re not there yet.”

“What’ll it take for you to trust me?”

“I literally make a siren noise, because you randomly decide to treat people like shit.”

“I’m trying.”

“Go a month without a bitch alert and I’ll answer ONE question.”

“It’s a privilege to get to know you? Isn’t getting to know ‘the real me’ one of your missions. We could do quid pro quo.”

“It doesn’t work that way. I ... it’s hard to dig at my memories. A lot of them aren’t pleasant.”

“Do you have any pleasant memories with your mother?”

“A few. She wasn’t always terrible. Till I was five or so, she was engaged. She taught me to read. Indirectly saved my life too.”

“Saved your life?”

“Twice that I know of. Once by teaching me to read and about the ‘know books’ and the ‘word book.’ Then more recently I went septic and passed out and she called an ambulance ... lucky she was sober that day I suppose.”

“What books are those?”

“The Know books were an aged set of encyclopedias and the word book was a dictionary.”

“And that saved your life?”

“When I was five ... maybe five and a half. My father threw me into a dressing mirror. One of the kind that freely stands and rotates on an axis ... it was gold painted wood.” I raised my pointer and ran it along the scar on my right cheek, “You have to look for this one, the eye came first ... but that was the cause of this one. But anyway, Three weeks or so after that ... I felt weak ... and my chest was burning around where the glass had cut me. So, I got the ‘know books’ and the ‘word book’ and I looked up cuts ... a couple of hours later I knew what the problem was ... so I went into the kitchen and I took a little yellow paring knife and went into my mother’s room and got tweezers out of her make up kit. So, I climbed up on the bathroom sink. It was one of those one that floats, doesn’t have a cabinet or anything under it. And I got some gauze and rubbing alcohol out of the medicine cabinet. I wasn’t supposed to open that cabinet, but I did. Then I used the mirror so I could see and I cut open the scabs and dug out the bits of glass with the tweezers. Applied alcohol and gauze ... the gauze wouldn’t stick ... but I tried. I moved the books into my room and the yellow paring knife, but I put the tweezers back.”

“What the fuck!?! That can’t be true.”