Inevitable and Only(10)
Raven slapped both hands over her mouth. “Sam Shotwell did not tell you he loved you.”
“He did! It was part of the exercise. I swear, actors are so much more highly evolved than the average high schooler.”
Raven laughed. “I wish I was in this class with you. Except I’m terrified of being on stage.”
“It really did feel like the Drama Shed was its own little world, separate from school,” I said, “where jocks are allowed to have feelings and people can forget their problems for a while.” I blew out a deep breath. “I guess that’s the point of acting, right? To be someone else.”
I must’ve said it too wistfully. Raven studied my face. “Cadie, are you sure you’re all right? What’s going on?”
But I wasn’t ready to tell her yet. If I said it out loud, then it would really be true.
CHAPTER FOUR
I didn’t go to the bookshop after school. Josh was already waiting outside Mom’s office when I got there. Mom emerged a few minutes later, carrying a huge stack of paperwork, dark circles under her eyes. She tried to smile when she saw us, but only managed it with half of her mouth. Something in my chest twisted a little.
“Hey,” I said, “can we stop at the ShopRite on the way home? I’ll make dinner tonight.”
She looked at me, surprised. “All right, then. What are you planning to make?”
She sounded dubious, as if she didn’t believe I knew how to cook, as if she wouldn’t like whatever I made. As if I hadn’t helped Dad make dinner enough times that I could imitate any of his recipes. But thinking about Dad made the twist in my chest tighten, so I swallowed my sarcastic answer and said, “Whatever you want. You place the order, I’ll be the chef.”
Mom lifted a hand to rub her eyes. “My contacts are drying out,” she explained.
Mom doesn’t cry, either. One of the very few things we have in common.
When we stopped at the grocery store, Mom said she wanted comfort food, something warm and filling. I wished I knew how to make vegetarian paella and chocolate-dipped churros, the special treats my abuelita made for us whenever we visited Mom’s parents down in Florida. But that wasn’t what I was craving, anyhow. So I sent Mom to get flour and sugar while Josh and I filled the cart with cottage cheese, eggs, apples, and raisins. Ingredients for Cottage Cheese Contraption—one of the hold-overs from our days at Ahimsa House. Everyone took turns cooking, so some nights we had gourmet Indian stir-fry or fancy Italian pasta dishes, and other nights we had unidentifiable casseroles made with cream of mushroom soup from a can.
Or Cottage Cheese Contraption, invented by an old woman everyone called Granny. She’d been a housewife in Arkansas for fifty years, and when her husband died, she packed all her essential belongings into one suitcase, sold everything else, and took off on a road trip across the country. A year later, she landed in Takoma Park, at Ahimsa House. She’d lived there ever since, grandmothering every lost and lonely kid who came through.
Josh was two when we left Ahimsa House, too young to remember anything about it. But he loved hearing stories about the people who lived there. About the days when Dad was a grad student in Renaissance literature and drama at Georgetown, when Mom served chai lattes at the Sunflower Café and played jazz piano at fancy DC nightclubs on the weekends. I’d shown Josh pictures of Mom in a tiny black dress at one of her gigs, a choker of pearls around her throat. She was unrecognizable, her eyes outlined in smoky makeup, her long hair loose down her back, a white rose tucked behind her ear.
Before Josh was born we took a lot of vacations—camping trips to Sugarloaf or the Catoctin Mountains. Mom and Dad had once promised each other that someday they’d hike the entire Appalachian Trail. I had hazy memories from those vacations: campfires, marshmallows, getting dunked in freezing-cold streams by way of having a bath, the thrill of peeing in the woods.
When I was almost five, Dad got invited to present a paper at a Christopher Marlowe conference in California, so he took Mom and me with him—“his girls,” he called us—and we spent a weekend camping in Joshua Tree National Park. What I remember about that trip was that I had my own tent for the first time, a pink-and-purple-and-orange tie-dyed tent that someone from Ahimsa House had lent us. I was so proud of that tent, of sleeping in it all by myself.
A month later, Mom found out she was pregnant.
Dad dropped out of school to find a job, and Mom picked up the last semester of doctoral work she’d never finished at the University of Maryland after she and Dad eloped. I remember watching her walk across the stage in a funny cap, her gown pulled tight over her gigantic belly, holding a scroll that she read to me later: Doctor of Musical Arts. Two weeks later, I had a baby brother.
After a couple years of teaching at Montgomery Community College, Mom found her job at Fern Grove, and we left Ahimsa House for our very own row house on 34th Street in Hampden. Three tiny bedrooms plus a bathroom upstairs, living room and kitchen downstairs, and a semi-finished basement. There wasn’t room for four people and Mom’s piano, plus all of Dad’s books, so Mom said either Dad had to figure out what to do with the books, or they had to go.
We weren’t used to hearing Mom talk like that, but she was supporting the family now, as she kept reminding us. So Dad found Fine Print Books, which was going out of business, and got a good deal on the place. He sold off some of their rare and antique stock, moved in his own collections, and settled in.