Chapter 1 Pete - 3

“Well, maybe just this once...”

Three cheers for Mormor’s recipe from Malm?. Ancient Mrs.Reka Muller stumped up bearing a bottle of schnapps, and Mrs.Grace opened a little tray of watercolor paints and began dabbing blue flowers rather carelessly onto the sketched vine, which now stretched the whole length of the room. “There now, don’t you feel pretty?” she asked the wall, then handed the paintbrush to Nora. “Add a flower, why don’t you—” and the Irish girl started swirling some petals onto the wall.

Maybe it wasn’t the most natural of crowds—none of the women except Mrs.Grace looked entirely easy with one another; Mrs.Muller’s face could have soured milk; Arlene and Claire were crabbing at each other—but the air popped and snapped the way the atmosphere at Briarwood House rarely did. It jived , full of the smell of the Nilsson family Thursday-night meatballs.

“This sauce needs to simmer,” Pete announced, cracking a lid over the pan on the hot plate. “Fifteen minutes—” And he flapped his dish towel at the chorus of female groans protesting they could not possibly wait that long.

“Hush, you folks,” said Mrs.Grace in her Iowa drawl. “Hammerin’ Pete is the cook and the man of the house, so as far as dinner tonight is concerned, what he says goes.”

Pete blushed, slipping out onto the landing where Joe Reiss was still noodling about on his guitar. “I thought you played saxophone?” Pete ventured.

“Sax, guitar, clarinet, I play everything.” He finished up with some kind of fancy run. “Always tenor sax for the Amber Club.”

“Is it true that’s a mobster club?” Pete couldn’t help asking. Everyone knew the Warring family ran Foggy Bottom—ran a lot of the District—and you heard things about where (and how) they did business. The numbers business, the racketeering business, illegal liquor... Pete had a long-running fantasy where he cleaned up Foggy Bottom with a lot of cold iron and hot lead and saw all the Warring brothers into a cell to wait for Old Sparky. This fantasy usually ended with him and a dame who looked like Nora out on the town with her in a mink and him in an arm sling from his final shoot-out.

Joe shrugged. “Mobsters tip better than senators, and I’ve played for both.”

Pete felt himself going bug-eyed. “You’re the luckiest, Mr.Reiss.”

“Jesus, call me Joe. I hear Mr.Reiss , I start looking around for my dad telling me to stop being a jazz bum and sell sump pumps at the hardware store in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And you’re the lucky one, sport.” Joe nodded into Grace’s tiny green-walled room, thick with the smells of meatballs and hot coffee. Claire was lighting a Lucky Strike, old Mrs.Muller was sourly rocking baby Angela on her lapful of shawls, the widow from 3A was adding a misshapen yellow flower to the painted wall vine. “Growing up in a houseful of women? You are going to know everything about the fairer sex by the time you’re old enough to date.”

Pete blinked. He’d never thought of it that way before.

“Got a harmonica?” Joe’s long-fingered hands did a swift ripple over the guitar strings. “Thought I saw you noodling on one this summer.”

“I can play a bit.”

“Bring it next door sometime; we’ll jam. Some tunes need a bit of harmonica.”

“My mom won’t—”

“Learn to sneak around,” Joe advised. “That’s the other thing you’ll need to know by the time you’re old enough to date.” He began to play again, improvising on “Now’s the Time.” Pete went back inside, rather dazedly. Just go jam with a jazz trio, anytime he liked. Mom wouldn’t like it... Well, Mom didn’t have to know, did she?

“How was everything?” his mother asked a few hours later, taking off her coat. She looked around with her usual sharp eyes, but the house was hushed, the kitchen immaculate, Lina gone up to bed.

Pete, stuffed with meatballs and jazz and conversation, thinking of the uncooked casserole he and his sister had buried joyously at the bottom of the trash can, gave a wide, innocent smile. “Quiet as a tomb, Mom.”

Pete’s Swedish Meatballs

3 cups diced stale bread, preferably sourdough 1 / 2 cup whole milk

1 pound ground beef 1 pound ground pork 1 pound ground lamb 1 / 2 teaspoon allspice

1 / 2 teaspoon garlic powder

1 / 4 teaspoon nutmeg

1 tablespoon ground thyme Pinch of salt 1 / 2 cup finely minced white onion

1 egg 1 egg yolk 3 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper 2 tablespoons flour 4 tablespoons unsalted butter 1 cup white wine 1 / 2 cup heavy cream

1 teaspoon soy sauce or anchovy paste

Place the diced bread in a large mixing bowl, slowly add milk, and mix thoroughly, mashing until a slurry is produced. If necessary, add a dash of cream to achieve a smooth, porridge-like consistency.

Add the ground beef, pork, lamb, allspice, garlic powder, nutmeg, thyme, and salt to the bowl with bread/milk mixture and stir to combine. Add the onion, egg, egg yolk, and pepper, and sprinkle on 1 tablespoon of the flour. Beat together until the texture is smooth and you can form meatballs with your hands without the mixture falling apart. Add a little more flour to bind if necessary, then refrigerate the meat mixture for 20 minutes. While the meat chills, melt 3tablespoons of the butter in a large skillet over medium-low heat. Reduce heat to low to prevent burning. Remove the meat mixture from the refrigerator and form it into 1-to 1 1 / 2 -inch meatballs, using a large baking sheet as a landing zone.

Place about 10meatballs into the skillet and cook on medium-low, rotating meatballs in the butter to ensure browning on all sides. Once meatballs are browned and retaining their shape, cover the skillet with a lid and cook for an additional 20minutes—uncovering every 5minutes to stir briefly and add a splash of white wine if the skillet is looking dry, then re-cover. This will help the meatballs to steam and cook all the way through.

Slice a meatball in half to test for doneness. If it’s firm to the touch and lightly pink inside, remove the rest from the skillet to a serving bowl and repeat steps4 and 5 with the remaining meatballs. Meatballs will continue cooking after being removed from the heat.

Once all the meatballs are cooked and transferred to the serving bowl, reduce the heat under the skillet to low. Scrape the bottom to remove browned bits, then add the remaining white wine, remaining butter, remaining flour, the heavy cream, and the soy sauce. Stir until smooth, cooking over low to medium-low heat until the sauce coats the back of a spoon.

Eat as a dinner party appetizer with lingonberry jam and plenty of toothpicks, or serve with buttered egg noodles or mashed potatoes as a main course, while listening to “I Wanna Be Loved” by the Andrews Sisters.

“You can take these home with you, Pete,” the florist at Moonlight Magnolias grunted, nodding at the enormous sheaf of peach-gold roses lying on the counter in a white paper cone. “They’re for that Irish girl at your mother’s house, Miss Walsh.”

Pete peeked at the card, but it was blank except for a big, slashed X . For a moment he was tempted to junk the card and give the flowers to Nora himself, but Athos from The Three Musketeers would never do anything so underhanded and dastardly, so Pete lugged the roses home and watched Nora blush clear to the tips of her ears when he handed them over. He’d have given a kidney to know how to make a girl look that dreamy, because he knew it was more than just a sheaf of expensive roses. Maybe that was something he’d figure out, if he really was going to grow up knowing everything there was to know about women. He figured he had a few years before he’d be asking girls on dates, so he’d better start applying himself.

There was the usual list of Do This, Do That from his mother—weed the garden, sweep the front stoop, mop the kitchen, wax the banisters—but he had something else to do first. Something he’d been putting off. Taking a deep breath, he pulled up at the hall table with a fresh sheet of paper and wrote:

Dear Dad, I won’t be writing to you anymore. I guess you aren’t interested in hearing from me, since you don’t write back. I wish you’d come home, but I guess you aren’t interested in doing that either. Thirteen’s a little young to start being the man of the house, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do it. It’s not fair, but I can do it. I’m not alone here.

Pete tried to think what else to write, but there didn’t really seem to be anything else to say. So he signed his letter and sealed it, wrote the New Jersey address out for what he figured was the last time, and put it out for mailing. His heart was thumping like he’d just run a fast block, but he also felt oddly, grimly satisfied. He didn’t know what to feel. He just knew that he was finished with it.

“Peeeeeeeeete—” Lina ran out of the kitchen with oven gloves on her hands and something on a baking sheet billowing smoke. “What did I dooooooo?”

Pete inspected the scorched lumps. “Lina-kins, I don’t think peanut butter cookies need to be broiled.”

“I thought it would make them done faster,” she wailed.

“Why are you making cookies, anyway?”

She scuffed one foot along the floor. “I volunteered to bring them for Sunday school, because...”

“Because?”

“Nobody likes me there,” she whispered. “They call me Cross-Eyes and Wall-Eyes . I thought maybe if I brought cookies... But I can’t read the recipe so good, and if I ask Mom she’ll just say she doesn’t have time and I should give up the whole idea. And then they’ll really hate me in Sunday school.”

Rage went through Pete like one-eyed Rochefort’s rapier in The Three Musketeers . All right, so his sister didn’t read so good. And their mother would tell her to give up the whole idea, and those Sunday school brats would call her names even more. And she’d start believing it, and that was the first step toward her falling through the cracks—the thing he hadn’t realized he dreaded till he fumblingly articulated it to Mrs.Grace.

“Lina-kins,” he said, jutting his jaw at an angle that was hopefully resolute and Musketeer-ish. “Mix up another batch and turn the oven down to three fifty.” He had no idea if that was the correct temperature or not. Why didn’t they have a proper cookbook like houses were supposed to have, with the smiling lady on the cover? Betty Somebody. “We’re going to make perfect peanut butter cookies if it takes us all day. And while they cook we’ll practice your reading,” he bargained, seizing the opportunity. “Because if you can’t read recipes, how are you going to learn to bake?”

He hoped for a smile, but she just whined, “ Peeeeeete , you’re bossy .” Yet she was lumbering back into the kitchen and reaching for the oven dials, and he’d take that—he’d take it any day. Maybe Dad was never coming home and maybe the world could end in a mushroom cloud at any moment, but Lina was trying again and he was going to see to it that this time things panned out for her. Pete grabbed the second bouquet he’d brought home from Moonlight Magnolias and hoofed it upstairs. “Can Lina bring dessert to the next supper club night?” he asked when Mrs.Grace answered his knock.

“Of course. Fliss is making us all some British specialty called bubble and squeak —I didn’t dare ask what on earth it was. I’m sure it’ll be as perfect as her jammy dodgers. How a woman with a baby keeps herself so pretty and crisp and bakes up a storm and keeps her room looking like a bandbox, I have no idea.”

“Just so we’re clear, Lina’s cookies are going to be awful,” Pete said. “We need to help her get better. We have to.”

“We’ll have her fit for the Pillsbury Bake-Off in no time, Hammerin’ Pete.” Mrs.Grace gave a little salute. She was wearing one of Joe Reiss’s shirts tied up around the waist over her floral skirt, and Pete realized, They’re lovers with a certain thrill of mixed shock and laughter. Shock because he could just hear his mother trumpeting TRAMP , and laughter because skinny Pete Nilsson had done a bit of changing in the nearly two months since Mrs.Grace March had moved into Briarwood House. He was not only having all kinds of sophisticated realizations about things that went on between men and women (in his own house!), he was already realizing that he wasn’t going to rat Mrs.Grace out to his mother about it. Because he didn’t think Grace March was a tramp, and his mother would disagree and kick her out, and he knew this absolutely: that his mother was sometimes utterly, meanly, completely wrong, and he didn’t have to agree with her when she was.

He didn’t have to fight her about it, either. He could just... get around her. He was already trying to figure out how to do that—not just on the little things like chores, but on the bigger things, like those special prescription glasses that Lina needed. Maybe he could find a way to get them for her. And he could make sure Lina finished school, somehow. He might not be able to get around Mom’s determination that he drop out as soon as possible, but he was damned if she’d do the same when his sister came of age.

“Lina can bring whatever kitchen horror she likes,” Mrs.Grace was saying. “We’ll all bill and coo.” She sniffed the air. “Is something burning?”

“Probably.” Pete brought out the nosegay he’d been hiding behind his back: three red carnations, only slightly wilted, in a sheaf of ferns. “For you, Mrs. Grace,” he said, sweeping an imaginary feathered hat from his head, bowing over one foot extended in its imaginary lace-topped musketeer’s boot. “‘Tell me what queen has a servant more ardent,’” he intoned in Dumas’s best style.

“Goodness,” Mrs.Grace said, taking the flowers and bringing them to her nose. “You are learning fast.”

And Pete raced down the stairs, hollering “Got that oven hot, Lina?” and grinning fit to beat the band.