Eleven The Kitchen

Going home after school can feel like a walk-on in one of my mother’s murder shows. There’s a fifty-fifty chance the house is either empty or someone is lurking behind the drapes with a machete.

Today feels like a machete day.

It’s a couple-mile walk from where Beckett left me at Chula’s with a basket of tortillas and two mostly full cups of coffee. The half-vacant strip mall is midway between where the streets turn into boutiques and gastropubs toward Beckett’s end of town and the mostly boarded-up shops and dilapidated buildings on the way to mine.

I head out a few minutes after she does and start walking—past the abandoned gas station where they filmed a Christmas movie a few years ago called Saguaros and Santas. Between the Mercado El Toro and Escondido Methodist, where a gigantic mural of happy, smiling white people on one side of an open Bible and Mexicans toiling the fields on the other side has mostly faded into a memory. I wonder if Beckett thinks this mural is visual noise too. In my eye, there’s more visual noise in this piece of whitewashed historical fiction than in a thousand pieces of graffiti art.

When I get home from Chula’s, Joanna’s car isn’t in front of the house, and I breathe a little sigh of relief about it. But it’s only a temporary relief. There’s nowhere to hide in this house. There’s nowhere to hide in this whole town.

Even though the walk home isn’t horrible, I still collapse on my bed as soon as I get there, and instantly fall into a deep sleep.

The sound of the front door slamming shut jolts me out of a dream tunnel. I check the time on my phone.

Six fifteen.

Joanna’s home and I haven’t even started dinner yet.

She’s in the bathroom, showering away the day’s makeup and formaldehyde, when I scramble out of my room. I sneak into the kitchen, hoping to get something started before she comes out.

I’m still looking through the cupboards when she shuffles in wearing her standard yoga pants and an oversized T-shirt.

“Is grilled cheese okay?” I ask.

“That’s fine.” She sits at the table with her mineral water, twists her legs up lotus style, closes her eyes, and begins to breathe deep. She sometimes pretends to do the relaxation exercises her therapist taught her back in the day, but I feel like it’s mostly for show. Maybe I wouldn’t feel that way if there had ever been some kind of tangible change in her mood as a result.

I move slow and careful as I get out a loaf of bread, a block of cheese, a stick of butter, trying my best not to make too much noise. The air in the kitchen is so thick and still that the sounds of the stove clicking on and the butter sizzling in the pan hang suspended deep inside it.

She doesn’t unfold herself or open her eyes until she hears me set a plate down in front of her. Then she tracks my movements to the counter and back to bring napkins. Her gaze lowers in sync with me as I take my seat.

“What?” I finally say.

“Where is it?”

My mind buzzsaws through everything she could possibly mean.

“Where is what?”

“Suzanne told me she’s seen you take things. I just didn’t want to believe it until now.”

My aunt has seen me take things? I lay the triangle of grilled cheese back on my plate. Like what, my grandpa’s Adelita statue no one else wanted? I literally took that out of a box of his stuff she was donating to Goodwill.

“Are you selling them, is that it?”

... there’s so much shit in this yard... occasionally when he goes out of town, I sell some of it off.

B’Rad... the estate sale...

“Are you talking about the urn?” I say.

“Yes, Daya, where is it?”

“I hid it.”

She wasn’t expecting me to say that—I can see it on her face.

She goes, “You hid it?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

But I can’t tell her why. I can’t say it’s because I had company over. That’s one of Joanna’s house rules. I don’t want you having people over when I’m not home. She never says boys. She always says people.

“Why would you hide it?” she asks again.

“It was upsetting.”

She puts her finger to her lips and frowns into it. “Upsetting, how?”

“Thinking about Grandpa being inside there,” I say.

It’s not untrue. It’s just not the truth about why I moved it yesterday.

She drops her finger, leans forward.

“He’s not in there,” she tells me. “I haven’t been able to bring myself to put him there. Suzanne keeps telling me he needs a permanent home, but—”

“He had a permanent home.”

My mother tips her head.

“He was sick, Daya. Grandma couldn’t take care of him anymore, you know that.”

“I think it’s wrong to stick him in a little box and call it a home,” I tell her. “I think it’s wrong to leave him on the bookcase like he’s a souvenir.”

She nods like she gets it, but I doubt if she really does.

She says, “That’s because you’re still grieving him.”

“Aren’t you still grieving him?”

She swallows, takes a breath.

“Your grandpa isn’t in that box, Daya. Even if his ashes were in there, that’s not him.”

“He still deserves better.”

The thick veil of her lashes absorbs her tears before they can fully surface.

“Sometimes, what we think we deserve isn’t always God’s plan for us,” she says.

I count twelve clicks of the second hand on the wall clock before quietly saying, “I think that’s BS.”

It’s obvious by the look on her face that I’ve hurt her, but I’m not sure what to do about it. I can’t force myself to accept her theory of a God whose “plan” for us means less humanity than we deserve. Even after we’re gone.

“After dinner,” she says, “I want you to go get the urn and put it back.”

“I’ll do it now. I’m not hungry.”

“No, sit down,” she tells me. “I have more to say.”

I slowly lower myself back onto the chair.

She pushes her plate away by an inch or so.

“Last night was a real wake-up call for me, Daya.” She nods like she’s encouraging herself to go on. “I think Stella is a bad influence on you—”

“Don’t you mean Suzanne thinks Stella’s a bad influence on me?” I ask.

I can’t stop myself, even when I see the basket-weave of anger and hurt all over her face. Suzanne is doing a real head-job on my mom. I’m watching in real time as my aunt turns her into Suzanne 2.0. Joanna needs to hear the truth.

She leans back.

“Why don’t you like Suzanne?” she asks.

“You don’t like Suzanne,” I tell her. “You’ve said it yourself.”

“No. I never said that. I idolized her, Daya. I did everything she did.”

“You said she bullied you into doing what she did so you would be just like her.”

Joanna’s not convinced. She likes her version of the story better than mine.

“Honestly?” I say. “I don’t blame you. I’d probably do... literally whatever to get Suzanne off my back too.”

“So, you think taking my life in a positive direction is just me trying to appease my sister?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

She crosses her arms, drums a single finger against her shoulder, and suddenly I’m ten again, telling my mom, “I know you gave all our old stuff to charity, but I think it’s time to get some new furniture. You shouldn’t be sleeping on the floor. Neither of us should.” I remember feeling so grown-up that day—with zero understanding of how unhealthy that role reversal actually was. How, in some ways, it hasn’t completely shifted out of that, even now.

“You know, it’s really okay to do things Suzanne wouldn’t approve of,” I tell her.

If I had to guess by her expression, this thought has never once crossed her mind.

“What do you mean?” She sounds both defensive and curious. “Like what?”

“Like... not keep Grandpa in a claustrophobic urn, when you and I both know he would have hated that.”

Joanna shakes her head. “What would you rather—”

“Take him to the Grand Canyon. Or Joshua Tree. Let him be somewhere he loved.”

She looks like she might possibly consider this, but all she says is, “Suzanne would kill me.”

I want to tell her Suzanne’s already killing her. That she’s slowly suffocating her with her need to be right. To be righteous.

But I don’t.

I don’t think my mother could handle that right now. She thinks she’s taken her life in a positive direction, and maybe that’s true. Except I know how she operates. In a way, it’s like an addictive person trading in cigarettes for sweets. She’s still meeting a need without understanding what’s driving her to it. And I know that Joanna is fragile, always one small life-quake away from absolute shatter.

Again.

I lie on my bed with only the string lights on overhead. Not so much doom-scrolling as dread-scrolling. Because my feed is full of either prom-related posts or church-related posts, and I’m not interested in either one right now.

Tell me something good, I text Stella.

Good is for angels and chumps, she writes back.

Then tell me something spicy.

Valentina Orozco is a bomb-ass kisser.

She’s no help.

I go to Beckett’s feed. She hasn’t posted anything new today.

I go to Lucy’s feed, out of simple curiosity. It’s mostly all group pictures.

Her and Javi Benitez.

Her and Javi and Cason.

Her and Cason.

Her and Beckett.

Her and Beckett.

Her and Beckett.

Her at youth group, it looks like.

Her up on the stage at Grace Redeemer, getting dunked in a tub of water. The sign in the background says: THE REDEMPTION BAPTISM EXPERIENCE. It’s from last July.

Is that what Joanna not-so-secretly wants me to do? Is that what a connection to God looks like, Grace Redeemer–style? Getting baptized onstage in front of everyone, with a live internet feed so anyone who wants to can watch? It’s performative Christianity, that’s all. It doesn’t feed people. It doesn’t clothe people. It doesn’t put a roof over anyone’s head.

I swipe one more time, land on a group photo where everyone’s dressed in formal wear. It’s from a year ago, so... prom? I pop in to get a closer look at Beckett, standing between Lucy and Cason. Lucy is turned, smiling at her bestie. Cason looks like he’s trying to use X-ray vision to get a peek at his girlfriend’s chest.

And Beckett? Beckett looks... radiant. I don’t know how else to put it. Even surrounded by their weird, murky energy, she’s luminous.

I wish I could have been there with her, instead of Cason. I wish there was some configuration of the universe where Beckett and I could go to prom, dance, kiss. Maybe lie out under the stars after and reflect ourselves back to them. Our flawed, imperfect selves, so open and willing that we don’t need to be perfect to shine back into the universe.

I let out a breath I must have been holding, close out of IG, and shoot a text to B’Rad.

What ru doing right now?

He sends me a hot dog emoji.

Can we meet at lunch tomorrow? I want to ask you something.

I get a thumbs-up in return.

If he wasn’t working, I would’ve just asked him.

But he’s too busy to talk, which gives me time to change my mind, if I want to.

As C.Ry sings track 8, “What’s It Gonna Be?,” in my ear, I ask myself:

What’s it gonna be, Daya?Are you bold enough to follow through with this?

Or are you gonna chicken out by tomorrow?