“Oh.” My mother gasped. “I hope it’s not cancer. Maybe this is why they hired you in the first place.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” I had never lied to my parents until I’d started working at the Cones’。 And though I felt bad that I was transforming into someone different, a girl who would hide things from her parents, the payoff seemed worth it. I’d get to eat dinner every night with Sheba and Jimmy. And Izzy! How could I not lie?
“I’ll come down there and help you.”
“No, Mom. They’re not letting anyone in the house.”
“Oh. Oh no. Okay. Now, you call me if you need help. What does she want you to prepare tonight?”
“She didn’t say. She just said meat and a vegetable.”
“Oh, Mary Jane. She must be very ill.”
“How about I just make what you’re making?” I suggested quickly, to distract her.
It worked. “Meatloaf, pan-fried potatoes, and iceberg wedges with tomato slices and ranch dressing.”
“Okay. And dessert?”
“Orange sherbet. Just one scoop with three Nilla Wafers, each broken in half, and then stuck in the center like a blooming flower.”
“I can do that.”
“Remember to sauté the meatloaf filling before you mix it into the hamburger and bread crumbs. That way it’s more savory.”
“Onion and . . .” I tried to remember exactly what we added to the hamburger for meatloaf.
“Onion, diced celery, garlic powder, salt, and pepper.”
“Okay, I can do that.”
“And fry the potatoes in Crisco, not butter. They’re better in Crisco.”
Izzy loved helping with dinner preparation. She sat on the kitchen stool and stirred the meatloaf filling in the frying pan. She whisked the buttermilk ranch dressing and arranged the cut tomatoes over the iceberg wedges. She salted the potato wedges as we fried them in Crisco. And she assembled the Nilla Wafer flowers in the sherbet bowls, which we made ahead of time and then kept in the newly roomy freezer.
While the meatloaf was cooking, we went to prepare the dining room. The table was so heaped with things, there was no visible surface. “Let’s do this methodically,” I said.
“What does that mean?” Izzy put a hand on each hip, just like me.
“Let’s be organized in how we put away all this stuff.”
“Should we do ‘bad/good’ again?”
“Yes, that’s a great idea. Get a trash bag.”
Izzy disappeared into the kitchen. I was starting to understand that one of the values of having a kid around was that they could always do things like run off and fetch a trash bag. I did things like that for my mother and now Izzy was doing them for me.
Izzy returned with a trash bag and two pairs of gloves.
“I don’t think we need the gloves.”
“Maybe we do?” She put on a pair. They were floppy at the ends, the fingers drooped like melted candlesticks.
“When I hand you books, put them in stacks in front of the bookshelves in the living room. Any dishes or kitchen things go to the kitchen counter.”
“And trash goes here.” Izzy shook the garbage bag.
“Yes. But you can’t hold on to the bag. You have to be willing to run stuff around the house. Clothes can go on the steps to take upstairs later. Shoes, too. Okay?”
“Okay.” Izzy looked at me with an intense little stare. Like she was going to be graded on this task.
I circled the table and gathered books, which I handed off to Izzy in stacks of three or four. Each time she returned from dropping them off, I gave her another pile. When the books were gone, we started in on the trash: empty takeout containers, receipts from the grocery store, candy wrappers, old newspapers, two empty pizza boxes, and lots of junk mail. I found the matching flip-flop to one of the two that had been in the entrance hall, and also Izzy’s orange bathing suit she had been wanting the week before when we went to the pool one afternoon.
Finally all that was left on the table was an unplugged record player, a dozen records, and a large collection of Izzy’s arts and crafts projects. I picked up the records and shuffled through them. Three of them were Running Water records, all of which had a picture of the entire band, Jimmy always in the middle. On one cover, his shirt was open to the top button of his pants. On the other cover, he wasn’t wearing a shirt at all and it looked like he wasn’t wearing pants, either, though the photo ended before you could really know. He stared the viewer in the eye, the way he had stared at me this morning during breakfast. Like he was daring you to look away. Like he was asking a question with his eyes. Like you should know what the question was and be able to answer it with your own eyes. But I didn’t know how to answer any questions with my eyes. I didn’t even know people could stare like that. Until I met Jimmy.