The Summer Kitchen by Lisa Wingate Read Free Book Online Page B

the focus, but I’d never really considered that, in my efforts to give them everything that was missing from my childhood—the mom who scrapbooked every milestone, who showed up at the school parties with homemade treats, who read bedtime stories, drove the carpools, lined the batters up in the baseball dugout, and planned the huge birthday parties—I’d cast aside the dream I had for myself.
    It didn’t feel like a sacrifice. It felt like a mission. But now, despite such careful attention to detail, the mission had gone awry.
    “I had to quit work after my car accident,” the woman said, and I focused on the conversation again. “I wasn’t up to it.”
    “Oh.” I pretended to be busy looking for a gap in traffic, but I was thinking that I understood how it felt to lose the very thing you thought you did so well. In a way, I was as down and out as she was. “I’m sorry.” Shifting in my seat, I turned away from her, anxious to drop her wherever she wanted.
    “I loved the kids,” she offered. “I missed them. That’s been . . . oh . . . twenty years ago now. Doesn’t seem like it, though.”
    I gunned the car into a gap in traffic, because I didn’t know what to say.
    My passenger swayed in the seat, her hands catching the armrests. “I don’t think I’d want to be in the classroom these days. Kids aren’t like they used to be,” she said, looking out the window. “Back then, all you had to worry about was kids copying each other’s homework, and an occasional Saturday night party when someone’s parents weren’t home. If you had any problems, most of them had folks you could go to. Now, they live rough lives around these neighborhoods, and half the time there’s no telling where the parents are, or else they’re more messed up than the kids.” She pointed ahead to the narrow driveway of the shabby stucco apartment complex I’d passed last night.
    “Turn left up there,” she said.
    In the daylight, I read the government housing sign in front of the apartments. I’d never once given them a second thought before last night, even though we were only a few blocks from Poppy’s house. Once during the estate sale, I’d stopped for a soda at the mini-mart in the dilapidated strip mall across the street. The squat Pakistani man behind the counter was obliging enough, but the specially built cage around the register area and the group of men lingering in front made me uncomfortable. As we drove away, Holly pointed out that there was strange activity in that parking lot, all hours of the day. She surmised that, aside from possible drug deals and prostitution, it was a place where illegals hung out waiting for construction trucks to drive by with potential job offers. After that, we bought our sodas and filled up with gas on our own side of town.
    Holly would have died of shock if she’d seen me calmly waiting to turn left into a place that looked even worse than the strip mall. The apartment complex seemed to belong in some third world country. I tried not to give an outward reaction as we bumped over the entranceway, and I drove between the buildings, pretending not to notice the piles of refuse lying windblown against the buildings. Foul words had been painted along the walls in bright colors. Three kids watched us from the front steps of one of the apartments, their mocha faces curious and slightly suspicious as we passed. I looked at them in the side mirror—a toddler wearing only underpants; a boy with sleek, thin limbs hanging loosely from an oversized T-shirt and a pair of shorts that were too large; and a girl who probably should have been in elementary school today. She stood twisting a braid around her finger, watching my car.
    My passenger directed me to 9B. Behind us, the kids descended the steps and scampered toward the corner, the two older ones first, and the toddler following in a stubby, barefooted run.
    Where in the world were they going?
    “They wander around here all the