“Don’t worry. Your feet won’t be cold. I left the heat on seventy-five so it would be warm and cozy when I returned,” she said. “Take your bag. We can’t leave it in the entry.” I wasn’t going to part with it anyway, but what she said reminded me of Daddy leaving his briefcase in our entryway.
I picked it up, and she put her hand on my back and directed me to the kitchen, which was on the right.
She had me sit at a small wood table that had four chairs of the same wood as in the entryway. Her floor was light brown like the tile floor in our kitchen. Everything else about her kitchen looked older. The paint was chipped, peeling, and scratched on the white cabinets. The counters were darker stone than the floor and cluttered with canisters, old newspapers whose paper had turned yellow, pill bottles, and a few different shakers, more than salt and pepper and sugar. She had a window over her single sink. It looked dirty on the outside, and I could see where it needed to be cleaned around the edges of the windowpane. Mama would use a cotton swab. Daddy had said she didn’t just clean dirt but pounced on it.
“Just sit here and watch me work on our pizza,” the Umbrella Lady said. “I have them in the freezer, but I put lots of extra good things on them before I bake them. Any little girl who eats my food will grow quickly, like a magic tree, even if she doesn’t ask questions.”
She laughed at what she had said as if someone else had said it.
I sat and pulled my carry-on bag closer to me. Although there was nothing cooking or baking in her kitchen, it smelled like there was. Mama had told me that the aromas of thousands and thousands of meals were in the walls of old houses, even a house like ours, and when the wind blew through, it would bring back something made as far back as twenty years ago. The wind was blowing harder now, so I thought that might be happening. It also made me worry a little about my coloring book and the Umbrella Lady’s note back at the train station.
Suddenly, a snow-white cat came into the kitchen and paused to stare at me suspiciously. It had eyes as green as new spring grass.
“Oh, look who’s come to say hello,” the Umbrella Lady said. “Mr. Pebbles. Just hold your hand out, and he’ll rub his head against it,” she said.
I did, and the cat did just what she had predicted. Then he curled up at my feet and looked at the Umbrella Lady expectantly, as if he had done something worth a treat.
“I’m glad Mr. Pebbles came down. He lives upstairs in my bedroom. I like to talk to someone when I work in the house, and if there is no one here, which is most of the time, I’ll talk to Mr. Pebbles. The first Mr. Pebbles died years and years ago,” she said. “I have that picture of him.” She nodded at the wall on my right, where a black-framed picture hung of a white cat sitting and looking like it was posing for the camera.
“It looks just like this Mr. Pebbles,” I said.
“Oh, yes. Like identical twins.”
I had always wanted a cat, I thought, but Mama had said we’d be eating cat hair no matter how much she cleaned. The hair could float up the stairs and into our noses while we slept. “Dogs bark harder at people who’ve swallowed lots of cat hair,” she had told me.
“People who have dogs or cats usually get another one after their dog or cat dies,” the Umbrella Lady said now. “Some people can’t do that, but this is a way I kept the original Mr. Pebbles alive, you know, by having another cat that is identical. I feed him the same as I fed the first Mr. Pebbles and the second, and he sleeps in the same cat bed.”
“Second?”
“Oh, yes, there was a second. The second Mr. Pebbles was hit by a car full of teenagers who drove up on the sidewalk out there. In the summer, he used to sleep on the sidewalk. The first and the second are buried in the backyard. I’m the only one who knows exactly where. If you looked in the spring, though, you would see some pretty wildflowers coming up, and you would know, I bet. Wouldn’t you?”
I nodded, even though I didn’t know why I should especially be able to know there were cats under the flowers, and why would I be here looking in the spring?
“I don’t think it’s right to forget something or someone who died just because they’re buried and out of sight. Which brings me to the big question. What happened to your mother? Why are you with only your father?”
I didn’t answer. It was something she hadn’t seemed very concerned about knowing. I was glad of that, because it made me sad to think about it and actually horrified at the idea of explaining what had happened to Mama. It was still much better to think of it as a bad dream, but suddenly, she pulled her question out of a hat, as my father would say. I could almost see her reach up over her head and pluck it off a question tree to toss quickly at me.
She stopped working and looked at me when I didn’t answer. She had a hopeful expression on her face, the sort of expression where eyes are smiling and there is the start of a little laugh at the corners of lips.
“Is your mother still alive? Did your father and mother divorce? Most of the time, children stay with their mother when there is a divorce, especially children as young as you. Were you visiting your father and returning home to your mother? What have you been told or, rather, told to tell other people about your father and your mother? Divorced couples have so many secrets buried in their heads that they have to look away from other people’s inquisitive eyes, and they tell their children basically to tell lies. But divorces born out of lies give birth to lies. Is that what’s happened? Is that what’s going on? You should tell me what you know. What do you know?”
Her questions came one after the other, with just a tiny pause in between during which she could tell I wasn’t rushing to answer.
Finally, she stopped working on our dinner and turned completely toward me. She had her hands on her hips. The dark-green apron she was wearing was embroidered with red and white threads. I didn’t understand what the words meant. It read: Chefs help those who help themselves. If they helped themselves, why would they need the chef’s help, anyway?
“So?” she asked. “Let’s start slowly and see what you know. First question, maybe the most important question. Is your mother still alive?” She said each word slowly, as slowly as she might if she was asking someone nearly deaf.
I still didn’t want to answer, but she stood firmly, her lips pressed so hard together that her mouth looked more like a pale pink gash across her face. She wasn’t going to move until I told her something about my mother. I could see that.
I shook my head.
“Ah, so there was no divorce. How sad,” she said. “Any child would rather have a divorced mother than a dead mother.”
She stood there thinking. Then she reached into a cabinet and took out a jar almost full of pennies.
“I put a penny in this jar every time something sad happens to me or to someone I like.”
She opened her purse and found a penny. I watched her drop it through a slot in the lid of the jar.
“There. That takes care of that,” she said, and smiled. “Now we’ll only think about something happy, like our pizza and ice cream. Okay?”
I nodded, now wondering if she really meant it. Would she never mention it again?
Because of all the pennies already in the jar, I thought she had gone through quite a few sad thoughts. Maybe that was why she wanted to change the subject very quickly, which was really another sad thought itself.