The Other Boy Page 14

  “Wow, this is great.” Maddy looked up. Her mom stood at the edge of the garden in her old blue bathrobe, holding a glass of iced tea. She handed the glass to her grubby daughter. “I thought you could use this. Dad and I were watching you out the window.” Maddy got to her feet, accepted the frosty, wet glass, and downed the tea in three long gulps. “You know, it’s nice to see you enjoying your work here in the vineyard. You’ve adjusted so well since the beginning of the summer.”

  Maddy smiled grimly. If “adjusted well” meant she was confused and mad about everything in her life, then her mom was right—she was doing just peachy. “Yeah, well, I needed a little exercise this morning,” Maddy explained.

  Her mother smiled and turned to go back to the house. Halfway across the yard, she stopped. “Oh, Maddy, I almost forgot. David and Fred are coming for lunch today.”

  “What? I thought they only came to dinner!” Maddy cried. Her mom looked at her strangely. Maddy dropped her eyes and started gathering some of the weeds up into a little pile.

  “Daddy and Fred are going into town for the Winemakers License Hearing at the town council, and you know that’s a big deal. So I thought they should come straight here after, and we’ll all have a nice sit-down lunch together, to celebrate clearing another hurdle.”

  Maddy sank back on her heels. Great. She’d get to stare David in the face for an entire meal. Her headache started coming back. Then her eyes widened as something stirred in her mind. David had accused her of being the girl he’d always thought she was, the spoiled brat from the city. But what if she could show him that she wasn’t—that she had changed? What if she could catch him by surprise?

  Maddy leaped to her feet. “Hey, Mom,” she called across the yard. “You know, I could make lunch today, if you want.” Her mother stopped short and turned around slowly, an incredulous look on her face.

  “You want to cook?” she asked carefully.

  “Yeah, sure. I’d love to.”

  “Well,” Maddy’s mom said delicately, “that would be great. What do you want to make?”

  She hadn’t gotten that far yet. Maddy looked around the garden. “Um, I’ll do something with the veggies here.”

  Her mother looked doubtful. “Okay, well, that’s fine. Can you have it ready by one?”

  “Sure!” Maddy sounded a lot more confident than she felt. She looked around the garden as her mother disappeared back into the house. The vegetables stood shining in the sun, looking intimidatingly raw. She groaned a little to herself. What had come over her? Was it momentary insanity? She had made scrambled eggs and spaghetti before but…eggplant? Maddy rose and walked over to the shiny purple vegetables. She picked one and held it up. It was light. The smooth skin and springy flesh underneath made it feel disturbingly alive—like it might actually be an animal and not a plant. Maddy turned it slowly in her hand. How the heck do you cook this? Do you eat the skin? What about the hard green leaves on top? What the hell? Everyone was always raving about how good eggplant was. She’d figure it out. She picked six big ones and set them aside.

  Picking the zucchini, Maddy found that they were covered with spiky little hairs, which she’d never seen before, and the tomatoes were all misshapen and bulgy, not round like she was used to. There was something else growing that she couldn’t even identify—it was a green object with a long, feathery top and a bulbous bottom. It kind of looked like deformed celery. Whatever it was, there was a lot of it, so Maddy picked several of those too, along with onions and peppers. At least those looked normal.

  She loaded everything into a basket and lugged it across the lawn, feeling the sun beating down on the back of her neck, and banged back into the kitchen. Her parents sat at the table, the newspaper spread out in front of them, sipping their coffee. Her father was peacefully munching a plate of toast. In the corner, the radio was playing classical music.

  Maddy dropped the basket on the floor and scowled at them, panting. The dirt from the garden had mixed with the sweat on her arms, leaving long dirty streaks. Her head was pounding and the mosquito bites on the backs of her knees itched ferociously.

  “Mom says you’re cooking for us, sweetie!” Her father chirped.

  “Mmmm.” Maddy stomped over to the fridge and took out some blueberry pie, which she began devouring straight out of the pan without cutting a piece. She realized her parents had put down the newspaper and were staring at her.

  “Pie for breakfast, Maddy?” her mother inquired. “Do you want me to make you some eggs?”

  “No!” she snapped, and then controlled herself. “I mean, I’m fine, thanks, Mom.”

  “All right.” Her mother wandered over to the basket of vegetables and sank down on her heels to peer in. “You picked some fennel! That’ll be interesting.”

  “Fennel?” That must be that weird bulbous celery thing with the feathery top. “Oh, yeah. That’s what I thought too.”

  Her mom rose and gave her an absent smile. “Well, have fun. Daddy has his hearing soon, and I promised the North Napa Vineyard Association I’d staff a booth at the outreach fair this morning. But everyone will be back by one.”

  “Great!” Maddy sounded far more enthusiastic than she felt. “See you then. I have everything under control.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Maddy stood at the kitchen counter, holding a giant chopping knife and eyeing the stack of vegetables heaped in front of her. Somehow, these were going to turn into lunch for five, though she had no idea how that was going to happen.

  It was sweltering in the kitchen, despite the open windows. The thought of turning on the stove wasn’t very appealing, but Maddy had the feeling people wouldn’t be impressed by raw onions and peppers. She had tied her hair into a bun and put on a loose cotton tank top, but it didn’t make much difference. It was just hot. There was no way around it. The sweat beaded up on her arms and at the edges of her hairline. A trickle ran from her neck down the front of her chest. Bleah. All she wanted to do was leave this inferno of a room, pour herself a glass of iced tea, and lie on the porch chair with a fan aimed directly at her face.

  But she couldn’t, so instead she poised her knife as she had seen David do, and brought it down on one of the eggplants with a resounding whack. The vegetable split into two pale halves, which lay in front of her on the cutting board, rocking slightly. Maddy leaned forward to examine them. All sorts of little seeds were suspended in some sort of spongy, stringy stuff in the middle. What did you do with those? Could you eat them? She shrugged and chopped four others into halves and the halves into pieces. That should do it. It looked like kind of a lot, but there were five people eating.

  The fennel was even more daunting. Eat the tops? Cut the tops off? Eat the thing raw? Cook it? Finally, she just sliced the whole thing up, feathery tops and all. The tomatoes were easy, although two had worms in them, which was revolting. She accidentally dropped some pieces on the floor and then stepped on them, which created tomato slime all over the place that she had to stop and mop up.

  The peppers were the nicest looking—dark green, slender, and shiny. The onions, though, made her eyes tear. While she was blundering to the sink to splash water on her face, she knocked the entire cutting board, heaped with sliced vegetables, onto the floor. Damn it! She forgot her stinging eyes and knelt quickly to gather up the scattered pieces. What David didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. She picked the biggest pieces of dust off the pile and then put the spill out of her mind. It was already twelve thirty. How the hell had that happened? The only lunch in sight was a battered pile of raw vegetables. She flashed on the image of David standing at this very counter, his knife flashing like magic, transforming a pile of olives into tiny bits, chatting effortlessly the entire time. Well, you’re a beginner, Maddy, but you can do it. Just think of his face when he realizes you cooked this whole lunch.

  She wiped her arm across her forehead, grabbed a large pot out of the cabinet, dumped every last piece in, and then turned the burner on. There. Now
, what went with cooked vegetables? Well, she knew how to make pasta. And they could spoon the vegetables over the top. Maddy searched through the pantry but couldn’t find any of the familiar blue-and-red boxes. She shut the door and stood tapping her fingers on her cheek, thinking. They’d had pasta just the other night. Maddy remembered seeing a pile of it on the counter. In a flash of inspiration, she opened the refrigerator door. There it was—a plastic bag of noodles sitting right in the front. She grabbed it, filled another pot with water and set it on a high flame.

  The smell of smoke distracted her from the pasta water. Damn! She peered into the vegetable pot. Some of the veggies were burning and stuck to the bottom of the pot, but other pieces still looked alarmingly raw. Maddy grabbed a long wooden spoon and poked at the mess. Maybe she should take it off the burner and switch to the microwave or something. Before she could do that, she was interrupted by a splashing, sizzling sound. The pasta water was ready—boiling over, in fact. She turned down the flame and dumped in the noodles. They looked strange—soft instead of stiff. But, it was twelve forty-five, and she still had to set the table. She thought again of the long table set among the cool green leaves of the field. Well, she wasn’t doing that. The table out on the lawn would be fine. The kitchen was like a circle of hell right now. There was no way they could eat inside. Maddy pulled a stack of plates down from the shelves and added silverware. Paper napkins would have to suffice—it was just lunch. If anyone (David) didn’t think that was classy enough, tough. Except there weren’t any napkins—at least, none that she could find, and she didn’t know where her mother kept the cloth ones. She grabbed a roll of paper towels. Why had she ever thought that this little enterprise would improve her foul mood?

  She banged out the back door and across the lawn. It wasn’t much cooler outside, and the picnic table at the rear of the lawn was baking in the sun. Maddy didn’t really have time to think about it, though. She hurriedly dealt out place settings for five and dashed back across the lawn.

  The kitchen smelled ominously of burning, and smoke was beginning to wisp from the vegetable pot. Crap! Maddy realized she’d forgotten to take it off the burner. She quickly set the vegetables aside on the counter and peered anxiously into the pot of noodles. Something wasn’t right. Instead of the nicely al dente strands she expected, the surface was covered with broken-up pieces of noodle, and the water was all cloudy. She looked at the clock—she hadn’t screwed up this time. It had only been eight minutes since she put the pasta in the water. So why did it look so weird? She stabbed a fork at the mess, but only succeeded in breaking up the depressingly mushy noodles into even smaller pieces. It looked years overdone. Lovely. Just lovely.

  Maddy stood staring at the pot, breathing in the smoke that hung in a little cloud around the kitchen ceiling until she heard her mother’s voice on the porch. “Need any help?” She turned around. Her mom was peering through the screen door.

  “No!” Maddy leaped at the door. “Go sit down outside. I’m almost ready….”

  “Oh, good. Dad and Fred are back and they’re starving.” Her mother trailed off. Maddy turned her attention back to the more urgent tasks at hand. She gingerly tried to pick the noodle pieces out of the water with two big salad forks and managed to transfer most of them to a bowl, though they were dangerously fragile. The vegetables looked completely bizarre. For the most part, they were an indistinguishable, blackened stew, but for some reason, the onion stood out in big, raw-looking pieces. Maddy scraped it all on top of the noodles and, in a pitiful attempt to make the dish attractive, picked a sprig of Mom’s fresh basil from the pot on the windowsill and stuck it in the middle, where it looked garishly green in contrast.

  Maddy picked up the giant bowl and a serving spoon and headed toward the door. Damn. Drinks. She set the bowl down and opened the fridge. The tea pitcher was about an inch full. The entire family had drunk it by the gallon all summer and Mom had picked today not to make any? Maddy looked around wildly and spied a packet of Crystal Light sitting on the counter. Mixed-berry flavor. Fine. She filled a pitcher and dumped in the powder. It turned the water a thoroughly unnatural red. Maddy loaded the whole business onto a tray. This is the lunch she was going to win David back with? One bowl of mush and red-40-laden water. She gritted her teeth and pushed through the screen door toward the table on the lawn.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Everyone was already sitting around the table. Maddy tried not to notice David’s figure at one end. The lawn seemed very long as she bore her tray in front of her like some ridiculous offering. She looked like hell, too—dirty, smelly, and unshowered. The thought occurred to her that she matched the food—totally unappealing.

  She looked everywhere but at David as she set the tray down on the table.

  “What’s this dish called, Maddy?” Fred asked. He looked very different in his neatly pressed slacks and sport shirt. She’d never seen him in anything but jeans.

  “Ah…Eggplant Surprise.” She sank down into a chair and sneaked a hopeful glance at David. He was staring at the empty water glass in front of him, a studiedly casual expression pasted on his face. Maddy turned her gaze to the table. It looked dismal. The sun was beating down on everything in sight. Her father had almost sweated through his shirt. Maddy’s mind flashed on the image of her birthday dinner, the gracefully set table, the platters of luscious dishes, the glasses and china glittering in the flickering candlelight—and David’s proud, smiling face. She almost had to shut her eyes against the scene in front her. Before her sat a hurriedly set table in the harsh glare of the noon sun, complete with one roll of paper towels and a lonely bowl of vegetables.

  Fred lifted the pitcher of red liquid. “Can I pour anyone some…Kool-Aid?” He paused quizzically on the last word.

  “Crystal Light,” Maddy muttered. Fred looked at the pitcher more closely.

  “Right! Crystal Light, anyone?”

  “Sure.” Her dad gamely held out his glass.

  Maddy could barely keep from dropping her eyes as her mother’s spoon dipped into the serving bowl. The heat from the vegetables had continued cooking the pasta even more, which was unfortunate—it looked even more like mush than it had in the kitchen. Plus, now that some of it was ladled out, she could see that she had grossly overestimated how much five people could eat. The huge mound of the stuff in the bowl was easily enough for twenty. Her father looked at his plate as if something on it was about to jump up and bite him, but he quickly recovered. Maddy watched in anguish as David’s plate was filled.

  Everyone at the table gradually fell silent as the food was handed around. David was the last to get his portion. Maddy could hardly look at him, but he accepted his plate of the frightening substance readily and then, to her surprise, looked directly at her. He shot her a disarming smile. Maddy’s pulse shot into the stratosphere and she felt her face turn flaming red. Ohmygod. What did that mean? He didn’t hate her? No, he was probably feeling sorry for her and her hideous attempt at cooking. It’s a look of pity, Maddy told herself glumly.

  “I think that David, as the Ironstone Vineyard resident chef, should try the dish first so he can give us his professional opinion,” her father said brightly.

  Lovely, Dad. Thank you very much, Maddy thought.

  David obligingly raised his heaping fork and took a large bite. He chewed for a minute, frowning slightly. Maddy found herself holding her breath. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from his face.

  David erupted in a convulsion of coughing. Everyone started in alarm.

  “David!” Maddy’s mother exclaimed. “Are you all right?”

  Instead of answering, David leaped up from his chair, knocking it over, and raced toward the house, where he disappeared inside the kitchen. The group, sitting in stunned silence, could hear the faucet running in the kitchen and loud slurping sounds. After a long moment—approximately seven or eight years, in Maddy’s estimation—David appeared on the porch again and walked slowly toward the table. He stopped w
hen he reached them, his face a slightly more normal shade of pink.

  “Okay?” Fred asked cautiously.

  “It’s good,” David said in a strangled voice. He picked up his overturned chair, and sat down. Maddy couldn’t resist. She reached for her own fork and ever so carefully placed a tiny bit of eggplant in her mouth. The effect was instantaneous—heat exploded down her throat, her lips and tongue turning numb almost immediately. It took all of her willpower not to repeat David’s performance. She coughed violently and chugged twelve ounces of Crystal Light. She set her glass down with a shudder and looked around the table. Now everyone was staring at her.

  Maddy’s mother finally broke the silence. “You know,” she said, poking at a piece of green pepper with her fork, “just out of curiosity, did I happen to mention that we’re growing jalapeño peppers as well as sweet peppers in the garden?”

  Maddy flopped back in her chair, her cheeks burning now instead of her mouth. She recalled the beautiful little dark green peppers she had admired. She had chopped up nearly a dozen.

  “I’m impressed, though, Mad, that you took a stab at the pasta. It’s so delicate,” her mom hurried on.

  At the other end of the table, David spoke for the first time. Maddy jumped at the sound of his voice. “How long did you boil it for?”

  “Eight minutes.” She stared determinedly at the planks of the table.

  Her father cleared his throat. “Well, that might be why it’s a tad…soft. You’re only meant to boil fresh pasta for a minute or two at the absolute most.”

  Fresh pasta? That explained why it was in the fridge.

  Staring at her wrecked attempt at cooking, Maddy could feel the tears prickling behind her eyes. No. No. She would not start crying like a little kid in front of David because her lunch was not the perfect representation of New Maddy. No. But it was useless. She could feel red patches start to form on her face, like usual, and her throat swelled and ached. She blinked furiously and stared up at the sky.