Three Story House: A Novel (11 page)

Isobel didn’t like him. When she was home, she shadowed his workers, pointing out their flaws directly to them. More than once she stormed over to Benny’s camper-cum-office to complain, and afterward he’d meekly asked Lizzie to help Isobel be a little less hands-on. Elyse, on the other hand, had let her interest in Benny and his stories develop into a near obsession. It was if she were cataloging his life. To what purpose, Lizzie couldn’t fathom. It wasn’t sexual and it wasn’t fatherly. If it weren’t so improbable, she’d say they’d become friends.

The last Thursday of the month, as Benny was giving his day’s report, Elyse arrived home with a small bag of groceries and announced her intention of trying to use the cast-iron waffle maker. “Breakfast for dinner,” she said and then greeted Benny with a kiss on the cheek. He spoke in low whispers to Elyse, who covered her mouth like a schoolgirl to laugh. The giggling unnerved Lizzie. She clapped Benny on the back and told him to go home before his workers demanded overtime.

Elyse sighed watching Benny leave. She opened the fridge and talked about the recipes she’d been finding tucked away inside Grandma Mellie’s kitchen. “Time stopped around here,” she said, taking out a can of lard. The effort Elyse put into food puzzled Lizzie, who saw meals merely as fuel for what her body needed to accomplish on any given day; and then there was Isobel, who after so many years living among skinny women, saw food as a necessary evil. Yet, of all of them, Elyse was the most comfortable with herself. She was sexy without being sleazy and nice without being a pushover. She was a little bit fat, but it wasn’t what you noticed about her. Only after you’d been around her a while did you see that her pants were too tight and her arms doughy.

“The chef at the bar thinks Mellie’s cookbooks could be valuable,” Elyse said, closing the refrigerator. “I’m going to take her the Memphis ones tomorrow so she can look at them.”

“How can you spend your time doing something like that?” asked Lizzie. Within a week of announcing her intention to get a job, Elyse had been hired as the afternoon bartender at a popular restaurant. She worked the lunch shift and then right up to dinner. She and the chef who showed up in the afternoons to oversee prep had become friendly. “It can’t be what you want to be doing. I keep thinking about Mellie and how little choice she had. And look at us, the world is our oyster.”

“You do what you can,” Elyse said. “The two of you don’t get it, you know? You’re living your childhood dreams, and my dreams are more complicated than growing up to be the thing I wanted to be as a kid.”

“There can’t be any money in it,” Lizzie said.

“You’ve never met afternoon drinkers,” Elyse said, pulling a wooden spoon from the drawer. “There’s a lot of shame and hush money involved.”

“I’ve got to sit,” Lizzie said, massaging the back of her knee.

“Still don’t understand how you can spend six hours a day working out.”

“Rehab is different from exercise.”

“If you say so.” Elyse put her finger to her mouth and looked upward in consideration. “Are you hungry now or can you wait? These waffles will be best right out of the pan.”

“Isobel said she’d be out later than usual, something about having a conference call with her agent and some production company guy. We should wait.”

“I’ll make a few test ones and then we can fire it up again when she rolls in.”

Lizzie watched her cousin crack eggs like chefs did on television, effortlessly with one hand. “You know, people think everything is better now, but it’s not. Feel this.” Elyse passed her the cast-iron waffle pan, which felt greasy to Lizzie. It weighed as much as a small car.

When she was cooking, her cousin exuded calmness. It was only in between activities that restlessness overcame Elyse. There was a girlishness about her, or even more than that, a childlike approach to the world around her—as if she still believed that puppy dogs and rainbows could brighten anyone’s day. Here they were all still who they’d been as children. Elyse had always been chubby, but in an adorable way, and she’d been saved from ridicule then as now by her perfectly creamy skin and her girlish charm. She was the sort of woman men wanted to protect and women felt unthreatened by. Lizzie hadn’t exactly given much thought to her appearance as a child. Some people would have called her a tomboy, but it wasn’t so much that she disliked feminine traits as that she didn’t have time for them. They hadn’t known Isobel would be beautiful. What she had going for her, what she’d always had going for her were perfect proportions and dimples. Casting directors love dimpled children.

“What is it that you want? I mean, what are your dreams?” Lizzie asked. “I know what they used to be, but now that we’re all grown up, I can’t figure out what you want.”

“The recipe calls for melted shortening, but you know what? I think I’m going to try using that bacon fat left over from this morning instead. Doesn’t that sound yummy?”

“Not going to talk about it, huh?” Lizzie said. She didn’t remember her grandmother ever making waffles with that particular pan, but she did remember that whenever the milk soured, Mellie used the curdled dairy to make what she had called dinner waffles. “Are you using sour milk?”

“That’s the other recipe.” Elyse passed over the large note card she was holding.

Lizzie stared at her grandmother’s handwriting that noted simply “Breakfast Sour Waffles.” It wasn’t at all what she remembered. It looked like a version of her own handwriting when she was a teenager. Large circular loops—so that the
f
’s looked like
b
’s. The black ink had lightened to a milky brown over the years.

           
1 teaspoon salt

           
2 cups flour

           
1 teaspoon baking powder

           
2 eggs

           
3 tablespoons melted shortening

           
1½ cups sour milk

           
Use fork to stir salt, flour, and baking powder together. Combine egg yolks, shortening, and sour milk. Stir with same fork. Beat egg whites in separate bowl with whisk until stiff. Set aside. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and mix until batter is smooth. Fold in the stiffly beaten whites of eggs. Bake on hot irons. Six waffles.

Her cousin reached over and flipped the card in Lizzie’s hand. “I’m doing those. I like a little sugar in my waffles. Only difference is you add a bit of sugar, use regular milk and wait to add the shortening, or in my case bacon fat, after you mix the wet and the dry.”

Lizzie’s stomach growled. “I guess I am hungry.”

“We can always eat the test batch,” Elyse said and winked as she used a whisk to stiffen the egg whites.

“There’s a hand mixer somewhere,” Lizzie said, moving to get up from the table.

Elyse waved her down. “I’m doing this the old-fashioned way.”

She set the whites down and turned on the portable propane burner they’d gotten at one of those giant camping stores.

“You want this back?” Lizzie pushed the cast-iron pan toward her cousin.

She picked it up and settled the base over the open flame and then set the waffle-patterned plates in place. “I’m going to let it get hot first.”

“You should get a pot holder.” Lizzie couldn’t see how the mesh wire handles wouldn’t be too hot to touch in a moment.

“It’ll be all right.” Elyse folded the egg whites into the batter and then dumped a large ladle of the batter onto the plates. Steam rose up into the air and condensed on the windows. Batter ran down the sides of the waffle maker, puffing as it came into contact with the hot iron.

A sweet, yeasty cake smell filled the kitchen. “You could always open a waffle house,” Lizzie said.

Elyse flipped the pan and then scraped off the drippings with her fingernail and popped them into her mouth. “If I did, I’d be as big as the moon and then no one would ever love me.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” The setting sun lit up all the flyaways in her cousin’s hair and made her seem even more like a child.

“You should.” Lizzie wondered if the thing bothering her cousin was the failure of the bed and breakfast or something larger.

Elyse opened the pan and pried out the waffle. “I’m fine,” Elyse said, and although she didn’t stamp her foot, her tone gave that impression. “My sister’s getting married. BFD.”

Although Elyse would never admit this, she disliked her little sister, Daphne, for being the favorite. This was understood between the cousins. Just as it was understood that Lizzie hated her mother for holding onto the truth about her real father, and Isobel didn’t speak to her mother because she wasn’t sorry about having left her father.

“That’s not such a big deal,” Lizzie said. “It isn’t like biblical times when the older sisters had to get married first.”

“I don’t like weddings,” Elyse said, taking a break from cooking to pour a large glass of white wine.

“I guess Pinot Grigio does go with everything,” Lizzie said, tapping her fingers on the table. “There’s something you’re not saying.”

Elyse finished the glass and poured a second, mumbling an answer in between.

Lizzie snapped her fingers. “Who is Daphne marrying?”

Elyse tore up bits of a waffle and dipped them in syrup. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Landon.”

“Landon? Landon? The guy with only one arm?” Lizzie asked. Landon was the boy her cousin had had a crush on all through high school. He’d been born with some genetic condition and didn’t have the lower half of his right arm. There came a point every summer when Isobel and Lizzie had to put a moratorium on any mention of Landon.

“It’s not that I care,” Elyse said before Lizzie could say more. “I had to adjust my expectations, you know? I mean there are things that you never dream of happening and then when they do—”

“You adjust,” Lizzie finished.

Elyse didn’t look at Lizzie. She made waffles until the batter was gone and then set a plate in front of Lizzie and put the rest in the oven to stay warm. “I lied to my mom, you know.”

“That’s a first.”

“Told her that I thought you might kill yourself. That’s the excuse I gave her to make it okay for me to be here while she and Daphne plan that wedding.”

Lizzie wanted to be upset, but instead she laughed. “I guess that’s as good an excuse for running away as any. She didn’t believe you, did she?”

“She didn’t even listen to me.” Elyse looked at her fingernails and cleaned out the waffle residue.

“Moms never do.”

Elyse fixed a plate and settled next to Lizzie at the table. She held still long enough for Lizzie to see the sadness settle on her. Her shoulders dropped, and she blinked often enough that Lizzie suspected she was afraid of crying. She clearly wasn’t able to admit how deep her sadness was because her sister was marrying the man Elyse had always thought was hers. When life doesn’t go the way you expect it to, you make strange choices. They ate until their plates were shiny with syrup and butter.

As they were doing the dishes, Isobel came into the house, all smiles. She took up Elyse’s nearly empty wine glass and proposed a toast. Lizzie and Elyse fumbled around trying to find a glass to raise.

“I can’t wait any longer,” Isobel said. “I’m going to be back on television.”

“Holy hell,” Elyse said, clinking the whisk she’d grabbed to her cousin’s glass. “How’d you manage that all the way out here?”

“Congratulations,” Lizzie said, feeling her stomach constrict at the thought of Isobel’s leaving them. She and Elyse would never be able to finish the house on their own.

Isobel talked about the offer, which was to be part of an hour-long “where are they now” type special on child stars of the nineties. A film crew would show up at Spite House for a few days and film Isobel working in the house. “I’ve even decided to try to do a little local theater, you know, so they can see that I’m still working on my craft.”

“What does that even mean?” Elyse asked.

If anyone else had asked Isobel that question, she’d have turned cold. Arched one eyebrow and offered a half-smile as if responding would merely expose the asker to more embarrassment. Instead, Lizzie laid a hand on Isobel’s arm as if to tell her all that she and Elyse had talked about earlier—Landon and the disappointment of not even knowing what dream it was that you were waiting to come true.

“I don’t want to settle for one of those small lives—filled with jobs that pay for cookie-cutter houses in suburban neighborhoods where children are sent to good schools and I can’t help but feel like it’s all over.” Isobel paused for breath and then took a long drink of wine. “I keep looking for a new start, but the past looms so large—as if the shadow of what I’d already done is enough to keep anything new from happening.”

Without a word, Elyse got up, removed the remaining waffles from the oven where they’d been kept warm and fixed Isobel a plate.

B
y the time the dogwoods bloomed in early March, Lizzie had a job. The dwindling balance in her grandmother’s trust and the mounting costs of the renovation pushed her into calling T. J.’s sister, who needed help with an afterschool program her nonprofit organization ran. In less than an hour, Rosa May had hired Lizzie and put her to work.

“Walk with me,” Rosa May said, motioning for Lizzie to follow her down a dim hallway Ignoring the grinding in her knee, she tried to keep pace with her.

“You must be a runner,” Lizzie said, struggling to match Rosa May’s stride.

She slowed. “I’m sorry. T. J. said you’d only now started to make real progress with therapy. I damaged my Achilles a few years back. It was murder to come back from.”

“Murder’s about right.” For the last month, she and Phil had worked six hours a day on strengthening and conditioning exercises. Although he remained optimistic, her leg wasn’t back to normal, but it was stronger. “If all goes well this week, I can start jogging again.”

“Bet you’re tired of that damn stationary,” Rosa May said.

“Just the seat. No way a woman would ever design something so tortuous as a bicycle seat.”