When in Doubt, Add Butter (8 page)

I silently cheered him on.

“That’s how much you care for your son?” Her voice was demanding, immediately accusatory. “You don’t even care if you eat with him? Wow, that is really … just
wow.
”

He shook his head, but it looked like it was more to himself than at her. “Half the time, Kimberly has fed him dinner by the time I get home, anyway.”

“That’s because you take so long!” She said it through gritted teeth, each word carefully formed.

He looked weary. “I can’t help the traffic, Angela.”

“You can help what time you get into it! You’re always staying well beyond the end of the show.”

I cringed. The entire atmosphere had gotten thick and tense. The strongest mood in the house always wins, it’s just a universal law, and Angela always seemed to have the strongest mood.

And she always seemed to win.

I stole a glance at Peter. His face was like something etched by a Renaissance artist, taking every cliché of masculinity and softening it just enough to keep him from looking like a caricature of Hercules. The gentle waves of brown hair also softened what was otherwise a fiercely masculine visage. But when he looked like he did now—angry but in control—he looked distinctly different. Maybe even more handsome.

His voice was quiet, but not weak. I’d never seen him back down, never heard him give in. Not that I knew everything that happened in this house. Far from it. I was here for two or three hours a week, but given the fact that Angela’s bitching was consistently the same, it was hard to imagine she was sweet the rest of the time.

I used to ask myself how on earth Peter had gotten into this marriage in the first place, but that wasn’t really the point. He had, and that was that. She’d probably been different once. Whether she’d changed or just been trying to land him, who knows?

All I know is that it was impossible to imagine him, or anyone, purposely signing up for the floggings I saw her issue almost constantly.

How did he live like that?

Why
did he live like that?

I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that: Stephen. Peter was absolutely
devoted
to that little boy, and the child clearly loved his father, too. I’d seen them playing around, joking, laughing, a million times. If Peter was five minutes later getting home than Angela would have preferred, I don’t know that it was having a huge impact on Stephen, but I knew she would make it
sound
as if it were.

And I was also pretty sure that Angela would be the type to use Stephen as a pawn, threatening to keep him away from Peter. I’ve known more than one guy who was so scared by the possibility that he wouldn’t dare take a chance.

It was sad.

On the other hand, maybe I was just giving Peter excuses that didn’t fit. Maybe he stayed because he liked his daily beatings. Maybe it was some sort of Stockholm syndrome and he was afraid to leave the known for the unknown.

Maybe he was just a total pussy.

All I knew for sure was that
I
could never live with the kind of acrimony I witnessed in this house virtually every minute I spent within its walls. I couldn’t abide it as a bystander, and I absolutely couldn’t imagine being a participant day after day.

The vegetables were cooked, and I turned the heat off and lifted the pan, almost hitting little Stephen—who had sneaked up on me—right in the face with it.

“Whoa, buddy!” I reared back, and a few pieces of zucchini flew out of the pan and hit the floor with a splat. I set down the pan, picked the zucchini slices up off the floor and tossed them into the sink. “You okay? I didn’t get you, did I?”

Stephen shook his head.

“Are you hungry?”

He nodded.

“You want veggies with tomato sauce?”

He looked hesitant. “I don’t know.”

I bet he didn’t. It was hard for anyone to know what was all right around here. “I’m going to make a topping for it right now. Want to help?”

“Yes!”

“We’ll need to use the blender.” I figured he’d be attracted to the noise and potential mess.

Apparently, I was right. “Okay!”

“Okay!” I got out the nutritional yeast and sesame seeds, and a scooper. “We need one of these scoops full of each of these things—can you measure it out?”

“Yeah.” He looked uncertain.

“It’s easy.” I got the blender and set it on the counter in front of him. “Pull up one of those stools and you can reach better.”

More noise. He dragged the stool across the wood floor and climbed onto it, smiling.

I could feel Angela’s irritation at the noise—which I knew she was picturing creating deep rivets in the floor—radiating from the other room.

“So, here’s the scoop.” I handed it to him. “First get the flakes.” I pushed the canister over to him and watched as he carefully lowered his hand into it and pulled up the measuring scoop.

“Is that too much?” he asked, fretful.

Jeez, this woman had everyone in the house totally cowed!

“Well, you’re not finished yet. Now you make it even by taking a knife and scraping it evenly along the top.” I demonstrated, running the blunt side of a butter knife along the cup. “See? Now you dump it into the blender.”

He did, and looked delighted with himself.

Bless his heart.

“Now take another scoop and do what I just did.”

Eagerly, he reached in, scooped out some yeast flakes, and pulled up the measuring cup. I handed him the butter knife, and he was just starting to scrape the measurement even when Angela shrilled loudly from the doorway.

“Exactly
what
is going on here?”

Stephen, startled, let the knife fly, and it clattered onto the countertop, making an edgy rough scraping sound.

“My
God,
that could have been his eye!” Angela hurried over to Stephen, but instead of taking him into her arms and coddling him like you might expect a normal mother to when freaked out about her child’s safety, she pulled him roughly off the stool and said, “Go to your room. You
know
you’re not allowed to play with knives.”

Instantly, I felt horrible. “Please don’t be mad at him—it’s not his fault! I told him he could help me, so he probably thought it was okay to do what I said since I’m an adult.”

She sniffed at me.
Sniffed!
As if it were debatable whether or not I was, in fact, an adult. “You’re the
cook. You
are not authorized to tell him to do anything.”

“No, of course not, I wasn’t giving him orders. I just thought it might be nice for him to have a little bit of distraction while you and Peter … talked.”

“Mr. Van Houghten and I—”

Mr. Van Houghten
. She’d said it pointedly. Big Me, Little You. It was one of her favorite passive-aggressive tricks.

“—don’t need you running interference for us. We’re perfectly capable of having a discussion
and
taking care of our child, thank you very much.”

There was so much I wanted to say to her. But even if I had the freedom to let fly with everything, without regard to losing my job, I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Besides which, I
couldn’t
let fly without regard to my job. She was not only in charge of my Monday-night paycheck, but she held the purse strings for my country club job as well. I had already lost Fridays, so I
really
couldn’t afford to lose another night.

“Of course, I was just trying to help. I thought he’d have fun helping out.”

“It wouldn’t have been very fun if he’d poked his eye out with that knife, would it?”

“It was a butter knife, and I was right here,” I pointed out. I
had
to. “He really couldn’t have gotten hurt.”

She tilted her head at me like the old RCA Victor dog and narrowed her eyes. “Is that right?”

I tried to give a little laugh, but it was hard to do in the face of her steely resolve. “Well, I’ve had my share of knife injuries, believe me, but
none
of them ever came from a butter knife.”

She assessed me, judging. Then just shook her head and left the kitchen, passing Peter on his way back in.

“
You
deal with her,” she snapped. “I have a
splitting
headache.”

If she had a headache, it was bound to be from malnutrition more than from me, her exhausting cook.

Peter ignored her and fastened his gaze on me, concerned. “What happened?”

“I let Stephen measure an ingredient out and gave him a butter knife to level the measure.” I grimaced with the retelling, hoping it wouldn’t seem so heinous a crime to him as it did to her. “I’m really sorry.”

“A
butter
knife?” He laughed and reached for the knife on the counter. “This one?”

“Yes.”

“Does it actually
say
Fisher-Price on it?” He turned the knife over, pretending to look for the toy branding, then set it down. “That couldn’t have hurt him.”

“Honestly, that’s what I thought,” I said. It was a relief that he wasn’t mad. “But Angela came in, and I guess she was scared when she saw it in his hand, so she spoke”—
shrieked
—“and it made him jump and drop the knife. Which, admittedly, isn’t something you ever want happening around a child.”

Peter waved the notion away. “Don’t worry about it. I think it’s nice that you were letting him do something in here. She won’t even let him come through here without hovering over him to make sure he doesn’t eat something unhealthy. Not that you could
find
anything unhealthy in here. Or edible.”

I smiled. “Well, she does have a lot of food allergies and whatnot.” Onions, dairy, honey, cinnamon, peanuts, carrots, mushrooms, and any kind of root vegetable, to name a few. “That kind of limits what you can keep in the kitchen.”

He gave a half shrug. “I don’t know that she has
allergies
so much as there are things she doesn’t like the idea of.”

“They’re really not allergies?” He’d said it earlier, but I thought he’d been kidding. I’d been driving myself crazy, scanning the tiny ingredient list on every box, can, bottle, or bag I bought for them for a year, absolutely vigilant about not even purchasing a bag of something that had been next to a bag of something else that was processed in a plant that may or may not have processed peanuts. What a waste of time!

“Not that I know of.”

“Huh.” Well, it wasn’t like I could stop being vigilant about it, anyway. If she said she had allergies, I had to proceed as if that were true, even if it wasn’t.

But
why
would she say it if it wasn’t true?

There was no reason in the world she needed to lie and tell me she was allergic to stuff if she just didn’t like it. She was the boss—if she hated cheese or onions, or if she preferred that I sauté everything in no more than a quarter teaspoon of oil and drew big yellow smiley faces on the napkins, she wouldn’t get cheese or onions and I’d sauté everything in no more than a quarter teaspoon of oil and I’d draw big yellow smiley faces on the napkins.

There was no reason to make it seem like a bigger deal than it was for her to want her specifications met.

God, she was tiresome.

“Anyway, thanks for trying to take care of Stephen,” Peter went on. “It was a lot better than letting him hear his parents argue. That’s for damn sure.”

I agreed, but of course couldn’t do so out loud. “I was happy to have him here. He’s adorable.”

Silence stretched between us.

“I guess I’d better finish up here,” I said.

“Here.” He handed me the knife, and I held it in my left hand as I measured out sesame seeds with my right.

“Thanks.”

“Is this the fake Parmesan?” Peter asked.

I nodded. “It’s pretty rich, nutritionally.”

“It ain’t Parmesan.”

I laughed. “No, but it also ain’t dairy.”

“Right.” He looked at me, and I saw a distinct weariness in his eyes. This was a guy who’d made a bad deal, and he knew it and paid for it every day of his life. “But it’s what she wants. And she gets what she wants.”

“A lot of people would call that lucky.”

“Yes, they might.” A muscle tensed in his jaw. “You’re not like her, though.”

“Well.” What could I say to that? If we were friends chatting in a bar, I could be honest. We weren’t, and I couldn’t. “We’re all different, aren’t we?”

His eyes flicked to mine, but he didn’t answer.

So I followed my usual compulsion to fill a tense silence with empty chatter. “I have to say, I feel just awful about what happened earlier. It was my fault, not Stephen’s. I hate to see him getting in trouble when I asked him for help.” Not only asked, but in reflection, I had basically lured him right into a trap.

God, the poor kid was already skittish enough. He’d trusted me for a moment there, and it had led him to get into trouble.

I felt just terrible about that.

“The poor kid.” A darkness I’d never seen before on him crossed his features. The bad deal wasn’t just his. His son was paying the price, too. “Thanks again for trying to help. I’ll go talk with her about it.”

I could already anticipate how
that
would go, and I did
not
want to be anywhere near here when it blew. “Everything here will be ready in five minutes. I’ll leave it on the counter and slip out.”

“Thank you, Gemma.” His eyes met mine again, and gratitude softened them. “You’re the best.”

He went upstairs, and before he reached the landing, I heard Angela’s voice rising in anger.

I don’t know what they said. I didn’t want to know. I couldn’t stand it.

It was quite telling that every time I left their house after cooking for them, I felt sick.

Quickly I finished the dish, pouring the hot tomato sauce over the vegetables on a platter, then grinding the nutritional yeast, sesame seeds, salt, and pepper in the blender to make Angela’s poor substitute for Parmesan cheese.

I shook that into a bowl, set it next to the dinner platter, put a serving spoon next to it all, and did a quick cleanup so I could get the hell out of there.