I knew exactly what I wanted from the grocery store. My grandma’s dumplings were the ultimate comfort food, cheap and easy, requiring few ingredients. Carl pushed the cart and helped me find what I needed. He greeted everyone he saw with a friendly hello, not bothered by the fact that most of them openly stared at us. As we neared the cash register, an Amazonian blonde grabbed his wrist and screeched like an annoying bird. They started talking, and she ignored me completely after an initial dark glare in my direction. I drifted toward the magazine rack and caught sight of a man in an apron shaking a little boy by the collar. I moved closer and saw that the man was holding a candy bar. The boy looked up, terrified, and I smiled at him. I’d been caught stealing candy years before at a Kmart in Cedar Falls, but the manager had mercy and let me go.
“Please,” I said, stepping forward and digging in my pocket. “I’ll pay for it.” I offered a handful of change, and the grocer stared up at me, slack-jawed, slowly rising to full height. “Here,” I said, smiling to encourage him. He glanced down at my palm long enough to pluck the proper coins. He loosened his grip on the boy, who snatched the candy bar and ran.
“How’s it going, Junior?” Carl asked, coming up beside me with the cart. “Looks like you just met Lila. She’s new in town.”
“So I see.” Junior snapped out of his trance and squeezed behind the register to ring me up.
“Sorry about that woman back there,” Carl said to me. “She’s an old friend from school, and she has a way of cornering you.”
“It’s okay,” I said. Had he thought I’d be jealous? Was I jealous? Junior bagged up my groceries and took my money. I didn’t have much left over.
“Do you have any pans I could borrow?” I asked Carl on the way back to the truck. He’d insisted on carrying my two small bags.
“Sure I do,” he said. “You can come on over and use whatever you need.”
“I don’t want to intrude,” I said. “There’s a stove burner at my place, I just need something to cook in.”
“Come on. It’d be a favor to me,” he said. “I’d love to taste whatever it is you’re making. I haven’t had home cooking in a good long while.”
It didn’t take much for him to convince me. I was in no hurry to get back to the garage, and I wanted to see where he lived. I noted the decline of roads as civilization receded behind us. The two-lane highway out of town had been cut through stone, cliffs rising on either side as we passed through naked layers of earth. Once we hit blacktop, the road—or its makers—had been humbled. Instead of blasting through the landscape to make its own way, it followed the rolling ridge, traveling along its spine, the world falling away from its flanks. Then we turned onto dirt and drove and drove through woods edged with barbed wire. The trees gave way to pasture on the left, and we passed a small frame house with a close-cropped yard and irises blooming beside the steps. A tiny old lady in overalls stood out front with a watering can, watching us pass. Her dog barked but didn’t move from her side. Carl waved, and the woman nodded. “That’s Birdie,” he said. “The midwife.”
A few minutes later, we pulled up to his house, plain except for the decorative trim along the porch. A forgotten garden filled the side yard, a few random blooms showing through the weeds. “This is it,” he said, grabbing the grocery bags. “Come on in.”
I’d expected a spare bachelor’s kitchen but instead found it well stocked, the pots and pans and utensils worn to a dark patina. When Carl excused himself to tidy up the other rooms—he hadn’t been expecting company, he said—I sneaked glances at the framed cross-stitch sampler on the wall, the patterned dishes in the china cabinet. An unmistakable photo of Carl and Crete as boys, the older boy’s arm locked protectively around his much smaller brother’s shoulder. Beside the kitchen door, pen marks broke their height into increments, the highest one well above my head. They had grown up here.
“What can I help you with?” Carl asked when he returned.
I didn’t want any help. Dumplings were the one thing I remembered how to make from Grandma’s recipes, and I’d made them in every foster home that had allowed me to cook. I wanted to mix and measure and sink my hands into the dough and let the ritual kneading and shaping return me to my mom’s kitchen. “You can keep me company,” I said, “as long as you don’t get in the way.”
He leaned against the counter and chatted while I worked. When the dumplings were ready, we ate them at the dining room table, Carl complimenting my cooking repeatedly and finishing off the portion I’d planned to save for lunch the next day. After dinner, we moved to the porch swing with sweating glasses of iced tea.
“I’ve been meaning to ask, how’d it go with Ray?” Carl asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“I don’t want to pry,” he said. “I know whatever happened with your family must be painful. I can see it on your face when I bring it up. So I’ll try my best not to.”
I looked around the peaceful yard and out to the hills. There was no indication in the unbroken expanse of green that other people existed. A pair of birds cried in the trees, and it sounded like they were arguing. “We lived on a farm,” I said finally. “Me, my mom and stepdad, and my grandma. My stepdad was great, always treated me like his own kid. I never met my real dad, and my mom didn’t talk about him. My grandma told me once that he was a visiting professor from some other country—she wasn’t sure which one. My mom met him in grad school at the University of Northern Iowa, and they split up before I was born. My mom taught English at the high school in Waverly, and my stepdad ran the farm. They were driving into town to get a carryout pizza for dinner—we did that on the weekends sometimes. There was a combine in the road, and they didn’t see it in time. They smashed into it and flipped over. Not too long after that, my grandma passed away, and I got stuck in foster care. I was twelve.”
I’d told the condensed version of my life story so many times over the years that I could recite it without emotion. When I said the words out loud, they felt like they belonged to someone else. Thank God you weren’t with them, the neighbors had said. You’re so lucky nothing happened to you. As if I could go on like before.
“I’m so sorry,” Carl said. He took my hand and I let him. I sipped the tea he’d made. It didn’t compare to Ransome’s.
“What about your family?” I asked. “Is there anyone besides your brother?”
“I’ve got cousins all over the county,” he said. “My dad was quite a bit older than my mother, and he passed on. My mom’s still living, but we had to put her in a home.”
“What kind of home?” I asked, sliding my hand out of his.
Carl looked uncomfortable. “Well, she … she gets confused. She jumped out of the upstairs window once, broke her leg. At the time my dad told me she fell. He planted those bushes all around the house in case she tried again. She’d get real depressed, lay in bed, wouldn’t talk to anyone but Dad. She wasn’t doing good without him here keeping an eye on her.”
“So you sent her away?”
“If there’d been any other way, I’d have kept her here with me. But I’m just not home enough to take care of her.”
We rocked in the swing, the porch floor warm under my bare feet.
“Your brother,” I said. “You guys are pretty close?”
“Yeah,” Carl said. “Always have been, ever since we were kids. He was ten when I was born, and he sort of took care of me. I really look up to him, you know? The way he runs the business and all that. I mean, we’ve fought here and there, had our differences, but you could hardly ask for a better brother.”
“Would you mind not telling him about the lawyer?” I asked. “I just … Like you said, my parents … I don’t like to talk about it. It’s better not to bring it up.”
There was more to the story, things I didn’t want to tell Carl. When my parents died, I’d expected to stay in Waverly with my stepdad’s extended family, but one by one they’d bowed out: not enough room, not enough money, not willing to take responsibility for a soon-to-be teenager. I’d grown up around these people, eaten Sunday dinners with them. They looked genuinely sorry when they turned me away, but I could also sense their relief, because I had never been blood to them. As much as my stepdad made me feel like I belonged, his family thought of me as my mother’s child, not one of their own, and it was a hurtful thing to realize.
Finally, a second or third cousin of my mother’s, a guy I barely knew, was tracked down in Decorah and pressured into taking me. He sat me down at his tiny kitchen table and explained the burden I’d put on him. My parents’ farm would be sold to pay debts, and when everything was sorted out, there would be very little left to take care of me. I would need to earn my keep. That first night as I slept on the foldout couch, he slid his hand under the blanket and over the planes of my body. The second night he peeled back the bedding, and I slashed him with a kitchen knife. Part of me was terrified by what I’d done—his high-pitched scream, the blood soaking through my nightgown, the increasingly dark detours my life was taking. Another part of me couldn’t help thinking that the scar would be impressive. I never got a chance to see it. The third night I slept in a temporary shelter in the care of family services.