Eggplant parmesan was a risky choice in many families, but Kyle’s risks seemed to pay off these days, so he decided to go out on a limb and make it for dinner. He’d managed to get Caroline to eat it once before, when they had still been in Seattle, but she’d decided in the last week or so that she didn’t like tomatoes, so he wasn’t confident it would fly this time. And he’d seen the way his dad had glared at the eggplant while putting away the groceries Kyle had brought home. His dad had grumbled about aliens and seed pods.
Still, Kyle needed his dad on board if he was going to get Caroline to eat tonight. The last thing he needed was a Fenton-wide battle of wills. He was playing both ends against the middle. If he’d stacked the deck by adding extra cheese, no one had to know.
While his cheesy creation baked, he worked on his presentation for the downtown business association. Rebecca had set up a meeting with them, and Kyle was excited to show them what he could do. He’d pulled some images of the historic downtown, picturing businesses that were still standing, and new photos with happy families on the main street. Rebecca wanted a tagline about shopping at home to attract people away from the internet mega-sites and the chains. Kyle hadn’t quite worked out what would flow best, but he liked the idea.
The scent of tomato and garlic wafted through the kitchen. He’d made a lot, more than the three of them could reasonably be expected to eat in one sitting.
Adding an extra body around the table might solve that problem.
He picked up his phone and fired a text to Adam.
what are your feelings with regards to eggplant?
Maybe he’d find a new ally. Someone to stand with him when Caroline started to fuss and his dad sighed.
They’re sorta slimy. Why?
Maybe not.
you’re lucky you’ve got your looks mr. Hathaway
“Daddy, I’m hungry!” Caroline called from the next room.
“Dinner’s almost ready!” Kyle saved the presentation on his laptop.
“What’s for dinner?”
“It’s going to be delicious!”
“But what are you making?”
“Alien seed pods!”
There was a giggle. “Daddy!”
“Don’t yell, Jelly Bean. If you want to talk to me, come into the kitchen.” Kyle sighed. That was such a parent thing to say. How was he that person?
“But I’m hungry!” Her voice wasn’t coming from anywhere closer. Kyle sighed and went to the living room. Caroline was sitting on the floor by the coffee table, a piece of pink construction paper in front of her, and crayons scattered around her.
“Bean, we don’t yell in the house,” he said.
“But I’m hungry.” Caroline didn’t take her attention away from her drawing.
“I know. Grandpa will be home from work any minute now, and then we can eat.” He sat down on the couch behind her. The braid he’d put her hair in that morning had come loose. He pulled the elastic free, undid it, and started weaving it back together.
“What’s for dinner?” she asked.
“Eggplant Parmigiano!” He said it in his best Italian chef voice, stringing the second word out into about seven syllables.
“Does it have tomatoes?” Caroline wrinkled her nose.
Kyle caught the sigh in his chest before it had a chance to escape and tip her off. “It’s one of Grandpa’s favorites.” Lying to his kid was wrong, but someday she’d thank him when she was a grown-up with a fully developed appreciation for weird food.
Caroline twisted to look up at him, making him let go of her hair. Her eyes narrowed. There was a fight coming, one Kyle was going to lose, because he was on rocky footing with the eggplant to begin with. If his dad came home tired from work, and Caroline pitched a fit about dinner, Kyle would wind up serving peanut butter instead, and then he would be eating eggplant leftovers by himself for a week.
“What are you drawing?” He peeked over her shoulder at the construction paper. She’d drawn three people, wobbly stick figures in boxy clothes, all with matching brown hair and bright red smiles. They stood on a green line that Kyle knew from previous versions of this picture was grass. The figure in the middle was smaller than the other two. At the top of the page, in the sky there were blue clouds, and what was probably supposed to be a sun, but it might have been a dog— A big yellow smiling face with long floppy ears hanging from either side of its head. Caroline had inherited his woefully underdeveloped artistic gene.
“That’s me.” Caroline pointed to the shortest person on the ground. Crayon Caroline wore a flouncy purple princess dress that, if Kyle understood correctly, only had one sleeve. He ignored the twinge of guilt as he examined her more closely. Where one arm was colored in thick dark purple, the other was only a thin black line. “And that’s you.” She pointed at the stick figure man on the left, with spiky brown hair and a red shirt. “And that’s Grandpa.” That was a nearly identical man wearing a blue shirt. “And that’s Mommy.”
It took Kyle a second to catch up with that last part. He dragged his gaze from stick-man Grandpa up to the top right corner where Caroline was pointing. The sun-dog smiled back at him, except now Kyle could see it was neither a sun nor a dog. The yellow ellipses hanging from the side of the face weren’t floppy doggy ears. They were Olivia’s hair. He could see the waves where Caroline had tried to show the way it had curled to Olivia’s shoulders. His throat tightened, and there was nothing he could do to stop the tears that caught him by surprise and spilled out over his eyelashes and onto his cheeks. He wiped them away before Caroline could turn and see them.
“Oh really?” His chin quivered, and he clenched his teeth.
“Yup,” Caroline picked up the yellow crayon and drew a squiggly crown above crayon Caroline’s head, like this conversation was normal. Kyle let out a slow breath, and then took one back in, waiting to see if he was going to be able to hold this together.
He looked at the drawing again, at their little stick-people family, and at Olivia’s smiling yellow face in the sky. His knee began to jiggle, bouncing up and down in a nervous tic. He picked up Caroline’s hair, undid the half-finished braid, and started over again, ignoring his shaking hands.
When the police had come to his apartment in Seattle, it had been after midnight. Caroline had been long asleep, and Kyle had been up late working on a project for Shannon. When he’d opened the apartment door to find two uniformed officers with serious faces, it was like the beginning of an out-of-body experience. They’d spoken. Kyle had spoken. They’d said things like hit and run and two eye witnesses. They’d driven him to the hospital where Olivia’s body had been stretched out on a gurney under a green sheet. They’d asked him questions, given him details he wouldn’t remember in the morning, then driven him back home.
He and Caroline had been to a grief counselor a few times, after. The counselor had been a kind woman in a brightly colored office who’d asked Caroline questions about Kyle and Olivia, and had encouraged her to draw pictures of her family. Caroline had drawn them like she always had at home, with her in the middle, Kyle on the left, Olivia on the right. A smiling row of stick figures on a single line of green grass.
The counselor had asked if Caroline understood that death meant her mother wouldn’t be coming back. Caroline had said that she did, and had kept on drawing them in a row of three. The counselor said things to Kyle about kids managing grief in their own time. She’d given him strategies for answering Caroline’s questions and what to do if she acted out in ways she normally didn’t.
“Open-ended questions are best,” the counselor had said. “Let your daughter talk about what’s in her head.”
“What made you draw Mommy in the sky?” he asked in his dad’s living room as his fingers worked through the last strands of the braid. Below him, Caroline shrugged.
“Because that’s where she is,” she said, like it was the simplest truth. Kyle wanted to ask so many questions. Yes but why are you drawing her like that now? You know that’s not true, right? Mommy’s not really in the sky? That’s what people say to make themselves feel less alone?
“I’m home!” His dad called from the hall.
“Grandpa!” Caroline leapt to her feet. The curly silk of her hair slid out of Kyle’s fingers, leaving him alone on the couch to stare at the stick figure drawing and Olivia’s glowing sun face. He heard his dad tell Caroline to go wash her hands before supper. Kyle took one last look at the drawing and stood, going to meet his dad in the hall.
“What’s for dinner?” his dad asked. “It smells great.”
Kyle wrapped his arms around his dad, and after a second he hugged Kyle back.
“We’re having peanut butter sandwiches.”
The next morning, the van wouldn’t start. Again. It sat, mocking Kyle as he uselessly turned the key in the ignition. He took Caroline to school in a cab, then shelled out the cash to have the cab drive him downtown, so he could work in Rebecca’s café. There was a small list of things to do. Shannon’s revised Maine trip was coming together; it turned out that local seafood was a popular choice among the gluten-free hundred-mile set. And he’d found a bed-and-breakfast that used their own homemade cleaning products. He’d reported all of that back to Shannon the week before and had only received a short Thanks as a reply.
As he sorted through emails, the chair opposite him was scraped away from the table, and Rebecca sat down. She passed him a fresh cup of coffee.
“On the house,” she said, smiling. It struck Kyle how much she resembled her brother—same dark hair, pale skin, and blue eyes that made him squirm when they were focused on him, although for different reasons with Rebecca.
“Thanks.” He took a sip. He hadn’t talked to Adam in a few days. There’d been a couple of text messages—Kyle had managed to get his dad to agree to babysit for a few hours on Saturday while they went hiking—but no conversation. He hadn’t talked to Rebecca since . . . well . . . since they’d spoken briefly on the phone in Adam’s apartment.
“I have a job for you,” she said.
Kyle frowned. “I’m having the weirdest sense of déjà vu.”
“Another job.”
“But I haven’t pitched for this job yet.” Rebecca’s project had been next on his list. There was a town council meeting at the end of the month where the business owners hoped to get some funding to support the initiative.
Rebecca waved her hand like she was batting away a fly. “Another job. A better job. A paying job.”
Kyle leaned forward. While the downtown business promotion event was keeping him interested, it wasn’t a paying job, at least not yet, not until they confirmed the town funding. A paying job would be good. He was staying afloat in Red Creek, living rent free with his dad, but there were expenses. Swimming lessons, for example. The going rate for swimming lessons at the community center had been enough to make him hesitate before handing over his credit card.
“But if you’re not interested . . .” Rebecca said.
“Tell me.”
Rebecca smiled a toothy smile. “I have a friend, we’ve known each other for a while, and her husband is the venue manager at the new conference center they’re building out on the highway.”
“Where the old trailer park used to be?” Kyle was aware of the development, another sign of Red Creek’s expansion while he’d been away. The center was scheduled to open later in the year.
“They’re having a job fair next month, hiring everyone from cleaning staff to office support.”
Kyle was aware of the job fair too. He was pretty sure he’d seen it in the local paper, circled in red pen, on his father’s kitchen table.
The idea of a job fair made Kyle’s stomach knot. He’d done those, a few times, after college. It had been him in a suit with a folder full of resumes, milling about with hundreds of people dressed the same way with the same folders in their hands and the same nervous expressions on their faces.
“Oh yeah?” He tried to sound engaged, though he already knew he wouldn’t put himself through that again.
“Yeah!” Rebecca said. “But Natalie, my friend, said she could pass your resume on to her husband before the fair, and that he’d be interested in interviewing you, given your experience in Seattle.”
“My experience?” Kyle couldn’t imagine how that would fit if they were trying to hire facility staff or office workers.
“He needs a sales team! Event coordinators? I thought you’d be great at it. You can tell him all about the work you’re doing with me too!”
Kyle tried not to make a face. All he’d done with Rebecca so far was schmooze a few other business owners and spitball a couple of concepts that nobody had signed off on yet. Rebecca appeared both pleased and excited though, and he didn’t want to burst that bubble for her.
“Yeah. Okay,” he said. “I’ll think about it. I appreciate the help.”
“I’ll get his contact information for you.” She scraped her chair back. “That would be better, wouldn’t it? You can connect with him directly, make a great first impression! Kyle Fenton, Star Candidate. That would be better than being introduced as his wife’s friend’s brother’s boyfriend, right?”
Kyle’s face warmed at that. Boyfriend. What a weird word.
“Right.” He ducked his head, but she must have seen him blush anyway.
“I don’t have to give you the speech about what will happen if you break my baby brother’s heart, do I?”
“What?” Kyle’s ears burned so much he thought they might melt. “What? No! I . . . We, I mean . . . it’s . . . I hadn’t . . .” He continued to garble out random syllables. Rebecca smiled again.
“You two idiots deserve each other,” she said.