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After-School Special

Jake

“Are you kidnapping me? You can tell me the truth,” Cat says, blowing her hair out of her face and righting herself in her seat as I peel out of the loading zone.

“I’m not kidnapping you.”

“Oh.” She sounds disappointed, but she rallies bravely. She punches buttons at random on the dash and console. Classical music whines from the car speakers, and my seat starts to massage my lower back.

There’s an unsettling fearlessness here that needs to be addressed. “You shouldn’t be getting in a car with someone if you think they’re kidnapping you.” I slap at the illuminated buttons until my seat settles on the more manageable vibrate setting. “You shouldn’t be going off with strangers.”

She looks at me.

“I’m not a stranger,” I say quickly.

A curt know-it-all nod. “You’re my stepdad.” My stomach whomps again at that word. She clicks another button, but unfortunately it’s not the James Bond emergency ejection button. Her window glides up.

I’m ready for a subject change. “Who was that kid who meowed at you?”

“That was Charlotte. She has a mom and a dad and a sister and a baby brother and a big house and a pet bunny.” I can tell from her tone these facts make Charlotte vile. “I hate her. I hate her so much.”

She has a funny, husky little voice. A frog voice. It suits her. It’s weird, and not what you expect when you look at her. She snoops in the glove compartment and finds a pair of sunglasses. She puts them on.

“Do you hate anyone?”

I think of Andrew. “Yes.”

She sighs happily and leans back in her seat next to me. She’s absurdly small. Her little legs stick out straight in front of her. It occurs to me that she should be in some sort of restraint system, in the back seat.

“A booster?” she says when I try to verbalize this. “I don’t use a booster anymore,” she lies smoothly. “Where are we going?”

“Home?”

“I’m hungry.”

I remember the depleted fridge and the empty milk carton, and when I spot a grocery store, I swerve into the parking lot. Another car blares its horn at us.

Inside, Cat hops on the end of my grocery cart and hitches a ride like this is routine.

“Mom lets me have chocolate milk,” she says when I pick up a carton of two percent.

I ignore her.

“Mom gets the chocolate ones,” she says when I grab the exact same box of oat granola bars off the shelf that Dodi had on her counter.

I ignore her.

“I don’t like you,” she says.

I ignore her.

An elderly shopper dodges to one side to let us pass and smiles—a full-on, eye-crinkling smile. I glance behind me, but no one’s there. This is alarming. No one ever smiles at me like this. “Such a good dad,” she coos. “Giving Mom a break?”

Cat shoots her a disgusted look and I hang a sharp right into the deserted bulk section. When we emerge into the meat section, the sight of disarticulated cow and pig and chicken made tidy and presentable in plastic packaging prompts a question.

“What’s your mom cooking for dinner?”

Nose in the air, eyes on the far distance, Cat ignores me from her perch at the end of the cart. She’s learned from the best.

I pick up a family pack of chicken breasts—I don’t think I’ve ever bought the family pack of anything before—and place it in the cart.

“I hate chicken. I hate it so much.”

I ignore her.

But then Cat’s attention is snagged. “What’s wrong with that chicken?”

She’s wrinkling her nose at a packaged critter farther down. It’s skinny, and instead of wings, it has front legs.

“That’s rabbit.”

As soon as I say it, I regret it. Little kids don’t like learning that people eat bunnies. Cat’s about to have her loss of innocence right here under my watch in the meat department and—

“I want to eat it.”

Of course she fucking does.

“Why?”

“It looks delicious.”

Raw meat does not look delicious. “Does this have anything to do with Charlotte having a pet rabbit?”

“No,” she lies.

“Are you going to go to school tomorrow and tell Charlotte you ate rabbit for dinner?”

“No,” she lies.

Grant liked rabbit. I know several rabbit recipes. I could do lapin à l’istrettu , or lapin à la moutarde . Or even just a nice, basic rabbit stew.

“You promise you’ll eat it?”

“Yes.” She seems to be telling the truth this time. I don’t give a rat’s ass about Charlotte. I do care about some little twerp turning her nose up at my cooking.

I exchange the chicken for the rabbit, and in the produce section I get mushrooms, shallots, parsley, hearty winter vegetables…

“I hate white carrots,” Cat says.

“They’re parsnips.”

“I hate them.”

“That’s irrelevant.”

“ You’re an elephant,” she says mutinously. She narrows her eyes at me and slits my throat with a scowl.

At the checkout I throw a chocolate bar on the conveyor belt, and Cat eyes it sidelong. “That’s for me getting in the car, isn’t it?” she says.

“It’s for you getting in the car and doing whatever else I tell you, until your mom gets home.” I hold the chocolate bar high over her head. “Do we have a deal?”

Her nostrils flare, but she practically skips back to the car. Inside the car, she scarfs two and a half granola bars, then steps on the remaining half by accident, grinding it into the car’s carpet. It’s the least of my problems.

“There’s rabbit juice,” she says when we pull up to the apartment building, pointing at the back seat where the bags of groceries sit. There is, leaking from the meat packaging and pooling on the leather seat.

She leads the way up the stairs, strumming her fingers on the balusters and humming mournfully to herself in a minor key. We drip a trail of rabbit juice right up to Dodi’s front door. I let us in and sling the grocery bag into the sink.

“Gross,” Cat says, smearing a droplet of blood across the tiles with the toe of her boot.

“Get out of here. Go poke safety pins in your Barbies’ eyes or something.”

She looks delighted at this suggestion and scampers off without saying another word. In the silent aftermath, it’s a minute before I realize my shoulders have been hovering under my ears since driving into the school pickup zone. My muscles relax slowly. I let out a breath and lean against the counter. This is Dodi’s evening, day after day. Relentless. I look at the clock. It’s not even four.

Plenty of time to cook a proper meal, at least. Dodi has a big Dutch oven, which I set on the stovetop. Her chef’s knife is dull, so I sharpen it, and then all the others too, while I have the sharpener out. Everything in this apartment is completely dysfunctional.

I’m not a good enough cook to attempt something complex in a strange kitchen, so I keep it simple. I fry a few slices of thick-cut bacon while I slice the shallots with mechanical precision. When done with that, I fish out the bacon, and into the simmering grease go the shallots and the crushed garlic. When they have become translucent and the kitchen is fragrant, I add the rabbit pieces and sauté until golden. In go the porcini mushrooms and parsnips and carrots, a sprinkle of flour, and a little more browning, and then the broth and red wine. I pour and swirl, then add the sprig of thyme and fresh chopped parsley and bay leaves and, on impulse, a dusting of nutmeg…I bring it to a simmer, and on goes the lid, and then it’s time for the braised artichokes.

I trim and pare the hearts and stalks, and rub with lemon, and then the artichokes and carrots go into a pot just big enough for them, with the garlic. Rinse, pat dry, and then back in the pot with thyme and a single bay leaf. Wine, water, salt and pepper…

And then I rifle through the cabinets, panicked, as it occurs to me too late that someone as apparently undomestic as Dodi might not have baking essentials. I do find it, though: a single package of yeast on the verge of expiry. I mix the dough, knead it, let it rise, punch it down, divide, let it rise again on the pan, and then into the oven.

The hours go by, and then it’s just the mess to clean up. I swipe the vegetable trimmings into the compost, wipe down the counters, scour the cutting boards, and pluck the bloody meat packaging out of the sink where I left it. As I turn to place it in the trash, Cat materializes triumphantly brandishing an eyeless Barbie, and I trip over her. She shrieks indignantly, the packaging goes flying out of my hands, bunny juice splatters across the kitchen, and the front door bangs open all at once.

“What—?” Dodi shouts. She stomps into the kitchen, a big paper bag of groceries clutched to her chest, and stops in her tracks at the sight of us. Her hair stuck to her damp forehead, eyeliner wing on one side smudged, clothes rumpled, the bottom of the paper bag apparently giving out, her hand cupping a soup can as it tries to slip through a tear—this is Dodi at the end of a long day, home for the second shift, fighting for her life.

She pans slowly around the kitchen. She takes in Cat with her mutilated Barbie, the knives laid out in a row on the counter, the blood spattered across the cabinets, and me, wearing her absurd, flowery apron.

I’m so relieved to see her.