“But I’m cleaning up the kitchen. It would be a shame not to use it.”
Harvey’s expression is pained. “I’m sorry, Miss Whitehall, but Mr. Morelli is due back this evening and I’m worried he’ll think… well I don’t know what he’ll think. But I know he wouldn’t want you cooking for me.”
I remember the way Eli looked in the firelight, slowly rolling up his shirtsleeves. My pelvic muscles clench. If I belonged to Mr. Morelli, he probably wouldn’t want me cooking for another man. But I don’t. So why would it be a problem?
I smile at Harvey. “Mr. Morelli would love for me to cook for you. He told me to make myself useful.”
Harvey’s brow smooths. “Did he?”
Last night Eli told me to ‘be a good girl.’ Surely cooking and cleaning is being a good girl? I cross my fingers behind my back, just in case. “He did. And I can make enough food for everyone. You and Mr. Gretzky and Mr. Schnee and Dolmio and Sal…”
Harvey gives me a rueful smile. “It has been weeks since I’ve had a home-cooked meal…”
I try not to look too excited. “Wonderful. Could I maybe write you a list of ingredients?”
“Of course. What are you going to make?”
The food to cure all sadness. The one thing I feel like eating whenever I’m low. “An old family recipe.”
Harvey finds me a pen and paper and I note down everything I need. When he leaves, I mop the kitchen floors until they’re sparkling clean. As they dry, I move back into the dining room and stuff all the dirty containers and paper into trash bags. Everything that looks useful goes into a big box in the corner of the room. Once the junk is cleared, I polish the dining table and sideboards and push all the chairs back into place. The carpet is still dusty but everything else looks a hundred times better.
Feeling stupidly proud of myself, I go back into the kitchen and get an orange soda. I sit on the clean counter and drink it like I’m the queen of the world.
My whole life I’ve justbeen there, like a candy cane on a Christmas tree. Zia Teresa did my chores. My teachers and Bobby made excuses for my homework. I was good at singing and ballet, but I didn’t help anyone with it, just like I wouldn’t have helped anyone if I studied Fine Arts at Columbia. No one even needed me to marry Mr. Parker. Mom needed money and Mr. Parker needed a wife with an important last name, but no one needed January Whitehall.
Yet this kitchen used to be dirty and now it’s clean because of me. For the first time in my life, I’ve done something useful. Mom would be furious to see me acting like a servant but what’s so bad about cleaning? Everyone likes when things are clean. I look around at the sparkling surfaces. Maybe I could ask Eli if I could be his housemaid?
It sounds crazy, even in my own mind, but they definitely need somebody and I’d like being a housemaid a lot more than I’d like being shipped off to Italy. Plus, it might be safer if Eli and the others saw me as a servant. I don’t want to be their sugar babies or wives, their strippers or murder victims. I want to be too unimportant to proposition or kill. I want to melt into the walls of this beautiful house the way Zia Teresa did at my place. As a maid, I’d be nobody. And I could be happy being nobody.
“Afternoon!” Harvey bursts into the kitchen, arms laden with groceries. “Everything looks wonderful.”
“Thanks,” I say, sliding off the counter. “How did it go at the store?”
“It took a while, but I found it all.”
Harvey bought three times as many ingredients as I need. I decide to make everything at once, that way all the staff can eat and they can have leftovers. I’ve already found a big pot for the meat, so I set the chicken and beef to simmer in salted water as I carefully shred the skin off the carrot and potato.
I shouldn’t know how to cook. Mom didn’t like my interest in food any more than she liked me singing, but whenever she was gone, I hung around Zia Teresa in the kitchen. Zia could make any cuisine under the sun, but when it was just the two of us, we only cooked Italian. The meals she grew up with and loved. Zia showed me how to cut spaghetti and fettuccini, to roll gnocchi, to fold ravioli parcels full of parsley and fresh ricotta. We made alfredo and carbonara and cannelloni though most of the dishes didn’t have real names.
“What do you call this?” I would ask of a thick soup of spinach and rice.
“It’s spinach and rice,” Zia would say.
“But what is it in Italian?”
She would roll her eyes. “Spinaci e riso.”
While mom was away getting her eyelids done, Zia Teresa focused my studies on desserts, tiramisu and profiteroles and continental cake. When mom returned and I was back on a diet of kale and grilled chicken, I dreamed about mascarpone cream.
In the eighth grade I wanted to run away and become a chef. As I got older, I imagined cooking for Mr. Parker, making him so happy with my food he would let Zia Teresa move in with us. Then she and I could hang out in my kitchen and we could talk and make trays of lasagne and sugar-dusted biscotti. As I skim the fat from the surface of my broth, I hope with all my heart Zia Teresa knows I’m alive and well and making brodo.
“Hey, Tits.”
I jolt, my spatula flying out of my hand. Doc leans against the clean counter, smirking at me.
“Doc! You scared me.”
“Sorry,” he says, looking around the spotless kitchen. “What’s with the cleaning? Are you broken?”
