SIX
KITTEN
Things were really lookingup for Team Asshole.
We helped my brother and his friends get set up in the house next door to ours. Mr. Davies had lived there previously and passed away from natural causes, a heart attack while gardening, or so everyone had assumed. My dad and a few other men had buried him in his backyard, and we’d held a small neighborhood service as well. That was the first funeral I’d ever attended. The first of many.
Cipher acted as foreman to our crew of workers, and we made repairs to the roof and mended the broken windows, traded out some of the broken furniture and old beds for slightly less used ones. We cleaned the inside top to bottom. And while Cipher supervised our crew, I supervised him.
“Babe, it’s fine,” Cipher grumbled one afternoon when I’d caught him trying to hammer a board onto the window frame. I’d promptly snatched it from him.
“No, it’s not fine. Your arm is still healing,” I reminded him for the hundredth time.
“All right, here, take it.” He handed over the nail, and I finished the job, but I had to get on him again later that daywhen I caught him hauling away trash with a wheelbarrow. Still, having a project improved his mood, and it gave us all the chance to bond.
The B-holes, as we’d begun calling them, were proving themselves capable as well. My brother signed onto security shifts right away, allowing Cipher some much-needed time off from duty. Ansel had been accompanying Artemis and Macon on hunting trips. Rafi and Selena were sticking close to the compound but helping out with chores nonetheless. Despite the language barrier, Selena and Teresa were becoming fast friends. I was teaching her and Rafi English, similar to how I’d taught Teresa how to read, while they helped me learn Spanish. In the afternoons when we had down time, we’d read children’s books together and Teresa and I helped correct their pronunciation.
I learned too that Rafi and Selena were cousins who had come to Atlanta from Miami. They’d immigrated to Miami from Venezuela right before Rabbit Fever broke out.
“Gangs,” Selena told us when we’d asked her why they left South Florida. “Death, murder, very bad there.”
My brother told me that he’d met Rafi in the trials and had used our mother tongue, Portuguese, to communicate with him. They were isolated from one another, but allowed to chat via telephone, similar to how we’d visited Santiago in Atlanta. Selena visited Rafi every week and worked in the laundry room of a government high-rise while waiting for him to be released. The other member of their party, Dimitri, had been Selena’s boyfriend. We all knew what had happened to him. Selena spoke of Dimitri often, though my brother never said anything to me about it.
There were a lot of things my brother and I didn’t talk about.
Teresa and I decided it might be a nice gesture to our new arrivals if we made something sweet as a housewarming present, so I found one of my mother’s old recipe books and looked uphow to make sugar cookies, an old favorite. We had to substitute a lot of the ingredients–butter, flour, sugar–and the clay stove outside wasn’t quite as consistent as the indoor oven. The cookies came out with burnt edges, but otherwise they looked okay.
“Who should we get to try them?” I asked Teresa, and it just so happened that Cipher was walking by, so I called him over and handed him a cookie.
“What’s this?” he asked, looking suspicious.
“Try it and tell me what you think it is.”
Still eyeing me closely, he bit off a chunk of the cookie–it took some effort–and screwed up his face. “Hardtack?” he asked
Teresa and I exchanged a look. “What’s that?” she asked.
“What soldiers eat when their rations run out.”
“Is it sweet?” I asked.
“Not very,” Cipher said, so I grabbed up another cookie and took a bite. Not as sweet as I’d expected and the consistency was a bit gritty too.
“What’d you use for flour?” Cipher asked.
“Dried chickpeas,” I said.
Macon came up then–he’d been waiting for the cookies to cool–and asked to try one. I handed one over and waited to see if his report was any better.
“Never tasted anything quite like it. You did say sugar cookies, didn’t you?”
“Yes?”
“What’d you use for the sugar?” he asked.
“Corn syrup.”
“Was it expired?”
