Read The Summer Kitchen for Free Online Page B

Laundry.”
    “Yuck. Starbucks is better.”
    “I know,” I agreed, and even as I said good-bye, I couldn’t put a finger on the reason I’d lied. Holly would have willingly dropped her plans and gone with me to help paint, or act as bodyguard and baby-sitter, but I wanted to spend a last day at Poppy’s house by myself. I wasn’t sure why.
    The question perplexed me as I cleaned the kitchen, then gathered some paintbrushes and a can of off-white semigloss left over from Chris’s one-act play project at school. Tucking them into the trunk like contraband, I checked for signs of life at Holly’s house before backing out and heading down the street.
    Guilt trailed me as I drove across town. If Holly found out where I was, she’d be hurt. She would think I was taking a step backward, doing what I’d done in the first few months after Jake left—sneaking off by myself so I could drive to the SMU campus and sit on the bench across from his fraternity house. Sometimes I’d stay there for hours watching the kids come and go, halfway believing that if I waited long enough, Jake would be one of them. He’d be back in premed, studying calculus or designing rockets in his head as he walked home from class. Watching all the other kids come and go, I’d be filled with the bitter heat of envy. Their parents could pick them up for lunch anytime they wanted.
    I hadn’t gone to the campus to sit for three months now. Not since Holly found out about it. Having to admit what I was doing made it seem pathological and pointless. The last thing Rob or Christopher or even Holly needed was to worry that I was going off the edge. I stopped driving to the campus and filled my time stuffing envelopes and answering phones for the organ donor network, checking in with the police, and finally taking care of cleaning out and selling Poppy’s house for Mother, who, thank God, remained entrenched in Seattle with Maryanne, where the two of them could share Valium and wine chasers while comparing symptoms of illnesses, real and imagined.
    If anyone found out I was painting the cabinets at Poppy’s house, that’s the excuse I’d give. I was just filling time so as to keep from ending up like Mother and Maryanne. Poppy’s house needed work, and who knew if the next residents would be able to afford renovations.
    Turning the corner onto Red Bird Lane, I noticed that Andrea had put up the real estate sign. It leaned to one side, Andrea’s name swinging forlornly off the bottom. The neighborhood was silent, the kids probably off to their last few days of school before summer break, the older residents locked in their homes behind burglar bars and dilapidated chain-link fences. I remembered when the neighborhood was filled with activity—children on bicycles, mothers pushing baby strollers to the little park across the creek from Poppy’s house, men mowing lawns, grandmothers and grandfathers sitting on porch rockers, waving as people drove by. Now the street was cloaked in stillness, the cracked sidewalks seamed with spires of grass, the windows opaque with cardboard and aluminum foil, porches only places to dump the rotting carcasses of old furniture.
    Painting the cabinets in Poppy’s house was probably pointless, truth be told. The people who moved in here most likely wouldn’t care.
    A lump rose in my throat, and I swallowed hard. Poppy loved this home, where he’d built a life with Aunt Ruth. He would have wanted it to go to a new owner looking as it had back when he and Aunt Ruth had the showplace of their little street.
    In all reality, I didn’t have anything better to do than paint cabinets today anyway.
    I took my supplies into the house, set them on the kitchen counter, and stood surveying the interior. The front parlor and the dining room lay soft and golden beyond the doors on either end of the kitchen, the wood floors warming in the languid morning light. The house looked larger with nothing in it, but even though the rooms