Read Online The Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry - Free Book Online Page A

Left and right. Left and right. As close as you can.
    I inhale and exhale. Lift my head from the comfort of the cold stone. Look up.
    His skin is the color most people would call olive. But olives come in many colors, black and purple and sour green. Kalamata. Gaeta. Castelvetrano. If it had to be an olive his skin would be a cured Arbequina. I don’t know how old he is. Older than me, not as old as my parents. His hair sticks up all over but still looks soft.
    “You okay?” he asks, in a low voice with a quality I can’t quite place.
    “Yes,” I say, because it’s easiest. “I don’t know you.”
    “I’m David,” he says, and reaches out a hand.
    “Don’t touch me.”
    “Okay.”
    I cradle my injured hand in my uninjured one. “Just don’t, don’t even come close.”
    “Okay,” he says. “I’m really sorry. Give me a sec, I mean, I’ll give you a sec. Gotta see what’s not in pieces.”
    That voice, it’s odd, I can’t figure out what it reminds me of. He hops down the stairs and I see the paper grocery bags now, their contents spilling out and strewn on the sidewalk. The oatmeal, the butter, the oranges. I watch a runaway apple roll across the uneven street and come to its final rest in a storm drain. He gathers everything else up quickly and brings the bags back up the stairs.
    “Everything but the eggs looks okay,” he says. “Those are a total loss. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
    His voice is muddy, that’s what it is. Dark and brown and muddy. A note to it like coffee left too long on the burner. And unsweetened, bitter chocolate. But there’s dirt in it too, deep, dark dirt, like the garden in October.
    “Okay, thanks, I’m going to go inside now,” I say.
    “Are you sure you’re okay? You don’t need to go to the hospital or anything?”
    “If I did I could just walk there,” I say, pointing. From here we can both see the PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL sign, blue and white, EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT specified in bright white lettering on cherry red underneath.
    “Okay. I understand. I’ll just set these up on the porch?”
    I stand up and step back toward the door as he approaches, and as I open it to go inside, the lingering brownie smell hits me and I remember why I was standing out here in the cold instead of going in in the first place, and I let it fall shut again.
    I press my back against the solid, reassuring bulk of the door and say, “I’m just going to stay out here a minute.” His feet are on the porch part of the stairs, the wide, flat part, with mine. If he doesn’t come any closer, I’ll be all right.
    “Are you crazy? It’s freezing!”
    “I’m not crazy,” I say. I watch his feet.
    “Well, you need to wash your hand out,” he says. “There’s rust in there.”
    His hand on my hand is a maddening feathery irritation and I jerk it back.
    “No!”
    “Okay.”
    He walks down the stairs and stops at a bike that’s chained to the No Parking sign. There’s a basket across the back so he must have used it to bring the groceries. He reaches into the basket and pulls out a bottle of water. To my surprise, he comes back up the stairs with it.
    “Hold your hand out,” he says. I don’t move.
    He says, “Rust. You don’t want it infected.”
    My father’s daughter, I know he’s right. So I force myself to stay still, and open my palm. He pours water across it and it spills over the side of my hand and runs out between my fingers and spatters on the porch. I watch the spattering drops hit David’s shoes sincethat’s easier than looking at the raw scrape across my hand, which is beginning to ache.
    “Well, it’s not bleeding a lot, but it looks pretty bad.”
    “That’s mostly scar,” I say. “This whole part here? That’s from years ago.”
    “But didn’t your dad fix things like that? For a living?”
    “Yeah! He was incredible.” I know this story, I tell this story. “People got in accidents, lost one finger, two, three, my dad could sew them