Read Online This Must Be the Place: A Novel by Kate Racculia - Free Book Online Page B

being dead.”
    Mona shrugged. “Being dead strikes me as enough of a problem, don’t you think?”
    Oneida had already peeled more than a dozen carrots and was slicing apples for cobbler. She stared down at the creamy white flesh fallingaway under every stroke of the knife. “He’s just so different from the other tenants. Seems kind of weird, is all.”
    Mona tapped her spoon on the edge of the pot, loosening blobs of squash. “Don’t worry, Jones. I can smell bullshit a mile away, and Arthur Rook was standing next to me.” Oneida looked up, stricken, and Mona smiled. “I know he’s hiding from something,” she continued. “Maybe his wife kicked him out. Maybe he lost everything in a bad stock trade. Maybe he’s having a psychotic break. A good landlord doesn’t care. He paid cash up front, he was polite, and, in case you didn’t notice, he’s cute as hell. Maybe he’ll liven things up around here.”
    Oneida’s cheeks and forehead burned. She hated it when her mother talked about men. It mortified her to think that her mother could be physically attracted to someone, would want to date him, kiss him, have sex with him. Sex as a general topic was embarrassing enough, but as it related to her mother? Insufferable. She tried not to think that she’d been infected with the Ruby Falls groupthink—this was the attitude that got her mother into trouble in the first place—but she couldn’t help it. Even worse was realizing she accepted herself as the Trouble Her Mother Got Into, that her existence had kept Desdemona Jones from going out into the world and having a bigger life. These spasms of baseless guilt overtook her more often as she grew older, as she understood her own mad desire to leave Ruby Falls far behind. She pushed it down into her stomach and swallowed.
    She tossed a hunk of apple into her mouth and watched her mother waltz around the kitchen. Mona Jones, cooking, reminded Oneida of a ballroom dancer: she made it look effortless and elegant, something she’d been born to do. Her piecrusts were flaky, buttery clouds of pastry; her homemade pastas were rich but magically weightless; her wedding cakes were elaborate pieces of sugar architecture built on carrot, cheese, lemon, and chocolate—delicate islands of edible ingenuity that had informed Oneida’s first daydreams of fairy-tale castles, imaginary lands, enchanted woods.
    Oneida knew her mother could have opened her own restaurant in New York City; she could have built an empire of books and cooking products, her signature on a line of stainless cookware, aprons, andhigh-heat spatulas. But Mona was living in obscurity in Ruby Falls, unappreciated, her marvels of gastronomy wasting away in the bellies of ex-hippies and lonely old ladies on Social Security who wanted nothing more exciting to eat than pot roast on Monday, chicken on Tuesday, spaghetti pie on Wednesday, meat loaf on Thursday. Wasting away in her own belly, Oneida thought, and touched her rumbling stomach.
    Mona spun between the table and the stove, checking the meat loaf, stirring the sautéing carrots, layering the cobbler in a single fluid motion, a few curls falling out of her ponytail and drifting through the air as she twirled. Mona had had her thirty-first birthday last spring, and she seemed young even to her daughter: she still wore ponytails, brightly colored T-shirts, jeans, flip-flops. Oneida could picture her walking through Ruby Falls High—which Mona said hadn’t changed a bit since she went there—holding a science textbook and humming some old grunge classic. She was pretty, fair and dark-haired, so she’d run with the popular kids—but she’d be nice to Oneida: smile at her in the hall, pass her the basketball in gym, commiserate about the cafeteria food as they stood in line together. All the normal teenage things that Oneida didn’t think she had the capacity to even understand, her mother would teach her to like. Mona would have been her friend, she