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“Don’t you have to boil the noodles first?” I ask as I lay the dry noodles, three across in the three casserole dishes that Mary has set out on the counter. She shakes her head, looking smug and mysterious. I am skeptical. I’ve watched Leslie McGill make her lasagna, and it was always a chore straightening the cooked noodles in the pan.
“Ancient family secret.” She smiles. “It will be fine; you’ll see.” She hands me an onion. “Go ahead and dice that.”
“Dice means . . .?”
She laughs, but not in an unkind way. She takes the knife from me and pops the onion onto the cutting board. “Take off the ends.” She does this and scoots the discards off the cutting board. She flops the onion onto a cut end and cuts it in half. She peels the outer skins off and turns the half lengthwise. “Now you’re just cutting squares. Dicing.” She makes short work of the first half of the onion and hands the knife back to me. I remove the skins and repeat her steps, pleased that my diced onions look every bit as good as hers. “No reason to cry,” she says, catching me wiping tears away, and I laugh with her. She hands me another onion, and I dice it as well.
“We’re going to cook that over medium heat, maybe medium low. We don’t want burned onion.” She crinkles her nose. I turn on the oven, and she hands me oil. I pour a small pool into the middle of the pan and swirl it around, as I’ve seen Leslie do, and I catch a nod out of the corner of my eye. Swirling oil in a pan—what a stupid thing to feel proud about, but I feel it all the same. I’ll take my moments of “right” where I can get them. I put the onions in and let them sizzle, stirring them. Two pounds of raw hamburger later and the kitchen is radiant with the savory scent. While that simmers and blends together, we put together the ricotta, mozzarella, parmesan, and six beaten eggs. It’s my project, but Mary is not far away.
Cooking is part of the rhythm of Life House. We all take our turn at everything. We clean the toilets on rotation; we mop and wax the halls on rotation. Today is my cooking night, and tomorrow is toilets. It’s all part of the life-skills program, and it is mandatory. If you don’t participate, you don’t stay. We are encouraged to have a job as well, and toward that end, I’ve applied to a couple of the jobs posted on the board in the common room. I haven’t heard from anyone yet, but I’m hopeful.
While the lasagna is in the oven, cooking and bubbling, letting the cheeses melt and mingle with the meat and onions, Mary and I are busy breaking apart heads of lettuce into three different bowls. “We break the lettuce because it is less traumatic.”
“We would hate for the lettuce to be traumatized,” I say, sarcasm dripping from my mouth. I immediately wish I had toned it down.
“By that I mean it won’t go brown as fast,” she says, not insulted, just explaining.
“Oh. That’s good to know. We never really did much salad eating at home.”
“Neither did we.” She smiles.
“How long you been here?” I ask. Her belly is wide and tight, like her baby is riding sideways across her hips. She is shaped like a very healthy pear.
“About three months. I came in at five months—twenty-five weeks—so just into my fifth month.” She laughs. “I’m due on Christmas Day.”
“Have you matched?” This is the lingo for finding an adoptive family.
“No. I’m keeping him. I’ll be moving over to Life Ways after he comes.” She explains that Life Ways is another house, where girls who opt to keep their babies go after the babies come until they can get on their feet and get stable. The house provides childcare so new moms can work and help with childcare classes. “How about you? What are your plans?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet.” What she said about Life Ways is ricocheting through my head, rebounding against the walls of my heart. I could keep her. I could keep her and raise her at Life Ways, with all this kind of support, with all these girls who know what it’s like to be alone in the world. Whoosh whoosh whoosh goes her tiny little heart, singing only to me.
***
After the dinner of garlic bread, lasagna, and salad, dishes are washed and put away, leftovers safe in the common rack of the fridge. I follow Mary to group. I like group; I like hearing the other girls talk about their lives, and I like feeling like I belong. I’m glad to be walking in with somebody. I was nervous the first couple of meetings, but Cici had explained that I don’t have to say anything if I don’t want to. “It’s like AA,” she had said. “You can just go and listen to everybody else if you want.”
“That was the best lasagna I think I ever had,” a girl says, walking past us at a full waddle and into the group room. I have seen her before but still haven’t really met everybody. I call out a thank you as pride billows inside of me. Leslie would be proud, too, and it hadn’t mattered at all the noodles weren’t boiled ahead of time. Instead, Mary taught me to add extra water to the sauce and to increase the oven time by fifteen minutes. The noodles had been perfect, and the cheese that had crusted in the corners of the pan . . . oh my God. It was so good. I’ll have to tell Leslie about the noodles the next time I see her, and I feel a strange jolt because I think I will someday, see her again, and that feels a little like having family.
Chairs are set in a lopsided circle, and they are already beginning to fill up. Cici is sitting with her chair spun around backwards so she can cross her arms over the back. I take a chair to her left, and she high-fives me as I sit down. “Good dinner,” she says, winking, because she knows how worried I was about cooking for everybody.
“It was all Mary,” I say, but Mary quickly denounces credit and takes a seat, looking overstuffed and uncomfortable. She folds her hands over the top of her belly, not needing the back of a chair.
I sit, feeling too short, with my feet only barely touching the floor, dangling and awkward. I’m not really short, well, not short like Janice, but I’m definitely petite, maybe on the short side of average. I wish I had a table to lean on, to hide behind. I’m thinking about turning my own chair around but don’t want to draw attention to myself. I try crossing one ankle over my knee, which is even more uncomfortable, so I drop my foot again, resting my heels on the crossbar, leaning slightly forward with my hands under my thighs. I let my hair fall forward, a shield.
“Good evening, ladies.” As usual, Janice’s voice resonates as she walks into the room, her heels click, click, clicking on the wooden floor. She takes a seat, hitching her own heels, spikes at least four inches high, on the crossbar of her chair. She’s maybe as tall as I am in my bare feet.
Her greeting is returned in a chorus of voices: “Good evening.”
“Shall we open our meeting with a prayer?”
Cici reaches out and takes my hand, and I see that all around the circle hands are being clasped, one to another. Heads bow, hair falls forward. Chairs creak under the burden.
Janice offers up a prayer. “Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for bringing these women to us, so that we may spread your word and show them the path you have designed for them. Let their hearts be healed from the wounds that have brought them here. Let the life they carry be blessed with health. Let each of these women come to you, and we pray that they find peace when they go back out into the world. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.”
The voices around the circle say, “Amen,” and I mouth the word, not quite yet comfortable enough to say it aloud. God has not been around much in my life, that I can see, and I’m not quite sure we are yet on speaking terms.