Kenia thanked Martha, a note of near apology in her voice, as she better understood Ms. Jolene’s own skepticism towards her app and her internship. Despite that, Martha stood in the doorway holding Mocha in her arms and waving goodbye with his paw.
Joel did not look up from the television as Kenia left. She was glad for it.
Kenia kicked started Kermit and rolled down the drive to the main road. She found a bend just a little ways down state road 521 that presented a good view of the valley below and ate her lunch of baby carrots, pretzel chips, and hummus while sitting on a warm rock and listening to the buzz of cicadas and the wind in the trees. Not a single car passed.
When she finished she pulled out her tablet. The next home was already close, really the next driveway—an unexpected surprise that it was so close. She revved Kermit’s engine, the barking exhaust disturbing the summer afternoon silence. She looked both ways for traffic that wasn’t there and shifted to first, riding just a few yards uphill until she saw a driveway marked with a mailbox with the name “Pennel” on the top, carved from a sanded wood block frame.
The driveway was an emerald tunnel broken occasionally by shafts of dappled sunlight. The house that came into view was a grand, rustic farmhouse, its façade was well cared for, the wood freshly painted in white, with blues on the friezes, gables, and shutters to accent. The shingles were in good repair, the air just above them shimmering with heat haze. The brick chimney and foundation were protected in a glossy shellac, and the front porch was free of the clutter she had noted on so many other galleries. Instead of the milk crates, car parts, and moldy furniture, a few straight-backed rocking chairs sat at attention, equidistant from one another while a porch swing rocked in the breeze.
It was a refreshing sight after so many decrepit homesteads, but as she rounded the driveway she was forced to reconsider. The front yard was chaos: three rusty car hulks rested on cinderblocks without wheels or windows. Weeds grew up through the frames where the engines should have been. Each was in a further state of disrepair than the last, the oldest easily dating back to the 1930s. Their guts and interiors were strewn over the ground in haphazard piles, the grass worn into dirt footpaths between them. A moldering mattress lay half folded, its rusted springs showing through its padding like bones through a rotting corpse. Clay jugs surrounded a moonshine still, its parts gleaming in the sunlight. Close by a string of smoke rose from a dying fire within an oil drum. The backseats from one of the cars sat in the shade of a crepe myrtle, and from the branches, forming a kind of backdrop behind the bench, hung a faded “Don’t Tread on Me” sign with a coiled snake and a Confederate flag.
Kenia removed her helmet and set it on the handlebars, Kermit’s engine still turning over. She was paralyzed by what she saw: disorder that was such a contrast to the well-loved house, a yard that was a parody of her most slanted stereotypes of the region. A figure rounded the corner of the house. It was a young boy in bare feet and overalls without an undershirt beneath. His head was covered in a wide-brimmed straw hat, his face streaked with dirt. In his mouth he chewed a corncob pipe, his lips set in a pensive frown. He was Huck Finn, from central casting, and was followed by a strawberry blond girl, a bit taller, her hair pulled into Pippi Longstocking pigtails, wearing an orange hunting vest over camouflaged fatigues, a rifle nearly as long as she was tall hanging on her shoulder. A third figure, this one a lanky young man in an oversized white robe, came last. In his hands he carried a loop of extension cord. The hood on his head had flaps on either side and rose up into a defiant point twelve inches above his head.
Kenia was not sure she could believe what she was seeing. All three young people stopped around the same time when they heard the idle of Kermit’s engine. The girl in between the two boys looked back and forth as if taking a reading of their own reactions. The boys remained frozen. The girl in pigtails looked back to Kenia, but Kenia had already shoved her helmet back down on her head. Kermit’s back wheel fired off a barrage of gravel as she spun the bike around and gunned the engine to take her back to the road, to sanity and safety, as quickly as possible.
That night Kenia did not dream as much as she remembered. She was only around nine or ten, creeping down the steps, she could see the blue numbers on the digital clock of the VHS recorder reading 3:47 a.m. It was a few days before Christmas. The tree with its boxes and presents was resplendent in its tinseled cheer, even if the lights were off for the night. It was Saturday. Kenia was usually awake early, before her siblings, and would come down to watch the earliest of the Saturday morning cartoons. But she knew from the dark of night outside—stars were still visible among the bare treetops—that cartoons were still far off. The television would only be playing infomercials and televangelists, both speaking out earnestly to their listeners while phone numbers scrolled across the screen.
Despite the hour, the light on the oven range was on. She crossed the living room to find her father’s shape filling up the overstuffed chair, which they had moved into the corner to make room for the tree. He was taking deep, even breaths as he slept, a Harvard Med School hoodie pulled over his scrubs. His hand held a half-tipped glass of milk, most of the contents having spilled, darkening his sweatshirt. He had fallen asleep before he had even taken a drink.
Kenia retrieved dishtowels from the kitchen and slipped the glass from his hands. Those hands. Two days before, a school bus carrying the girls and boys basketball teams from Eleanor Roosevelt High had lost control on a patch of ice and crossed the centerline into an oncoming dump truck.
Her father had been on call, his beeper summoning him from the kitchen table where he had been helping Chinemere with her calculus. He had not been home since, her mother providing them with updates as the most injured children were treated in the OR.
All the children had survived and her father, as chief surgeon, had played an integral role, pushing himself beyond his own physical limitations. Kenia considered those hands as she laid the dishtowels across the spilled milk. She was old enough to know that magic—probably—was not real, but to her, her father’s hands were just short of magical. After all, they could put broken people back together, a process that was miraculous to her and as beyond her comprehension as her sister’s calculus problems, which had more Greek letters in them than numbers, or the impossible birth of Jesus, who looked up at her from his nativity scene, this one made in Kenya out of banana leaves and yarn with black faces.
Her father did not stir. She carried the glass of the remaining milk to the kitchen, pulled up a chair, dumped it, and washed it in the sink before placing it in the dishrack to dry with a faint clink. Then she returned to the living room, considering the darkness outside before plugging in the lights of the tree. It didn’t actually warm the room, but it still felt like it to her. To that end, she pulled the throw blankets from the back of the couch where her mother had folded them—she could not help it, her obsessive need for order overriding her patience with her brood of children, who only folded them when asked. Kenia climbed onto the arm of the chair and pulled the blankets over her father and herself before falling back asleep.
She was not sure how long she had been lying in bed crying, but when Kenia came to herself, snapped back to the present day by her thoughts, she checked the time on her phone. A little before five in the morning. Her alarm would not go off for another hour and a half. It was Saturday again. She closed her eyes, but sleep was out of reach, her mind a nest of competing anxieties and imperatives. She finally settled on one.
Dad helped people who needed it.
She knew what she had to do.
It was close to eleven a.m. when Kenia rolled back up to Martha Andersen’s house. It looked the same as the day before; perhaps some of the fast food containers and pizza boxes had been dragged further away from the trashcan by raccoons or whatever vermin visited during the night. She pulled the grocery bags from the side saddles on Kermit, her footsteps heavy with the weight of her purchases. Her backpack was also full to bursting.
Martha opened the door, surprised. “Ms. Kenia, you’re back!”
Mocha jumped up, placing his paws on her thighs. Kenia stammered for just a moment, last second reservations about violating study protocol and even simple boundaries of etiquette making her hesitate. But she pushed past her discomfort.
“Ms. Andersen, you were so gracious in hosting me yesterday and showing me that photo album, I wanted to repay the kindness and make you lunch.”
“Oh Kenia,” Martha said, her hand on her ample bosom. “You don’t need to.”
“I insist,” Kenia said, surprising herself by pulling open the swinging screen door, trying to soften the intrusion with a gracious smile. Mocha danced around her, his claws tapping on the floor. The television was on but the volume low. She was relieved not to see Joel as she crossed to the kitchen. The sour smell of garbage and the refuse in the sink hit her fresh in the face. She did her best to breathe through her mouth, but even then she could taste it.
There was not a clear space on the countertop with so many dishes stacked there. One end, however, was covered in a flurry of mail. Envelopes for utilities, loan consolidation offers, and Publishers Clearinghouse waited in different stages of being opened and read. Kenia set the grocery bags down on them, pulled out a new set of dish gloves, dish soap, and spray disinfectant.
“My, you’ve come on a mission,” Martha said.
She had. She couldn’t quite explain it even to herself, but Kenia had been seized by a desperate, impatient urge to be useful, to do something . . . effective, impactful, practical. Maybe it was a delayed reaction to the long weeks of data collection, consisting of talk without action. Maybe it was because Martha had shown her kindness, reacting to a sadness she had detected in Kenia, and had acted as a mother might. Maybe Kenia just missed her own mother.
“What can I do?” Martha asked, a bit dumbfounded, twisting her fingers together in front of her belly.
“You sit there in that chair and tell me stories of how Selah Station used to be,” Kenia said over the clank of plates and bowls.
And so she did. Martha sipped her tea while Kenia attacked the dishes in the sink first. Some of the dishes were well beyond saving, and she tossed them in the trashcan—there were no recycling bins in Selah Station that she had noticed. The trash was already close to full, and even stomping on its contents didn’t help much. So she pulled out the bag, tied it off, and carried it outside with a box of additional black trash bags she had also purchased. She righted the overturned trashcan, did a quick cleanup of the scattered to-go and delivery boxes, then returned to the kitchen where Martha had made fresh tea.
Kenia thanked her. She had already worked up a sweat and preferred cold water, but she took some of Martha’s offered tea before turning back to the dishes. Forty-five minutes later the sink was clear, the water running through over the freshly scrubbed stainless steel basin. The counters were clear and clean, even if they were old, chipped and cracked by wear and tear. In the meantime, Kenia had learned that Martha had grown up quite the tomboy, rambling in the creeks—“cricks” as she called them—catching frogs, climbing trees, and playing with children of all colors.
“Back then, it didn’t matter, at least not here in Selah,” Martha said.
Kenia learned that Martha’s favorite childhood friend had been named Mable, who she had been as close to as a “sister.” They would sleep next to each other on summer nights when they would inevitably spend the night at one or the other’s house.
“We were inseparable; Mable and Martha, Martha and Mable,” she said.
“What happened to her?” Kenia asked, pulling out a pot to cook quinoa in—she had ridden Kermit the ninety minutes to Martinsburg and back that morning to buy it and the other groceries. Introducing Martha to options other than pasta and white rice was part of her goal for that day. It might have been presumptuous, arrogant even, but she justified it to herself that she needed to know how hard it was to actually prepare the recipes recommended by Healthy-Bytes.
This is community-based participatory research, she told herself.
Plus Martha reveled in reminiscing, her delight in having an audience again and her curiosity about the dish Kenia was preparing growing. But she became downcast when she returned to the subject of Mable. “Her family moved away. They didn’t feel comfortable here after the university closed and attitudes in Selah started to shift.”
“Mable was black?”
“Yes, sorry I didn’t mention that.”
Kenia shrugged and added water to the quinoa.
Joel was still sleeping. Martha told her he did not get up until three p.m. most days.
“I figure the more he sleeps, the less he drinks and smokes,” Martha said, the sadness of her resignation heavy in her voice.
“So he didn’t make it to rehab this morning?” Kenia asked, lighting the stove to heat the water before she pulled out the cucumbers, red peppers, and carrots she had bought from local farmers selling produce on the side of the road.
“He says that hooey about sobering up every day. Still doesn’t.” Martha sighed and grew quiet and downcast.
Kenia chopped the vegetables as the water warmed. “Tell me about Christmas here. What was that like?”
Martha picked up the thread of her childhood memories where she had left off, recalling one Christmas after another, when Mable was still a part of her life. The kitchen grew warm and fragrant. Kenia seasoned the skinless chicken breasts she had brought with Greek spices and slid them into the oven to bake. While they cooked, she washed the arugula and baby spinach salad, tossed it with the vegetables, cranberries, crumbled goat cheese, and with virgin olive oil and balsamic vinaigrette. A wave of heat hit her in the face when she checked on the chicken. When it was done, she slid it out, diced it into cubes, drizzled them in a chipotle reduction and filled a set of plates, placing the salad on a bed of quinoa and topping it with the chicken. She set the plates down on the table and pulled out a chair next to Martha.
“Let’s eat.”
They put the leftovers in Tupperware and sipped green tea, which Martha was surprised Kenia served without sugar.
“A bit plain, isn’t it?” Martha said taking a tentative sip.
“You’ll get used to it, if you drink enough.”
Martha flipped through the recipes Kenia had printed up for her, reading some aloud. “Spaghetti made out of squash! What will they think of next?”
Kenia shrugged, staring into her mug. “I’ve realized that some of them just aren’t practical. This whole app might not be practical, but it’s good to know if you like them.”
“Like them, dear, that was restaurant food, gourmet. I want to try to make some on my own.”
“Great. Let me know how it goes; it will be useful for feedback for my professor,” Kenia said, trying to explain away her imposition as part of the practicum, wondering if helping Martha had been as much for herself as for Martha. Kenia looked at the clock on the wall and Ms. July, her tissue paper bikini barely containing her breasts, as she glanced back from her tropical photoshoot with a contrived come-hither look. The afternoon was wearing on. Martha offered to show her more photos albums but Kenia declined, eager to be going before Joel woke up.
Martha and Mocha walked her out to Kermit, Martha giving Kenia a tight, enveloping hug that squeezed the breath out of her. Then she hooked her leg over Kermit, started the engine and rolled away, Mocha barking and chasing her, tail wagging, until she twisted the handle grip and accelerated with a wave of her gloved hand.
Where the driveway met the road she hit the brakes. A dark blue police cruiser was parked behind a Jeep Cherokee, lights flashing. The driver of the Cherokee was a young white man in sunglasses and no shirt, and his female companion was in jean shorts and a bikini top. Kenia was glad for the helmet, hoping to hide her skin color from the police. In an effort to slide past unnoticed, she coasted, as quietly as the motor could allow her to. But then two things happened that surprised her. She realized the police officer, who was waving on the driver, was black. Second, seeing her, the officer smiled and walked over.
“Thea, how are you?”
He was middle-aged, cutting an impressive figure in his uniform, his stiff Smokey the Bear hat tipped forward on his head in a slightly menacing way. But this was belied by the wide smile on his face. To correct for the mistaken identity Kenia pulled off the helmet and cut the engine. The officer stopped for a moment in his tracks, registering his surprise and confusion.
“I’m sorry, I thought you were Thea Ferguson.”
“I’m Kenia Dezy. I’m an intern working with her and Ms. Jolene down at the Med-Dent building.”
“Kenia,” he said, closing the distance between them and shaking her hand. She took it, realizing she had never actually touched an officer of the law—ever. “Am I saying that right?”
“Yes, nice job.”
“I’m Officer Farrcroft, but most everyone knows me as Keith.”
“Pleasure,” Kenia said, processing.
“You looked perplexed.”
“Sorry, I need to fix my face,” she laughed. “I guess I’m just surprised, and a little relieved, to see a brother in uniform out here.”
Officer Farrcroft flashed a relaxed smile. It was hard not to like him, she realized, despite his profession. He carried his authority with a lightness that was refreshing. His nightstick, mace, and pistol all seemed more like inert decorations than threats to her. “Well, Selah can still surprise you.”
“It can.”
“What are you doing up here?”
“I interviewed Ms. Andersen yesterday. Came back to try out a few recipes with her.”
“She’s a very sweet lady.”
“She is. Her son was not quite as welcoming.”
Officer Farrcroft grimaced. “Yep, he’s a bitter one. But don’t let him get under your skin.”
“Might be too late.”
“His bark is worse than his bite. Sad case really. He is a bright kid. Just not a lot of opportunities for young people in these parts.”
“Yeah, I’ve been hearing that a lot. By the way, what do you know about the folks the next lot over, the Pennels?”
Keith’s smile returned. “Great family. You met them yet?”
“Uh, I did . . . I rode up yesterday. House was nice and all, but well . . . I don’t know what I saw, but one of those kids came around the corner in a grand wizard robe. I got the hell out of there.”
Officer Farrcroft laughed so hard Kenia wondered if he had actually understood her.
“I don’t mean grand wizard as in Gandalf, I mean as in the Klan.”
He wiped a tear from the corner of his eye. “Oh I know. I guarantee it was a misunderstanding. You probably stumbled into one of their shoots.”
“Shoots?”
“Their whole yard is a set. Never heard of Redneck Manor, the YouTube show?”
“No.”
“Well, we’ll remedy that. Come on, I’ll introduce you to them. Those kids are putting Selah back on the map.”