The Tiger in the House Page 4

  “I’m only researching the subject, that’s all,” said Juniper, opening her door.

  She came to the passenger door, and the dog disembarked with deliberate slowness. At the clinic door, she tried to pull up the handle, but it was locked. She knocked loudly and peered in to see if Ben was still rattling about. The light from the exam room offered a vertical slice. Ben stuck his head out, saw Juniper, and gave a half wave. He walked around the reception desk and opened the door.

  Sweat beaded around his hairline, and he had an unfocused look.

  “Hard day?” she asked, stepping inside.

  “What? Oh, yeah, it was.” He ran his fingers through his hair and looked away.

  She knew how hard a bad day could be.

  “Sorry to be late. There was big accident on the bridge,” she said. “And I’m sorry you’ve had a bad day.”

  Ben looked at his watch. No one her age had ever worn a watch, a device that only did one thing. Delia was more like Ben’s generation than Juniper’s. Six years made a big difference, not a generation gap by any means, but still, Delia always was the parent and she gravitated toward more parental responses. Ben was solidly in their parents’ age demographic.

  When Juniper graduated from high school, it was Ben and his wife, sitting next to Delia, who whooped and hollered as she crossed the stage. But still, he was more like their unofficial big brother. After the graduation ceremony, he found her, and said, “Don’t worry, pip-squeak, if you ever need me, just call.”

  Juniper had only seen a few men like Ben. She called them the big easies. Men who loved animals, spent all day with some sort of mammal tucked under one arm, always knowing where to put their hands to calm a dog or a cat, and married, the big easies were always married. Just like Ben, married and living on Peaks Island.

  So why did Ben have this extra sizzle of something today, a low hum of static electricity with his facial muscles pulled a little tighter?

  The clatter of Baxter’s claws came to an abrupt halt in the reception area, midway to Ben’s examining room. The dog tilted his head, blinked hard, and flared his nostrils, somehow filtering out hundreds of scents from terrified cats and dogs that had passed through. Some other scent stopped him. Baxter regularly forgave Ben for all his sharp needles and pokes and prods and had always approached Ben like an old comrade, as if they came from the same neighborhood. Now, he hesitated.

  “This isn’t a good time,” said Ben. “I’ve got to pick up the kids.”

  Wait, his kids were in high school now. One had just graduated. They needed picking up? Hadn’t she just told him about the snarl up on the bridge?

  “Then you’d better call your wife because you won’t make the next ferry,” she said. Juniper might not have the nose that Baxter did, but she could smell a brush-off a mile away, and coming from Ben, the sting went deep into her flesh.

  Then she softened as she walked back to her car with Baxter. Even the big easies have bad days.

  CHAPTER 9

  J Bird

  Juniper had worked in cafés and restaurants since she was sixteen years old. When she was a freshman at Fairfield University, she woke up five days a week at four a.m. to bake muffins at Sticky Fingers Café. By the time spring break rolled around, she developed a muffin recipe with grated ginger and peach puree that eventually caused her to be fired. “I own that recipe,” her boss declared. This was his first restaurant, and he was convinced that he owned his workers and the air that they breathed.

  Juniper had just enough nineteen-year-old strength in her spine to smile and say, “No, you don’t. And you don’t own me either.” When she was fired on the spot, she took the secret ingredient of the famous muffin with her, which her boss could never figure out. The secret essential ingredient was Juniper, with her full frontal love of food alchemy and how it restored the soul, how it had saved her time and again since the death of her parents.

  She had developed a loyal following of older motorcycle riders who spread the word of her ginger/peach muffins through their Google riders’ group, and when they showed up as usual one Saturday morning, their leather chaps squeaking against each other, their helmets humbly in hand, a static silence filled the bakery when they were told that Juniper had been fired.

  Her coworker Angelo told her later that there was an alarming sit-in on the following Sunday of twenty-five motorcycle guys, who filled the café with their broad backsides and black leather. They occupied every available seat and sat in silence, not ordering anything, as if they were at a funeral mass. They stayed for thirty minutes, and after thoroughly unhinging the owner, they stood up and tossed some twenties into the tip jar.

  Juniper tailored college to her cooking. History classes were doorways into Renaissance pastries and slow-cooked meats. She studied enough French and Italian to spend her junior year abroad studying literature, which somehow always came back to food, the chilled butter of perfect croissants, the almost indiscernible tang of a few drops of buttermilk in pastry shells, custards, and the hearty crepes with ham and cheese sold by street vendors.

  In Italy, she learned to make fresh ricotta and mozzarella, topping them with basil, tomatoes, roasted garlic, and fresh olive oil.

  Delia was already a caseworker when she visited her little sister in Italy, scrupulously saving her vacation time to be with Juniper at Christmas. Delia grudgingly followed Juniper to a corner pasta factory no bigger than a frozen yogurt shop at home. The woman who owned the shop showed them how to make pasta, passing it through the roller again and again until it was thin enough to go through the slicer, spilling out strings of pasta to the waiting arms of her assistant. The pasta hung on dowels around the shop, looking like miniature laundry.

  Delia always credited all the sensuous talents of cooking to Juniper. “J Bird, you’re the cook in the family, everyone knows that.” The family meant the two of them.

  But their father, who wrote food reviews when he was free from delusions, taught both of his daughters to savor food, to discern food that was prepared without finesse and love. He once took them to a local restaurant in Portland on two consecutive nights and ordered the same dish, shrimp scampi. He said nothing to the girls, gave them no hint of his preference until they had consumed their second meal of glistening shrimp.

  “Tell me which one makes you happy,” he said.

  Juniper, who was only nine at the time, didn’t wait for her big sister to answer. “The one yesterday was more delicious. It made me hum a song the whole time I was eating,” she said.

  He smiled. “Each dinner had exactly the same ingredients. The difference was the chef. Sheila cooked yesterday, and she loves food, she respects the crustaceans, and she is an artist. The chef this evening was Philip, a man who wouldn’t know love if it conked him on the head. It’s about skill and proficiency, but the main ingredient is the transference of energy.”

  But during his bad times, and increasingly so until the end, food spoke to him with threats that her father endured until he could no longer taste the pleasure.

  Until the day in the pasta factory, when the small Italian woman held the wet strands of pasta over her arm, Juniper might have continued to believe that she was the only sister who understood food, who tasted the layers of flavors, the comingling of savory spices. Delia had all but convinced her that her big sister was good for one thing in this life: taking care of J Bird and then taking care of the kids traveling through foster care.

  But there had been a sea breeze off the Mediterranean in the small town of Minori, the zest of lemon was everywhere in the shop, the sweet notes of the semolina flour wrapped around Juniper. Delia looked transported, stunned, as if a long-dormant part of her brain had creaked open, lubricated by the molecules of fresh pasta bouncing unrestrained along the corridors of her olfactory center.

  “Ask her if she’ll teach me how to make this pasta,” Delia said. She spent the remainder of the day with the woman, rolling, cutting, and hanging more pasta. Juniper left the two of them in
the small kitchen. They spoke a language of food, unable to communicate otherwise.

  Delia returned to their hotel and stretched out on the single bed next to Juniper.

  “I didn’t know, I didn’t understand before. This is the good part of Dad. He left it for us, this way of seeing food.”

  If ever there was a time to be smug, to say I told you so, it was right then with Delia softened up like a slice of baguette with warm brie. But it was so comforting to Juniper that Delia could finally see her world that she smiled and handed her sister a bowl of olives, purchased that morning at a small storefront grocery.

  The pasta maker later told Juniper, “Your sister has the nose. She can smell anything, that one. The semolina opened up its secrets for her.”

  It had taken Juniper five long years to convince Delia that they could open a bakery, and now they were only two months from opening.

  * * *

  She had found the location on her daily outings with Baxter. On Willard Beach in South Portland, prior to nine a.m., dogs were permitted off leash. In fact, she had walked Baxter on this beach four days a week since he was a puppy, which meant that for a total of three years, she had passed by the one-story building, which had, until one particular day, cloaked itself.

  Back in March, five months ago, Juniper stopped to shake sand out of her blue Nikes, balancing on one foot as she shook one shoe, then the other. Maybe it was the shaking or the balancing on one foot, a change in perspective. She looked across the street at the building for sale, an old storefront that still had the faded letters DRY GOODS over the covered entryway, but which had last been a real estate office.

  The morning light, not far from the spring equinox, caused the window to glitter, a word she would confidently repeat to Delia. The window vibrated, the light bouncing and jumping. The old storefront was at a crossroads to the beach, the place where everyone who knew about this beach (dog beach in the early a.m., runners next, track teams later afternoon, strollers throughout the day) passed by. She had never truly noticed the building before.

  Juniper snapped the leash onto Baxter’s collar and crossed the street. She pressed her hands against the glass and peered in. Everything that could have been ripped out had been. A few wires dangled from the ceiling where lights had been. Two large ceiling tiles sagged from their aluminum frames. What was beyond the tiles?

  Baxter bumped her leg with a stick that he carried from the beach. She looked down to nudge it away, and when she looked up again, a ruffle of soft wind, sweet with the promise of summer, blew her hair, and in one devastating instant she saw people at café tables with croissants and sandwiches, steam coming from mugs of tea and coffee, clean, gleaming windows, an open kitchen, bread boards, two industrial ovens, large tubs of Canadian flour, and Delia. She saw Delia as clearly as she had ever seen her, elbow deep in dough with a kind of happiness on her face that she had never seen before.

  Juniper blinked, looked down at Baxter, the stick, up again at the former dry goods/real estate office. Had thirty seconds passed? Five minutes? No matter. Juniper found something that had been there all along, waiting to be seen. A café/bakery. And she needed Delia to make it happen.

  Two days later, on a Saturday afternoon when Juniper was done with her early shift at Bayside Bakery and Delia was not on call, they stood in front of the storefront.

  “Even if I thought this was a good idea, it would have to be gutted, plumbing installed for a restaurant,” said Delia. “ADA requirements, ramps, grab bars in the bathrooms. Permits, building inspections,” she said, already rubbing her hand along the storefront glass.

  Delia, so conditioned to be the parent, the serious one, seemed compelled to point out every single drawback. “I have a job with benefits, insurance, stability,” she said.

  “That’s right,” said Juniper, “soul-sucking stability.” Baxter sat on her feet, trying to emphasize her point. “We have a choice. Dad didn’t have a choice and we do. Mom made a choice to give up what she loved doing to take care of Dad. You can stay in the world of social service and meetings and tragedy forever. Or we can take a chance.”

  Baxter stood up and pressed his head into Delia’s hand, wagging his tail.

  “Okay, Baxter, I can see you’re in on this campaign,” she said, kneeling down to nuzzle the dog. “We can try it for two years. If we’re dead broke by then I can always get a job again.”

  CHAPTER 10

  After the epiphany in the pasta shop in Italy five years before when she visited J Bird, Delia began to bake bread on the weekends. Once a month she made pasta. She was not the tart, muffin, or chocolate éclair maker that J Bird was. That was a different language. Delia found her culinary home with breads and pasta and used her researcher’s brain to understand yeast, the texture of crust and rye flour versus wheat. She read everything she could find about yeast, fascinated by the entire life form that had previously been unknown to her. Pasta was uncomplicated compared to the variability of bread.

  Her first loaves had been unbalanced, lacking a critical amount of salt, or having too much salt. Bread was something she wanted to get right. There was so much about foster care that was never going to be right, a patched-up lifeboat for some kids. Within her own family, there was no going back, no extraction process of the gene that had caused her father’s schizophrenia. But with the bread, she felt a kind of absolution. Perhaps it was because she baked only on Sundays. The bread became her holy day.

  The living, breathing yeast drew her in. Delia relied on packaged yeast for the first year until she learned how to make her own starter. She caught on quickly to the life cycle of yeast, how the organisms could drink food straight from the atmosphere, catching molecules of salt air as it streamed by, the iron-rich moisture of rain, and even her own cast-off breath, all forming a natural yeast. She let the organisms evolve from the flour itself, along with the moist air off the Atlantic, the occasional loud dog burps whenever Baxter supervised, and every bit of her life that swirled around their kitchen. If she was absolutely quiet, closed all the windows, and turned off the music, she could hear the yeast mixture bubbling and exhaling. Once, she pulled her hair back with a scarf, put her ear close to the mixture, and closed her eyes. She was startled by a series of sighs, ahs, and ohs from the bowl, an orgasmic chorus as the yeast expanded into its own delicious passion.

  Careful, be careful, she thought, pulling back suddenly. Her father heard voices coming from places far less strange than frothing yeast. This was the legacy of schizophrenia; were it not for her fear of inheriting the raging delusions of her father, she could give in fully to the beauty of the live yeast and its passionate, symphonic universe. She should stick to her highly developed reliance on smell, which was bounty enough with the aromatic bread.

  She would have to be content with working the dough, mixing the flour, delighting when the perfect skin formed on the dough that contained the methane bubbles coming from the life cycle of the yeast community. The outside world fell away, the tedium of documentation in protective services, the memories of her childhood that held her hostage. They were no match for the visceral experience of kneading, nudging, baking, sniffing, and tasting bread made by her own hands.

  J Bird noticed Delia’s bread with her keen sense of foodie appreciation. “Good texture. Crust noticeable, but it doesn’t need a jackhammer. Let me take a sample to Bayside Bakery and get their opinion.”

  That had been a year ago. Juniper grabbed onto an idea like a hound dog, and the taste of Delia’s bread launched her into the idea of the café.

  “You and me, why not you and me? Why should I keep baking for other bakeries and why should you keep working in foster care when you bake the best bread I’ve ever tasted? I know the business part of a bakery, how to order, where to get the best supplies, and I know how to make the fancy stuff. But your job would be the bread and pasta.”

  The idea had seemed frivolous, irresponsible. Other people might be free to take a chance, to respond to artistic whim
sy, but not Delia. She spent her childhood ever vigilant for the spikes in mood that would turn her father into the terrified and terrifying man who was so unlike her real father. Shielding her little sister from the worst of his paranoid delusions had been natural to her. After the fire, it was her job to take care of J Bird. But now, was it possible that she could shed the constraints of caretaker? The café loomed in the future, a dim star that grew brighter every day.

  CHAPTER 11

  Delia packed her briefcase, cleared her breakfast dishes, and freshened Baxter’s water before she left for the day. By the time she arrived at work, she smelled the remains of Ira’s breakfast, something with eggs, onions, and beans; likely a burrito stashed into a desk drawer before she arrived.

  “Have you found any relatives who can be guardians for her?” asked Delia.

  If extended family could be found, Ira could do it. He could reach into the tangled ether of Social Security numbers, previously known addresses, or scraps of paper found at the crime scene. She had no doubt that Ira, the master of foster care in Southern Maine, kahuna of lost, neglected, and abandoned children, would find an aunt, uncle, or grandmother to care for Hayley.

  He kept one eye on his aging desktop computer, his desk awash in papers. He spread his hands directly in front of him, rearranged his spine, possibly stretching for the first time since he’d been at this desk since eight a.m., and said, “No. Nothing yet.”

  The child had been in the emergency placement for three days when Ira delivered the news about her parentage, or more precisely, her lack of discernible parentage. A shadow of dread crept up Delia’s neck. Ira always had a lead by now. Alienated grandparents emerged, stepdads with vital information, a critical morsel from a social service agency in another state, a women’s shelter. But now, nothing.