“I was just about to start dinner,” she said, in response to my shellshocked silence. “A bit of food would do you good, I think.”
“Can I help with anything?” I said automatically.
“Aw, so well-raised,” said Jezebel. “I wouldn’t have expected anything else from Naomi’s kid. You can go fetch Noah and tell him to set the table.”
“Okay,” I said, and went upstairs with some trepidation. I wasn’t especially good with kids and I did not imagine this woman’s child taking kindly to a stranger coming upstairs to his room and telling him to do chores. His father must have still been at work.
I knocked on the first closed door I saw, from behind which emanated a series of beeping and whirring noises. It sounded like a video game; a friend of Esau’s had had one, bought off the black market somewhere. When there was no response I turned the doorknob, pushing it slowly open so as not to surprise the occupant. I didn’t need a vengeful eight-year-old on my hands.
The first I saw of him was the back of his head, hunched over a computer screen over which lines of text were scrolling. It wasn’t a video game, at least none that I’d seen, but I didn’t know what else to compare it to. “Um,” I said, “your mom says it’s time to set the table. Sorry.”
He turned around and I realized my first mistake, which was to assume that he was younger. Instead he was about my age, and he didn’t look particularly surprised to see a stranger standing in his bedroom. “Okay,” he said. “Tell her I’ll be right down.” His voice had changed – Esau’s was still cracky and straw-filled, despite being close to the same age – and it was a shock to hear it coming out of someone I had been assuming was a child. Even though he clearly did not look like a child. He needed a haircut; his dark hair was starting to curl around his ears.
“Sorry,” I said again, and backed out of his room, closing the door as I went so that it shut in front of my face. Down the tightly-wound stairs I went, back into the kitchen where chopped onions were sizzling in butter on the stove. We didn’t have butter often but I recognized the smell of it, the moment when the pieces that separate and suspend themselves turn a beautiful toasty brown. “He’s coming,” I told Jezebel. I perched at the edge of the counter. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help?”
“Run into the backyard and grab me a tomato, would you?”
I looked at her blankly.
“Tomatoes. Garden. Can you get me one?”
I found my voice. “I’m sorry, I don’t…I don’t know what they look like.”
“You have got to stop apologizing for every step you take, kid. So you’ve never seen a tomato. Big deal. Lots of people haven’t. You just say, ‘Hey Jezebel, I grew up on sad tasteless canned food, please describe a proper tomato to me so that I can go and do your bidding.’”
She waited.
“Um,” I said, “Jezebel, I grew up on sad tasteless food.”
She grinned. Her black hair fanned out around her head like a halo. “All right, I get it. There’s a couple of vines out back. On the left side of the yard when you go out. Tomatoes are round. You want one that looks a healthy red, and like it’s heavy, a little. Squeeze it and make sure there’s some give. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and walked over to the back door. I still couldn’t help glancing at the ID monitor as it flashed my false name. I wondered who Elizabeth Vazquez was. What her life was like. Out in the backyard, which was approximately the size of my foot, I found the vines Jezebel had described. I spent a long time weighing tomatoes in my palm, trying to decide if they were heavy enough. When I heard a pan clatter on the stove I looked back instinctively, and saw a curtain flutter in the upstairs window. Enough time wasted, I reminded myself, and chose a likely candidate, and walked back into the house.

YOU ARE READING
The Wire Hanger
General FictionCoby is living a perfectly ordinary life. But then a bleeding woman appears on her doorstep, and her mother inexplicably knows what to do. Soon everything Coby thought she knew about the world she lived in will be called into question as she works t...