The Wire Hanger

Chapter Ten

“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.