Free The Summer Kitchen by Lisa Wingate Page A

my mind Jake echoed the reminder about replacing smoke detector batteries. I had the painful sense of losing him all over again and not knowing if he was ever coming back.
    What if he never did? What if he found the peace he was seeking on the other side of the world, in some mythical connection to his birthright among the lush forests and thick humidity of Guatemala? What if he erased us, and his guilt over Poppy’s death, like a long dream that fades in the light of a new day?
    I wanted to grab him and say, Stop this! What happened to Poppy wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have prevented it.
    But deep inside me, the tiniest voice, unwanted yet determined, said that if Jake had been where he was supposed to be that night, if he’d been responsible, none of this would have happened. Poppy would still be rambling around this house. Jake would still be a few miles away in his dorm, and our lives would be normal again. . . .
    It was easier to focus on the kitchen than to consider what might have been. Unfortunately, the paint job wasn’t turning out well. The cabinet surfaces were rough and greasy. My brushstrokes had dried over the old moss green paint in a thin streaky layer that would definitely need a second coat. I should have washed and sanded the surfaces first, but I couldn’t bear to remove the shadows of Jake, and Poppy, and Aunt Ruth. I’d painted carefully over the smudgy doughnuts of fingerprints, sealing them safely in places only I would know about.
    Right now, my hard work looked like pea soup left on the counter so long it had congealed and separated.
    “Yuck,” I muttered, and it occurred to me that hours of watching the home decorating channel doesn’t necessarily qualify you to paint cabinets. The thought made me laugh, a strangely sweet sound, like a favorite food you hadn’t eaten in so long you’d forgotten you liked it. If Jake were here, he’d laugh at this.
    Who turned Mom loose with the paintbrush? His voice seemed so real, I looked for him.
    “Don’t count me out yet,” I told the quiet house before returning to the cabinets. When Rob and I married, I’d painted an entire married-student apartment by myself. My mother was mortified that we were planning to live in the aging brick building on the edge of campus, but she eventually acquiesced. She forgave Rob for our meager accommodations, because he was, after all, in medical school. Mother was looking forward to being able to say at cocktail parties, This is my son-in-law, the doctor. Rob came from a long line of Dr. Dardens, which made him a catch according to Mother. I’d finally done something right.
    She’d hate that I was at Uncle Poppy’s house, up to my elbows in paint, which, now that I thought about it, made the job that much more appealing.
    When one coat doesn’t work, try two, I told myself, and decided to come back tomorrow. Preparing to leave, I felt like a child who’d sneaked off to visit a forbidden friend and stayed too long. As I left the house behind and headed across town, I tried to imagine who might move in and what their lives would be like. Maybe there would be little girls who would slip through the wall of hollyhocks to discover the hidden room where I’d passed so many childhood hours. . . .
    Our neighborhood in Plano was quiet when I arrived, the house empty. That was probably fortunate, since my clothes and I were spattered with paint.
    Rolling the sweat suit into a ball, I tucked it in the linen closet while the whirlpool filled. As I sank into the water, I felt good about the day. Tired, but good. It had been too long since the waking hours had passed with happy thoughts instead of painful ones.
    The phone rang as I sat with my mind drifting. Someone answered it before the machine would have. A few minutes later, Christopher came to the bathroom door. “Mom, you in there?”
    “Hi, sweetheart,” I said, slipping from the water and grabbing a towel. “Hang on a sec. I was just getting