a faltering rendition of “You Are My Sunshine,” which never failed to bring back memories of the bright-yellow sun she’d drawn during our very first encounter. “What do you want on your bread?” I asked when we’d sung ourselves dry.
“Stwawberry jam.”
Of course. “Have you used the bathroom yet?” She padded off toward the insanely small bathroom while I opened the fridge and prayed for strawberry jam. Bless Bev’s saintly heart, there was one jar of jam in the fridge and it had strawberries on the label.
There were three more teary episodes in the hour that followed, which may have set a new record. The first was when she discovered that German bread was harder than the Wonder Bread she was used to; the second was when I suggested she go back to bed and lie quietly for a few minutes as the rest of the world wasn’t awake yet; and the third was when we discovered that shower hoses apparently didn’t hang from the wall in German bathrooms but had to be held by hand. I knew this would be a bit of a sticking point for me, too. If there was one thing I loved in life, it was a long, hot shower. But I was trying to look on the bright side that morning, so I remembered what I’d been told about the exorbitant price of water in Germany and tried to be grateful that my contortionist showers would probably save me money.
“I want to go home,” Shayla wailed as I aimed the water at her hair and rinsed off the shampoo suds she had been shaping into horns and halos minutes before. They coursed down her back between her chicken-wing shoulder blades.
“This all feels pretty weird, doesn’t it.”
“Wee-ohd,” she repeated with passion, tears in her voice.
“We’ll take a walk around town later, okay? Get to know it a little better. It looked really pretty when we drove in yesterday, don’t you think?”
“It’s wee-ohd.”
“You’re right. It is. But you do like Bev, right? She’s not weird at all.”
“Gus, too.”
“They’re good people,” I agreed as I wrapped her in a thin blue towel Bev had left for us. “And Bev’s going to be taking care of you while I’m at work, so you’ll get to spend lots of time with her.”
“She makes good cookies.”
I laughed and wondered if all women were plagued, from such a young age, by an obsession with food. “We’ll get you cookies today too,” I said, and the news seemed to comfort Shayla immensely. So at five o’clock in the morning of my first full day in Germany, I sat on the edge of the tub with a sopping-wet child wrapped in my arms and had a long conversation about cookies and cake.
The air felt taut. It was streaked with Daddy’s spittle and tinted gray-green by his wrath. “You will finish your meal!” he screamed into Trey’s stricken face, his bullhorn words a blistering burn, a stab, a hammer strike. “And you will finish it now. So pick up your fork and get shoveling, boy!” He punctuated his tirade with a string of expletives that made my brother shrivel and slump.
Trey looked across the table at me and I tried to wing some courage to him with my eyes, but I knew he couldn’t really see me. It was a weird side effect of my dad’s temper tantrums, as if the loudness of his voice took so much out of us that there was nothing left for seeing or smelling. I’d felt it often enough that I recognized it in my brother—my gentle, tough brother whose eyes looked stubborn and scared.
“Eat!” my dad yelled again, and when Trey, frozen by fear, didn’t budge, he grabbed a fistful of zucchini and mashed it against his son’s mouth. I saw tears spring out and balance on Trey’s lower eyelids as he clamped his jaw shut and furrowed his eyebrows in a superhuman effort to keep emotions at bay. He had never liked zucchini, had always gagged on it like I gagged on mushrooms, and I knew he’d rather have eaten worms at that moment than chewed on the green triangles he’d so meticulously separated from the rest of his stir-fry. I looked at his plate where the vegetables had been stacked in neat little piles until moments ago. We’d both learned early on that tall stacks made quantities look smaller, and I’d often felt a little jealous that Trey’s most detested food was so much more stackable