down and see if Renie needs any help.
When I start down the hall, I hear Lise on the phone. She’s angry, shouting. “Well, I’m sorry that I bothered you. I haven’t heard from you for a while and so I thought I’d check in. I won’t keep you.”
Silence.
I’m pretty sure that wasn’t one of Lise’s patients. I’m pretty sure that was her daughter.
I move quietly past and go downstairs and into the kitchen.
It’s a mess—bowls and measuring cups and spoons out, bags of groceries half unpacked, onion peels on the floor.
“Can I help?” I ask Renie.
She looks up. “What are you going to do?”
“Well, I can peel. Chop. Dice.”
“Really! Can you baste and blend?”
“Baste and blend? I can sauté and puree. I can flambé, toss, and skewer!”
Renie pulls a head of lettuce from the grocery bag, hands it to me. “How about broast? Can you broast?”
“Broasted lettuce?”
She shrugs. “I actually don’t even know what ‘broasted’ means.”
“I’m a little vague on that myself.”
“Make a salad,” she says. “And pour us both a glass of wine. There’s some Chardonnay left over from last night in the fridge. God, I hate to cook.”
I pour us glasses of wine, then move to the sink and start washing lettuce leaves. “I’m not crazy about it, either.”
“Well, get used to it—we all have to take turns making dinner. It’s one of Lise’s rules of the house. Got to have a homemade meal for dinner. Got to keep the bathrooms clean, and there are no dishes allowed in the sink. No cutting things out of the newspaper until everyone’s read it. If you take something from the first aid kit, replace it.”
“You have a first aid kit?”
“A major first aid kit. There’s stuff in there to start IVs! That’s what happens when you live with a doctor. It’s in the last bottom cupboard on the left. Oh, and here’s a really important rule: No men can stay over. Or women, in my case.”
“Really. Why can’t anyone stay over?”
“Well, do the math. Could get crowded. But mostly Lise had a bad experience with one woman who lived here and had her boyfriend over all the time. He practically lived here. So she just made a hard-and-fast rule. It’s a little fascist, but it works. Most people have their own place that we can go to. Here, wash these two carrots.”
“You want them peeled, too?”
“We don’t peel.”
“You don’t peel?”
“What is this, Seinfeld? No, we don’t peel. Hardly ever. Too many nutrients in the peel, Lise says.”
“What are we having besides salad?”
“Spaghetti and marinara sauce.”
I wash the carrots, then ask if I should slice them.
“One sliced for the salad. One shredded, for the sauce.”
I turn around. “Carrot in marinara sauce?”
“Yeah. It sweetens it.”
“Really? I didn’t know that.”
We work companionably in the kitchen, Renie and I, and I have a sudden memory of working this way with Penny and Brice. To move myself away from that, I ask Renie what questions she answered in her advice column today.
“Oh, I had one that just made me nuts. This woman writes in that her mother-in-law criticizes her all the time. All the time, in front of her husband, and her husband never defends her. So I told her to take her mother-in-law out to lunch and give her a taste of her own medicine. I gave her a little list of things she might say. Interesting outfit you’re wearing; do you like that color against your face? Do you really want to sit facing out? Are you sure you want to order that? A spoon might work better for that. You put salt on that? Could you lower your voice a bit? I’m right here. Is that … is that lettuce in your teeth? You know. And then I amped it up a bit for the big finish, where she points a fork at the mother-in-law’s chest and says, Listen. Whatever you think of me or what I’m doing, I don’t want or need or expect any longer to hear. You managed to raise a spineless son by being judge and jury of everything, but I’ve got a long line of vertebrae running down my back and I’m going to tell you what he should have said a long time ago: Back off and butt out.”
“Well,” I say. “That ought to do it.”
“Taste this,” Renie says, holding out a spoon with salad dressing she just made.
“Wow,” I say.
“Good?”
“Interesting!”
She stands there. Then she says, “Well. It won’t kill us.”
That night, just after we’ve finished