Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

I must have gone to fifty different houses like this. Occasionally, I’d find a light on-usually upstairs, usually a teenager’s head silhouetted against the blue cast of a computer screen. Or a couple that had fallen asleep with the television still crackling. A bathroom light, to keep monsters away from a child. It didn’t matter if I was in a white neighborhood or a black one, if the community was wealthy or dirt-poor-houses are cellular walls; they keep our problems from bleeding into everyone else’s.

The last neighborhood I visited that night was the one that drew my truck magnetically, my heart’s polar north. I parked at the base of my own driveway, headlights switched off, so that I would not give my presence away.

The truth was, Charlotte was right. The more times I picked up shifts to pay for your incidentals, the less time I spent with you. Once, I’d held you in my arms while you slept, and I’d watched dreams screening across your face; now, I loved you in theory if not in practice. I was too busy protecting and serving the rest of Bankton to focus on protecting and serving you; that had fallen to Charlotte instead. It was a treadmill, and I’d been knocked off it by this lawsuit, only to find that you were impossibly, undeniably, growing up.

That would change, I vowed. Carrying through with the step I’d taken when I went to Booker, Hood & Coates meant that I would actively spend more time with you. I’d get to fall for you all over again.

Just then, the wind whipped through the open window of the truck, wrinkling the wrappers of the baked goods and reminding me why I’d come back here tonight. Stacked in a wheelbarrow were the cookies and cakes and pastries that you and Amelia and Charlotte had been baking for the past few days.

I’d loaded them all-easily thirty wrapped packets, each one tagged with a green string and a construction paper heart-into my truck. You’d cut those out yourself; I could tell. Sweets from Syllabub, they read. I’d imagined your mother’s hands stroking pastry dough, the look on your face as you carefully cracked an egg, Amelia frustrating her way through an apron’s knot. I came here a couple times a week. I’d eat the first three or four; the rest I’d leave on the steps at the nearest homeless shelter.

I reached into my wallet and took out all my money, the cashed sum of the extra shifts I’d taken on at work to keep from having to go home. This I stuffed, bill by bill, into the shoe box, payment in kind for Charlotte. Before I could stop myself, I tore the paper heart off one packet of cookies. With a pencil, I wrote a customer’s message across the blank back: I love them .

Tomorrow, you’d read it. All three of you would be giddy, would assume the anonymous writer had been talking about the food, and not the bakers.

On the way home from Boston one weekend, my mother reinvented herself as the new Martha Freaking Stewart. To that end, we had to detour totally out of the way to Norwich, Vermont, to King Arthur Flour, so that we could buy a crapload of industrial baking pans and specialty flours. You were already cranky about spending the morning at Children’s Hospital having new braces fitted-they were hot and stiff and left marks and bruises where the plastic rubbed into your skin, which the brace specialists tried to fix with a heat gun, but it never seemed to work. You wanted to go home and take them off, but instead, my mother bribed us with a trip to a restaurant-a reward neither one of us could turn down.

This may not seem like such a big deal, but it was, to us. We didn’t eat out very much. My mom always said that she could cook better than most chefs anyway, which was true, but that really just made us sound less like losers than the truth: we couldn’t afford it. It was the same reason that I didn’t tell my parents when my jeans were becoming highwaters, why I never bought lunch although the French fries in the caf looked so incredibly delicious; it was the same reason why that Disney World Trip to Hell was so much of a disappointment. I was too embarrassed to hear my parents tell me that we were too broke to afford what I needed or wanted; if I didn’t ask for anything, I didn’t have to hear them say no.

There was a part of me that was angry my mother was using the baking money to buy all those pans and tins when she could have been buying me a Juicy Couture cashmere hoodie that would make other girls in school look at me with envy, instead of like I was something stuck to the bottoms of their shoes. But no, it was critical that we have Mexican vanilla extract and dried Bing cherries from Michigan. We had to have silicone muffin pans and a shortbread form and edgeless cookie sheets. You were totally oblivious to the fact that every penny we spent on turbinado sugar and cake flour was one less cent spent on us, but then again, what did I expect: you still believed there was a Santa Claus, too.

So I have to admit it surprised me a little when you let me choose the restaurant where we’d eat lunch. “Amelia never gets to pick,” you said, and even though I hated myself for this, I felt like I was going to cry.

To make up for that, and because everyone expected me to be a jerk and why disappoint, I said, “McDonald’s.”

“Eww,” you said. “They make four hundred Quarter Pounders out of one cow.”

“Get back to me when you’re a vegetarian, hypocrite,” I answered.

“Amelia, stop. We’re not going to McDonald’s.”

So instead of picking a nice Italian place we probably all would have enjoyed, I made her stop at a totally skanky diner instead.

It looked like the kind of place that had bugs in the kitchen. “Well,” my mother said, looking around. “This is an interesting choice.”

“It’s nostalgic,” I said, and I glared at her. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, as long as botulism isn’t one of your long-lost memories.” After glancing at a Seat Yourself sign, she walked toward an empty booth.

“I want to sit at the counter,” you said.

My mother and I both looked at the rickety stools, the long drop down. “No,” we said simultaneously.

I dragged a high chair over to the table so that you could reach it. A harried waitress tossed menus at us, with a pack of crayons for you. “Be back in a minute for your order.”

My mother guided your legs through the high chair, which was an ordeal, because with braces your legs didn’t move that easily. Right away you flipped over your place mat and began to draw on the blank side. “So,” my mother said. “What should we bake when we get home?”

“Donuts,” you suggested. You were pretty psyched about the pan we’d bought, which looked like sixteen alien eyes.

“Amelia, what about you?”

I buried my face in my arms. “Hash brownies.”

The waitress reappeared with a pad in hand. “Well, aren’t you just cute enough to spread on a cracker and eat,” she said, grinning down at you. “And a mighty fine artist, too!”

I caught your gaze and rolled my eyes. You poked two crayons up your nose and stuck out your tongue. “I’ll have coffee,” Mom said. “And the turkey club.”

“There’s more than one hundred chemicals in a cup of coffee,” you announced, and the waitress nearly fell over.

Because we didn’t go out much, I’d forgotten how strangers reacted to you. You were only as tall as a three-year-old, but you spoke and read and drew like someone much older than your real age-almost six. It was sort of freaky, until people got to know you. “Isn’t she just a talkative little thing!” the waitress said, recovering.

“I’ll have the grilled cheese, please,” you replied. “And a Coke.”

“Yeah, that sounds good. Make it two,” I said, when what I really wanted was one of everything on the menu. The waitress was staring at you as you drew a picture that was about normal for a six-year-old but practically Renoir for the toddler she assumed you to be. She looked like she was going to say something to you, so I turned to my mother. “Are you sure you want turkey? That’s, like, food poisoning waiting to happen…”