Natashia Deon - Grace

“Then you’ve come to the right place.”

She takes my hand and guides me to her dining table like I’m her little girl, helps me sit. She takes a pink apron laid on top of the table, hooks it over her neck, then ties a bow around her waist.

“You don’t have anything to worry about now,” she say, and glides toward the back of the house, swaying from side to side as she go.

If she ask me where I been or where I’m going, I’m gon’ first say, “For a walk.”

She’s in the kitchen where I can see her cutting some green vegetable I don’t recognize. She say, “You look like a girl who can handle a little spice. This soup is my family’s recipe.”

From on top of the stove, she lifts a wagon wheel — sized lid from a deep black pot. What’s inside steams over her face as she stirs with her wide wooden spoon.

I feel so small sitting at the head of her big table in her big house. Even the vase on the table is big. Its fresh flowers reach out in every direction like a frozen and colorful explosion at the center of her table. The longest stem points to a wood and glass cabinet where little clay people are faceless. The painted-on clothes is how I can differ the boys from the girls. The porcelain dresses are green, yellow, and red, and the boys got wide hats of the same colors.

“Make yourself at home,” Soledad say.

I don’t even know what “home” means.

“I hope you’re hungry,” she say. “When we’re finished here I’ll fix a bed for you in the guest room.”

“No, ma’am. That would just be too much.”

She peeks around the wall at me. “We’ve got a bond, Naomi. You may not know it yet, but I understand things about you because I know who Cynthia is. And I know what it’s like to escape mistreatment. To be alone out there. Not a friend in the world.”

She jots around the kitchen area.

“Stay as long as you need,” she say. “Charlie won’t be home for another week or so. And when he’s home, he’ll agree to your staying.”

I want to feel what it’s like to stay.

I’m tired.

Tired of all the running.

“Do you drink spirits, Naomi?”

I lie and say, “No, ma’am.”

“Then you’re a good girl.” She sets two bowls on her countertop. “I’m sure you’ve never had any stew like this before. It’s from Mexico. My mother’s recipe. It’s called menudo.”

“No, ma’am. I haven’t ate that.”

“Then you’re in for a treat.”

I fold my hands together on the table, trying to act like I been taught some manners. The crocheted placemats feel lumpy under my hands and these silver spoons and forks is catching light. I put my fingers in the diamond-shaped holes of the tablecloth, give the net a little tug, slide my finger inside the scoop of the spoon, pick it up and see my reflection.

“You’ll like the bread, too. Finely ground corn, water. A few seconds on the griddle then. .” She walks in slowly. “Mexican flatbread. We call them tortillas.”

She balances two bowls of soup in one hand and a stack of flatbread covered mostly by a cloth in the other. She slides a bowl to me and sits down in front of hers. The steamy red stew washes up the side of my tan clay bowl and settles.

“My father used to eat menudo all the time. My mother said it was to cure his hangovers but he said it was to stop her nagging.” She laughs, unwrapping the cloth from over the stack of tortillas. “Menudo reminds me of family.”

The smell of simmered onions and garlic, tomato, and something sweet and green, unfamiliar, rises from the stew’s fog. White balls, like lumps of grits and brown meat, peek out of the juice like little mountains in a lake of red. She watches me bring a spoonful to my opened mouth.

“You want to know what’s in it?” she say before I eat.

“I’m not picky,” I say, shoving it in and swallowing it down. I fill my spoon again.

“It has stomach in it,” she say.

I stop the next spoonful midway to my mouth.

“Beef stomach,” she say.

I send it on in and muddle, “I eat chitlins, too — pig intestines.” If she wasn’t watching, I’d tilt my head back and drink it whole.

“I like you,” she say. “We’ll get along just fine. I’ll show you how real friends should treat each other.”

All I want is that.

No promises I cain’t keep for her. No nothing. If I could find somebody like me and Hazel was, I’d be better. And for now, I could help out around here.

Soledad stirs her food and her face lightens with a memory of something. “Cynthia hated menudo. I used to make it for her anyway.”

“Cynthia can’t stand anything to do with something’s insides,” I say. “Bits neither.”

“Is that right?” Soledad say.

“Yes, ma’am. If she tastes the grit of black pepper in her food she’d spit it out.”

“So you know her pretty well, then?”

“No, ma’am. Not at all.”

“Well, it sounds like you ate with her.”

“Sometimes.”

“Sounds regular to me if you knew how she liked her food.” Soledad twirls her spoon and sighs. “She’d be satisfied giving me what was leftover after she ate.”

Soledad starts saying grace: “Dear Heavenly Father. .”

When she finishes, I watch her long fingers move along the table. They’re dainty soft, like their ends are made of swan feathers, brushing the spoon to lift it from beside her bowl. She dips the silver in the stew and puts it to her mouth in a smooth stroke. So light those fingers are. Weightless, they seem. Her thin lips, delicate, too. Like egg shells sipping spice on her tongue and into the pockets of her cheeks.

“It wasn’t the leftovers that bothered me,” Soledad said. “It was sleeping on her floor where she put every drifter or any of her girls who stopped working. Hurt my back that way. In fact, it was a splinter there that caused an infection. She spent ten days treating it. That floor was the last thing we argued about before I left her. Did she tell you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“How’s that floor treating you?”

“I sleep in her son’s room. The second bed. His dog’s got the other half of his.”

“She allows you to take care of her son?”

“Nine years old and he’s like a brother to me.”

Soledad stops eating altogether. She sets her spoon down on the side of her plate like she’s re-setting the table.

“So you do sleep in a bed?” she say.

“Not at first. Before, I slept on her old trunk that she made look like a bed.”

“Well. .” she say, blinking too much, making me feel like I said something wrong. “It doesn’t seem like you had it so bad after all.” She picks up her spoon again, runs it into her stew, pushes the meat to the sides of her bowl, stabs the meat with her spoon, and shimmies it in half. “Would take me all day to make this,” she say. “Never a thank you. She’d just keep reminding me of the stomach inside.” Soledad rolls her tortilla and dips it in the stew, bites the top of it. “Cynthia has a way of turning any good thing to nothing.”

That’s true.

“How was she when you left?”

I lift my shoulders. Don’t want to talk about Cynthia no more.

“Well, we shouldn’t be speaking of her anyway,” Soledad say.

“All right,” I say.

“Too much good food to waste, right?” Soledad spoons her stew, eats it, and taps her napkin to her lips. “Tell me,” she say, “do you have a boyfriend? Or someone?”

I nod. My heart hurts again. I say, “But he don’t love me no more.”

“Men are that way, aren’t they? Get what they want and go,” she say. “No matter. There will be others.”

“Yes’m.”

She flattens her napkin on her lap. “See,” she say. “I’m not all the bad that Cynthia makes me out to be, am I?”