Orphan Lost, page 6
I nodded and waited while she picked her way out of the vines to reach me. She had a colander full of beans on one hip with a collection of what looked like lettuce and radishes on top. We walked in amicable silence to the farmhouse. It was early enough the lights inside weren’t on yet, but as I walked up the steps, I heard Anna and Graham laughing.
Donna stomped her way across the porch and kicked off her boots in the mud room. I followed suit, and we walked into a kitchen where every surface was covered with water and soap bubbles. Anna was mid sling, flinging a handful of soap suds at Graham who was laughing and fending them off with a dish towel. Donna just sighed, canting her hip and resting the colander on it while she waited for them to notice us.
Anna was the first, slipping on a puddle as she turned to us with a grin. “It needed mopping anyway, Donna.”
“Uh huh,” she said, giving them both a reproving look. “And I need to be cooking dinner in this mess.”
“We’ve got it, Donna,” Graham said, taking the colander from her hands. “What do you want us to make?”
She scrubbed at her blond hair, scraped up into a rough bun. “I s’pose I could shower before they cut power for milking.” She turned that sharp attention to me. “Do you have homework?”
“Just informational sheets,” I said with a shrug. “I’m really behind in classes, but I have a mentor assigned.”
“Oh! Who’s your mentor?” Anna asked, face lighting up. “Was it Calix? He seemed into you, but everyone knows—"
“Anna,” Graham said firmly. “Give her time to set her stuff down. Not everyone wants to be interrogated right when they get in the door.”
I just laughed. “I don’t mind, really.” Donna headed under the stairs to what I suspected was a bathroom, leaving the three of us alone in the kitchen.
“See?” Anna crowed, crossing her arms while suds dripped out of her bangs. “So, who did you get?”
“Calix, but Juniper butted in and sent him packing,” I said.
Her brows lifted. “Really? Juniper’s pretty standoffish. She doesn’t hang out with anyone except Calix, and that’s only because she has to.”
“She was nice enough.” I shrugged and waved vaguely at my face. “She wanted to grill me on my tattoo.”
“Of course she did,” Anna muttered with an eye roll. Then she brightened. “How did your first day go otherwise? I’m sorry I missed you at lunch, but I was off campus visiting Graham at work.”
“Okay, I guess,” I said, glancing at Graham. “Where do you work?”
“Factory,” he said with a shrug. “I package meats and cheeses on an assembly line. But it’s safe work if you follow guidelines, and it doesn’t follow me home.”
“Huh,” I said. He’d lost his leg on the front, so pretty much anything was probably a step up. “Need help cooking?”
“Sure,” Anna said, perking up. “We can always use another hand in the kitchen. We only have fancy dinners on Sunday, so today will just be spaghetti with meatballs.”
“Be right back.” I ran up the stairs, and my room was exactly as I’d left it. If someone had been snooping, they hadn’t been obvious about it. So I tossed my bag on the bed, ignoring how naked I felt without it, and headed back down.
When I reached the kitchen, Anna was blending oats into a powder, a scant pound of hamburger sitting in a bowl on the counter. I picked across the soapy floor and dug under the counters until I found the pots and pans and pulled a big pot for spaghetti.
“Do we have meat every night here?” Just the thought made my mouth water. With wartime rationing, a lot of things had been cut back.
“Most nights,” Anna said cheerfully as she began mixing the powdered oats, an egg, and the meat together. “We stretch the meat with fillers as much as we can so we all get some. Mostly we eat beef, but when one of the hens stops laying, we eat them too.”
I watched her for a moment. “Does it taste different?” Not that I cared all that much if they stretched it, but I kind of wanted to know in advance so I didn’t react badly if it was awful.
“A little,” she said, measuring spices. “We’re lucky that we get meat so often, and that unlike other families, we don’t have to worry about rationing so much. It’s a working farm, not just a commercial one, so it supplies a lot of our food.”
I filled the pot at the sink, the well pump kicking on with a racket, and carried it over to the stove. I slipped on the last step so it sloshed over the sides, but a little more water wouldn’t hurt the floor any. “Where’s the pasta?”
She tipped her head to a set of floor to ceiling cupboards while she enthusiastically squeezed the meat mix with her bare hands until it was evenly distributed. I opened the door. “One box or two?”
“One and a half; there should be a half box left.” She flashed me a grin. “We usually make our own pasta, but I’m feeling lazy, and I doubt you want to learn after a long day.”
I snagged the boxes as directed, salted the water, and turned on the stove, setting the boxes on the counter. Then I stood, leaning my hip against the countertop while I watched her roll tiny meat balls.
“Who else did you meet?” she asked, hands busy. “Tin foil’s in the bottom drawer. Can you line a baking sheet?”
“Sure,” I said and did so, finding the baking pan in a lower cupboard and hooking the foil over the edges so it wouldn’t slide around. “Um, Rhodes and his friends, I guess. I sat with them at lunch because there wasn’t a single other seat open.”
She whistled and shot me an appreciative look. “They never let anyone sit with them.”
I just shrugged, turning the oven to 350F for starters, since I wasn’t sure how hot it should be. “I sat down and didn’t leave.”
“Ha,” she crowed. “I’d like to have seen Rhodes’ face.”
“He a problem?” I asked, crossing my arms. After the initial confrontation, the guys had accepted me there almost amicably.
“No,” she said. “Whole family is rich and standoffish though. He’s engaged to a girl named Posey, arranged marriage I heard.”
“That’s what Juniper said,” I said. “Do they all have nature names?”
She paused, considering this and then began neatly filling the baking pan with meatballs. “Just an affectation of folks on that side of town, I guess. They’re old blood, old money.”
“Hippies?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? The kids go to school with us, but they don’t interact with most of us and instead spend their time with each other. Or maybe it’s just me. I’ve been here two years, but I’m still the ‘new’ kid.”
“Calix isn’t so stand-offish. He rode our bus today,” I countered.
“Yeah,” she said, washing her hands briskly. “His family rents a farm near town, the last to get on in the morning before school.”
“He seems nice,” I said, thinking of how nicely muscled, not to mention friendly, he’d been, even if he set off my nerves just by being around.
“Oh, got a crush?” she asked archly, flashing me a smile so I knew she was teasing.
I groaned and snagged a dishcloth and briskly wiped suds off the counter. “I don’t know anyone well enough, yet.”
“He’s got them muscles, Stella. There’s nothing wrong with liking him; he’s totally eye candy.” She grinned at me and slid the pan into the oven, turning the temperature up a little. “Rhodes and his friends too. Chef’s kiss, no joke.”
I just shrugged again, refusing to answer. She wiped her hands on a towel and then retrieved a mop and started in on the floor. I went along all the counters with the dishcloth before wiping down the outside of the cupboards. She finished right around the time I did and put everything away, tossing my dishcloth back into the anteroom next to the washer.
“Vegetables?” I asked, trying to remember what all Mom would include when she made dinner for Dad and me. “And bread maybe?”
“Oh, good idea,” she said. “We can make garlic bread. I just baked a fresh loaf yesterday, and there’s some left still.”
I stepped back while she bustled around.
She fetched the colander of beans from where it had gotten shoved to the back of the counter and passed them to me. “Snap and de-string these, then we’ll boil them.”
I brought them to the sink and washed them, picking out stray leaves and setting the lettuce and radishes aside on the counter. Then I snapped off the blossom end, peeling their strings off in one smooth motion. I’d done this often enough with Mom. Food was always cheaper when you bought it as an ingredient rather than a ready-made meal.
Meanwhile, Anna had retrieved a loaf of bread from the fridge and was neatly slicing it, buttering the slices, and sprinkling garlic salt on them before laying them out in a pan. The stove dinged, and she pulled the meatballs, sizzling in their pan with a smell that made me swallow hard, my stomach groaning. Then she changed the oven to broil and tossed in the bread. The meatballs went in a wide saucepan on the stove, and she decanted a jar of home-canned tomato sauce over them.
I finished the beans, and she snatched the colander out of my hands, dropping them in the stainless steel steamer basket sitting in another saucepan and pouring water in over them before covering them and setting them to boil. By now the spaghetti pot was boiling, so I dropped in the noodles, stirred once, and checked the box for cooking time.
Then I checked the clock and made a mental note.
This left us standing in silence, which Anna apparently couldn’t stand because she wiped her hands on the towel hanging on the stove and turned to me with a grin. “So, how was the acclimation class?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” I told her. “It includes English lessons for those who need them.”
“Yay!” she said with more enthusiasm than I could muster. “They started talking about doing that after I came, and I was interviewed by the school board about what was hardest to adjust to. I’m glad they went with it.”
I studied her, unsure if I could ask. “Was it rough?”
Her enthusiasm dimmed. “Yeah. I got picked on a lot.” Then she brightened. “But that all stopped when Graham came back from the war and I met him at church. No one wanted to cross him.”
I huffed a laugh. “He doesn’t seem mean.”
She gave me a wry half smile. “Not unless needed, and it was oh-so-very-needed.”
“Right,” I said, acknowledging that. “Well, I guess I’m glad the school and town is making an effort.”
She looked around the kitchen, cheeks a bit pink. “Why don’t you start on, um, homework, and I’ll watch dinner?”
I’d overstepped.
“Sure,” I said, without protest, and I headed upstairs.
After dinner, I waddled upstairs, full to the gills with rich food, and started sorting my paperwork from my first day of classes. I’d had more than I should have, but no one had stopped me, which was downright amazing. If I ate like this regularly, I’d be up to fighting weight in just a few months.
The paperwork was mostly informational, like I thought it would be. School rules, curfews imposed by the local government, notable figures, contact information, even a short historical section talking about the Native Americans who had lived here before settlers came and the original names for the area. I set aside paperwork for Donna to sign and skimmed the rest.
Something chimed, loud in the silence of my room.
A quick check showed it wasn’t my junk phone that I’d brought with me, and I looked around bemusedly before it clicked with me what it was. I dug to the bottom of my backpack until I found the phone I’d been gifted, discarded sometime before dinner. I swiped it awake, making a mental note to put in a password, and there were literally dozens of messages waiting for me. The ringer had been on too low for me to hear them from downstairs.
I thumbed through them. Juniper must have given Rhodes and his friends my number, because there were a series of messages that were just copies of their school schedules with nothing personal included. Rhodes had sent a single text.
RHODES
Hey, Dream Girl, what year did you live in San Antonio?
Why did the nickname make me smile? My stupid heart fluttered every time he called me that. I sighed, answered, and then moved to Juniper’s texts, a series of excitable messages about just about anything that came to her mind. In person she was fairly reserved, but in here she bubbled and laughed and was a whole character. I grinned at her last one, demanding to know if I was getting these or if I had already blocked her. Calix’s were next, only a handful. His schedule, asking how I was doing, asking if he could sit next to me on the bus tomorrow. I flushed at that and bit back a smile, texting back an assurance that I wouldn’t mind at all. My stomach fluttered with nerves while I waited for it to send, almost enough to make me cancel the text entirely.
Then I poked around on my phone, seeing what features it had, and my heart skipped a beat. It had unlimited data which meant Internet access.
I set a password first because if I was going to be accessing my personal things from here, I wanted to be sure a casual thief wouldn’t get them. Then I logged into my email, taking the time to skim the multiple long letters from my extended family trying to check in on me, each one more frantic than the last. I’d lost touch with them when my phone had been stolen during a lunch break from the orphan bus early on, and my junk replacement hadn’t been able to access my email.
I took the time to answer each person’s most recent email, explaining that my phone had been stolen, and I was now in Rockport, Wisconsin, a far cry from Charleston, West Virginia where I had been when I’d gotten the news about my parents.
Then came the harder part, sorting through my parents’ email accounts and blinking back tears while I responded to people who hadn’t learned they were dead yet.
Then I checked bank accounts. We’d had all of ours through the same bank, linked together, so I logged in and skimmed the purchases to make sure I was the only one accessing each account. I’d been using a credit card to protect our bank accounts, and, so far, I had been the only one making purchases.
Although I’d lost my phone, I had been smart enough to keep my wallet in my bra.
There were a handful of bills that had come through, yearly renewals, and I took the time to first reset the password using their emails and then reach out to their customer service, asking them to cancel because of my parents’ deaths.
Mom and Dad had both had their phones with them when they deployed and I’d never gotten anything of theirs back, so there was no way for me to log in to some of these accounts; but the ones that had been linked to their emails I could manage.
Then one last check on account balances and then it was time to make a credit card payment. There were two off-schedule, large deposits from the military, which I guessed was their hazard pay. Or maybe a death benefit? Who knew?
Regardless, if I was careful, there was enough money in those accounts to last me at least a year living on my own.
Then I checked my social media, wading through friends’ messages from after I’d lost my phone and answering them with a brief update.
There was a friend request pending with a clearly fake name: Starbound.
I went to her page and saw that she listed her location as Rockport. I chewed my lip while I debated, and then I approved it.
Not more than a minute later, she messaged me.
STARBOUND
It’s Juuni. Do you never answer your messages? Like, come on, I had to search everywhere to find you. Seriously, I pulled Mom’s records, and don’t tell her that, to find your name. And why don’t you go by Aster? Aster is cute, but anyway, answer your text messages?
ME
I just got upstairs. I was getting to it.
JUNIPER
Oh, thank the Stars, you had me all sorts of worried that my stupid brother had driven you off You know how guys get, and he’s worse than most.
ME
He's engaged.
JUNIPER
So what? I think you'd be a good fit for him, and obviously he thought so too at some point or we wouldn't be in this situation You didn't tell me you sat with him at lunch I had to pry that out of him.
ME
Punctuation is your friend.
JUNIPER
Shut up I'm on a phone here Do you know how much of a pain it is to type on here? No wait you have a phone too so how do you manage to sound so prim?
I laughed at that and swallowed a yawn. Juuni was growing on me the more we chatted. Glancing at the time on the phone, it was late. I tuned out her next few messages while I got ready for bed. Someone was in the bathroom showering, so I just rinsed my mouth in the kitchen.
On the way back upstairs, I ran into Tom standing with his hand raised to knock on my door. There was no sign of Donna, and I shifted uneasily at speaking to him alone, the floor creaking beneath me.
He startled and turned before he blew out a sigh. "Just checking on you. School went okay?" He rubbed at the back of his neck, the skin reddening. He had a crazy farmer's tan, showcased by his worn flannel pajamas.
I pasted a pleasant enough smile on my face. "It was fine. I have a phone now, but I don't have anyone's number from here."
"Oh," he said, brows climbing. "Where did you get that?"
"Our acclimation program's mentors handed them out," I said, pulling the phone out of my bra and swiping it on. It chimed repeatedly with messages while I passed it to him.
"Making friends already," he chuckled and fat fingered his number, Donna's, Anna's, and Graham's for good measure into it.
"I'm not sure what her malfunction is," I said with a laugh. "She's a little excitable.
