Catering to Nobody (Goldy Schulz Series)

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“She just doesn’t have anywhere to live while she’s here, Goldy honey,” my ex-mother-in-law had said, “and she needs Fritz to treat her medical problems. Take her in for a while. Give her a job. She’s never done anything out there in eastern Colorado except live with her folks. This gal wants to learn, Goldy. You can teach her.”

This I had come to doubt, I reflected as I pushed down on lemon halves to ream out their juice for the lemonade. Patty Sue had been so sheltered by her parents that her approach to any new endeavor was timidity, confusion, or both. She had attended a local community college “for a while,” she said vaguely, as if that, like everything else in her life, had not quite panned out. When she first arrived she had told me all about herself, including the fact that she was a virgin. Dr. Fritz Korman, John Richard’s father and the other half of Korman and Korman Ob-Gyn, was treating Patty Sue for amenorrhea. Which meant she hadn’t had a menstrual cycle for the last year.

“This is a bad thing?” Marla had asked at the last meeting of Amour Anonymous, our women’s group.

“It needs to be treated,” I replied. “Her doctor out in Fort Morgan sent her to Fritz, who claims to be some kind of specialist with it. It’s serious enough that Patty Sue’s mother let her come out and live with me, although she calls once a week to make sure I’m not corrupting her.”

“Not a chance of that, I’m afraid,” Marla said. “Maybe we could bring her into the group as a special assignment.”

I doubted if Patty Sue would have recognized herself in any of the literature about love-addicted women, which the Amour Anonymous group reads religiously. Sometimes I wondered if she recognized herself as anything. She was tall, lovely, and unsophisticated to the point of never having operated a dishwasher. She wanted to learn to drive a car but was intimidated by crown roast of pork. At first she had been quite eager to learn the catering business. She had made cementlike loaves of bread and overcooked hamburgers with the brightest of smiles. But just when she started mastering the skills, she had detoured into a state of distraction.

In September she’d started avoiding my eyes and my questions. Perhaps she was thinking about her sickness. It was strange because she didn’t look sick. In fact, physical fitness was her one obsession. She had even asked that her first wages as a caterer’s helper go to adding her to my athletic club membership. Despite the mood shift, which she unfortunately could not blame on PMS, she still worked out at the gym. But her energy had become feverish instead of enthusiastic. And her cooking abilities, such as they were, had gone to hell.

“That was great,” Patty Sue said now as she licked her fingers from the strawberries. “This kitchen always smells super.”

I set the bowl aside and broke three eggs into an iron skillet, then went back to squeezing lemons until it was time for the over-easy part. These days, nothing was easy for Patty Sue until it was over. My attempts in the last two weeks to teach her to cook anything more complicated than toast, much less eggs, had not gone well. Words like marinate and braise were beyond her. I had asked if she was homesick. She’d said no, and gone on to leave the top off the food processor when she worked with flour, generating small blizzards.

So I had put her to work serving to pay for her rent, food, and right to exercise indoors. For Laura Smiley’s wake she was in charge of the strawberry shortcake buffet. This would mean little beyond keeping a platter stacked with scones and replenishing bowls with sliced strawberries and whipped cream.

“Where’s Arch?” I asked as I placed little glasses of orange juice next to each placemat.

Patty Sue said, “On the phone, I think.”

Since she obviously was not going to get him, I started down the hall to his room. On the way I glanced at the drawings of mountain flowers he had done last spring. Laura had encouraged his artwork after he’d produced the sketches of high-country animals. These delicate pen-and-ink works were of bluebell, fireweed, daisy, lady’s slipper—all part of a project on nectar producers. Arch had chewed his tongue and furrowed his brow while drawing the details of tendrils and stamens.

Arch was the other problem-in-residence. Never gregarious, he had seemed even more isolated since the beginning of school. Twice he had come home with a black eye and a note from the principal saying he had been in a fight. I knew better than to pry. Or worse, rescue. I just wanted to understand what was going on.

Since Laura’s death he had become even more withdrawn. Whenever I was near he spoke on the phone in a hushed tone. His eyes glazed more and more in indifference, as if he were taking lessons from Patty Sue. Our days of counting spoons, of telling stories, of loitering next to the hill of pumpkins at the grocery store to choose just the right one for a jack-o’-lantern—these were over. Immersed in fantasy role-playing games, he prepared and embarked on elaborate paper adventures, the purpose of which eluded me. As I edged away from the drawings and approached his room I could hear the authoritative voice he invariably used when directing one of these adventures. I slid his door open.

“… and since you have trespassed the space in front of their lair,” he announced, “you will be attacked by a low-flying straight line of stringrays—”

“Arch!” I stuck my head into his room. “Hate to interrupt. Breakfast.”

He looked up at me from his neatly made bed. He was already wearing his white shirt and black pants. Soon he would cover this outfit with one of our white chef’s aprons.

“To be continued,” he said, and hung up. Behind the glasses his eyes were inscrutable.

“You’re all right?” I said, half statement, half question.

“I’m not hungry,” he said with straight-lipped calm. “For eggs or anything. Let’s just go.”

And so we did. Patty Sue ate all the eggs. We packed the van and set out.

The air was cool but calm, quite different from the snarling frost-blowing beast an October day could be. At eight thousand feet above sea level, snow and cakes fell unexpectedly. After eleven years I’d learned how to adjust the recipes, but driving the van through storms and over ice remains a challenge. This day the aspen leaves moved languidly as the van sputtered out of the driveway’s dust. Above, the sky was deep blue and cloudless, as if nature were holding her breath before the first storms. Starting the descent to Main Street, we passed a vacant lot and had a glimpse of the far distance.

“Oh,” said Patty Sue, “what is that?”

She was pointing to the town’s namesake, the Aspen Meadow, now a large patch of gold in a green-and-brown quilt of trees about seven miles away. This patchwork of fall color nestled at the base of mountains already blanketed with white. I explained to her that that area was known as the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve. There, I added as we turned onto Main Street, the forest was so thick that during dry spells even hikers were barred entry, for fear of forest fire.

“Arch knows all about the Aspen Meadow,” I announced, hoping to invite him out of his silence. “He’s done drawings as part of his school work.”

“You do?” said Patty Sue as she turned to face him. “You have?”

“Oh, I guess,” said Arch in a flat voice. “The Webelos hike in for the last pack meeting of the year,” he said. “The woods are real deep. We see a lot of deer and elk and foxes and stuff like that. But to get in you have to go down a long dirt road. Fritz fishes the upper Cottonwood in the summer, and Pomeroy Locraft raises bees.” He thought for a moment and then explained to Patty Sue, “I used to help Pom with the hives, last spring when I was studying bees.”

“And flowers,” I added.

“Did you get stung?” Patty Sue asked. “Did you catch fish?”

“I caught some trout,” said Arch. He thought for a minute. “The bees never stung me.” I looked at him in the mirror. He was shaking his head at Patty Sue, as if he were twenty and she eleven. He explained, “You learn how to be careful. Pomeroy taught me stuff like wearing white around the bees.” Arch sighed. “He taught me a lot.”

“This Pomeroy,” I said to anticipate Patty Sue’s next question, “teaches driver ed over at the high school and does the apiary in the summer. Pomeroy is also recently divorced.” I stopped at Main Street’s one red light and smiled at my housemate. “A new single person in town can be an interesting part of the landscape, too.”

“Oh,” said Patty Sue.

“Will Dad be at Ms. Smiley’s?” asked Arch.

“Yep,” I said, and pushed the van’s grinding gears into first. “Vonette and Fritz, too. Plus all the teachers from the schools.”

Patty Sue said, “I’ve never seen a dead person.”