Stolen Secrets Read online

  At least we had that in common.

  Swallowing my nerves, I followed the woman down the hall. When we reached the kitchen at the other end of the apartment, she turned around. “Someone has taken my teapot.”

  I cleared my throat and pointed to the silver kettle peeking out of the papery leaves of a dehydrated ficus tree. This was getting weirder by the second. “I have to go in a few minutes,” I told Mrs. Pfeiffer. “You said you wanted to talk about my mom?”

  She extracted the pot, sending a flurry of leaves to the floor. After she put it on the stove, we sat at a round table by a bay window that overlooked a blocky patch of yellowish grass caged in by a wood fence. She glanced at the pudgy dog in the backyard, nose twitching in a hydrangea bush. A wrinkle caved between the old woman’s eyebrows. She pounded a fist on the single-paned window, which shook against the assault.

  “Scheisshund!”

  The dog’s head jerked up. He tucked his tail between his legs and scampered off.

  “Is that his name?” I asked.

  “Yes. It most certainly is.”

  The teapot gave a breathy whistle.

  The basset hound waddled back into the yard. He thrust his snout into a flower bed again. “Is he your dog?” I asked, hoping for the animal’s sake that the answer was no.

  “Ha! That menace belongs to my neighbor. Those type of dogs are vicious, trained to kill, you know.”

  A laugh of shock bubbled out of me.

  She slid a plate of cookies onto the table. They smelled like Christmas—cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon. I hadn’t eaten anything since my walnut lunch. I nibbled on one as Adelle Pfeiffer brought out a pair of china cups, dotted with pink and lavender roses, and a silver bowl filled with sugar cubes—the kind you see in fancy restaurants. With trembling hands, she poured the hot water into teacups.

  “What’s my mom going to do for you?” I asked.

  “Who’s your mother?”

  I stared at her. Was she kidding? “Gretchen? Gretchen Newman?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I hired Gretchen to do odds and ends for me. I … I don’t do as much as I used to.”

  Odds and ends? “You mean, like helping you with your restaurant?” Though at this point, it was pretty clear that Mrs. Pfeiffer didn’t own a five-star bistro requiring a top-notch pastry chef for overpriced desserts.

  She looked at me blankly. “Do I have a restaurant? I’d remember if I had a restaurant … Yes, I would. I would definitely remember something like that.” Her face swelled with uncertainty. “Wouldn’t I?”

  “I’m sure you don’t have a restaurant,” I said. “Guess I heard wrong.” Fact: My mother was a big fat liar. I dunked my third cookie into the tea.

  “You look like my oma. Chiseled cheekbones, and eyes like the deepest part of the ocean. She had another name … her name was …” She dropped her chin into her hand and stared out the window. “I don’t know.”

  She wasn’t making sense. Time to get to the point. “What exactly is my mom going to do for you? Cook?”

  “I’m fabulous in the kitchen; better than her, better than that Vickie person the agency sent.”

  I had a sinking feeling that Mom had abandoned her goal of finding a pastry job. But caregiving? I couldn’t see her doing that.

  “Thanks for everything.” I stood up, catching most of the cookie crumbs on my lap in my hands. “I have to read three chapters of Faulkner for my Honors English class.”

  “Ah, the gentleman who said, ‘Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.’”

  “He said that?” It was the dumbest quote I’d ever heard. Facts were the only thing you could count on. Without them, there were only the imprecise perceptions of witnesses.

  “Don’t go, Livvy,” she muttered from behind her teacup.

  Livvy? I’d introduced myself as Olivia. “How do you know my nickname?”

  She cocked her head to the side. “Do you know who I am?”

  “Um, Mrs. Pfeiffer? The person who interviewed my mom?”

  “Gretchen’s my daughter,” the old woman said. “I pay her to protect me.”

  I stared at her, the words in my brain trying to sort themselves out. “My grandmother’s dead. She died a long time ago.”

  Mrs. Pfeiffer shut her eyes. “So that’s how the story goes.”

  Story?

  “It’s a fact,” she said, “that I am not yet pushing up daisies.”

  This woman’s driveway didn’t meet the street. She had to be making this up, or hallucinating, or lying for some reason. I edged toward the door.

  “There are people who know the truth,” she said, wagging her crooked finger.

  I rushed down the hallway, not even slowing. Mrs. Pfeiffer shouted my name. It sounded ugly, the way she cut O-LI-VI-A into four sharp syllables.

  I slammed the door shut behind me.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  I NEVER MET MY GRANDPARENTS. THEY GOT MARRIED after World War II. My grandfather died of a heart attack right before Mom went to college. My grandmother passed away in her sixties from the flu, or maybe it was pneumonia. Mom hadn’t said much about them, but one thing I knew, she wouldn’t tell a lie this big.

  I tried to collect my thoughts on the way home. When I got to the apartment, it was empty. I looked out the window. Couples huddled together at café tables on the sidewalk across the street, heat lamps glowing above them. The downtown bus pulled up to unload the business crowd. A man’s tie lifted in the wind, swatting him in the face.

  I texted Mom. Need to talk.

  She wrote back. What’s the emergency?

  Just come home.

  She called a minute later. I let it go to voice mail. I had to talk to her in person, see her face. But while I waited, I needed to do something to take my mind off the old lady. The apartment was filled with boxes, the same as the day we’d moved in. I hadn’t wanted to unload them and repack later. But right now, the chaos closed in on me like the sides of a trash compactor. I pushed all the boxes against the walls to clear space in the middle. There, that was better.

  I hired Gretchen to do odds and ends for me, the old lady had said. Mom could pipe frosting on cakes like no one else, but if the task involved grunt work, she became an expert delegator. She wouldn’t last two weeks at a job like that.

  Anyway, Adelle Pfeiffer was a fruitcake with extra nuts in the mix. She said Mom was her daughter, but daughters didn’t work for their mothers. Not for pay. They helped out because that’s what families did.

  Not to mention, my grandma was stone-cold dead.

  I was draping tablecloths over cardboard boxes at either side of the couch to make end tables when Mom stormed into the house. “Jesus, Liv, are you okay?” Her splotchy cheeks shone with sweat.

  I stared at her “job hunting” outfit. Wrinkled pants, and my blouse, last button undone. Gone were the casual clothes I’d seen an hour ago. I pointed to her briefcase. “What’s in there?”

  Mom’s gaze flicked around the room, landing nowhere. “Just the usual crap I need for interviews. Paper, pens, the photo album of desserts …”

  “What about the resumes?”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said, heading to the couch.

  “I found a Post-it with an address on it, so I went there after school. I saw you leave that house, Mom.”

  “What?” she asked blankly.

  I waited, hoping beyond reason that she could explain this in a way that made sense. Instead she murmured, “I didn’t realize you felt the need to spy on me, Livvy.”

  As if I had nothing better to do than stalk my own mother. “I saw you throw away those resumes, Mom. I know you didn’t wear the clothes I picked out for you. What’s going on?”

  Mom painted a smile on her face. “I didn’t want to tell you that you’d wasted your time. It’s not the way business operates in my industry. Proof of my skills depends on how I bake, not what I say on a piece of paper or what I wear.” She tucked an errant cur
l behind her ear, but it sprang back.

  “That address was a house, not a restaurant,” I said.

  I could barely make out Mom’s features in the darkening apartment, but her sigh was clear. “Liv, not now, please. I’m so tired, I could …”

  So tired she could what? Drink? Don’t go there, Liv. “Who is Mrs. Pfeiffer?” I demanded.

  She looked at me as if I was speaking another language.

  “She said she’s my grandmother.” The only sound in the room was a distant siren, growing closer, before fading away.

  “Adelle’s a confused woman,” Mom finally said. “She gets mixed up a lot.”

  I recalled the woman’s words: Gretchen’s my daughter. I pay her to protect me. Who was wrong? The demented old woman, or the one person I thought would always be truthful with me? “Come on, Mom. What’s this about?”

  “Listen, I know I haven’t been completely honest …”

  “Completely honest?” I repeated. “A person’s either telling the truth one hundred percent or she’s a liar. There’s nothing in between.”

  “Everything’s so black and white with you,” she snapped. “Your grandmother was dead. At least to me.”

  Wait, what? Her words were like raindrops, bouncing off my skin. It took a few seconds to absorb the meaning.

  “I didn’t plan on seeing her again,” she went on. “It was easier to bury her six feet under, metaphorically speaking.”

  The lady wasn’t wacked after all; Mom was the insane one. Adelle Pfeiffer was my grandmother. Mom had buried her, all right—alive. White-hot anger fueled my words. “You don’t like your mother, so you tell me she’s dead? That’s sick, Mom!”

  She seemed to shrink before my eyes. “Try explaining to your kid that you hate your mother when she thinks her own mommy’s an angel.”

  Oh my God, I have a grandmother. “Believe me, I never thought that,” I snapped.

  She clamped her lips together, tears welling in her eyes. My body tensed, a stony exterior meant to keep out her drama. That left me feeling as empty as the hollow guts of a ghost.

  “I didn’t want my mother to ruin you the way she ruined me,” Mom said through tears. “Saying she was dead put an end to that possibility.”

  “What gave you the right to decide that for me?” I thought about my father, who lived across the ocean with his new family. I had no one left but my mother—not a single relative. That’s what she’d told me. That’s what I’d believed.

  “If you’d grown up with my mother, you’d understand.”

  “We had tea and cookies, Mom. She’s a harmless old lady.”

  “I know you like everything to be precise and factual, easy to explain, but my relationship with my mother isn’t that simple,” she spat out.

  My cheeks burned as if I’d been slapped. “Why are we living in the same zip code if she’s that horrible?”

  Mom opened her mouth but answered with a shrug. I pushed past her, out the door.

  “Where do you think you’re going? Get back here!” she called.

  I was on the street, heading in the opposite direction from the one I’d taken this morning. Minutes later, I ran into a cluster of run-down buildings. I knew from Mom’s warnings that this was San Francisco’s version of the projects. People milled about—some talking to neighbors, some to themselves. I felt self-conscious in my cashmere sweater—like I was pretending to be somebody I wasn’t. Truth was, at this point Mom and I probably had less money than some of the people who lived here.

  I headed for the empty playground across the street and scuttled up the slide, parking myself at the top. Mom tore around the corner. I drew my knees to my mouth to muffle a sob. When she spotted me, she kicked off her shoes and attempted to climb the slide, but her stocking feet kept sliding out from under her. She strung together some major league curse words before tiptoeing across the sand to the stairs at the back of the structure.

  When she dropped down beside me, I scooted back until the safety bars dug into my side.

  “Adelle was a lousy mother,” she began. “She’d be a lousy grandmother, too.”

  “Then why’d you move us here?” I persisted.

  “My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s three years ago. I guess that’s why she didn’t tell you her married name, Adelle Friedman.”

  I pictured the teapot, nestled in the branches of the ficus plant. Pfeiffer must be my grandmother’s maiden name.

  “She makes stuff up all the time,” Mom said. “Last month a policeman found her wandering around Crissy Field. She got lost, even though she’s lived here for twenty-five years. She told him she was Cleopatra. Luckily, there was an expired driver’s license in her purse.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  She glanced at her hands. I saw that her nails were ragged, bitten to the quick. A fleck of silver polish remained on her thumb. “Adelle moved here after my father died,” Mom said. “The last time I saw her was the summer before my junior year in college. Visiting her was like shelling out money for a root canal.”

  She searched my face for a smile. I wouldn’t give her one. “So that’s why you knew all the streets around here. You never asked Tom for directions. He didn’t even live here.” I swept my fingers across the grate. Dirt sifted through the holes to the ground. “What could she have possibly done to make you hate her so much?”

  Mom shrugged. “Which story do you want to hear?”

  “Any.”

  “My mother was … is … an impatient person. Raising a kid was too messy, too slow for her. Barking orders got immediate results, or at least that’s what she thought.”

  I remembered the way Adelle had spit out my name when I’d tried to leave.

  “One time, when I was seven, we went to a friend’s pool party,” Mom said. “I was content to hang my feet over the edge, but Adelle insisted that I get in the water. I couldn’t swim, but she promised to hold on to me. We waded out to the middle, me in her arms, and all of a sudden …” Mom spread her arms like eagle wings. “The third time I bobbed to the surface, I saw her in the shallow end of the pool, watching me. Some man I didn’t know jumped in, clothes and all. My mother berated the poor guy for a half hour. She told him I would never learn to swim if people interfered. Pretty much everyone thought my mother was a nut job. I never got invited to another party.” She hardly inhaled before switching stories. “When I was twelve, I wanted a CB radio for my birthday. No surprise, I didn’t get it. It cost about a hundred and fifty dollars, I think, which was a fortune back then. Still is. Anyway, I saved up all my paper route money, and a year later, I bought it myself. My mother had a fit, said it was a waste. She threw it against the wall and broke it into a heap of plastic. ‘One hundred and fifty dollars worth of garbage, that’s what you bought yourself,’ she told me.”

  The examples weren’t nice, it’s true. No one would want a mother like that. But they didn’t really seem bad enough to sever ties with her forever.

  “She shouldn’t have had a kid in the first place,” Mom finished.

  “You and I wouldn’t be talking right now if she hadn’t,” I pointed out.

  “So I should put up with her cruelty because she gave birth to me? God, Liv, grow up. Being a parent means more than carrying a baby for nine months.”

  Like you’d know, I thought. You drank through the first eleven years of my life. I shook my head, trying to dislodge the thought. My mother was a good person who’d behaved badly.

  “At the end of my last trip to see her, I left on a train headed to the East Coast and I didn’t come back. I haven’t regretted my decision,” she said.

  I couldn’t hide my shock. “You mean you didn’t even talk on the phone?”

  “Not until last month when I got a call from her lawyer. He said she needed full-time care, which meant he had to hire two caregivers to share the day. The first thing I did was look for a decent care facility. My mother could afford the Ritz-Carlton of retirement homes. She was
a poet who never earned much, but luckily, Dad’s life insurance invested well.”

  A poet? This didn’t jibe with the portrait my mom painted of a tyrannical mother.

  “Of course she refused to go into a home, even though she’s probably close to ninety,” Mom added.

  “You don’t know how old she is?” I asked, surprised. “Her records were lost before she came to the U.S. She took advantage of it, I can tell you that. She was thirty for at least a decade.”

  “This doesn’t explain why you have to be her caregiver.”

  Just then two boys around my age walked by, jeans slung halfway down their hips. They wore oversized sneakers that flopped on their feet. They saw us on the slide and nudged each other with their elbows.

  “Shit,” the tall one said. “Looks like some doves flew into the wrong jungle.”

  Mom tensed beside me. I knew what she was thinking: guns, knives, drug dealers. But there was something about those boys. They didn’t sound angry. In fact they reminded me of some kids in my classes. I considered the mixed-up rules of life at Grant High, and something inside me shifted. I bent my arms and cooed like a bird, grinning so they knew I was playing along. We traded smiles as they turned the corner.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Mom hissed. “This isn’t maple sugar Vermont.”

  “They’re people, Mom. Like you and me, trying to get by on too little.”

  She nodded. “That’s why we moved here, Liv. For our future. Adelle’s lawyer told me that if I didn’t help take care of her, my mother might write me out of the will. I didn’t even think I was still in there.” She covered my hand with her own. I flinched and pulled it back. “I have more than myself to think about now. So I quit my job.”

  Audrey’s text about how Gourmet City was hiring popped into my head. Thought your mom was laid off. Yeah, that’s what I’d thought, too. The lies were piling up faster than farm manure.

  “I got a good deal, Liv. I work from eight to four every day, and then the other caregiver takes over until morning.”

  Gourmet City had paid Mom a good wage. And I’d covered most of my own expenses with babysitting money. Besides, selling out to collect an inheritance seemed greedy.