Chapter 8: Rockland
The group home kitchen in Rockland had a gas stove that ticked like a clock and a griddle warped in the middle, but Lila Marsh loved it anyway. She was fourteen now, five years past the Beacon's back door, and she had carried Lou's pancake in her hands all that time.
"You can't just take over," said Devon, twelve, arms crossed against the counter. "Mrs. Adley's gonna kill you."
"Mrs. Adley is at the dentist until four," Lila said, tying her hair back. "And you all are going to eat the best pancakes of your lives. This is not a request. This is a rescue."
Tommy, ten, peeked around Devon. "I don't like pancakes."
"You don't like pancakes," Lila said, "because nobody ever made you a real one. Watch and learn."
The pantry gave up flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, milk, and vanilla. Lila measured by eye and feel, talking herself through it. "Flour to here. Sugar, one spoonful. Salt, a pinch."
"You're talking to the bowl," Devon said.
"I'm talking to the cook," Lila said. "Me. I'm the cook."
She cracked an egg one-handed and missed, and yolk ran down her wrist, and everybody laughed. Lila laughed too, because Lou had laughed the first time Lila burned a pancake clean through.
"Lila Marsh." A woman's voice from the doorway. "What in the name of all that is holy are you doing?"
Peg Renshaw, the house cook, sixty and floury to the elbows, stood with her hands on her hips.
"Hi, Mrs. Renshaw," Lila said. "I'm making pancakes."
"I can see that. The question is why you're making them in my kitchen without asking."
"The kids deserve something good on a Saturday," Lila said. "And I know how to do this. Somebody taught me."
Peg looked at the batter, the eggshells, the kids already lined up with plates. She looked at Lila's face, which was trying hard not to look hopeful.
"Who taught you?" Peg asked.
"A cook," Lila said. "Her name is Lou. She owns a diner in Port Ellery. The Beacon Diner."
Tommy tugged Peg's sleeve. "She drew her a sun."
Lila's hand went to her pocket before she could stop it, though the napkin wasn't there. It was in her shoe, tucked under the insole where no one ever looked. "The first night I went to her door, I was nine and starving and it was raining, and she fed me. Then she took a napkin and drew a sun on it, just a circle with rays. And she wrote, You matter. Come back anytime."
The kitchen was very quiet. The griddle ticked.
"You kept it," Peg said. It wasn't a question.
"Five years," Lila said. "Every place I went, it went in my shoe."
Devon said, "That's the dumbest place to keep something important."
"It's the safest," Lila said. "Nobody steals shoes."
Peg tasted the batter. "You remembered the vanilla."
"Lou says a pancake without vanilla is just bread with ambition," Lila said, and grinned, because she had never said that sentence out loud before and it sounded exactly like Lou.
Peg laughed. "All right, chef. One hour. I supervise. You burn my griddle, you scrub it."
Lila poured the first circle of batter and stood with the spatula the way Lou had stood, hip out, wrist loose, waiting for the moment. "Now," she whispered, and flipped, and the pancake turned in the air and landed golden, and the kids exploded.
"She flipped it! Did you see that?"
Peg watched Lila work. The pancakes came off in a steady rhythm, and the kids ate standing up because nobody wanted to wait. Tommy took a bite and went silent, which in Tommy was praise.
"This is the thing you told me about," Devon said through a mouthful. "The pancake she taught you."
"The first one I made, I burned it black," Lila said, flipping another. "Lou said, that's a pancake for the crows, and she made me eat it anyway. Said a cook eats her mistakes. Then she stood behind me and put her hand over mine and showed me the wrist, the flick. She said, you have to mean it. The pancake knows."
"The pancake knows," Tommy repeated solemnly, like scripture.
Peg tried a pancake, and her eyes did something complicated. "That's a good pancake," she said quietly. "A professional pancake."
She has a rule, painted over the pass so everybody sees it. Nobody leaves hungry. That's the whole menu. That's everything.
"You miss her," Peg said. The words landed behind Lila's ribs. "They moved me before I could say goodbye. She didn't know where I went." Her voice did something she didn't let it do, and she fixed it. "But I had the napkin. So it was fine."
"It wasn't fine," Peg said.
"No. It wasn't. But I'm going back. I'm going to learn to cook for real, and I'm going to walk into her diner and say, you taught me this, and she's going to act like she isn't crying, and I'll pretend I believe her."
Tommy put his plate down and hugged her around the waist, sticky hands and all, and she let him, spatula in the air.
Peg put a hand on her shoulder, warm and floury. "You've got the hands for it," she said. "And the head. And the heart, which is the part you can't teach. Lou gave you a good start."
"She gave me everything," Lila said.
Twenty-three pancakes, not one left over, which Peg said was the truest review a cook could get. When the kitchen was clean, Peg found a pencil and a napkin, drew a small lopsided sun in the corner, and handed it to Lila. "For your collection."
Lila folded it into her pocket. The kitchen smelled like vanilla and butter, and Lila Marsh stood in the middle of it and knew, the way you know a thing in your bones, exactly who she was going to be.