My hand shot up. “I have a third idea.”
“Oh?”
“The staff is conspiring against her. An elaborate trick.”
Sister Josephine smiled. “Intriguing theory.”
Mabel said, “It’s complicated enough with two,” and a few other people agreed with her.
“It’s better if it’s complicated,” I said.
Mabel turned in her desk to face me. “Wait. Excuse me? It’s better if it’s complicated?”
“Of course it is! It’s the point of the novel. We can search for the truth, we can convince ourselves of whatever we want to believe, but we’ll never actually know. I guarantee that we can find evidence to argue that the staff is playing a trick on the governess.”
Sister Josephine said, “I’ll add it to the list.”
After school, Mabel and I split up our science assignment on the 31, hopped off around the corner from Trouble Coffee, and went in to celebrate our excellent time management with two cappuccinos.
“I keep thinking about ghosts,” I said as we walked alongside the pastel houses with flat facades and square windows. “They show up in all my favorite books.”
“Final essay topic?”
I nodded. “But I have to figure out a thesis.”
“The only thing I like about The Turn of the Screw is the governess’s first sentence.” Mabel paused to tug on her sandal strap.
I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face. I said, “‘I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong.’”
“Of course you would know it by heart.”
“Well, it’s amazing.”
“I thought the whole thing would be that way, but it’s just confusing and pointless. The ghosts—if there are ghosts—don’t even do anything. They just show up and stand around.”
I opened our iron gate and we climbed the stairs to the landing. Gramps was calling hello before we’d even closed the door behind us. We set down our coffees, shrugged off our backpacks, and went straight to the kitchen. His hands were covered in flour; Wednesdays were his favorite because there were two of us to bake for.
“Smells delicious,” Mabel said.
“Say it in Spanish,” Gramps said.
“Huele delicioso. What is it?” Mabel said.
“Chocolate Bundt cake. Now say, ‘The chocolate Bundt cake smells delicious.’”
“Gramps,” I said. “You’re exoticizing her again.”
He lifted his hands, busted. “I can’t help it if I want to hear some words in a beautiful language.”
She laughed and said the sentence, and many other sentences with only a few words I understood, and Gramps wiped his hands on his apron and then touched them to his heart.
“Beautiful!” he said. “Hermosa!”
And then he headed out of the kitchen and saw something that made him stop. “Girls. Please sit.”
“Uh-oh. The love seat,” Mabel whispered.
We crossed to the faded red love seat and sat together, waiting to discover the subject of that afternoon’s lecture.
“Girls,” he said again. “We have to talk about this.” He picked up one of the to-go cups that we’d set on the coffee table, held it with disdain. “When I was growing up, none of this stuff was here. Trouble Coffee. Who names an establishment ‘Trouble’? A bar, sure, maybe. But a café? No. Mabel’s parents and I spend good money to send you girls to a nice school. Now you want to stand in lines to buy lunch and spend far too much on a cup of coffee. How much did this cost?”
“Four dollars,” I said.
“Four? Each?” He shook his head. “Let me offer you a helpful piece of advice. That is three dollars more than a cup of coffee should be.”
“It’s a cappuccino.”
He sniffed the cup. “They can call it whatever they want to call it. I have a perfectly good pot in the kitchen and some beans that are fresh enough for anyone.”
I rolled my eyes, but Mabel was ardent in her respect for elders.
“It was a splurge,” she said. “But you’re right.”
“Four dollars.”
“Come on, Gramps. I smell the cake. Shouldn’t you check on it?”
“You’re a sly girl,” he said to me.
“No,” I said. “Only hungry.”
And I was. It was torture to wait for the cake to cool, but when it did, we devoured it.
“Save a sliver for the fellas!” Gramps implored us, but for four old guys, his friends were the pickiest eaters I’d ever known. Like the girls at school, they were off gluten one week only to suddenly be on it again if the meal was enticing enough. They were laying off sugar or carbs or caffeine or meat or dairy, but maybe a little butter was fine now and then. When they broke their own rules, they complained about it. Took bites of Gramps’s sweets and declared them too sugary.
“They don’t deserve this cake,” I said between bites. “They won’t appreciate it like we do. Maybe you should mail a piece to Birdie. Overnight it.”
“Does she know about your baking?” Mabel asked him.
“I may have mentioned it once or twice.”
“One bite of this and she’ll be yours forever,” Mabel said.
Gramps shook his head and laughed, and Mabel and I were soon stuffed and happy, traipsing back out as Jones, the first of Gramps’s buddies, arrived, holding his lucky card deck in one hand and his cane in the other.