Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(15)

Kate rolled her eyes.

“Honey is one of my favorite nutraceuticals,” her father told Pyotr.

Bunny offered the jar to Pyotr. “Pyoder?” she asked.

“I am okay.”

He was watching Kate, for some reason. He had a way of keeping his lids at half-mast, which made him seem to be arriving at some private conclusion as he studied her.

There was a loud clicking sound. Kate started and turned toward her father, who waved his cell phone at her. “I think I’m getting the hang of this thing,” he said.

“Well, quit it.”

“I only wanted to practice.”

“Take one of me,” Bunny begged. She put her chocolate bar down and dabbed her mouth hastily with her napkin. “Take one and send it to my phone.”

“I don’t know how to do that yet,” her father said. But he snapped her picture anyhow. Then he said, “Pyoder, you were hidden behind Bunny in that one. Go over and sit next to Kate and let me take one of both of you.”

Pyotr promptly changed places, but Kate said, “What’s got into you, Father? You’ve had that phone a year and a half and you never gave it a glance until now.”

“It’s time I joined the modern world,” he told her, and he raised the phone to his eye again as if it were a Kodak. Kate pushed her chair back and stood up, trying to get out of the shot, and the click sounded again and her father lowered the phone to check the results.

“I shall help wash the dishes,” Pyotr told Kate. He stood up too.

“Never mind; that’s Bunny’s job.”

“Oh, tonight why don’t you and Pyoder do it,” Dr. Battista said, “because Bunny has homework, I’ll bet.”

“No, I don’t,” Bunny said.

Bunny almost never had homework. It was mystifying.

“Well, but we need to talk about your math tutor, though,” Dr. Battista said.

“What about her?”

“Spanish tutor,” Kate said.

“We need to talk about your Spanish tutor. Come along,” he said, standing.

“I don’t know what we need to say about him,” Bunny told her father, but she rose and followed him out of the room.

Pyotr was already stacking plates. Kate said, “Seriously, Pyotr, I’ve got this under control. Thanks anyhow.”

“You say this because I am foreign,” he told her, “but I know that American men wash dishes.”

“Not in this house. Actually, none of us do. We just throw them in the machine and run it whenever it’s full. We take some out for the next meal, and then we put them back in and run the machine when it’s full again.”

He thought about it. “This means some dishes are washed two times,” he said, “even though they were not eaten from.”

“Two times or half a dozen times; you got it.”

“And sometimes you are maybe using already eaten-from dish, by accident.”

“Only if one of us has licked it really, really clean,” she said. She laughed. “It’s a system. Father’s system.”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “A system.”

He turned on the faucet in the sink and started rinsing plates. Her father’s system did not involve pre-rinsing; just send any scuzzy dish through the machine a second time, were his instructions. Besides, even without the second pass they would know it had at least been sterilized. But she sensed that Pyotr already disapproved enough and so she didn’t try to stop him.

Although he was running hot water, which was terrible for the environment and would have driven her father crazy.

“There is no housemaid?” Pyotr asked after a moment.

“Not anymore,” Kate said. She was putting the meat mash back in the fridge. “That’s why we have Father’s systems.”

“Your mother passed away.”

“Died,” Kate said. “Yep.”

“I am sorry for your loss,” he said. He spoke as if he’d memorized the sentence word for word.

“Oh, that’s okay,” Kate said. “I never knew her that well.”

“Why you did not know her?”

“She developed some kind of depression right after I was born.” Kate was in the dining room now, wiping off the table. She returned to the kitchen and said, “Took one look at me and fell into despair.” She laughed.

Pyotr didn’t laugh himself. She remembered he’d been reared in an orphanage. “I guess you didn’t know your mother, either,” she said.

“No,” he said. He was slotting plates into the dishwasher. Already they looked clean enough to eat off of. “I was found.”

“A foundling?”

“Yes, found on porch. In box for canned peaches. Note said only, ‘Two days old.’?”

When he was talking shop with her father he had sounded halfway intelligent—thoughtful, even—but on subjects less scientific his language turned stunted again. She couldn’t find any logic to his use or non-use of article adjectives, for instance, and how hard could article adjectives be?

She tossed her dishcloth into the hamper in the pantry. (Her father believed in 100-percent cotton dishcloths, used once and then laundered with bleach. He viewed sponges with an almost superstitious horror.) “Well, all done here,” she told Pyotr. “Thanks for helping. Father’s in the living room, I think.”