Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
PRIYA
My kitchen smells like failure.
Specifically, it smells like the third attempt at a Hungarian chimney cake that refuses to cooperate with the altitude up here.
The dough keeps overproofing, the sugar crust burns before the inside cooks through, and the cabin's ancient oven runs twenty degrees hotter than the dial claims. Nani would have figured it out in one try.
She'd have adjusted the sugar, dropped the temperature, maybe added a prayer to Ganesh for good measure, and pulled a perfect golden spiral out of this oven without breaking a sweat.
Nani also spent sixty years baking. So maybe I can give myself some grace on attempt number three.
The chimney cake goes in the compost. The mixing bowl goes in the sink. My laptop sits open on the counter next to a stack of recipe cards written in my grandmother's handwriting, and the cursor blinks on a blank page titled Chapter Seven: Budapest.
Comfort food from around the world. That's the book.
Recipes tied to memory, to place, to the feeling of being held by something warm when everything else is falling apart.
My publisher liked the concept. My agent loved the advance.
My ex husband Vikram loved telling people at dinner parties that his wife was writing a cookbook, which was his favorite thing about me.
That I was a wife who did interesting things he could mention between courses.
Four years of marriage to a man who wanted the performance of me. The Indian wife who cooked beautifully, dressed well at faculty events, charmed his department chair. He never once asked what I wanted to write about. He asked what was for dinner.
The divorce was clean. Polite. He got the condo in Toronto. I got the cookbook deal, this leaky A frame in the mountains, and the slow project of figuring out who Priya Sharma is when she's not someone's accessory.
Seven months in, the answer is: a woman with flour in her hair who talks to herself while baking and whose nearest neighbor is a six foot wall of silence who looked at her pie like she'd handed him a live grenade.
Owen Tate.
I asked around town when I first moved in.
Betty at the general store said he comes down once a month for supplies, doesn't make small talk, buys canned soup by the case.
The woman at the post office said he gets mail under two names and never waves.
Sage at the coffee shop on Main, the one with the incredible Jamaican patties, told me he volunteers for search and rescue but otherwise keeps to the mountain.
So yesterday I baked him a pie because that's what you do. That's what Nani taught me. New neighbor, new offering. You bring food because food says what words can't, and most of the time what it says is I'm here and I see you and you don't have to be alone if you don't want to be.
He took the pie. Barely said thank you. Stood there holding a splitting maul with forearms that made me forget the speech I'd rehearsed on the walk up.
Gray eyes. Jaw set hard enough to crack walnuts.
The kind of body you get from actual labor, from chopping wood and hauling supplies up a mountain on foot.
And a dog. Boone. The sweetest creature on four legs, who looked at me with more warmth in thirty seconds than Owen managed in three minutes.
Fine. Some people don't want neighbors. Some people moved to the top of a mountain specifically to avoid them. Message received.
Except I'm still thinking about it this morning while I scrape burnt chimney cake into the compost, which is irritating.
A knock on my door at half past eight nearly makes me drop the mixing bowl.
Nobody knocks on my door. The mail carrier leaves packages on the porch. The raccoons don't knock. And the only person within walking distance is...
Owen stands on my porch holding my grandmother's pie plate.
He's wearing flannel. Obviously. A different one from yesterday, or maybe he owns twelve of the same. His hair is damp at the temples like he showered before coming, which means he thought about this enough to prepare for it, and that detail lodges somewhere behind my ribs.
Boone sits at his feet, tail going.
"Your plate," he says. Holds it out.
"You could've kept it until you came to town."
"It's your grandmother's."
He says the words as if his own grandmother raised him to know better. There are no water spots on the plate and the chip on the rim has been dried around carefully.
"Thank you." Taking it from him, my fingers brush his. His hands are rough. Warm despite the cold morning air. Something sparks at the contact. Brief, electric. His eyes drop to where our fingers touched, then come back up to my face. "Did you eat the pie?"
His jaw works. "It was fine."
"Fine." I lean against the doorframe. "I put brown butter, fresh cardamom from the Indian grocery in Kelowna, and hand picked Honeycrisps in that pie. Fine is what you say about gas station coffee."
Something flickers across his face. If I didn't know better, I'd call it amusement. "It was good."
"Try again."
"It was really good."
"Owen."
He exhales through his nose. Boone's tail keeps wagging. "It was the best thing I've eaten in three years. Is that what you wanted to hear?"
Yes. That's exactly what I wanted to hear, because I'm a woman who spent four years cooking for a man who said everything was delicious without tasting it, and hearing someone be specific about the fact that my pie mattered makes something bloom in my chest.
"Come in," I say. "I just destroyed a chimney cake and the coffee's still hot."
He hesitates. Glances past me into the cabin, and I watch the calculation happen. How long he can stay before it counts as something. How close he can get before it violates whatever agreement he made with himself about being alone.
"I don't really do visiting."
"It's coffee. You drink it, you leave. Boone can have the chimney cake scraps from the counter."
At the word scraps, Boone pushes past Owen's legs and trots into my kitchen like he's been here before. Owen watches him go. That jaw flexes again.
"Ten minutes," he says, and steps inside.
My cabin is small. One big room that serves as kitchen and living space, a bedroom through the back, a bathroom with a clawfoot tub that convinced me to buy the place.
Owen takes up too much space in it. He stands near the counter while I pour coffee, and I'm aware of him in a way that makes my hands feel clumsy.
The height of him. The quiet. How he looks at everything once, quickly, taking inventory.
His eyes land on the recipe cards.
"Those your grandmother's?"
"Yeah. She kept notes on everything she ever made. Ingredients, technique, little drawings in the margins." Handing him a mug. "She taught me to cook before she taught me to read."
He takes the mug. Drinks. His expression doesn't change but he drinks again immediately, which means my coffee is better than whatever punishment he's been brewing up there.
"What are you writing?"
"Cookbook. Comfort food from around the world." Gesturing at the laptop with the blinking cursor. "Supposed to be writing the Budapest chapter today. The chimney cake had other ideas."
"What went wrong?"
"Altitude, probably. The dough keeps overproofing. And this oven runs hot."
He sets his mug down, walks to my oven, and crouches in front of it.
Opens the door. Looks at the element, the seal, the thermostat dial.
Closes it. "Your gasket's shot. That's why it runs hot.
Air leak on the right side lets heat escape unevenly, so the left side overcompensates.
" He stands. "I can fix it if you want. It's a twelve dollar part. "
"You can fix ovens?"
"I can fix most things."
There it is again. That flicker. Buried deep under all that granite, something warm.
Boone has found the chimney cake scraps and is eating them off a plate on the floor with the focus of a surgeon. Owen watches him, and the corner of his mouth does something that's almost a smile but doesn't quite commit.
"He was a rescue," I say. Crouching to scratch behind Boone's ears. "Wasn't he?"
A pause. "He was somebody else's dog. Before me."
Something about the way he says it shuts the question down. Somebody else's dog. Somebody gone. I don't push.
We drink coffee in my kitchen for thirty two minutes.
He doesn't talk much. But he listens when I talk about the cookbook, about Nani's recipe cards, about the chimney cake disaster.
He asks one question about the cardamom in the pie.
Whether I toast it first or grind it raw.
It's the right question. The question of someone who pays attention to how things are built, even things made of butter and sugar.
At the door, he pauses. His shoulder is inches from the frame.
This close, I can see the lines at the corners of his eyes, the silver starting to thread through his hair.
He smells like woodsmoke. My head reaches his chin.
If I stepped forward, just a little, my forehead would rest against his chest.
I don't step forward.
But I think about it long enough for him to notice.
His eyes drop to my mouth. One second. Maybe two. Then he pulls back, and whatever door cracked open behind those gray eyes closes again.
"I'll bring the gasket up tomorrow," he says.
"You don't have to do that."
"Your oven's broken."
"It's been broken since I moved in. Seven months."
"Then you've been baking wrong for seven months." He steps off the porch. Boone follows. "That pie was good despite the oven. Fix the oven, and there's no telling what you'll make."
He's halfway down the trail before I realize that's the closest thing to a compliment Owen Tate has probably given anyone in years.
Inside, the cabin feels bigger without him. Which doesn't make sense. He took up too much space while he was here, all broad shoulders against my small kitchen. Now that he's gone, the space just feels empty.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
Meera:
Hows mountain hermit life? Met any hot lumberjacks yet?
Me:
He's not a lumberjack. He's a former park ranger who returned my pie plate this morning.
Meera:
PIE PLATE??? You baked for him??? Priya Sharma you moved to that mountain to find yourself not find a man.
Me:
It was a neighborly gesture.
Meera:
Sure it was.
The cursor still blinks on Chapter Seven: Budapest. Picking up a recipe card, the ink faded from Nani's careful hand. Kürt?skalács. Chimney cake. She wrote the temperature in Celsius with a note in Gujarati that translates roughly to patience, beta, patience.
Right. Patience.
The oven is broken. Owen is coming tomorrow to fix it. And I'm going to write this chapter, nail this recipe, and absolutely not spend the rest of the afternoon thinking about the way he looked at my mouth in the doorway.
Patience.