chapter 11
Decca
My hands slipped between the cool cotton sheets, feeling for a warm body.
Maybe he’d snuck in sometime during the night. Maybe he’d changed his mind about the guest room.
Nothing.
I told myself it was only my fingers that were disappointed to find air instead of a solid block of Gus next to me. It was only my senses that craved the satin of his skin and the rough stubble of his beard. But I didn’t quite believe my own lie.
There was a moment last night when I might have imagined Gus and me waking up together this morning, finding each other after the separation of sleep, spending hours lazing in bed, discovering each other’s bodies, talking about everything from the mundane to the magical in between long slow sessions of tangled lovemaking and exploratory kisses—after we’d both brushed our teeth.
Then something had snapped inside him and he’d run away so fast, I couldn’t even ask him what I’d done.
I didn’t understand it. He’d been so flirtatious, so confident. In the weeks before our wedding, it had reached a fever pitch, and he was the one in the lead. I was sure it would escalate to something more than kisses last night, the way he was groaning into my mouth.
Probably better this way. Go slow. That’s what we said we’d do.
That didn’t mean I couldn’t help things along.
I pulled on my new-to-me, peachy pink vintage silk robe—a wedding gift from Bethany, who thought I needed a proper newlywed lingerie trousseau, which ended up being a steamer trunk filled to the brim with her hand-me-downs. The ones that fit, anyway. She was about seven inches taller than me, with curves and huge boobs. Any garment that could accommodate her proportions would probably drown me. Most of the items—garters, chemises, robes, stockings, corsets—she wore once (or never) on a past shoot from her modeling days. Too pretty to throw away, but lingerie was not her style.
That suited me well, since my stupid ethical compass rarely allowed me to purchase anything brand new, whether it was a car or an item of clothing.
I could virtue signal and claim it was all in the name of lowering my carbon footprint, but in all honesty, my frugality and resourcefulness were probably more holdovers from my childhood. Before Granny got custody of me and moved us to middle Tennessee, so that I might escape the same drug-and-poverty riddled plight that took my parents, my family lived in Culver’s Hollow, in East Tennessee, and those roots were planted deep in Appalachian culture.
Granny was the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of Scots/Irish and German immigrants that lived off the bounty of the mountain and the goodwill of their neighbors from a time going back to the 18th century. That meant—well, a lot of things—but chiefly, that nothing went to waste. Not a hog tail, not a broken hoe, not the last slice of stale cornbread or spoonful of beans.
Certainly not exquisite Parisian silk from the 1930s.
I cinched the belt, shivering as the silk slipped against my bare skin. I hadn’t bothered to put anything on underneath it. Maybe Gus would take one look at me in this, hoist me onto the counter and christen the kitchen.
Probably not, but I’d be ready just the same.
I padded down the hall in my bare feet, the worn hardwoods cool from the morning shadows, and the AC that had decided to work today. There was rustling when I passed the guest room, my old childhood room.
The springs of the bed creaked. Instead of turning around and giving him his privacy, I kneed the door ajar.
Gus lay sprawled facedown on the bed, sheets entangled around his waist.
His suitcase was on the floor with clothes spilling out onto the oval rag rug. Open books were stacked on the desk in the corner, the green swing arm lamp still on.
It would’ve been super weird if he’d moved into the main bedroom with me right away, right? We said we’d find the bones, but we both knew that wasn’t going to happen on night one.
My body shouldn’t have this visceral response, though, like I was going to be sick. I figured he’d slept in here last night. But seeing him tucked away from me so comfortably was something different.
I crossed the room to switch the light off and forgot about the creaky board. Gus stirred at the sound, lifting his head off the pillow. The poor man was way too tall for a double bed. He was forced to sleep diagonally and still, his head practically hung off the edge of the mattress. He rubbed his eyes and did a double take when he saw me.
“Hey,” he said, like it was perfectly fine that I’d been creeping on him, watching him sleep. “What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Seven?” I hadn’t even looked yet. I was too determined to enjoy this rare morning with nothing to do.
“I missed church,” he said with a groan. He yawned, still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
“Church is at nine-thirty.”
“Not for me it isn’t.” He sat up.
“I didn’t realize you were planning to go today. Shouldn’t they give you some kind of free pass the day after your wedding?”
“Father didn’t expect me, I don’t think. I just wanted... since I didn’t have anything else going on... I thought I should be there.”
Didn’t have anything else going on. Like… the first day of your marriage.
“Oh.” I wanted to say something more, but nothing was coming to me. I didn’t know exactly how I felt. Except for stupid. Stupid for waking up in such a state of hopefulness. Stupid for standing here wearing little more than a cobweb. Stupid that any part of me had expected him to share our bed.
Mybed. Not ours.
“So, is this like, a permanent solution, then? This is your room?”
He looked around. Shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah. I mean, unless you had other plans for this space. You have an office downstairs, right?”
“Right. Um… I’m going to start breakfast.”
I plodded down the steps. Now that the brightness of the morning had clouded over, my body ached from the lack of sleep I’d gotten last night. Not even my trusty Valerian root tincture could stop me from tossing and turning, racking my brain over how I’d managed to drive him away so suddenly?
I put the kettle on for coffee, and instead of setting my intentions for the day, using each scoop of dark roast to visualize what I wanted to manifest, I added only grounds to the basket.
I needed to cook something. Weave the excess energy that made my insides buzz into food. That would make it better.
Food was how the women in my family rediscovered themselves when we felt lost and ungrounded. When money was tight, Granny never let on that she’d had to stretch the meat by cutting off only the tiniest chunk to flavor a pot of soup beans. Those beans were nothing less than a delicacy that I still craved whenever I needed comfort.
When I aced a test at school, she had molasses oatmeal cookies just out of the oven and waiting for me.
Then there were all the ordinary Saturdays, when Granny and I worked side-by-side in the kitchen, cooking up a mess of greens, or green beans, or okra after working side-by-side in the garden all day, all month, all season to cultivate that bounty.
When I was in the kitchen, I was my true self. That was exactly what I needed right now.
I ran my fingers over the spines of Granny’s cookbooks that lined the shelves in my cozy kitchen. Most were the staples from the 60s and 70s, ubiquitous to older homes. The red and white checkered binders and spiral-bound volumes published by church ladies auxiliaries. All holding classic recipes like Salisbury Steak, Watergate Salad, and an aspirationally named Ambrosia—actually, that was one I might have to try. There may have been far too many “salads” that featured suspicious combinations of citrus-favored Jello and Miracle Whip, but we also had Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the Joy of Cooking, and boxes and tins overflowing with handwritten recipes that came from so far up my family tree, from the hollers of Appalachia, they were still known as receipts. That’s what I was looking for now.
Heritage. Ties. Cultural touchstones.
The foggy funk of unearned disappointment was already lifting. The magic of the kitchen releasing me from the anxiety I’d had over Gus. Just in time, too, because as I reached up to plunk Granny’s personal recipe binder down from the shelf, Gus’s still sleepy form stumbled in to catch it for me as it slipped from my fingers.
“What are you making?” he asked. His eyes flickered down to my chest, where my robe gaped. His gaze lingered too long for it to be a casual, disinterested glance. The hope bubbled up again. Maybe seduction by silk would work. I just wanted him to stop seeing me as a friend. Once and for all.
“I don’t know yet. Something with biscuits, but I don’t need a recipe for those. Hungry for anything special?”
“Just coffee.”
I waited, keeping my body open to him so he could kiss me, hold me, hold the book longer than necessary so that our fingertips could brush when I pulled it from his grasp.
Nothing. It was no different than before I proposed. Maybe even less connected now. Before my stupid marriage idea, we always had something to talk about, argue or commiserate over. He’d always had questions about my faith or my family, and I, his. We’d carried fonts of complementary knowledge, each desperate to drink from the other’s. To bathe in that wisdom and distill each other down to our most essential.
Now we were married, and our wedding bands had essentially rendered us strangers.
But our marriage was still as new as the moon, and I tried to cut us both some slack.
We didn’t know what we were doing, and we were both so reluctant to make a mistake, for fear of creating some irreconcilable chasm between us.
That was the difference. The stakes. There were no repercussions if we didn’t see eye to eye as friends.
Marriage had shrunk our world down to a tightrope.
One misstep and we’d never recover.
Gus poured his coffee and leaned back against the counter.
I pulled two sticks of cold butter from the fridge, unwrapped their waxed wrappers and started grating them into the bowl with the White Lily flour and salt. It was the one thing Granny and I disagreed on—in biscuit making, anyway. She’d liked to pinch the butter into the dry ingredients with her knuckles. I thought the secret to fluffy, flaky biscuits was in the cold tidbits of butter, melting in the hot oven, creating little pockets of rich deliciousness.
I overturned the bowl onto the butcher block and formed the rounds, careful not to twist the biscuit cutter as I went (it made for biscuits that didn’t rise). As I worked the dough, handling it as little as possible, the tension left my body. My breathing flowed more deeply into my belly and my shoulders released, dropping from where they’d been clamped somewhere up around my shoulders. That was the magic of kitchen witchcraft. I didn’t even have to say an intention or incantation to work a charm. My magic worked intuitively. My body knew the ritual.
Perhaps Gus was right to… to what? Backtrack? Keep me at arm’s length? I couldn’t know what he was doing, and wouldn’t know until we spoke, but I wasn’t ready for a what are we to each other discussion so early in the morning. And so soon after our wedding.
I closed my eyes as I envisioned an even larger cloud leaving my body. Dark and opaque, conveying with it a sense of doom and desperation and need for definition. This was less intuitive now and more of an assertion of what I needed. I also knew I had a choice. I could live under this cloud, watching it as it gathered more and more of my need for control, perhaps ruining any good that might come out of our marriage.
Or I could do something I’d never done before. I could let go and trust where the journey took us.