Chapter Six
CHAPTER SIX
Kieran
Did Ellie Wasserman live in a fairy house? The Berkeley Craftsman’s wooden siding was chocolate brown, the trim was a cheerful poppy red, and tangled green vines ran along the eaves and surrounded the front door. The only greenery on my block was a sickly maple that was a toilet for dogs, and sometimes for humans.
But she’d told me her place was around the back. Gravel crunched under my feet as I walked up the driveway, around a little red sedan and past a fire pit with a few dingy plastic chairs around it. The whole backyard was full of California winter colors: highlighter-pink and cream camellias, a dark green Meyer lemon tree loaded with saffron-yellow fruit. I picked one off the tree and scratched the peel that smelled like sunlight.
The guesthouse in the corner of the yard was a tiny, rickety-looking version of the main building. But that was life in the Bay Area. You found a little bit of space where you could and paid rent that would make people cry-laugh anywhere else. At least she got more natural light and fresh air than I did.
I tapped my knuckles on the green door. Quiet greeted me. Maybe she was in the middle of something?
Ten seconds later, I knocked again. Then I twisted the knob. It wasn’t locked, so I stuck my head around the door. “Ellie?”
“DON’T!” she yelled at the top of her lungs as a blur shot by my feet.
The lemon went flying. “What the fuck?” I yelped.
But Ellie wasn’t looking at me when she ran up to the door. “Floyd, no!” She shouldered me to the side and lunged down to the ground. She came up with a squirming cat that let off an angry meow.
“I’m so sorry, sweet boy,” she said softly as she carried the huge tabby back inside. Her voice was like I’d never heard it before, warm and soothing like the first sip of hot chocolate on a cold day. “I know you wanted to go do catty crimes. But you can’t be the terror of the neighborhood anymore.” She rubbed her nose against his fluffy cheek when he yowled again. “You have to let me look after you.”
My finger found the collar of my sweatshirt and heat flooded my skin. Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten into as much trouble as a kid if someone had hugged me and talked to me like that when I broke something or flunked another test, instead of lecturing me over and over again about how I was letting everyone down.
“Could you close the door, please?” Ellie said.
I inhaled, then breathed the memory out. Business Ellie was talking to me now. “Good afternoon, Kieran. Good to see you, Kieran,” I said as I pushed the door shut behind me.
She closed her eyes for a second, then put the cat down. “I’m sorry. Kieran, good afternoon. As you saw, I was a little distracted.”
Could I get her to use that gentle, cozy voice again? I liked that better. “Why can’t the cat with the awesome name go outside? Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do?”
“He has FIV.”
“FIV?”
“Like HIV, but for cats. He doesn’t have an immune system, so if he went out and got into it with another cat, he could both get really sick and pass the virus on.” She shook her head, a little smile curling her full mouth. “And he absolutely would, because he’s a fuzzy little hooligan.”
What was someone as careful as her doing with a bruiser as a pet?
She said, “I’m going to need ten more minutes, since you’re early.”
A surprised laugh burst out of me. “I was early? That must be some kind of record. Can you write that down somewhere?”
She didn’t laugh back. “I have to speak to someone before we go. Have a seat”—she pointed at a little gray couch—“and please don’t mess with my stuff.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Could we take the cat with us? He definitely made her more human.
She dove through the door and crossed the yard to where an older woman had come out onto the back deck of the big house. She was Ellie’s opposite, tall and way too thin, with gray hair cut super close to her head. Couldn’t have been her mom. Or maybe she looked like her dad? Was she adopted? I didn’t really know anything about her.
A minute went by. Two. I took out my keys and spun them, dropped them. Picked them up, spun them again, dropped them again.
Looking wasn’t messing, right?
I shoved my keys in my pocket, got up, and wandered over to the little kitchen. Frying pans hung from hooks on the ceiling, and a magnetic strip on the green wall held a few knives. A big orange cast-iron pot sat on the back burner of the stove, with enough black marks on the bottom to show it wasn’t just decoration. A “Packing List for Sonoma” was stuck to the fridge.
A peek around the green-and-gold folding screen at the other end of the room and I found a tightly made double bed, paperbacks piled on the nightstand next to it. Floyd was sprawled on his butt in the middle of the mattress, licking where his balls used to be. He glared at me when he caught me staring.
“Nice, cat. Real classy.”
I left him alone and went to Ellie’s wall of books. I recognized a few from Steve’s office, big technical manuals full of diagrams. But there were a lot of things I hadn’t seen before, in French and Spanish as well as English. Post-its in pink and yellow stuck out from over the top of the pages, and when I pulled out one book, its spine cracked open to a page titled “Cassoulet” covered with greasy brown dots and blue scribbles.
Maybe she hadn’t worked in a restaurant, but anyone who made their cookbooks look like that must have known something.
I flipped through a few others. Thai salads, meringue-topped cakes, Carolina barbecue. Then on the bottom shelves, I found a row of cheap black-and-white speckled notebooks. They didn’t fit the grown-up vibe of the rest of the room. Everyone has a soft spot, Jay had said. I reached for one.
“Cooking Notes,” it said in sparkly green pen on the cover. The handwriting was rounder. A kid’s.
“October 25 , ” I read slowly, trailing my finger along the page.
Fish sticks. Cook at 400F for two minutes longer than the box says. Hank likes one tablespoon ketchup and one tablespoon yellow mustard mixed together. Mom likes one tablespoon mayonnaise with juice of a quarter of a lemon and one teaspoon Tabasco.
Hank’s waffles. Toast Eggos on medium, put on butter and maple syrup, then microwave for ten seconds to melt everything together.
I flicked through a year of little Ellie’s cooking. A lot of it was her trying to dress up convenience food—pancakes, ramen. Toward the end of the notebook, she’d started to try random scratch recipes. Ground Turkey Tacos had lots of stars and fireworks drawn around it, while another for zucchini omelets only had “Yuck.”
“Ellie!” a man’s voice called outside. A huge bear of a guy with bushy white hair and black eyebrows came out of the house and put his arm around the older woman’s shoulders.
He looked familiar. As I put Ellie’s notebook back, I saw his younger clone smiling in a picture frame. He was wearing a fancy graduation gown and kissing a younger, blonder Ellie on top of her head, her closed eyes and soft smile all contentment.
“I’ll text as soon as I get there,” Ellie said loudly. She jerked her thumb back at the cottage, and the man nodded. They all hugged, and he bent to kiss Ellie’s cheeks, like a blessing.
I’d gotten used to my parents not being big on physical affection, but I still felt like an alien watching strange human rituals whenever I saw families hugging.
Ellie turned to walk back to the cottage, and I realized that I was still holding her old happiness.
“What were you doing?” she said as she came in, a split second after I’d put the picture down like it scorched me.
“Not touching anything,” I said.
Her mouth opened, and I recognized the annoyance on her face from Qui. But her mouth closed and she shook her head. “Sure. Let’s hit the road.”
“You live with your boyfriend’s parents?” I asked as she led me to the red car. But wait, that didn’t make sense. I hadn’t seen any guy’s sneakers, or a jacket, or anything that said a man lived with her.
“Ben and Diane are my parents-in-law,” she said, popping the trunk.
“You’re married ?”
“Nope. Bag goes in there.”
My brain flailed while I shoved my duffel between a suitcase and packed paper grocery bags. “You’re divorced and you live with your in-laws? That’s rough. But then why would you have a picture of your ex?”
“Still wrong,” she said distractedly.
“Then what ?” I said, my voice high with confusion.
She sighed like I’d dumped a bag of cement on her shoulders. “I’m a widow.”
But widows were old, and wore black, and sat crying at home in the dark. They weren’t pretty blond girls with cheeks dotted with freckles. But what the hell did I know about the inside of Ellie’s head? Or heart? “How?” I asked, still uncertain.
She rubbed the gold chain around her neck. “The usual way. We were married, then he died. Please get in the car.”
While Ellie navigated through city streets, I was busy trying to make sense of this huge new piece of her story. Maybe she’d been fun once, to get someone to marry her. The guy in the picture looked like he’d been happy. Until he’d died . Fuck.
“I’ve never heard anyone think so loudly,” she said.
I sat up. “Huh?”
“Though I guess that’s because you’re fidgeting.”
I tried to sit still for a whole three seconds. “I was just thinking that I’d never met a young widow before.”
“I am a statistical outlier, yes.” Her voice was drier than a desert in August.
She was right; I needed to keep my awkward thoughts on the inside. Had her husband been old? No, idiot, that wasn’t an old picture, and his parents looked like they were in their late sixties, maybe? But people could die of lots of things. Oh my God, did she kill him? No, that’s really stupid. Why would she live with his parents if she’d killed him? Unless she had some kind of creepy serial-killer plans to take over the house?
“How old are you, anyway?” I asked. She was so cautious and serious, I’d bet she was in at least her late thirties. Or forty?
“I’m thirty.”
And this is why I didn’t bet with actual money. “You’re about my age.”
“Three years older. Today is just full of astonishing revelations for you.”
Her hands gripped the wheel tighter and tighter, and I knew I was prying, but I couldn’t help myself. “How old were you when your husband died?” I tried to ask gently.
“Twenty-seven. Now, are you done asking historical questions? Because I need to focus.” She turned up her music and merged onto the chaos of the freeway, her body straight, almost stiff as she watched the traffic.
By the time she was my age, she’d met someone, loved him enough to promise him forever, then lost him. No wonder I thought she was older. It was like she’d lived her life on fast-forward, while I’d been doing it in slo-mo. I couldn’t imagine how I would have coped if someone I cared about died.
“Is that opera ?” I said to distract myself, pointing at the speaker.
“Yeah,” she said, rightfully a little confused at the sudden change of subject. “ The Marriage of Figaro .”
“It’s awful.”
A surprised laugh burst out of her. “It’s Mozart .”
I liked that sound. It meant she wasn’t sad. “So it’s old and awful,” I said, hamming it up a little.
She batted my hand away from the dial. “Driver picks the music.”
I fake-sulked. “You actually like this? It’s just strung-out vowels.”
“If you think about it, all singing is vowels. We don’t vocalize consonants,” she said in her teacher voice.
There was the bossiness I recognized. “OK, fine, but she’s torturing them to death. Cats having sex sounds better than that,” I joked.
A small smile. “You are, of course, entitled to your opinion.”
I snorted at the jab. “That’s a very fancy way to tell someone you don’t give a shit what they think.”
“Whatever you say.” She gestured toward the back seat. “By the way, I have a few books for you to look at. Some of the stuff you said at the first meeting made me think of Jamie Oliver, and I thought Emeril and Heston Blumenthal might speak to you, too. They’re in the tote bag behind you.”
My joking mood died instantly. She wanted to start work already? I liked it when we bickered better. When we poked at each other, I could give as good as I got. The thought of reading like a turtle in front of her made me imagine my parents’ boredom and frustration. “You don’t want me to look at those right now.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ll puke all over your dash. I get carsick super easily.” Which wasn’t a lie. But I knew I was only buying myself a little time.
“OK. When we get there, then.”
I sighed and stared out the window.
Against my will, I listened to the music drifting out of the speakers. The woman’s voice fluttered like a bird’s, and the background music sounded like spring rain. It had the warm crackle of an old recording, too, and I felt my body relax as the notes filled my brain. “What’s she singing about?”
Ellie smiled. “She’s playing a teenage boy who has a crush on an older woman. He’s asking her how he’d know if he were in love.”
“He doesn’t sound very smart,” I said dryly.
“Well, his hormones and his self-awareness are in inverse proportion to each other,” she said, her voice amused.
The music was still pretty, but the big question was climbing up my throat and demanding to come out. “Ellie?”
“Kieran?” she answered back in the same fast way.
“How did your husband die?” I blurted.
She glanced in her mirrors, suddenly wary. “Why do you need to know?”
Way to go, Kieran. Open mouth, insert foot . “I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” she said smoothly, though her back had stiffened again. “It’s just irrelevant to the work.”
“What do you mean, irrelevant?”
“For the next few months, I’m supposed to be you. Who I am isn’t important.”
Yes it is, I almost said. Like part of me wanted to shake her, tell her that she mattered. Since when did I want to give pep talks?
“But shouldn’t we get to know each other?” I tried instead.
“Well, I certainly need to get to know you. Me not knowing you is why we got in trouble in the first place,” she said matter-of-factly.
“So I’m supposed to bare my soul and you get to sit there all tidy and perfect and not say anything at all?”
The car lost speed as we rolled through a toll lane. “I’m not perfect.”
Her voice was low and quiet and lonely.
The same part of me that wanted to tell her she mattered whined like a sad puppy. “I’ll answer one of your questions if you answer one of mine,” I offered.
She shook her head, smiling a little again. “No thanks.”
“Come on, Ellie, pretty please? This isn’t fair.” Out of nowhere, I wanted her to open up to me more than I’d ever wanted anything.
She snorted. “You’re just going to have to live with unfairness like the rest of the grown-ups.”
We sat in silence for a second, and I tried to think of any way in. Wait, I knew something else about her.
“Who’s Hank?” I tried.
She knocked her crown against her headrest. “It’s like the past five minutes of conversation never happened. Do you have some kind of time-turning charm?”
“You tell me who he is, and I’ll tell you something about me,” I coaxed.
“You should just tell me anyway,” she coaxed back.
I kept my mouth shut.
“Hank is my younger brother,” I finally said with a sigh. “What is your family like?”
“They’re…” Argh. Why did I give her that opening? Not that Brian was bad. But talking about my parents was like DIY fingernail removal. “They’re a lot.”
It was going to kill me, but I stayed quiet.
“And?” she finally said.
I raised my eyebrows at her. “You first.”
She studied me, like she was deciding something important. “OK,” she finally said, and I held back an exhale of relief. “Hank lives in Pasadena and he’s studying for a doctorate in computer science at Caltech. He looks exactly like me, except he’s a foot taller and fifty pounds lighter.”
A scarecrow with wild blond hair and denim-blue eyes appeared in my head. “And he likes ketchup and mustard mixed together with his fish sticks.”
One hand came off the wheel and slapped her forehead. “Seriously? I thought I asked you not to mess with anything? You’re incorrigible.”
I wasn’t totally sure what that meant, but it couldn’t have been too terrible if she was laughing when she said it. “I didn’t break your old notebook, I swear. They’re pretty cool, those recipes. Little Ellie figuring out how to make things taste good.”
“I’m glad someone thinks nine-year-old me was cool,” she said, like she didn’t believe me.
All of a sudden, I really needed her to hear me. “I’m not being funny. I mean it. So, ketchup and mustard?”
“Hank likes ketchup and mustard mixed together with pretty much everything. Even french fries, the weirdo. But how did you learn how to cook? From your parents?”
“Hah. No. Mom would have kicked me out of the kitchen in thirty seconds.” I also would’ve broken anything I touched.
“So how?”
“I started cooking at Coconut Pete’s.”
She smiled. “When I hear the name Coconut Pete’s, I think of buckets of rum concoctions and various fried things to soak up the booze.”
“Pretty much. Anyway, I was eighteen, washing dishes there when one of the cooks didn’t show up for service. The boss yanked me out of the back and put me in front of a deep-fryer, and that’s where I stayed. I went home every night smelling like cheap soybeans, but I’m awesome at deep-frying. I did a lot of experiments with candy bars on slow nights.”
“What’s the weirdest thing you ever deep-fried?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Great question. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. FYI, don’t mess with perfection.”
“So you enjoyed it? Even if it was just deep-frying?”
Marin’s green-and-gold hills rolled past us like slow ocean waves. I leaned my head on my hand and watched them as I thought aloud: “I liked the flow I could get into, and I liked that I could sleep late.” I didn’t say that it was a job so easy that I could show up with a world-ending hangover and still get paid. But now it was my turn again. “Where are you from?”
Her fingers tapped on the steering wheel before she answered. “I’m from everywhere. Born in San Jose, then I lived in LA, San Diego, Palm Desert, Mendocino, Arcata, Truckee, Chico, and finally Stockton.”
The way she recited that list of places all over California bugged me, like she was trying to make something fun when it wasn’t. “Was your family military?”
“Nope. We just moved a lot.”
Maybe moving that much as a kid could have been exciting. Or it could have felt like she was a balloon, with no one holding tight to her string.
“Why did you move so much?”
“My mom thought it was fun.” Her mouth turned down for a second. Then she seemed to shake off the bad feeling. “What happened after Coconut Pete’s?”
“I got a job doing prep at a hotel restaurant in Montecito, the Pacific. The chef de cuisine there, Ximena, she was big on tough love. I was a skinny little punk, but she thought I had something. She made me feel like going back to school wouldn’t be a waste of time. I could get a better grounding in techniques, and she tied everything I was learning to what we were doing in the restaurant. Stuff made so much more sense to me when it was concrete, and I got so many new shiny toys to play with. Then she hooked me up with Steve when I wanted to do an internship at somewhere cutting edge.”
Ellie nodded. “That’s cool that you had someone like that, who thought you could do more.”
A warm feeling curled up in my chest, but unlike all the other times with Ellie, it wasn’t embarrassment. I felt recognized. “Yeah. I was lucky.”
Ellie
Kieran squinted out the windshield as I pulled up to Tad’s house. “I thought a cottage was a tiny place with a straw roof.”
“Yeah, I don’t think the Big Bad Wolf’s going to blow that down anytime soon.”
Of course, Tad was twenty years older than me and a lot further along in his career, and his husband, Bobby, had sold his software start-up and retired at thirty-eight. It wasn’t like I lived in poverty now, either; Ben and Diane would make sure I was OK, and my emergency savings account was fat and happy. But there would always be a scrappy kid inside me digging through the racks at thrift stores and buying bulk cereal, and that kid’s mind boggled at this so-called “cottage.”
It was only a little smaller than my in-laws’ house. Most of it was one big open room, with white paint and high-beamed ceilings that made it feel airy. There were woven hangings on the walls, rust-red and lapis-blue souvenirs from annual vacations to New Mexico. Big squashy tobacco leather couches and armchairs made two parentheses around a dark wooden chest that served as a coffee table.
I unfolded a list from my purse and stuck it to the enormous fridge with a rainbow-flag magnet. “You brought your knives, right?” I called to Kieran.
He held up the tidy canvas bundle, eyebrows raised. “I do listen sometimes when you tell me things.”
I ignored his impatient tone and kept unpacking kitchen gear, and he wandered around the living room, picking things up and putting them down, and then looked down the short hallway opposite me. “Which of us gets the futon?” he called.
“Aren’t you going to be chivalrous?” I called back.
He stroked his chin as he leaned against the archway. “You like your five-dollar words, don’t you? I’m not sure I know what that means.”
He was acting casual, but it was a little studied. It made me wonder how much of the rest of his behavior was a fa?ade. But the traffic had been intense and I wasn’t in the mood to dig into his brain anymore tonight. “Anyway. How about rock, paper, scissors for the real bed?”
He sauntered over. “Sure. I’m amazing at this game. Ready?”
I looked at him incredulously as I held out my hand. “No one is amazing at rock, paper, scissors. One, two, three… I didn’t say go!”
He waved his scissors in the air. “You said three. Isn’t three when normal people go?”
“I am normal. OK, one, two, three. Argh!” He did a victory dance that consisted mostly of hip thrusting. “Two out of three?” I asked, half laughing.
“Fine.” His wide mouth crooked up, and my eyes stuck on it for a second before I got back to business.
“One, two, three… no!”
“I won, I won! That king-sized bed is mine.” He jogged in a little circle like he’d just scored a goal in the World Cup final, and I felt a grin stretch across my face. He was just so goofy, and I couldn’t help but be a little bit charmed.
But wait—this was what Tad had warned me about. “Yes,” I said, forcing the smile out of my voice with cool professionalism. “All yours.”
Kieran raised his arms and stretched, and I absolutely did not notice that his sweatshirt rode up. Except his happy trail was auburn. Shut up, libido. “So what’s the plan for the rest of the night?” he asked.
“Checking Tad’s supplies and then a quick trip to the supermarket. I have a standard list of ingredients we need for testing.”
His head cocked. “You’re not a ‘buy what you feel like’ kind of person, then?”
I gave his rhetorical question exactly the amount of attention it deserved. “Then we should do some planning. Start to think of things you want to try out and then write down some kind of outline. There’s a farmers’ market in Sonoma Plaza day after tomorrow, too. We should go raid it.”
Out of nowhere, he looked uncertain. “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out,” he said with a lightness I didn’t buy, his fingers rubbing his forearm.
“That’s why Tad pays me the moderately sized bucks.” I tilted my head. “Is that all OK with you?”
He shrugged. “Totally fine. You’re in charge. If you want me, I’ll be rolling around in my enormous bed.” And with that, he wandered off.
So he was fine when he was playing, but as soon as we talked about work, he checked out? That wasn’t a good sign.
A little part of me said that I’d liked playing too, once upon a time, but I ignored it. One of us had to stay on task, and it was clear it wouldn’t be him.