8. Blue
blue
On Tuesday, the weather took a break from itself. The wind died down to a standstill, and the clouds were gone. The sky was a brassy blue, and the sunlight reflected so hard on the waves of snow beyond the window that I had to squint against as I sat at the table in the kitchen across from Wolfe.
I watched very closely as Wolfe made the tea: five tea bags, a whistling kettle, a blue teapot. He also made oatmeal in a pot on the stove. Made bacon in a pan; there were only three pieces.
He served up the food, and when we sat down, he sliced up a single banana on top of the oatmeal in the bowls. His bowl contained less than mine and had only a pat of butter and some cinnamon because the rest of the butter was in my bowl, along with the last of the milk.
“Are we out of food?” I asked, looking at the way the steam rose from the cups of tea, waves scattered in sunlight.
Part of my brain attempted to dredge up names as to who to complain to, who could fix the situation.
The other part of my brain drew back in horror.
The kitchen was small, and I never sensed that it was packed to the brim with food.
I didn’t sense it now, but I did know that I’d been eating between sleeping.
I’d never gone hungry the whole time I’d been there, not even for a second, and yet here we were, sharing a single banana and three pieces of bacon that waited on the plate to be evenly divided up.
If I had been Wolfe and I knew a storm was coming, I would have purchased enough food for one man, not two.
Hence, the limited food supply meant for one man, not one man and a greedy guest.
“No,” Wolfe said. He shook his head, sipped his tea, and started eating his oatmeal.
“I have a small freezer. It has meat in it. And bags of frozen blueberries.” He looked at me, then shifted his gaze to those bits of steam coming off the tea, fading in the warmth of the kitchen.
“I don’t like blueberries, but they were on sale. ”
“So I’ve eaten all your food.”
“All the fresh food is gone, yes,” he said. “But there are cans of vegetables, and ten pounds of flour, powdered milk, and so on, regular staples you would have living in Montana. Even folks in town stock up before a blizzard because it’s smart.”
“So I’ve eaten all your fresh food.”
The idea of it made me go still because it meant that in my other life, the one beyond my memories, I’d been a selfish asshole who figured it’d be okay if I ate all the eggs, and drank the milk, and gobbled down all the bananas and other good stuff, simply because I was hungry and without any regard for the man who’d actually made the effort to purchase things to get through a blizzard.
“There are still cake donuts left.”
“I didn’t even know there were cake donuts,” I said, shaking my head.
“There are two.”
He got up and went to a cupboard to bring out a small box made of thin cardboard. I watched him put two donuts on a plate and then crumple the box. He brought the plate to the table and set it down. Then, as we ate our breakfast, those donuts sat between us.
They were days old, not fresh. Simple cake donuts without decoration or even a sprinkle of sugar to break up the deep beige color. Still, I knew they were a kind of reward. My mouth watered at the thought of biting into one, or dunking it in my tea.
With my chin dipped down as I pretended to focus on my oatmeal, I looked over at Wolfe. He was not looking at the donuts. He was simply eating his meal as though the sweet treat didn’t matter at all. But, by his disinterest, I knew that it did.
I sat up and, in a voice I hoped implied utter truth, I said, “I don’t actually like cake donuts.” I rolled my eyes. Boredom. Even annoyance.
“Oh?” Wolfe’s eyebrows rose as he looked at me. “How do you know?”
“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging. “Some things come back to me and then they leave. But I do know I don’t like those. Never have.”
“You did eat some, you know,” Wolfe said.
“Then I must have been out of my mind,” I replied. There was no way I was going to eat that donut.
We finished our oatmeal, and I watched Wolfe eat one cake donut. One. He broke off some donut and dunked it in his tea, a sigh running through him as he enjoyed it.
My mouth worked as he took the other donut and put it in a little plastic baggie.
Saving it for later, as though it were the last donut in the world.
Maybe for him it was, or maybe it seemed like it was.
I held myself still and didn’t say anything about it.
But I would do my best to make it up to him.
Hobbling, I took my dishes to the sink and picked up a kitchen towel, drying as he washed and rinsed. He dried them again and put everything away. I watched so that I could provide more help next time.
There was nothing to wrap up and put away because we’d eaten it all, but when he opened the fridge to put the baggie with the single cake donut in it away, I could see that the fridge was mostly empty.
There was a metal can labeled bacon grease, a wilting bundle of celery, half a packet of mushrooms, half an onion with the skin still on, wrapped in a piece of cellophane. No bread, no milk, no butter.
He shut the fridge, a hurried slam, and looked at me.
“I’ll get the steak out to thaw,” he said, as though I was some kind of teenager with a hollow leg who needed reassurance that there was more food coming.
“We’ll have steak and noodles and mushrooms for dinner.
” He paused, then added, “Don’t worry about it. We’re going to the store tomorrow.”
“Okay,” I said. Like it didn’t matter. As though I couldn’t see it in his eyes that he was trying to avoid the issue altogether. But I had an obligation to him. Whoever I’d been in my other life, I owed him. To that end, I said, “So how about those lanyards?”
Morning chores done, he opened the back door and led the way to the workshop. We didn’t even put on our coats because the wind was so still and the sun was so fierce that we could walk the snowy path without even feeling it.
Once inside the workshop, Wolfe closed the workshop door behind us, turned on both heaters, and pulled the topmost box of gimp thread over to the desk. He was going to teach me how to make a lanyard, and I was going to make a million of them so he wouldn’t have to.
I would have thought that a braid as square and sturdy as a lanyard would need a kind of frame that one might build it on. But it was done entirely freehand.
Wolfe in the chair, and I sat on a box while Wolfe had me watch a few instructional YouTube vids on his phone, mostly done by high-voiced young girls eager to share what they knew, and one solemn older man from India, who was creating lanyards way more complicated than I ever wanted to make.
Then Wolfe showed me how to start a box braid, one of the simplest. Two strands, one yellow, one blue. Over under, over under, flip, repeat.
When it was my turn to try, I casually pushed back items on the edge of his farm table desk and sat on the desk right above where the small space heater was going.
Wolfe raised his eyebrows at me, as though I’d committed a sacred sin, only he considered me too young to know any better and had to bite back everything he wanted to say.
“Is this okay?” I asked. “There isn’t really another chair in here, and if I cross my legs like this—” I demonstrated. “Then I can be like the brave little tailor.”
“The who?” he asked, his mouth forming an O shape that stayed in place as if he simply couldn’t believe that I’d started speaking Urdu and he was very frustrated with me.
“The brave little tailor?” I repeated. “Seven at one blow?”
“I don’t know that one,” he said, shaking his head, pulling his attention away from me as though I was the most irritating thing in the room.
“It’s a fairy tale,” I said as I got down, sensing he wanted me off the desk. “But I could go get a chair from the kitchen.”
“I’ll get it,” he said.
He got a kitchen chair for me to sit in, and the way the room and desk and supplies were laid out meant that when I was sitting in it, we were just about thigh to thigh.
Which meant that I could feel the warmth of his body, feel the dense lines of leg muscle, as I looked over his shoulder while he fiddled with his paper and pencil and tried to solidify his ideas for the designs.
“Santa’s face is too complicated,” I said, for some reason imagining I was an expert now.
“What do you mean?” he asked, waving his hand over the sketch that had been erased and redrawn at least a dozen times. “It’s Santa.”
“Sure, Santa’s great and all,” I said, mentally squinting for memories of any Christmas I had actually participated in.
What came up was not a tree, or a hearth decorated with boughs of holly, or anything remotely like that. What came up was a red-haired boy and a dark-haired boy smiling as they handed over a small package wrapped in the most wrinkled holiday paper I’d ever seen.
We found ‘em, the red-haired boy said, his voice breathless with excitement.
Yeah, the dark-haired boy said. They were by some trash cans, so we washed ‘em and dried ‘em. Stretched ‘em while they dried so they wouldn’t shrink.
The object of all this attention turned out to be a pair of fingerless gloves made of dark, soft wool.
They kept my hands warm, but left me dexterity.
I’d worn them for a long time, though I didn’t know where they were now.
A thoughtful gift from two people who had, quite possibly, cared for me.
Maybe they were Nimble and Star, only I couldn’t be sure.
And I wondered where those gloves were now.
“Blue?” Wolfe asked, his voice coming at me as though from a distance. “You okay?”
The expression in his eyes told me that he was willing to give me the last donut if it would make me feel better. “Yes, just dizzy. It’s very warm in here.”