Chapter 20 #2
Charles shrugs. “It is what it is.” Fiddling with his hands.
“Anyway, I’ve got the stuff for donation.
” He gestures toward the boxes. “So at least there’s that.
Nice to pare things down. It feels good, you know?
” And Clemence nods because he seems to expect her to.
“It’s important to just get on with things. ”
“Things like jumble sales,” says Clemence. She wonders if he’s making fun of the slightness of her life.
But he seems serious. “Exactly.” Both of them turning around as his mother comes out to the porch, and she speaks to him severely in Korean.
Turns out she’s angry that he’s late, that she’s been waiting for him.
She switches to English, and tells him she hopes his donation is up to par.
That he’s not one of those people who bring her their boxes and boxes of garbage.
She mentions the mouldy bath mats, and Charles promises her that there’s no such thing.
“Clothes, mainly,” he says. “And some stuff from the kitchen that I never use. I had three juicers. Who needs three juicers? I don’t even drink juice. ”
He’s not staying—just dropping by. “Of course you are,” says his mother in exasperation, but she’s prepared three plastic bags stuffed with food containers for Charles to take home with him.
Including—as Clemence can see through the straining bag—the soup.
For once, Mrs. Yeung doesn’t mention Charles’s wife, and she’s almost kindly as she and Clemence walk him back to his car.
Though maybe it’s because she wants her son to come back downtown before too long since the tiles in the upstairs shower need replacing.
Charles tells her that he’ll definitely try.
“Definitely try,” says Mrs. Yeung, as the car disappears at the end of the street. Charles had hugged her, and administered to Clemence an affectionate touch on the shoulder. “That’s how he says no way and hopes I won’t notice,” she adds.
“You know, I can recommend a handyman,” Clemence says.
She would have to get Tom’s contact details from Crampton.
And she knows that Mrs. Yeung is about to protest that she can’t afford it, but Clemence interrupts her.
“He might surprise you. He’s not particularly efficient, but apparently he’s even worse at putting up his rates. ”
Inside the foyer, they begin going through Charles’s boxes, one of which is entirely women’s clothing.
Good designer stuff, too, and Clemence is perusing for her own interest until it becomes clear that Charles’s wife is very small.
A blessing in disguise, perhaps, because how embarrassing would it be to have him—or, heaven forbid, his wife—show up at the house one day to find Clemence wearing clothes intended for the jumble?
She takes the set of knives in the other box, though.
Mrs. Yeung urges her to, in compensation for her volunteer service, and also because they’d had to instate rules about selling knives as jumble since the year someone was nearly stabbed in an altercation about whose turn it was to refill the coffee urn.
Church basements were tense places—it was best to avoid weapons altogether.
And so Clemence has something new and shiny in her kitchen now, sharp knives where all the others are dull to the point of useless.
Which hasn’t mattered much, because the only thing she slices is cheese, but these new knives make her consider expanding her culinary horizons.
She removes an apple from the bowl on the counter just to experience the difference, how easy a thing can be if you only have the right tools.
The apple falling into perfect sections, which she places on a plate, and then she sits down at the table to eat them, thinking of Charles, and of Toby, and inexplicability.
About how she is utterly failing in her quest to live the Eat, Pray, Love without the love.
She doesn’t even really have the “eat” part, because she can’t afford restaurants, and she has only a hot plate.
She thinks about all the great women whose culinary genius might have been quashed by the absence of a proper kitchen—imagine the bolognese sauces we might have been permitted had some of these maiden aunts been in possession of a decent saucepan?
The advances in bread-baking, but for want of an oven.
An oven—all those years she’d had an oven, a huge state-of-the-art model that was as complicated to program as a spaceship, and she’d taken it for granted.
Even just the smell of something baking or roasting signalled home.
For the first time since she’d come here, Clemence’s room of her own seems kind of meagre, and she turns around to glare at the knife set on her counter, because it’s the knife set that’s at fault.
Rendering everything else dull and shabby in comparison, when there is nothing she can do about it.
The church bells chiming a question, seven times: What if she’s actually wasting her wild and precious life?