36
Infuse: To allow the flavor of an ingredient to soak into a liquid until the liquid takes on the flavor of the ingredient.
2016
Eleven days.
Jenara called.
She wanted to see him.
Gale paced in his apartment, waiting for five o’clock, the time she asked him to meet her out front.
They’d go to the beach.
March was proving unusually warm.
It sounded promising, so it couldn’t be.
If she was going to forgive him, she’d just out and say it, right? Jenara was trying to break it to him gently, in public, so he couldn’t make a fuss.
Not that he would.
Gale wasn’t a fusser. He’d shut down. Walk away. Never beg. It just wasn’t him.
Maybe that’s your issue, man.
“I’m not doing this, Sean.”
Sounds to me like you are.
“The Grand Championship is next week.
What am I supposed to do?”
Your best.
One thing has nothing to do with the other.
“Says you.”
“Says who?”
Kyle shuffled into the kitchen, scratching his belly and stretching.
“Damn, I slept in, huh?”
“You haven’t been up yet today?”
Gale checked the time.
“It’s four forty-five.”
“I worked a double yesterday.
Didn’t get home until two.”
“That’s still sixteen hours, dude.”
“Fifteen.
And I didn’t go right to bed when I got home.
What’s it to you, anyway?”
“Nothing,”
Gale mumbled.
“Sorry.
It’s just .
. . Jenara’s picking me up out front in a few minutes.”
“Dude.”
Kyle dropped onto a kitchen chair.
“That’s good though, right?”
“Fuck if I know.”
“She could have ghosted you.”
He has a point.
The tiniest spark of hope pricked Gale’s anxiety.
“How long until you have to go down?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll distract you until then.”
Kyle play-punched his shoulder.
“You ready for the big day? The competition, I mean.
This is a big day too.”
“I knew what you meant.”
Gale blew a breath through his lips.
“Ready as I can be.
The crates are going to be brutal.”
“It’s fifty K, man.
They better be.
You got it, though.
None of your competitors is being mentored by the one and only Queenie B, that’s for sure.”
Another point for Kyle.
Wow.
Maybe he’s smarter than we give him credit for.
The “Shut up, Sean”
stayed in his head, but Gale was confident he got the point.
“You’re going to help her out the day I’m gone, right?”
“Yup.”
Kyle’s smile made Gale smile too.
“You really like working there.”
“I do, and not because . . .”
He made a gesture in the air.
“It feels kinda good, you know? Feeding hungry people who can’t afford to eat regular.
I don’t have to be a great chef or anything, just a competent cook.
It’s cool.”
“It is.”
For you.
The thought—his, not Sean’s—came at him like a smack in the face; it was nevertheless true.
“I thought that was enough for me,”
he confessed.
“I never thought about anything more than cooking, to keep my head straight and make enough money to get by.”
But Kyle was unsuccessfully, and obviously, laughing behind his hand.
“What?”
Kyle shoved Gale gently.
“Dude, you had aspirations, back in the day.
How do you not remember all the restaurants we planned to open? You even had a notebook dedicated to that one with the hipster name.
Menus and floor plans. Crap, what was the name?”
The notebook.
Cartoon burger, fries, and a striped cup on the cover.
Buried so deep, it came to him fuzzy.
“The Flight Fantastic.”
“Right! The microbrewery.”
“Craft burgers and sausages.”
“That’s still an awesome idea.”
Maybe it was.
Maybe its time had come.
Or passed.
Gale hadn’t thought about it in a long, long time, but he bet his mom still had the notebook stashed away someplace. The laughter died like a balloon deflating inside him. “I lost a lot of years.”
“Don’t go there, dude.
It’s done.
Now look at you.”
Kyle jiggled him by the shoulders.
“You got this.
Win or lose next week, you’re a Cut! champion.
You’re besties with Queenie B.”
“I’m sure she’d love that designation.”
But Gale managed to smile, glancing at the clock on the microwave.
“I better go.
Jenara’s probably downstairs waiting.
Thanks for distracting me.”
“Any time, dude.”
Kyle hugged him.
“Whatever happens, you’re good.”
Simple and trite, and, somehow, Kyle’s sentiment made Gale feel better.
“Thanks.
See you later.”
“Yeah.
Later, dude.”
Gale trotted down the steps, gathering whatever fortitude he could muster.
Whatever happens, you’re good.
Though Gale’s heart stuttered a little, Kyle’s words repeated inside his head.
Promising.
Reassuring.
Gale grabbed onto them with everything he had.
Jenara’s black town car awaited him, slick and newly washed.
Not her personal car.
A livery car.
Maybe even the same car they’d met in. Gale wasn’t sure what to make of that, or if he should make anything of it at all.
“Sorry, I’m late.”
He ducked inside.
“You’re fine.”
Her smile, slightly stiff, but not stilted, was the clichéd parting of clouds on a stormy day.
“Savin Rock sound good to you?”
“Sure.
I haven’t been there in years.”
“It’s really pretty this time of day.”
Jenara leaned over and turned on the radio.
Gale took her hint.
They’d talk at the beach.
It wasn’t a long drive; the silence between them was comfortable enough. Familiar. Filling the space between them with words had never been necessary. Jenara liked to read; Gale liked to watch her, the way her lips moved so slightly. He didn’t watch her now. That would be weird. Only an occasional, surreptitious glance. Every time, her eyes on the road, attention focused, slightly stiff but not stilted smile in place.
Pulling into the lot, Jenara found a spot near a park bench overlooking the beach.
Other cars were there.
The walking paths made Savin Rock a popular spot for beach-walking, even in the colder months.
Dogs. Kids. Lovers. Sandy beaches. Rocks for kids and dogs and childlike adults to climb. The Sound’s abundance of oyster and slipper shells to pick. Sea-washed rocks and glass. The view of sand and sea and grass, especially at the turn of day, couldn’t be beat.
Gale got out of the car, followed Jenara to the park bench, sat when she sat.
Hands jammed in his pockets to keep from putting his arm around her, he waited.
And he waited.
Be cool, man.
Gale somehow managed to obey.
“I thought I could do this.”
Jenara blew out a long breath.
Here it comes.
“I had it all rehearsed.
I knew exactly what I was going to say and how I’d say it, but . . .”
“But?”
Had the word come out of his mouth? Soft and calm and not at all trembling like his insides.
Jenara faced him.
“Now I’m seeing you, like, face-to-face, and it’s all jumbled.
I don’t want to say any of it anymore.
I thought I could . . .”
“Take your time.
Say what you need to say.
It’s okay.”
She took a deep, deep breath.
When she blew it out, a little cloud forming in front of her face told Gale he should be cold, even though he was burning up.
“At first,”
she said, looking out to sea, “I just thought I needed a few days.
Time to process, you know? Instead of calming down about it, I got angry.
So, so angry.
How dare you do this to me, knowing what I’ve been through? Then I remembered when we first met, and you warned me, and I told you something that boiled down to it doesn’t matter to me. That I wasn’t going to not like you because of it. And then I got mad at myself, because I never wanted to be the kind of person who’d write someone off because he has issues.”
She looked at him now, tears in her eyes.
“It’s why it took so long to call you, Gale.
I needed to stop being angry.
What finally calmed me down was coming to the realization that I just can’t do it again.”
Vision narrowed.
Jenara.
Her hair blowing in her face.
A hand pushing it back.
“I can’t put Alicia through it, either.
She misses you so much, but she’ll forget, you know? And maybe I’ll get lucky and another superamazing guy’ll come along who I won’t have to worry about every time he leaves the house.”
“It’s never going to happen again.”
“I know you mean it with all your heart, but I heard that, I believed it, a thousand times.
You have to see it from my perspective.
Do you? Can you?”
Damn it all to hell.
Gale nodded.
“That’s what I came here to tell you.”
Tears rolled, her lip quivered, her face contorted in her efforts not to let either happen.
“But now I don’t know that I can even though I know I have to.
Fuck, Gale.
I don’t know what to do.”
This is exactly what she doesn’t want, man.
This is what loving you is.
No lingering shadow.
Just Sean’s voice, not mocking or mean.
Sad.
Resigned. The infinite wisdom of the dead. Then Jenara was leaning into his shoulder. Gale’s arm encircled her, tears prickling. Tucked into each other, on the bench, at the beach, as the sun slowly set, Gale and Jenara sat, the months of their love story unraveling behind them. A ribbon caught in the sea breeze poised in that last moment before someone caught it, or let it fly free.
Courage, man.
“I have to tell you something,”
he said.
“About New Year’s Eve . . .”
At some point in the telling, Jenara had shifted away from him.
She stared out to sea, hunched over and hands in coat pockets.
“You told Regina and not me?”
“Not then.
Only recently.
I should have told you everything on New Year’s morning.”
“That you didn’t says things I don’t want to know.”
She shook her head, slowly back and forth.
“I don’t know what to say.”
Do it for her, man.
Do it for you.
“There’s only one thing left to say.”
Gale’s lips ached with the effort to keep them from trembling.
He tipped her chin up, needed to see her eyes when he told her, “I’m thirty years old, and you’re the first person I’ve ever been in love with.
I hate it, but this is—”
Jenara put a hand gently over his mouth, smiling though she wept.
“That’s the first time you’ve ever said it.”
The kiss she pressed to his lips before the warmth of her hand got snatched by the cold now coming in off the Sound was not passionate or sad but full.
So full.
Emotions Gale had no words for and would never try to find.
They’d be irrelevant.
“Bye,” she said.
Hair swinging.
Hands in her pockets.
Jenara got into her car, turned over the ignition.
Tires crunched.
Then surf.
And seagulls. And wind.
And gone.
Gale bowed his head.
March wind ruffled his hair.
He was cold in so many ways, the words for them would be irrelevant too.
The sky burned bright orange and pink, the crimson on the horizon getting darker, richer, moodier. Gale shivered now, cold being the only appropriate word. He was too far from home to walk, even if it would do him good. Pulling his phone from his coat pocket, he stretched, his back popping from sitting hunched for so long. He texted:
Can you come get me? Savin Rock Beach.
Near old museum.
The immediate dot-dot-dot that said Kyle had been waiting, then—
Be there in fifteen.
He was there in ten.
Gale stayed on the bench, now too cold to step over his heart lying in bits at his feet.
“Hey.”
Kyle dropped onto the bench beside him.
Shorts and a track jacket, his working Crocs with no socks.
Probably no shirt underneath.
Gale’s eyes prickled all over again.
“Thanks for coming.”
“No problem.”
Winter, spring, summer, or fall, Sean sang, all you had to do was . . . text.
“You okay?”
Gale choked out a stunted sort of bark, like laughter, like a sob, startling gulls into flight.
Kyle put an arm around his shoulders.
“Let’s go home.”
They drove the whole way in silence.
The kind only longtime friends who’d been through a lot together could maintain.
I fucking love this guy.
“I do too.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.
Just talking to myself.”
“Alrighty then.”
Kyle grinned, eyes on the road.
He drove a shit-bucket, but he was a good driver.
“How about we order a pizza from Sally’s.
Text Nando or Jimmy. They’re both working. We’ll get it free.”
Gale didn’t need to get his pizza for free anymore, but he texted Jimmy.
They’d bring a couple of pies home with them; Sally’s Apizza was closing early.
Slow night.
They’d all hang, play video games. Eat pizza. Drink beer, all but Gale. Not tonight. Not ever.
Not tonight.
Let forever speak for itself, man.
“Shut up, Sean,”
Gale mumbled, but he didn’t mean it.
Kyle looked at him sidelong, shaking his head.
“Tell him hi for me.”
In the dusky-dark, Gale couldn’t tell if Kyle was smiling.