Chapter 14 #4
“You and Hollyweird made up, I see,” Sue was elbows deep in dishes when I entered her kitchen around eleven.
Randy practically pulled Evan off my porch while we were drinking our coffee and talking.
Randy said they were going to hike to a few of the hidden ponds and fish for our dinner tonight.
Evan looked at me like he was actively being kidnapped, but still went along with it.
“Something like that,” I laughed. Last night still felt like a dream. It happened so fast. Layers of myself peeled away and we woke up tangled in his bedsheets. It was good, and it had to be good enough because this was all I’d ever get.
“More than made up from the sounds of it,” Sue turned to me and waggled her eyebrows. “Made up, made out, made love…”
“Stop!” I cut her off as my cheeks heated. “You guys heard all that?”
“I heard something, Randy didn’t. He was dead asleep without his hearing aids in, a tornado could hit and he wouldn’t even stir.”
“That doesn’t make the situation that much better.”
She placed the last dish in the drying rack and dried her hands off. “If you only knew what Randy and I did back in the day to christen this place—”
I waved my hands in front of me in protest. “Please, please do not tell me. I will gladly live with the mystery of it all.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself, they’re good stories.”
Every time Sue and I made pupusas together she’d use the same massive robin’s egg blue ceramic bowl to make the dough.
There was a chip on the lip from the time I bumped the bowl into the counter when I was too young to have any hand-eye coordination.
I apologized profusely that day, I had committed one of the cardinal sins a child could commit, breaking something.
Sue laughed it off, ruffled my hair, and said it had character.
A pot of homemade refried beans was cooling on the counter, the warm smells of cumin and onion and garlic lingered in the kitchen. It smelled like home.
“Grab the masa harina would you?” she asked as she set the bowl onto her butcher-block counter.
I pulled the bag from the pantry and passed it to her.
Sue never measured how much corn flour or water she used, it was always by feel alone.
She could shut her eyes and touch the dough and know exactly what it needed more of.
Every time I tried making them for myself they’d always come out wrong, somehow.
She shook the flour into the bowl and added a heavy pour of water, mixing it with practiced hands. I stood to the side and watched with the same awe I used to when I was watching her from a step stool.
“No need to stand there troutmouthed, you can shred the cheese and save us some time,” she nodded to the fridge.
“On it, sorry, it’s been so long since I’ve had one of these.”
“We won’t have any if you don’t get that cheese shredded,” she chided. I rolled my eyes and got right to work. “They don’t have any Salvadoran food in Boston?”
“They do, they just never taste like yours,” I had tried them all at some point. They were close, but missed whatever magic Sue put into hers. “And the ones I make definitely taste nothing like yours do.”
“Well, that only gives you a reason to keep coming up here, then.”
We worked alongside one another in silence. Sue formed the dough into uniform balls and passed them over to me to stuff and flatten. She critiqued my methods and I gently reminded her that these were only supposed to be lunch for the two of us and leftovers for Randy, not a Michelin star meal.
“Did I ever tell you how Randy convinced me to finally go out with him?” Sue asked, rolling the dough in her hands.
“Wasn’t it something with a broken down car?” I spooned the refried beans into the center of the dough.
She nodded. “We were in the same social circle, and I had been planning to hike the Appalachian Trail solo while between jobs. He begged to take me out before I left. I said no.”
I laughed because I could picture it perfectly. Sue and Randy’s home was filled with photos of them from their youth, everything from band tour buses with cigarettes dangling from their lips to at the summit of Mt. Denali after they’d hitchhiked to Alaska. They lived a thousand lives together.
“Clearly that didn’t stick,” I said.
She shook her head, trying to move a stray hair that had fallen out of place without touching her face with dough covered hands.
I leaned over and tucked it back. “It didn’t stick.
He also said he’d wait for me until I got back.
The weekend I was supposed to leave, my friend’s car broke down.
We lived in the city, I didn’t have my own car, and I was too broke to buy a plane ticket.
Hell, I was too broke to buy a bus ticket.
Randy said he’d drive me. He called his boss and said he needed to take a week off to drive his future wife to Georgia. ”
“‘His future wife? Before the first date?”
“I told him he was crazy, and that I wouldn’t ever get married. I didn’t want to be tied down to anyone.” She passed me the last ball and crossed over to the stove to heat up her cast iron skillet. I was pretty sure the thing was as old as she was, if not older.
“But you let him drive you anyways?”
“I needed a ride! He was my only option.”
I laughed, thinking about the old blue Chevy sedan that sat long abandoned in the shed on their property. Now I knew why Randy could never get rid of it.
“He told me over and over again on the drive that he’d meet me at the base of Katahdin and we’d finish the hike together.
I asked how he’d know when I made it, and he said he’d find a way.
Sure enough, when I got to the base he was there with a backpack, waiting for me.
We did the hike together, he wasn’t much of an outdoorsman but he managed to keep my pace.
He asked me out again on the summit, and I said yes.
I was going to say yes when he first asked, but I liked dragging him along a bit. ”
A pile of finished pupusas now sat before us, ready to be fried.
“I think I know why you’re telling me all this,” I said.
Sue was pouring a few glugs of oil into a cast iron skillet. “I’m telling you this because not many men would be willing to hike up a mountain for you, and I think that dud you were with wouldn’t even walk up a flight of stairs.”
Evan was gone when I got back to my cabin.
This was the longest span of time we’d been apart, save for the nights we didn’t share a bed.
My mind was a clouded mess of ideas. I had finally found my inspiration in the form of my Gen-X aunt and her gruff husband.
The story didn’t need to be a parody of Thorndown, it had to feel like something real.
No one was more real than the two of them.
My fingers itched with anticipation, the same sensation I’d been chasing for days.
The porch proved to be too windy to pursue any writing in my already battered notebook so I fired up my laptop, my knee bobbing as I waited for it to power on. It was slow and sluggish, it had been dormant for too long.
As the chiming of the laptop signaled it was finally ready for me, I stared out at the rough surface of the lake.
Other days had been practically glass, ice, even.
But today it shed its placid identity for something far rougher.
It was as I surveyed the scene before me that I realized exactly what the setting of the book needed to be.
There was nowhere else that I could consider to feel as otherworldly as the fictional lands in Thorndown.
If I squinted, I could practically see a ship navigating between the sloping green mountains.
The computer started and sluggishly opened a blank document. A white rectangle blinked anxiously at me.
I began to write.
“I think you’ve earned it,” I said later in the day when Evan reappeared back on my porch. The gravel path crunched underneath his footsteps and I had slammed my laptop shut before he was in my sightline. I had managed to write a few thousand words of a story I might not hate.
“Earned what?” He kicked his legs up on the porch railing and leaned back.
“An all-inclusive tour to my ‘secret cove’.” The last place I had my solitude here, the final destination I had visited before all I’d known of normalcy was flipped inside out.
“Wow, this might be the biggest honor of my life,” he laughed.
I lightly slapped his bicep. “Oh shut up, I thought it might be good to go lounge on a beach where we’d be out of the sightline of Sue and Randy. She, uh, heard us last night.”
He sat up straight, face ruddying in a deep flush. “Shit.”
“No one around for miles, quiet night, you know…” I nervously laughed. “I think she really enjoys the free entertainment of it all.”
“That explains why Randy was interrogating me about my property portfolio and my savings account. Are they expecting a dowry?”
“Maybe hush money,” I replied.
“Tell me about this secret paradise cove,” he asked before taking a long swig from his water bottle.
“I probably am overselling it,” I let out a self-deprecating huff of a laugh. “You really need to see it for yourself.”
“Then let’s go.”
I changed into my swimsuit and tossed an oversized button down shirt over it, it flapped in the breeze as I walked down to the beach. The lake was speckled with choppy whitecaps. Evan was standing by the line of boats, a paddle in each hand and two life jackets haphazardly slung over his shoulder.
“Did I grab the right things?” he asked hopefully.
“You’re basically an expert,” I answered as I took a paddle and lifejacket from him.
Kayaking was much easier than canoeing. Nick and I usually gave it one solid try every year we came up, and because he wanted to steer we usually went in one large, wobbling loop before getting anywhere. I was hardly a pro, but I could get us to our destination.
Probably.
We stood before the aluminum boat. A test in communication and coordination. “Have you ever canoed before?”