Chapter 6 Maren
The household had invented its own breakfast schedule without ever holding a meeting about it.
Brady was at the stove by early morning, in an apron I never owned, scrambling eggs in butter that Damian had personally approved at the grocery store the day before. Thomas was at the table with coffee he had made on purpose to be stronger than Brady's, which was its own small daily war.
Damian came down with a laptop that he closed the second Brady told him to. And I came down last, in the same flannel I had been wearing for three days.
"You're back in the flannel," Brady said, sliding eggs onto a plate.
"I never left the flannel."
"That's what I respect about it."
That particular morning, the conversation was about my career.
"So," Brady said, sitting down with his own plate, far too casual. "Tell me about the SNL audition."
I put down my fork. "What audition?"
"The one you did at twenty. You did three sketches. The first one was the thing with the weather lady. The second one was the airport bit. And the third one," he pointed his fork at me, "you went completely off-script halfway through, which your agent must have hated."
I stared at him. "That audition has never been printed anywhere. I'm fairly sure only my old agent and one producer even remember it happened."
"And me," Brady said.
"How do you know that?" Damian asked, not looking up from his eggs.
"I've spent the last two evenings reading her threat assessment and her press archive at the same time," Brady said. "And I'll tell you, the press archive is way more interesting than the threat assessment."
"Do you have any other party tricks?" I asked Brady.
"Do I." He leaned back, delighted. "Okay. The indie at twenty. The two studio things in your early twenties that you don't like to talk about. The thriller. The romcom you did with Zack."
"That's most of it," I said.
"Your best one is the indie," Brady said.
"I agree," Damian said, with surprising heat. "I've seen it three times. The lighting in the back half is genuinely good. People don't talk about the lighting enough."
"You've seen it three times?" I said.
"The cinematographer never worked again, which is a crime," Damian said, like that was an answer.
Thomas set down his cup. "I watched it once," he admitted. "One night, in my room."
I looked at the three of them. My eggs were getting cold and I didn't care.
There is a way people study you when you're a job, and there is a way people study you when you're a person, and I knew the difference, and this was the second one.
All three of them had done their homework on me, and none of it had anything to do with the file.
Brady got up to plate seconds, and on his way past the refrigerator he reached up to the high shelf above it and brought something down with both hands, slow and careful, the way you carry something you might break.
It was my father's recipe book.
"You've been looking for this," I said.
"I have," he admitted. "Can I open it?"
My throat did something. "Yeah," I said. "You can open it."
He set it on the counter and opened it gently, and the pages fell to a spot near the middle, a recipe my father had annotated in ballpoint pen in the last year he was alive. I knew the page before I saw it. I hadn’t been able to look at that page since his death.
"There's a note here," Brady said softly. "In the margin. It's, hang on." He turned the book toward the light. "It's to you. Your dad wrote it to you."
"I know," I managed.
He read it out loud anyway, slow, in his own voice, no jokes in it.
"Maren, use less salt than this says. The recipe is wrong. I love you. Trust your own tongue."
I started crying.
I didn't decide to. I didn't even notice I was doing it until Damian, beside me, reached over and put a napkin into my hand without a word, like he had been holding it ready, which knowing him, he had been.
Nobody made it a thing or told me it was okay. Brady put his big warm hand flat on the counter near mine, not on it, just near, and he let me cry over my father's handwriting.
"He was right, you know," Brady said gently, after a while. "About the salt. Most recipes oversalt. Your dad knew what he was doing."
I laughed, wet and ugly, into the napkin. "He thought every recipe was wrong."
"He sounds like my kind of man."
I wiped my face.
"I want to do something," Brady said then, and there was a decision in his voice. "I want to cook through this book. One of his recipes a week. For as long as the book has pages. We just go through the whole thing." He looked at me. "I'll call it the project."
"You don't have to do that," I said.
"I know I don't." He turned to Damian. "You're on taste-test."
"Obviously," Damian said.
"Thomas, you're on dishes."
"Fine," Thomas said.
"And you," Brady pointed at me, "you choose the order. It's your dad's book. You decide which one we make first."
I held the napkin and looked at my father's handwriting in the margin, and I nodded, because I didn't trust my voice yet.
Thomas, very quietly, leaned forward. "The one in the margin, the one with the note. When it's made right, with less salt, what does it taste like?"
I told him. I described it the way my father used to make it when I was a kid, the way it filled the whole house, the exact way it tasted on a cold day.
Thomas took out his notebook and his fountain pen, and he wrote it down. All of it. I watched him write down the taste, like it was something worth keeping a record of, like it was evidence of something good.