Chapter 14 Brady
Here is what I did not tell her.
The day before, I drove to Larchmont in plain clothes and walked the whole block twice.
I clocked the bookshop's camera at the register and the dead spot in the corner by the poetry.
I found the back exit through the storeroom and confirmed it wasn't chained, because a chained fire door is how people die in movies and in real life.
I called ahead under a name that isn't mine and confirmed they had the book she wanted, in the back, on hold. I put the place on the approved-venues list and sent it to Damian, who read it the way Damian reads everything, like he was looking for the lie in it, and signed off.
Here is what I did tell her. "I want to buy you a sandwich."
She came down the stairs with a smile. The smile came and went, and lately it came more than it went.
"You're staring," she said.
"I'm appreciating." I held out the hat and the sunglasses. "Disguise. Larchmont's chill but it's not invisible. Put these on, become a woman named Linda, let's go."
"Linda." She put the hat on. "Linda has had a hard life. Linda manages a regional carpet outlet and she will not be upsold."
"Linda's exactly who we're going as. Get in the car."
"Does Linda have a backstory or am I improvising?"
"Linda's recently divorced. Amicable. She got the boat. She's reading more now, which is the whole reason we're going to a bookstore. It's an arc." I held the door for her. "Stay in character or the disguise doesn't hold. That's not me being weird, that's tradecraft."
I drove. Driving with her was the best part of any errand, because she could not tolerate a silence and I have never in my life produced one, so the car just filled up.
"Okay, intel," I said. "The bookshop has a cafe. The cafe has a chocolate chip cookie. I need to manage your expectations before we get there."
"Manage away."
"It's third best on the west side."
"Third." She turned to look at me. "You have a ranked list of west side cookies."
"I have a ranked list of everything, Linda, it's how I keep the world organized.
Number one's a place in Santa Monica, it's almost upsetting how good it is, I've cried.
Number two is a bakery I won't name because the owner's a crook but the man can bake.
This one's three. Solid bronze. Respectable cookie.
You'll enjoy it, you just won't write home. "
"You ranked them to spare my feelings about a cookie."
"I rank them so you're never disappointed. Disappointment is preventable. It's just bad logistics." I caught her looking at me. "What?"
"Nothing." That smile again. "You just say things sometimes."
"It's a gift. Watch the road for me, Linda, you're navigating now."
"I'm not navigating, you know exactly where it is, you've clearly been here."
I had been there. I did not say that. I said, "It's vibes. I navigate on vibes," and she let me have it.
The shop was the good kind. Narrow, tall, packed to the ceiling, the kind of place where the floor's a little uneven so the whole building leans into the books. I become a problem in a shop like that.
"Okay," I said, the second we were in, already pulling things off shelves. "You said romcom reissue, but while we're here, you're getting a syllabus. Hold these."
"Brady, I came for one book."
"And you're leaving educated. Hold these." I stacked them in her arms. "This one's got a fake dating thing, it's a crime how good it is. This one, the couple hate each other for two hundred pages and you'll want to throw it across the room in the best way. And this one…"
I picked up a paperback with a couple almost kissing on the cover and turned it over to the back, and I read the back-cover copy out loud.
"She was a big-city workaholic," I read, in the voice of a movie trailer, deep, gravelly, doom. "He was a small-town carpenter with a secret."
"Brady!" She laughed.
"What was the secret, you ask," I said, switching to a posh British lord, scandalized, monocle energy. "Nobody knows. He won't say."
A guy two aisles over had stopped flipping through his own book. I clocked him. Not a threat, just a man being slowly reeled in.
"But could she," I read, switching now to a breathless soap-opera widow, hand to my chest, "could she ever truly love a man who finishes his own crown molding?"
"You're going to get us thrown out, Linda's going to be banned," Maren wheezed. She was bent over the stack of books in her arms, laughing the way she laughs when she's stopped trying to be cute about it, the ugly good laugh, the one that's worth the whole drive.
"The bookseller's listening," I murmured, in my own voice. "Two aisles. He's pretending to shelve. He's been holding the same book for a full minute."
"That's because you're doing accents in a bookstore."
"I'm doing a public service. That man hasn't laughed since the poetry section started losing money."
The bookseller gave up. He came around the end of the aisle, a tall kid in an apron with a name tag that said HI I'M MARCUS, grinning despite himself.
"Do the carpenter one again," Marcus said.
"Marcus, you were eavesdropping. In your own store. I'm scandalized, and I respect it completely."
"It's a slow afternoon."
"It's a slow decade for crown-molding romance, my friend, but the genre endures." I handed him the book. "Here. You do the next line. Soap opera widow. From the diaphragm."
And Marcus, bless the man, took the book, put a hand flat on his chest, and read the next line of back-cover copy in a falsetto that cracked clean in half on the word passion, and Maren had to sit down on the little stool by the cookbooks because she had lost the use of her legs.
"I'm keeping him," I told her. "He's in the will. Right after Inez."
"Everyone's in the will at this point," Maren wheezed.
I went and found her real book in the back, the reissue, the exact cover she'd described to me once in passing like it was a person she'd lost. I put it on top of her stack. Then I put one more thing on top of that.
"And this," I said.
She looked down. It was a cookbook. Old-fashioned, a reissue too, a fat one with a stew on the cover.
"This isn't a romcom," she said.
"No. This one's just good. I'm telling you to get it because…
" I scratched the back of my neck. "My mom's got the original of this one.
The real first edition, all busted up, sauce on every other page, in her kitchen in Boston.
I learned half of what I know out of that exact book, standing on a stool next to her.
So I've read this. Cover to cover. The reissue's nice but it's missing her notes in the margins, and I miss the notes more than the recipes. "
Maren just looked at the cookbook, and then at me, and her eyes did a thing.
"Get the cookbook, Linda," I said, gentler. "Trust me on this one."
She got the cookbook.
I paid. We walked out into the afternoon with a bag heavier than one book had any right to make it.
And then I did the thing I had actually scouted for.
The day before, walking the block, I'd found the alcove. There was a gap between the bookshop and the bakery next door, a little brick inset, shaded, out of the camera's eye, out of the sidewalk's traffic.
I caught her wrist, easy, and pulled her into it.
"Brady, what are you," she started, and I kissed her.
I'd thought about it enough that I expected to overthink it, but I didn't. She came up onto her toes and her free hand found the front of my shirt and she kissed me back.
The bag of books knocked against my hip, and somewhere on the other side of the bricks the bakery's door chimed, and I did not care about a single thing in the threat file for about a minute.
I laughed into her mouth. I couldn't help it. Joy did that to me, it came out the nearest exit.
"Why are you laughing?" she said against my lips, smiling so I felt it more than saw it.
"Because I scouted this alcove yesterday," I admitted, because I told the truth when I was happy. "I told myself it was for foot traffic, but it wasn’t. I picked the spot where I was going to kiss you a full day before I let myself know that's what I was doing."
"That is the most Brady thing I have ever heard."
I kissed her again one last time.
Back in the car I didn't pull out right away. I sat there with my hands on the wheel and the bag of books between us, and I decided to say the thing while I had the nerve, because nerve is like weather with me, it comes and goes.
"Starting Thursday," I said, "I'm cooking through your dad's book. One recipe a week. For as long as the book has pages."
She went quiet.
"I floated it a while back, at breakfast, remember?
I made Damian agree to taste and Thomas agree to do dishes.
" I kept my eyes forward. "So, I start on Thursday.
First recipe. You pick which one. I'll cook it the way it's written and then the way the margin note says, the one in his handwriting, where he tells you the recipe's wrong about the salt.
We'll do them side by side. We'll find out if your dad was right. "
"He was always right about salt," she said, and her voice was not steady.
"Then we'll prove it. Every Thursday." I finally looked at her. "I call it the project."
"Why my dad's book?" It wasn't a challenge. She just wanted to know. "You've got your mom's. You could cook out of a hundred books. Why his?"
"Because nobody's cooked from it since he wrote in it," I said.
"A recipe book nobody cooks from is just a diary nobody reads.
And your dad left you notes in those margins, real ones, in his own hand, and they're up on a shelf going quiet.
" I shrugged. "My ma always said the kitchen's the one room where you get somebody back for an hour.
You make the thing they made, the way they made it, and they're sort of standing there with you.
I want to give you an hour with him. Every Thursday.
That's the project. That's the reason under the reason. "
She didn't say anything clever. She reached over the bag of books and took my hand off the gearshift and held it, and she held it the whole way home, the whole drive, through two lights I'd have filed a grievance against on any other day, and I drove one-handed across the city like a man who had finally found a use for all that paying attention.