Chapter 21 Brady
The recipe that week was bread pudding, and her father had left a note in the margin, and the note said: day-old bread only. Fresh bread is a coward's choice.
"Your dad," I said, holding the book up like scripture, "was correct, and I'd have followed him into battle."
"He took bread very seriously," Maren said from her stool at the island, wine in hand, feet hooked on the rung. "He once drove forty minutes to return a baguette on principle."
"A man of conviction." I turned to the kitchen, where Damian stood at the cutting board doing violence to onions. Thomas was at the sink washing the colander I'd need in ten minutes, because Thomas washed things before you knew you needed them.
"You're chopping those in the wrong direction," I told Damian.
"There is no wrong direction."
"There is, and you've found it. You're chopping against the grain of the onion's whole life story."
"It's an onion, Brady, not a memoir."
"Everything's a memoir if you cook it right." I took the board from him and demonstrated, and he watched with the expression of a man documenting my crimes for a tribunal. "See? Respect, technique, and love."
"You added nothing. You did the same cut at a different angle."
"The angle is the love, Damian."
My ma made her own bread pudding, and the custard trick was hers.
While it came together I told them about the Christmas my mother set the pudding on fire on purpose, because that's tradition, brandy and a match and a moment of glory.
But the neighbor across the way saw flames through the window and called it in.
"Fire department shows up," I said, sliding the dish into the oven. "Full truck. Lights. Four firefighters at the door, and my ma, God love her, doesn't apologize. She invites them in. They stayed for pudding. One of them still sends her a Christmas card."
"That cannot be true," Damian said.
"Cormac. Engine seven. The card has a dalmatian on it every year."
"Chop faster next time and there'd be no story," Damian said.
"Quieter," Thomas said mildly, drying the colander. "Both of you."
Maren laughed into her wine. It was a small laugh, smaller than her real one, because Chen's folder was still sitting on all of us like weather. But it was a laugh, and I caught it, and I'd take it. That was my whole job lately, catching the small ones until the big ones came back.
Dinner was at the table, and the conversation was her next film, the script she'd finally said yes to.
"I've read it twice," I announced. "I have notes."
"Of course he does," Damian told the ceiling.
"One, the best friend does all the emotional labor and the lead takes the credit, and we need to either fix that or cast it very deliberately. Two, nobody eats in this script. A hundred and ten pages and not one meal. That's how you know a writer's lying."
"People eat," Maren said.
"A character holds an apple in one scene. Holding isn't eating, Maren. I checked twice."
"I read it once," Damian said, "and his notes are wrong. The problem is the second act. The secret comes out too early and the middle sags."
"The secret comes out exactly on time. The sag is structural and the structure is the point."
"You don't know what either of those words mean, Brady."
"I know what sag means, I've seen your posture at the monitors."
"Children," Thomas said.
"You haven't even read it," Maren told him, pointing her fork. "And you have the strongest opinion at this table. I can see it on you."
"I have the strongest face," Thomas said. "It's different."
"I took the script," Maren said, setting the fork down, putting on her boardroom voice, the one that made all three of us sit up a little, "because the woman in it is unlikable on purpose for forty pages and then earns every inch back.
Nobody lets actresses do that. I've been waiting ten years for someone to let me do that.
So the sag stays, the apple stays, and you can both put it in writing. "
"I love it when she does authority," I told Damian.
"Eat your pudding," she said, and she was smiling for real now, and the smile came with a look she sent around the table, one to each of us, the way she'd started doing, like dealing cards, making sure every hand got one.
The house dispersed. Thomas took the dishes because Thursdays were his under the terms of the project, terms I'd written myself. Damian drifted upstairs and I heard the soft ceramic sound of a mug being set down outside her door for the morning, a man leaving I love you where she'd trip over it.
Maren stayed at the table with me and her second glass of wine.
Then she reached across the table and took my hand. She didn't smile while she did it. Maren smiled the way other people breathed, and she wasn't smiling, and so I went very still and paid attention with everything I had.
"I want to sleep next to you tonight," she said. "Just you."
"Okay," I said.
She led me up the stairs by the hand. In her room, with the lamp low, I put my hands on her shoulders and turned her toward me.
"Hey. You don't have to perform anything tonight," I said. "Not for me. Whatever this is, it can just be sleep."
"Brady." She looked up at me, and her eyes were doing the wet shine they did when she was about to say a true thing. "I haven't performed anything with you since the beginning."
I laughed into her mouth as I kissed her, because joy always finds my nearest exit, and she laughed back against my lips. We lay down in the dark with her head on my chest and her hand flat over my heart like she was taking a reading.
"Tell me about her," Maren said quietly. "Your sister Niamh. If tonight's a night you can."
I looked at the ceiling for a while. Her hand stayed where it was.
"She was loud," I said. "Louder than me, which people never believe. Nineteen. She wanted to teach little kids, had the whole plan, talked about her future classroom like it already existed." I could hear my own voice going somewhere I didn't take it often. "And then there was Ron."
"The boyfriend."
"I disliked him the first dinner. And I'm a man who likes everyone, Maren.
Liking people is my whole engine, so when the engine refuses to start, I notice.
" My jaw was tight. "He constantly answered for her that night.
Questions aimed at her, and he caught them midair.
He seemed paranoid about everything. He moved her glass without asking.
It was little things. But little things are never little. "
"You told her."
"On the porch, after. I named it. Jealousy, control, the whole shape of it, I could see the shape." My eyes were stinging now and I let them. "And she said, he's working on it. She said, I can help him. She was nineteen and she thought love was a thing you could fix into someone."
Maren didn't say anything. Her thumb moved once against my chest.
"I was deployed when it happened. The call came through the chaplain.
You know it's the worst kind when they send the chaplain to find you.
" The tears were running into my ears now and I didn't wipe them, didn't pretend, never saw the point of pretending.
"He wanted her to stop talking to her male friends.
He killed her in rage because he suspected she was cheating with one of them, and I was on the other side of the world being useful to strangers.
It was proven during trial that he was wrong. "
"Oh, Brady."
"At the funeral I gave a eulogy with jokes in it, because she'd have walked out of a sad one.
And then I went around behind the church, alone, and I made a vow.
Nobody I love goes unguarded again. Not on my watch.
Ever." I breathed. "And I've been keeping it imperfectly ever since.
You saw what ten minutes did to me. Ten minutes, and I was twenty-six again behind that church. "
She lifted her head, and in the dark her face was very close, and very sure.
"You've been keeping the vow," she said.
I shook my head against the pillow, an old reflex, worn smooth from use.
"Brady. Look at me." I looked. "Thomas told you it wasn't your fault, on the patio, and you couldn't hear it from him, because he's in the vow with you.
So hear it from me. I'm the one you're guarding.
I'm the woman in the house. And I am telling you, from inside the vow, you have been keeping it.
Every day. With eggs and rankings and a kitchen camera and your whole ridiculous heart. "
Something in my chest moved that hadn't moved in seven years. Not gone. Just moved, like furniture finally shifted off a floorboard that had been creaking all this time.
"Say it again in the morning," I managed. "I'll believe it by Thursday."
"Then I'll say it every morning until Thursday," she said, "and twice on Thursday, because that's project night and you'll be distracted."
I laughed, wet and broken, and pulled her in, and she held me, this small warm famous woman holding a man twice her size like it was nothing, like it was the job she'd trained for, and somewhere in the middle of being held I went under.
In the morning there was tea outside the bedroom door. Two mugs. Hers milk-first, mine strong enough to stand a spoon in, because the man at the monitors missed nothing, ever, and loved us all in ceramic.
Nobody in this house said I love you at a normal volume. They just left it places, where you'd be sure to find it.