14. Passive Concealment of Relevant Information
Passive Concealment of Relevant Information
Chapter Fourteen
The chicken piccata situation happened on a Thursday, three weeks after I moved in, when Vera came home late from the library to find me at the stove.
She stopped in the doorway. Stared, mouth agape.
"You're cooking," she finally managed.
"I appear to be, yes."
"You know how to cook."
"I've been cooking longer than you've known me."
"You let me make dinner for three weeks and you know how to cook." She set her purse down. "Petra Alves. Explain yourself."
"You like cooking. I didn't want to take it from you." I stirred the sauce. "Also, you never asked."
"I didn't ask because I assumed—" She stopped. Started again. "When did you learn?"
"Army. MREs are barely food. Once I made sergeant, I cooked for my unit whenever we had a real kitchen. Turns out I was pretty good at it." I glanced back at her. "Don't make a big thing of it."
She was staring at me with an expression that I could only describe as dangerously fond. "What else don't I know about you?"
"I can change a tire."
"That supposed to surprise me?" She moved into the kitchen, peering into the pan. "What is this?"
"Chicken piccata."
She dipped a finger into the sauce and tasted it. The sound she made was entirely inappropriate for a Thursday evening kitchen situation.
"Vera."
She opened her eyes. "What?"
"You're going to make me burn it."
"That was a compliment."
"That was a sound that should require a warning label." I pointed the wooden spoon at her. "Sit down. We're eating first."
"That's very commanding for a little lady—"
"Woman. Adult woman."
"—who has been hiding cooking skills from me for a month."
"Three weeks."
"Fine," she said, hopping up onto the counter and swinging her feet. "I'm watching you cook as payment for the deception."
"There was no deception."
"Passive concealment of relevant information." She tilted her head. "That's a technical term."
"That is so not a technical term."
"It could be. We're very thorough."
I turned back to the stove. Behind me, I could feel her watching, comfortable and warm and infuriatingly distracting, and I thought: I could do this forever. This perfectly mundane, ordinary thing. This kitchen, this woman on this counter, making up technical terms at seven in the evening.
"Brandon called me today," she said.
"Who—oh, Stevens. About what?"
"He wanted to know if the brown butter technique works for snickerdoodles and chocolate chip at the same time, or if you have to choose." She paused. "He's been thinking about it since the cookie afternoon."
"That was weeks ago."
"He's still kind of a kid, and I mean that in an endearing way." She stole a piece of lemon from the cutting board. "I told him you have to choose, but you can do two separate batches. He seemed moved by this information."
"Stevens has a lot of feelings about baked goods."
"Brandon has a lot of feelings about everything. That's what makes him Brandon." She ate the lemon piece and made a face, which made me laugh. "Miller texted me."
I turned around. "Miller texted you?"
"Yesterday. He found a vanilla extract from Oaxaca. Different ranch than the one he brought to the cookie afternoon. He wanted to know if I'd be interested in doing a comparison." She looked completely serene about this. "I said yes. We have a baking date on his next day off."
I stared at her. "Miller. Has a baking date. With you."
"He said—" She pulled out her phone and read: "Next Tuesday, if you're free. Bring your snickerdoodle recipe. Don't tell Alves, she'll make it weird."
A long silence.
"He told you specifically not to tell me? I'm gonna kill him."
She pocketed her phone. "I think it's sweet."
"He told you not to tell me."
"He also researched vanilla extract for me and carried your couch by himself. Miller contains multitudes." She hopped off the counter, came to stand beside me, and peered into the pan one more time. "Is it almost done?"
"Two minutes."
She slipped her hand into mine, standing beside me at the stove, and I looked at her—flour she didn't have on her cheek yet, food she hadn't made yet, a life that felt more like home every day—and thought I love you without the urgency of holding it back, which was the best thing about saying it out loud.
It just sat there, easy and certain, not requiring anything from me except to feel it.
"I love you," I said, because I could.
"I love you too." She squeezed my hand. "Now plate the food before I do something that makes you burn it."
Sunday morning had the exquisite quality of early autumn light in the desert that made everything look like it had been developed in a darkroom by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
I woke before Vera and extracted myself carefully from her arms. She slept like someone who had theories about the territorial sovereignty of the entire bed, and I found this charming rather than annoying, which told me everything.
Diagonal sleeper, she calls me. Woman takes up more of the bed than should be physically possible for a person of her size.
I made coffee and found Jane Eyre on top of my boots by the door.
She'd been suggesting it for two weeks. Leaving it in increasingly prominent locations. On my nightstand. On top of my boots. Once, balanced on the bathroom sink in a placement that could only be described as an aggressive recommendation.
I was three chapters in when she emerged from the bedroom in a tight t-shirt and tiny sleep shorts, hair spectacular, glasses on, looking at the book in my hands with the expression of someone watching a very rewarding prophecy come true.
"You're reading it," she said.
"You put it on my boots."
"I did." She came toward the couch, and I could tell she was trying not to visibly vibrate with delight. "And?"
"Rochester is extremely annoying."
She sat down next to me with a sound of pure vindication. "Yes! That's the point! He's brooding and impossible and completely undone by someone he didn't expect, and he has no idea how to handle any of it." She looked at me meaningfully.
"I'm not brooding."
"You're a little brooding."
"I'm thoughtful. There's a difference."
"There is not, actually, a difference." She curled her legs under her and picked up Persuasion from the side table, which she'd apparently been rereading for approximately the hundredth time this year, by my count.
"What chapter are you on?" she asked.
"Three."
"Oh, you're going to love chapter—actually, never mind. Keep reading."
"What happens in the chapter?"
"Keep reading."
"Vera."
"I won't spoil it." She opened her own book. "Just know that Rochester is about to do something that is objectively unreasonable, and you're going to find it compelling despite yourself."
"How do you know what I'll find compelling?"
She gave me a look over the top of her glasses. "Petra. I know exactly what you find compelling. You're my baby. We're in love. I know you."
I opened the book. She was right, which I was not going to admit out loud.
We read like that for two hours, shoulders touching, her foot occasionally migrating onto my lap, trading coffee duties, Vera reading sentences aloud when they particularly pleased her and me pretending to be less absorbed in Rochester's terrible decisions than I was.
Which was very absorbed, to my dismay. Rochester was going to have to reckon with himself significantly, and I could see it coming.
"This is nice," she said, not looking up from her page.
"It is."
"I used to read alone on Sunday mornings. I thought it was fine. I thought I liked it enough, but something was always missing, you know?" She turned a page. "Turns out I was just not reading with you yet."
I set down Jane Eyre and looked at her, this woman who had shown up in my hallway in Mary Janes and guessed my name and systematically occupied every part of my life until I couldn't remember what it had looked like before her.
"Vera."
"Mm?"
"I'm glad you moved to San Jacinto."
She lowered Persuasion slowly. Her expression, when she looked at me, was tender and soft. "Me too." She shifted, swinging her legs over and tucking herself against my side. "Now read your book. Rochester is about to do the thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing, Petra. You'll know it when you get there."
Half an hour later, when I finally found out, I chucked the book clear across the room, and Vera laughed and laughed and laughed.