Chapter 11
As it turned out, “unperishables” meant a can of cream-style corn, a can of baked beans, two tins of sardines, a sleeve of saltine crackers, some mustard packets, a package of chocolate sandwich cookies, a jar of peanut butter, and some honey that didn’t have an expiration date.
“Don’t eat that. We don’t know how old it is,” Nadja warned.
Robbie squinted at the bottom of the jar. Something had been printed there once, but it was long gone now.
“Didn’t they excavate honey from ancient Egypt that was still edible? This is fine.”
Nadja arched eyebrow at him. “That was wine. And I think ‘edible’ is a relative term.”
But Robbie was in his element now, making something out of spare parts.
It had been his favorite part of working on the line in restaurants.
One chef he’d worked with had given him liberties to create the daily specials, which Robbie took as an opportunity to help the overhead by clearing out inventory. Making beauty from chaos.
Pivoting had always been his strength. He was lucky. Waking up on a wolf commune hours from home to find out that not only was he a shifter but that he had a mate, albeit a fake one, was a hell of a pivot.
When he was growing up, his mama had always talked about the importance of balance. “Balance in all things, Robbie baby,” she’d say when she’d peel an apple with a cigarette bouncing on her bottom lip as she talked.
But Robbie had seen a video online of a person saying that they would much rather have rhythm than balance. If you only have balance, the slightest shift of the wind can make it vanish. But rhythm? Rhythm moved, it pulsed. It changed depending on the needs of the song.
Robbie had learned about rhythm in kitchens and had never forgotten the lesson. Keep the rhythm? The night flowed. Lose the rhythm? You’d be in the weeds until closing, clinging to survival by your fingernails.
He’d lost his rhythm lately. The only pulse had been the pounding of his racing heart and the soft slams of his heels against the floor as he’d bounced his legs anxiously.
But today, with every pounding step on the soft ground as he ran behind JJ, as he’d felt the chilly air against every bit of his body, as he’d thrown himself into the bosom of the lake, it had felt like the beginning of a new tempo.
Robbie took two plates down from the cupboard and arranged saltines on both. On one set of crackers, he spread peanut butter and drizzled honey. On the other, he flaked sardines and topped them with mustard from the fast food packets.
“Dinner is served,” he said, wiping the rim of one of the plates with a paper towel with a flourish.
Nadja sat down and studied the plates.
“What’s this?”
“Dinner,” Robbie repeated, sitting across from her and taking a sardine and mustard cracker off of the plate.
“Peanut butter and honey I get. But that?” She made a face.
“It tastes like my childhood,” Robbie said, putting the whole saltine in his mouth.
“Tell me about your childhood,” Nadja said.
He swallowed a long sip of water, clearing his throat, and said, “Oh, you know. A single mom who works too hard.”
Nadja snorted and reached for a peanut butter cracker. She nibbled on the corner, no doubt waiting to see if the honey had gone bad.
“That part is true,” he went on. “Single mom, lots of sisters, a dad who split before I was born. But we spent a lot of time at my grandparents when my mom was working during the summer. My granddad ate sardines with yellow mustard on saltines near every day.”
Nadja had finished the peanut butter cracker. Robbie reached for another sardine.
“They smell fishy,” Nadja said, staring at the plate like it might bite her.
He could admit that it far from the most appetizing looking thing he’d ever assembled.
In the fluorescent light overhead, the yellow mustard looked especially radioactive.
But food was food, and he wasn’t about to waste it.
“They are fish,” he said with a grin. “But you don’t have to eat it. You can eat the peanut butter ones, and I’ll eat these if you don’t want them. That’s fine by me.”
“No,” she said with a sigh. “No, I’m not going to be a snob. I’ll try it.”
She reached out and took one off the plate, studying it with the same concern that she might consider a lit fuse. She took the tiniest bite from the corner, and Robbie waited expectantly. She chewed slowly, and he fought back the urge to ask her if she liked it. She took another bite.
Normally Robbie didn’t mind silence. But for some reason, the lapses in conversation tonight were making him itchy.
“My grandpa wasn’t a nice guy. I didn’t like spending time with him.
Mean as a snake and just as unpredictable.
He was the kind of guy who provided for his family but always held it over their heads that he had, like they should be grateful that he bothered.
My grandma always blamed the war, said he came back a different man than he was when he left, but I don’t think that’s it. ”
“You don’t think the war affected him?”
“Oh, I know it did. I’ve worked with plenty of vets.
And I’ve read a lot. I know that war can break your brain and that you’ve got to work to put the pieces back together.
Sometimes they don’t fit back the way they did when you started.
But Grandpa was the kind of mean you learn from watching your dad be mean to your mom, not the kind of mean you become from being traumatized. You know?”
“I do know,” Nadja said with a far-off look on her face.
“Anyway,” Robbie said, feeling very naked all of a sudden, “the old man ate sardines and mustard, and if we were hungry, we did too.”
“I’m sorry if it’s painful to talk about.”
“It’s not,” Robbie said with a shrug. And it wasn’t. “He mostly didn’t bother with us. He spent most of his time in the den with the TV on. Once they stopped raising large livestock, he left all the work to my grandma. She took care of the chickens and goats and the big kitchen garden. We helped.”
“That all sounds really nice,” Nadja said. Robbie noticed she reached for another sardine cracker.
“It was. We helped with the animals and the garden, and then with the canning and preserving in the fall. ‘Many hands make light work,’ she’d always say. I liked it. Working with my hands has always made sense to me.”
“What do you mean?”
Maybe this was therapy. Maybe she just couldn’t turn it off. Or maybe she was actually interested. That thought was thrilling in a way that surprised him.
“My brain always seems to be six steps ahead of the rest of me. I’ve always got contingencies for my contingencies.
What-ifs. Plans for plans. But when my hands are busy, my brain gets real quiet.
I’m focused on weeding, or cleaning a coop, or dicing mirepoix, or building something, or getting the right color on a roux.
When my hands are busy, I’m able to be right where I am. ”
She was quiet, chewing and staring over his right shoulder.
“I don’t think I’ve ever worked with my hands like that,” Nadja said.
That surprised him. “Never helped with a garden?”
She scoffed. “I don’t come from gardening people.”
“Not even a few flower pots on the front porch?”
“Not front porch people either,” she said before popping a peanut butter saltine in her mouth. She chewed thoughtfully, took a drink of her water, swallowed, and said, “I didn’t have parents. I was raised by a guardian. I would call my upbringing one of benign neglect. Mostly.”
“Mostly,” Robbie parroted, feeling like that one word contained an entire lifetime of experience.
“Mostly,” she repeated. “And then I had to go to work.”
“As a therapist?”
She winced. “No. Not at first. Not for a while, actually. I didn’t go to school until I… left.”
She scratched at a residue on the tabletop with a blunt nail.
The kitchen faucet dripped, the sound of the water hitting the stainless steel basin loud in the quiet.
Outside, he could hear the wind rustling the bare branches.
There was a howl, long and low, in the near distance.
A week ago—hell, yesterday—that sound would have alarmed him being so close. But now, it felt almost comforting.
He couldn’t explain it, but he could tell by the sound of it that the howl was an excited one.
Like its wolf was about to race through the moonlit forest and couldn’t wait, like they were inviting everyone to share in their joy.
And someone must have because a moment later, there was another howl.
Higher, sharper. Closer. And then another.
They chorused together, punctuated by an aggravated snarl that made him smile for all that it reminded him of his Grandpa grousing at him to “pipe down.”
He looked at Nadja across the table and saw that she’d been watching him.
Her head was cocked slightly to the side.
He looked back at her, at her moon pale skin, almost translucent in the yellow glow of the overhead light.
She was beautiful. He’d registered that thought before, but now, looking at her, really looking at her, it felt like a punch to the gut.
She sucked in a breath, but then she stood quickly, picking up the now empty plates and moving toward the sink.
“You cooked, I’ll clean,” she said. And if her voice shook a little, Robbie was able to tell himself that it was because of her vigorous scrubbing with the yellow and green sponge, attacking the plates like she was scouring one of those flat-top grills that hadn’t been cleaned in fifty years and not a plate that held nothing but dry crumbs.
She wiped the counter, the table, even the front of a cabinet, scrubbing at an old smudge of what looked like petrified grape jam, a perfect purple fingerprint.
Robbie yawned. “Are you tired?”
She whirled around, her cheeks pink, her throat flushed, with the sponge still clutched in her hand.
“Tired?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding at the digital clock on the top of the stove that said that it was close to ten o’clock.