14. Adrian
— ? —
Adrian
I show up at Laura’s on a Saturday when I know Brooke is at the firm, and I stand on the porch holding a grocery bag and a level of nerves I have not felt since I was twenty-two and pitching my first novel to a room of people who could end me, and I knock.
Laura opens the door and looks at me without saying anything, which is a thing Brooke does too, this appraising silence, and I understand for the first time where my wife got it.
“She’s not here,” Laura says.
“I know. I didn’t come for her.” I hold up the bag, which is a stupid thing to do, brandishing groceries at a woman like a peace offering, which is exactly what they are. “I came for you. I need you to teach me a thing, and you’re the only person alive who can.”
She doesn’t move out of the doorway.
“Adrian.” She says my name the way you’d handle a thing you’re not sure is safe. “You understand that I am her mother. You understand that I held her on that couch three weeks ago while she came apart over you, and that a part of me would very much like to hit you with this door.”
“I do. I’d deserve it.” I keep the bag up.
“But I also know you spent a lot of years married to a man who forgot to see you, and I know you told her it was okay to choose herself, and I think that means you know the difference between a man making noise and a man actually changing. So I’m asking you to look at me and decide which one I am.
And then, if you decide I’m worth it, I need you to teach me how to make the thing she loved when she was little.
Because I don’t know it. And I should. I’ve been her husband for two years and I don’t know the food that makes her feel safe, and I want to. ”
Laura studies me for what feels like a very long time.
“It’s a chicken and rice thing,” she finally says, stepping back to let me in.
“Her grandmother’s. I made it every time she was sick or sad or scared, and she has never once managed to make it taste right herself, which she’ll deny, so don’t bring it up.
” She takes the bag out of my hands and looks inside and makes a small disapproving sound.
“This is the wrong rice. Of course it’s the wrong rice.
Sit down. We’re starting with the rice.”
That’s how I end up in Laura Lowell’s small warm kitchen on a Saturday afternoon, being taught to cook by a woman who is not entirely sure she shouldn’t poison me, and it is the best hour I’ve spent in a month.
She’s a hard teacher.
She doesn’t measure anything, which nearly kills me, because I am a man who measures, and every time I reach for the cup she swats my hand and says “you’ll feel when it’s right,” which is not information, that is a riddle.
She makes me start the sofrito three times.
She tells me my knife work is an embarrassment and then, grudgingly, that it’s improving.
She talks while we cook, and slowly, over the onions and the garlic and the browning chicken, she stops sounding like a woman deciding whether to hit me with a door and starts sounding like a woman who is, against her own better judgment, rooting for me a little.
“He wasn’t a bad man, her father,” she says, at one point, not looking at me, stirring.
“That’s the thing nobody tells you. Harold wasn’t cruel.
He didn’t cheat, he didn’t drink, he didn’t raise his voice.
He just loved his buildings more than he remembered to love me out loud, and by the time I understood that a person can starve to death on a diet of a good man’s distraction, we’d already lost the years. ”
She taps the spoon on the pot. “I watched Brooke marry a version of that. I saw it happening. And I told myself it wasn’t my place, the same way my mother told herself, the same way her mother probably told herself. We are a long line of women who kept quiet and called it grace.”
She finally looks at me. “So when I tell her it’s okay to choose herself, I’m not just talking about you. I’m talking about all of it. Do you understand what you’d be asking her to un-learn, if you actually meant this?”
“Yes,” I say. “I think so. I’m learning it too.
The un-learning. I spent my whole life being adored from a comfortable distance and calling it love.
I’m not good at the up-close part. But I’m trying to learn it, and I’d rather learn it badly and out loud than keep being excellent at the wrong thing. ”
Laura is quiet a moment. Then she says, “Stir this. Don’t let it catch,” and hands me the spoon, and I understand that I’ve passed some small gate, and that she’ll deny it later just like Brooke would.
The burn happens near the end.
I’m moving the pan off the heat the way she showed me, except I do it wrong, I grab the handle where it’s been sitting over the flame instead of the wrapped end.
The metal is exactly as hot as metal that has been over a flame tends to be, and there’s a sound, and a smell, and a white line of pain that goes straight up my arm. I put the pan down and I do not drop it, because dropping it would ruin the food, and the food is the entire point.
“Adrian.” Laura’s already got my hand, turning it over, looking at the red stripe rising across three fingers. “Cold water. Now. Move.”
“It’s fine.”
“It is very much not fine, you’ve burned yourself, come here.”
“Laura.” I take my hand back, gently, and I go back to the pan, because it’s almost done and I refuse to let a burn be the reason it’s not perfect. “I’ve written entire novels with worse hangovers. It’s three fingers. Let me finish. Please. I need this one to be right.”
She looks at me holding a hot pan with a burned hand because I won’t let the dish fail, and a look moves across her face that I can’t read, and she doesn’t fight me on it.
“You’re as stubborn as she is,” she says. “God help the both of you.”
Brooke comes home at six to a kitchen that smells of her childhood.
I’m at the stove when she comes in, and I hear her stop in the doorway, and I turn around, and she’s standing there in her work clothes with her bag still on her shoulder and an expression I’ve been chasing for weeks, unguarded, caught, before she can put the wall back up.
“What is that smell?” she says slowly.
“Sit down. It’s ready.”
“Adrian, what did you…” She sees my mother at the table, sees the two places set, sees my hand where I’ve wrapped a paper towel around the burned fingers, and her eyes narrow. “What happened to your hand?”
“Nothing. Sit.”
She sits, because she’s too thrown not to, and I put the plate in front of her, chicken and rice, her grandmother’s recipe, made by my clumsy burned hands under her mother’s merciless supervision, and I step back and I watch her, because I have been thinking about this exact moment for three days and I am not going to miss a second of it.
She takes a bite.
And she goes still.
It’s a specific stillness, the kind that happens when a taste reaches a part of you that words can’t, and her eyes come up and find mine, and they’re wet, and she’s furious that they’re wet, I can see her being furious about it, and she puts her fork down very carefully.
“This is Mom’s recipe,” she says, quietly, like an accusation.
“It’s your grandmother’s, technically.” I keep my voice light because if I don’t I’ll come apart. “Your mother’s a terrifying teacher. She swatted me eleven times. I have witnesses. Well. One witness, and she’ll deny it.”
“I never taught it to you.” Brooke’s still looking at the plate like it might not be real. “I never even told you it existed.”
“I know.”
“So how…”
“I asked.” I sit down across from her, the burned hand in my lap.
“That’s the whole trick, it turns out. The thing I never did for two years.
I asked the people who love you what you needed, and then I did the work to give it to you.
It’s not complicated, Brooke. It was never complicated. I just wasn’t doing it.”
Brooke doesn’t answer.
She takes another bite, and another, and she doesn’t say anything else, and she doesn’t have to, because I’ve been reading her face for two years and lately she won’t let me anymore, but right now, over her grandmother’s chicken and rice, for just a minute, she forgets to guard it, and what’s on it is enough to keep me going for a month.
Across the table, Laura catches my eye, and she doesn’t smile, exactly.
But she doesn’t not smile, either.
***
The grocery store happens because I offer.
“I’ll go,” I say. “Give me the list, I’ll have it done in an hour.”
“I can shop for my own groceries, Adrian.” Brooke doesn’t look up from her tea.
“I know you can. I’m offering to save you the trip.”
“I don’t need saving from a trip.”
Laura, at the counter, not turning around: “The pantry’s empty, and you were asleep on your feet by seven last night, and the man is standing right here with a car. Let him drive you. Both of you go. I have book club.”
There’s a silence, the specific silence of a woman being outvoted by her own mother in her own kitchen, and then Brooke sets her mug down with a small, final click.
“Fine.” She says it in the tone of a woman agreeing to a root canal. “But I’m picking everything. You push the cart and you carry the bags and you keep your opinions about produce to yourself.”
“Deal,” I say, before she can add conditions, and that is how I end up pushing a cart through a fluorescent-lit supermarket beside my estranged pregnant wife, and I would not trade it for the launch, the reviews, the whole burned career, any of it.
She’s sharper here than she’s been with me anywhere. The plainness of it lets her guard down into irritation, which is honestly a relief, because irritation is at least a thing she’ll show me.
“No,” she says, taking the olive oil out of the cart.
“That’s good olive oil.”