14. Adrian #2
“That’s twelve-dollar olive oil, Adrian.
Twelve dollars.” She holds it up like evidence in a trial.
“It goes in a pan. It gets hot. It stops being special the second it’s warm.
You are not spending twelve dollars on olive oil while I’m standing here to stop you.
” She puts it back on the shelf and takes down another.
“Four dollars. It does the exact same job. The only difference is the label and your ego.”
“The four-dollar one has a lower smoke point.”
“Oh my God.” She stares at me. “You looked up the smoke point. When did you look up the smoke point?”
“I’ve been reading about cooking.” I don’t tell her how much. I don’t tell her I’ve been reading about cooking the way I used to read about the thing I was writing, obsessively because it’s the closest I can get to being useful to her. “Fine. Four dollars. But I’m registering an objection.”
“Objection noted and overruled. Push the cart.”
We fight about the pasta in the next aisle, real Italian versus store brand, and I lose that one too, and I lose it happily, because arguing with Brooke over dried pasta in aisle six is the most married I’ve felt in a year, and I think she feels it too, because halfway through it she catches herself almost smiling and shuts it down, hard, like she’s remembered she’s not supposed to be enjoying this.
At the checkout she reaches for the fullest bags and I get there first.
“I’ve got them.”
“I can carry a bag, Adrian, I’m pregnant, not made of glass.”
“I know you’re not made of glass.” I loop all of them onto my arms, every one, and hold the last few out of her reach.
“You’re the least glass person I’ve ever met.
But you fainted on a sidewalk three weeks ago and scared ten years off my life, and I’m going to carry the groceries, and you’re going to let me, and we don’t have to make it a thing. Please. Let me carry the groceries.”
She looks at me for a second, and I watch her decide not to fight it, which for Brooke is practically a love letter. She lets me take the bags, and we walk out to the car, and she doesn’t say thank you, but she doesn’t have to.
***
The fruit is what breaks the thing open.
She mentions it in passing, the way she mentions all her cravings now, half to me and half to the air, that she’d give anything for those little sugar plums, the ones her grandmother used to get, the ones that are only good for about two weeks a year and it’s that two weeks right now.
I don’t say anything. I just find them.
It takes four stores and a farm stand an hour outside the city, but I find them, and the next morning there’s a bowl of them at Laura’s, peeled and pitted and sliced the way she likes, no note, because notes are collecting and I’ve stopped collecting.
That evening I’m at the house dropping off the last of the groceries when she looks at me across the kitchen and frowns.
“What’s on your neck?”
“Nothing.”
“Adrian.” She crosses the kitchen and takes my wrist and turns it over, and there it is, the rash I’ve been ignoring all day, blooming red up the inside of my forearm, and she goes very still. “This is on your hands too. And your neck. When did this start?”
“It’s nothing. It’s a reaction to a food. It’ll pass.”
“A reaction to what.” Not a question. Her eyes come up to mine and they’re doing the thing where she already knows and is making me say it. “Adrian. A reaction to what.”
“The plums,” I admit, because lying to her is the one thing I’ve promised myself I’m done with. “There’s a thing in the skin. I get a rash. It’s mild, it’s fine, it’s just a rash, it goes away in a day.”
“You’re allergic to the plums.”
“Mildly.”
“You’re allergic to the fruit, and you found four stores’ worth of it, and you peeled it and pitted it and sliced it with your bare hands, knowing it would do this to you.” Her voice is very careful. “And you didn’t wear gloves.”
“Gloves would have been smart,” I concede. “I didn’t think of gloves. I was focused on the plums.”
She stares at me.
“It’s a rash, Brooke.” I shrug. “I’ve had worse. It goes away.”
“You knew it would do this. Before you drove an hour for them. Before you sliced every single one.” She’s not really asking.
“I knew.”
“And you did it anyway.”
“They’re only good for two weeks a year,” I say, like that explains it, because to me it does. “Your grandmother used to get them for you. You said so, half to the room, like you didn’t even expect anyone to be listening. But I was listening. So.”
I hold my hands up, red and blotched, a little ridiculous. “It’s two weeks of plums and one week of a rash. That’s not a hard math problem. I’d do it again tomorrow. I’ll probably have to, actually, because you’re going to want more, and I’m going to get them.”
For a second she doesn’t move at all.
Then she makes a small sound that isn’t quite a word, and she lets go of my wrist like it burned her, and she takes a step back, and her hand comes up over her mouth.
“I have to…” She doesn’t finish it. “I need a minute.”
She walks out of the kitchen, fast, and a second later I hear the bathroom door close.
I don’t follow her. Following her would be collecting. So I stand in her mother’s kitchen with a rash on my hands and I let her have the minute, and I count it, quietly, as the closest I’ve come.
***
She needs to go to the penthouse on a Sunday, and she asks me clipped and businesslike.
“I left a thing. When I packed. I was in a hurry.” She won’t look at me when she says it, because the hurry is the night she left me and neither of us wants to name it. “My grandmother’s ring. It’s in the safe. I need it, and I’m not going up there alone, and my mother has book club, so…”
“So I’m the least-bad option.”