Epilogue #2
It is holding a napkin-lined basket at the full extent of his arm, at roughly the angle I would use to carry a live raccoon. The hand puts the basket on the sideboard and withdraws. The door closes.
I stare. Then I smell it.
“Oh my God.”
“No,” says Julian from the hall.
I get up. “Julian.”
“No.”
I lift the napkin.
Garlic bread. Gran’s garlic bread. The whole loaf, split and stuffed and put back together and baked in foil the way she did it. Butter soaked through the crumb. Garlic. More garlic. Rosemary. The smell of it fills the room, and I start laughing.
“Julian!”
“I am in the hall.”
“You made garlic bread?”
“Yes.”
“You can’t even be in the room with garlic bread.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“You leaned away from this loaf. That’s how I nearly figured out you were a vampire in the first place.”
“I remember the occasion.”
“How did you make it?”
“Badly.”
I laugh harder.
“Nine times,” says the hall.
I stop. “Nine?”
“Bess tasted them.”
“Bess?”
“Mrs. Libby found a church cookbook from 1974 containing a recipe attributed to Ada Harrington. I made it. Bess informed me that it was wrong.”
“How was it wrong?”
“She didn’t know.”
“So you made it again.”
“Yes.”
“Nine times.”
“The ninth was acceptable.”
“Acceptable according to Bess?”
“Yes.”
“That’s basically a Michelin star.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
I tear off a piece and taste it, and for the second time tonight, the room disappears.
It’s Gran’s. Not because the recipe is exact.
Maybe it isn’t. Maybe memory has moved it around in four years.
But the crust is right and the butter is right and the garlic is absolutely unreasonable, and I am seventeen and stealing the end piece before dinner while Gran tells me I’ll spoil my appetite.
I close my eyes. When I open them, Julian is still in the hall.
“Come here.”
“No.”
“Julian.”
“I love you very much and I am not coming into that room until you have removed the bread.”
I laugh so hard I have to put it down. “Fine.”
I wrap it up and carry it into the kitchen, where I put it in a cupboard and shut the door. When I come back, Julian is leaning against the wall beside the stairs with his hands behind his back. I put my arms around him, and he holds me.
“How many people know about this?”
He considers the question. “Define know.”
I give him a look.
“Most of Water Street,” he admits, and I pull back.
“You asked all these people. You went around town asking people to help you cook.”
“Yes.”
“You asked them.”
“I am aware of the irony.”
“How many?”
“I stopped counting.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “You did not.”
“Nine.”
“Of course you know.”
He looks towards the dining room. “Come back to the table.”
There is something in his voice, so I go. On the sideboard, where I somehow didn’t notice it before, is a silver bowl full of violently orange cheese curls.
I point. “Explain.”
“Lucy.”
“Obviously.”
“She said that if I intended to construct a culinary history of Penelope Harrington and omitted the basement of 2006, the entire enterprise lacked integrity.”
I stare at him. “Those were her exact words?”
“No. Her exact words contained an obscenity and the phrase don’t you dare get fancy about this.”
I take one. It’s exactly the brand.
“You put them in the good silver.”
“She was extremely specific.”
I sit down, and Julian sits across from me.
“All right,” I say. “Tell me.”
He looks at the candles. “I cannot taste anything.”
“I know.”
“I can read a recipe. I can weigh ingredients. I can control the temperature. I can repeat a technique until I can perform it correctly. It turns out I am reasonably good at those things, which I suspect is mostly a function of not becoming impatient.”
“Four hundred years will do that.”
“But I cannot tell whether any of it is good. I cannot correct it. There is no amount of practice that will let me do the thing you do when you put a spoon into a pot and know it needs salt.” He turns my wineglass a fraction on the polished wood. “So I couldn’t do it alone.”
He says it quietly, almost casually, and it’s the biggest thing he’s said all night.
“You had to ask.”
“I had to ask everyone.”
My throat closes.
“I started with Fern,” he says. “I went to her kitchen and explained that I wanted to make you dinner and that I couldn’t taste what I made.”
“You told her that?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“Well, that’s a fix. Then she put on her coat and took me outside to discuss parsnips.”
I laugh. “After that?”
“It became marginally easier.”
“Marginally.”
“Very marginally. Mrs. Libby found recipes. Bess tasted things. Theo explained stock to me for an hour and then told me I was making it unnecessarily complicated. Harriet located Dot. Lucy arrived with those.” He looks at the orange cheese curls.
“She also asked me nine questions about my intentions.”
“Only nine?”
“They were detailed.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
“Penny.”
“I’m okay.”
“You’re crying.”
“I can do both at the same time.”
“I’ve noticed.”
He waits while I look at the table, at the candles, at the bowl of orange cheese curls sitting in silver as old as the town, and at the door he had to stand behind because he made me garlic bread he couldn’t bear to be near.
“You asked half the town for help.”
“Yes.”
“For me.”
His eyes come back to mine.
“Last autumn, you put food in front of me knowing I would not eat it.”
“Not at first.”
“No. But after you knew, you kept doing it. You brought things to my house. You set places for me. You put a plate in front of me at your table when you knew perfectly well it would still be full at the end.”
“That wasn’t the point.”
“No,” says Julian. “It wasn’t. The point was the place.”
I don’t move.
“You made one for me,” he says. “Again and again. I cannot taste any of this. I will never taste any of it. But I know why it matters to you. I know what that casserole meant. I know why you talk about your grandmother’s garlic bread as though it was a member of the family.
I know Lucy Carver believes those orange things constitute food, against all available evidence. ”
“They do.”
“They stain silver.”
“That’s how you know they’re good.”
His mouth curves. “I knew what I wanted to give you. I simply could not make it by myself. So I asked.”
I reach across the table, and he gives me his hand. For a little while, neither of us says anything. The clock ticks behind him.
Eventually I look around. “The room’s different.”
“Yes.”
All eighteen chairs are around the table. Empty tonight, except for ours, but not stored. Ready.
“Are you going to use it?”
Julian follows my gaze. “I thought I might ask Theo up. And Mrs. Libby. Eventually.”
“Together?”
“I am not doing this twice.”
I laugh. “She’ll inspect everything.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“Theo will find something wrong with the fireplace.”
“He already has.”
“Of course he has.”