Chapter Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Seven
Five weeks later
“Okay, now I want you to blend in the onion. Gently—you don’t want to take out too much of the air in the batter.” Honey hovered near me at the kitchen table, watching me try my hand at making Karma’s akara recipe for the first time.
I thought I was a pretty decent cook, but with Honey watching me like a hawk, I had to admit the African fritter recipe had my nerves going in high gear. Another time, maybe a month earlier, I’d have diced onion and habanero floating over my head, but I hadn’t had any magical accidents since the night we caught Connor.
I followed Honey’s directions, gently mixing diced onion into the caramel-brown batter. Beside me a waiting pan of oil was coming to temperature. The batter I’d made was a blended mixture of beans, spicy chili pepper, regular peppers, bouillon, and ground crawfish, but after having devoured the entire container of Karma’s akara in one sitting, I knew I needed to learn how to make it myself.
“All right,” Honey declared. “That looks perfect—you’re ready to spoon it into the oil. Just be careful not to add too many at one time; they need a little room to breathe when you flip them over.”
I did as I was told, impressed that Honey had resisted nudging her way in to show me and then taking over the whole process. She was bouncing on the pads of her feet, obviously dying to get involved, but she had promised to let me make it all by myself and had been true to her word, as much as it pained her.
While the fritters turned a beautiful golden-brown color in the oil, Amy popped her head in from the kitchen entrance. “Room for one more? Oh gosh does it smell good in here.” She made her way in, easing her curvy figure through the too-small, too-occupied kitchen, but I loved having too many people in a kitchen. It was the one room of a house where I truly believed more was merrier.
Honey moved out of the way as Amy withdrew a tray from the fridge, displaying a truly glorious pavlova. “Voilà!”
The meringue base was huge and perfectly white, and the custard she had mounded in the center was almost the same color as the meringue. The custard was topped with liberal piles of blueberries and peaches and decorated with several well-placed dollops of whipped cream garnished with mint leaves and fresh flower petals.
Honey gasped. “Amy, that should be in a magazine!”
“It was, once.” Amy winked. “Now, don’t you two take too long in here; everyone is outside, and we’re getting hungry. You might need to bring more of that strawberry iced tea out when you come too. The first batch is almost gone.”
I had pulled the first few akara out of the pan and placed them on a waiting paper towel, where I dabbed them free of excess oil. Soon the whole batch was cooked, and I loaded them onto a big serving tray with a little dipping bowl of a yogurt sauce Honey had brought along with her. She carried a big jug of iced tea behind me as well as a platter of fresh heirloom tomatoes from my garden, cut into slices and served with super-fresh burrata cheese, garden basil, and a healthy glug of balsamic vinegar.
We headed out into the backyard, where several huge picnic blankets had been tossed onto the lawn in no discernible pattern, some overlapping others, some on their own, with an array of mismatched lawn chairs surrounding them.
On the blankets was every conceivable food one might want at a picnic. Huge wedges of watermelon, homemade elote corncobs, warm potato salad that was so fresh I could smell the bacon from ten feet away. From the barbecue grill that we had unearthed in the shed—and that miraculously still worked—Rich brought over a platter of perfectly cooked steak served on a bed of rosemary right from the pot at my back door.
Imogen plopped down two ice-cold bottles of sparkling rosé as she settled into her chair, then opened a cooler she’d brought to unveil bowls of the most stunning ice I had ever seen. The cubes were perfect little spheres, and each one had a real flower frozen into it. There was also a bottle of a homemade simple syrup that was a stunning pink color, labeled Pink Lemonade . “I might not be a good cook, but I can make one heck of a good cocktail,” she declared.
Daphne had been across the lawn playing a game of tag with the Tanakas’ granddaughter Emiko—or Miko, as she’d introduced herself—and the pair of them were giggling like mad as they approached the blankets.
Leo took the tray of steak from Rich and went around the circle, making sure everyone who wanted some was able to get a serving before the group descended like hungry dogs on the spread of food in the middle of the circle.
Detective Martin, who had come without Detective Kim, gave Leo a smile as she took the food from him, and without words, that smile conveyed a thousand apologies. Leo had told her a dozen times already he didn’t have any hard feelings about being questioned, and because he was Leo, I believed that was true.
Everyone loaded their plates, the smell of propane and grilled meat, sunscreen, and sweet watermelon filling the air alongside peals of laughter and boisterous stories that got louder the more of Imogen’s drinks we had.
The August sun hung low in the sky, and we were waiting for night to fall to watch a forecasted meteor shower, since my yard was the highest point in town to watch from.
With bellies and hearts full, jokes and tall tales spread through the group, and I looked around, marveling at this little family I had built just when I thought I had lost mine.
From the window in the back mudroom, a big orange cat sat with his face pressed against the screen, sniffing the summer air and watching us jealously. Beside him, a timid calico wrapped her tail around his, but did not run away or hide when she saw us watching her. Instead, she gave one slow blink and her attention darted upward, away from me.
I followed her hyperfocused gaze just in time to see a brilliantly colored bird land on top of my shed, then flit off to a nearby tree.
I wasn’t the only one who saw it.
“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” said Mr. Loughery, pointing at the bird so the others could see. “But I think that boy might have just been right about that bird after all.”
And as it turned out, the Pacific tanager—later renamed the Marlow tanager— was everything Sebastian had hoped it would be.
Rich planted a soft kiss on my temple, his arm loose around my shoulder.
We watched the bird until light faded from the sky, and as the stars began to fall, we were all right where we were meant to be, if just for one perfect moment.