Chapter 4
Chapter Four
A lot of people looked at Ryan and saw only what he presented on the surface: a strong, muscular meathead whose intelligence ended at wrestling stats and technique.
But the truth was, Ryan was a strong, muscular meathead whose intelligence ended at wrestling stats, technique, and a love of cooking and feeding his loved ones.
He’d been at it since he was old enough to hold a knife.
So, for Ryan, pancakes were not a difficult food to prepare.
He was a great cook, everyone always told him that, and he’d chosen to believe them because there were never any leftovers and people asked for his recipes all the time.
But if any of those people were to peek into Beni’s kitchen at the moment, they’d run for the hills and wipe their tongues of any food Ryan had ever made for them.
Stacks of pancakes lined Beni’s countertops.
Mostly crispy and black on the edges, but some of them managed to be goopy and pasty in the center.
He’d dirtied just about every plate and used an entire family size bag of pancake mix.
It required only water to prepare, but somehow, not even that could save his attempt at breakfast.
Things probably would have been okay if he hadn’t just heard from Stevie, asking questions about things that needed to be fixed at their theme park. Ryan was good at manual labor and she knew that, but he wasn’t invited to help.
In fact, the phone call was top secret and not something Ryan was allowed to mention to Jasper, which was bad enough on its own. That meant Jasper had told her that specifically. But worse, was that during their conversation, she also let slip that Jasper was sick and stuck in bed.
Ryan had assumed Jasper had gotten through his usual end-of-September illness without him.
He hadn't had a chance to make the soup he made Jasper every year, but at least chaos of their breakup could take the blame, rather than a lack of effort.
Now he knew the truth. Jasper had been at home, sick and soupless, and hadn't said a word.
Ryan couldn’t stand the thought of Jasper alone, sniffling and sneezing with no one around. For the first time in a long time, Ryan was a ten-minute drive away, but completely unwanted.
Anyway, filling a sixth plate with terrible, inedible pancake attempts had been the straw that broke the heartbroken camel’s back, and he'd taken himself to Beni’s living room to lie face down on the rug with a blanket pulled over his head.
Then, feeling the need to wallow even more, he pulled out his phone, started a playlist called Soul Crushing, and cried into the rug.
He missed Jasper so much, every passing minute tightened the vise around his heart until it squeezed out every thought that wasn’t him.
He missed Jasper’s playful jabs. He missed Jasper’s endless patience.
He missed the individual voices Jasper had given every single chicken.
His bed at his sister’s house was empty, driving home the absence of Jasper’s warmth and tight body and lazy morning blowjobs.
The floor he was on was cold and hard, reminding him of the three ice cubes Jasper liked in his cocktails and the unwashed ice cream spoons he always left on the counter.
Fifteen minutes had passed when Ryan heard footsteps stop directly by his head.
“Ry.”
He grunted.
“This is the fourth time in a row you’ve played this song,” Beni said. “You’re scaring Nina.”
“It expresses how I feel. I’m trying to heal.”
“Well, now your niece thinks the world is ending.”
“Did you tell her the truth? That the world will still be here tomorrow, but who even cares because living is just constant pain? That love doesn’t last, life keeps going, and no matter how miserable she is, tomorrow will arrive all the same?
” Ryan sniffled beneath his blanket. He heard Beni sigh as she sat.
“Ry,” she said.
“What?”
She pulled the blanket off his head. The static pulled his long hair across his face so he was still hidden. A flash of smugness passed over his veiled features before he remembered his life was over, and being smug was a waste of energy. But so was breathing, and he was still doing that.
“You gotta get up, bud. It’s been a week of this.”
He shook his head into the rug. “I can’t.”
“Why can’t you?” she asked softly, pushing his shoulder with her foot.
“I have no reason to get up.”
“Just because you and Jasper are having some problems doesn’t mean you—”
“It’s more than that,” Ryan said.
“What else?”
As if she didn’t know. Ryan grunted again. “We’re not having problems. He said we’re over. So, I don’t have a job. Or a plan. Or a home, or a… person.”
“You have a person! I’m a person.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.” He considered getting up avoid listening to his sister imply she was the same as a partner, because that was gross.
Also, Beni was way more annoying than Jasper, and now he was destined to live his life crying into her living room rug instead of cuddled up with the man he loved, enjoying his retirement.
“I know it’s not the same. But I love you, and you’re just lying there like a really big, weepy bump on a log. I have to try.”
“I just don’t know what to do,” Ryan said. “I have nothing left.”
“What do you usually do when you have time off?”
“Hang out with Jasper. Check on him if he’s sick. Make chicken stock to make him soup.”
“Okay,” Beni said. “But when he’s not sick. What if Jasper’s not in the picture at all—”
Ryan made a pathetic noise before Beni interrupted him.
“Hey! No, forget I said that. What would you do if you could do whatever you wanted, not related to Jasper?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t had to figure that out in a long time.”
“What about a miniature landscape?”
“I was working on one for our fifteenth anniversary. It’s a little model of the park, with the pigeons we liked to feed and the bench where we exchanged rings…” Ryan twisted his ring then, memories of Jasper removing his slamming into him.
Beni pinched the bridge of her nose and muttered under her breath, then smiled at him sympathetically. “Okay. You need a project.”
“Soup? Soup is a project.”
“You need a project that isn’t feeding your ex or making a model of your ex’s theme park.”
Ryan pressed his face into the rug again. “You said we were just having problems! Now he’s my ex?”
“I mean… kind of,” she said, standing and pulling on his arm. “And I think it’s time for you to get up and do something other than cry into my rug. The salt from your tears will make it all crusty if you don’t stop.”
He wiped his eye on the rug before turning his head slightly. “I can buy you a new one. I have nothing else to spend my money on now.”
“Get up.”
Ryan finally hauled his body from the floor, grimacing at the flattened shag in the shape of his body. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. How about some breakfast? Have you eaten?”
“No,” Ryan said, suddenly concerned she might see the state of the kitchen. “Why don’t I make some eggs? I’ll bring them to you. Just, um. Stay out of the kitchen for a bit. Give me fifteen minutes.”
“Okay. But turn off this playlist, please. I feel like I’m heartbroken and I haven’t been on a date in three years.”
Ryan nodded and shoved his phone in his pocket before dragging himself into the kitchen to attempt another meal—and after washing about forty plates and a handful of burned pans, he was successful.
But not at cooking up the eggs and toast he’d promised Beni.
He’d found a whole chicken in the fridge, butchered it, thrown the bones and skin in a pot with various herbs and vegetables and then set it to simmer.
By the time Beni walked in, he’d been in there half an hour with no breakfast to show for it, but a great start to a stock. She sighed. “That chicken was going to be my dinner.”
“The meat is still there,” he said, pointing at the plate where he’d stacked the pieces. “I’ll make dinner later.”
Beni nodded. “Okay. So, you’re staying here tonight?”
Ryan glanced at her, his eyes red-rimmed and puffy. “Is that… Do you want me to go back to Boston? I still have my apartment there. I can, if you–”
“No!” she said. “No, no. Stay as long as you need, of course. But I have some work to do for the rest of the day. Will you be okay in here?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, staring at the pot.
Beni squeezed his arm and left him to brood in front of the stove, grabbing a sleeve of crackers before she left. Ryan heard her office door open, then the soft sound of her voice on the phone. Tragically, it sounded like a work meeting, not secret plans to bring Jasper by later.
He pulled a chair into the kitchen and sat near the stove, standing occasionally to skim foam and fat from the pot.
Beni floated through now and again, grabbing water or snacks, complaining about some lady named Carol who refused to mute her microphone during an all-hands meeting, tasting the stock and nodding her approval.
Most recently, she’d placed a basket of clean towels at his feet and asked him to fold them and put them away.
He alphabetized the spices, skimmed the fat, deep cleaned the refrigerator, skimmed more fat, made himself a sandwich.
Somehow, he’d managed to keep his emotions in check the whole time.
But by late afternoon, the air in the kitchen was full of warm, comforting smells—herbs and chicken and every autumn he’d ever spent with Jasper.
If this was any other year, he’d be pouring the stock over egg noodles and soft mushrooms and bringing it to Jasper in bed where he’d be wearing a big sweater, surrounded by tissues.
Instead, Ryan was standing over the pot, pouring broth into old jars, burning his hands and trying to avoid seasoning it with fresh tears.
“What are you doing?” Beni asked.
Ryan jumped slightly, splashing broth on his hands and dropping the jar, spilling the liquid inside. “Shit, ow,” he hissed.
Beni grabbed a rag to wipe up the mess. “Shoot. I’m sorry, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Ryan said. And he was fine, technically.
His hand didn’t hurt. But pain or not, he was an unemployed, unwanted, forty-four-year-old man with a bad back and tired hips.
Instead of being at home, he was standing in his sister’s kitchen watching a quarter of the broth he’d made for someone who didn’t love him anymore run across the counter and drip onto the floor.
He grabbed a canvas bag and started placing the jars inside. Three of them now, instead of the four he’d hoped to make.
“What are you doing?” Beni asked.
“Nothing. I just thought maybe I’d get out of the house for a bit.” Ryan kept his eyes on the bag, moving the jars around to look busy so he didn’t have to look at her.
“Okay. But leave the bag.”
He looked at her then. “What?”
“Leave the bag. The jars. The very special stock you definitely made Jasper after I told you not to.”
“He needs it!” Ryan said. “He’s sick!”
Beni rolled her eyes as her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out. The message was unreadable to him, but he watched Beni’s eyebrows rise before she coughed out a short laugh.
“What?” Ryan asked.
She turned the phone and showed him a snapshot of a counter with at least four different soups, the plastic containers telling Ryan they’d been delivered.
In the middle was a pathetic bowl of canned soup—he could tell because the noodles looked mushy and the chicken chunks were gray.
The attached message read, He said he wanted soup.
Can’t get him to eat any of it. Ready for him to succumb to this illness, tbh.
“Okay, I said lmao, with four Os for good measure,” Beni said, tapping away on her phone. She glanced up and smiled. “See? You’re not the only one struggling. Laugh at his pain, it might help.”
He narrowed his eyes and snatched the bag of broth from the counter, bundled it up to his chest, and headed for the door.