Chapter 3 #2
He could dice an onion. Of course he could; the man had run a restaurant, a fact Rory kept having thrown at his feet like a challenge — reviewed, Dee had said, which Rory had filed under things he didn't care about — and the knife work, when it came, was clean and fast and correct, the pile of onion going small and even under Theo's hands, no drama, no showing off, just competence.
Rory watched a beat longer than he meant to.
Then he turned back to the pork before he could be caught watching, and told himself it was quality control.
They worked. It was, Rory would think later, the first hour in nine days that hadn't been a fight — not friendly, he wouldn't have called it friendly, but the particular truce of two people with their hands busy in the same small space, passing behind each other, behind you, reaching around, the choreography a kitchen teaches whether the two bodies like each other or not.
Theo asked short questions and Rory gave short answers.
Onion in, sweat it slow, don't color it.
Potato — that potato, the yellow, not the russet, the russet goes to mush and Eddie would've had something to say.
Bay. Thyme, a little, off the stem. The fish last, gentle, because it keeps cooking in the heat.
Rory heard himself giving the recipe the way Eddie had given it to him — not as amounts, because it had never been amounts, but as a series of small mercies you did for the thing so it would come out right.
"How do you know when the potato's ready," Theo asked.
"You feel it. Knife goes in with a little argument left. Not soft. It finishes in the pot."
"With a little argument left," Theo repeated, like he was filing it, and there was that careful shy thing in his voice again, and Rory looked at him and could not, for the life of him, tell if it was real.
They laid the fish in together after that — Rory draping the haddock across the top of the pot in wide pale sheets, Theo close, actually watching, the way Rory watched a new delivery, like there'd be a test. The kitchen had gone warm and close and thick with the smell of it, thyme and pork fat and the sweet starch of the potato giving itself up, and the light through the back window had turned long and amber and laid itself across the steel so that the whole grubby familiar room looked, for a minute, like somewhere a person would want to be.
"Can I ask you something," Theo said, "or is that also against the rules of the kitchen."
"Depends."
"How long have you really been here. Not the diner. Eddie. All of it."
"Since I was fifteen." Rory said it to the pot. "Why."
"No reason. You just—" Theo tipped his head, considering him, and Rory felt himself being read and braced for it. "You move like you own the floor you're standing on. I've watched a lot of people work a kitchen. Most of them are visiting. You're not."
Rory had nothing to do with that, so he handed Theo the ladle instead. "Watch the fish. Don't stir it, you'll break it. We're almost to the part you'll ruin."
"Which part is that."
"The cream part."
"Good to know," Theo said, and Rory would remember, later, that he'd said it — good to know — the way a man files a thing he intends to use.
Then came the cream.
Rory had his back turned — reaching for the white pepper, the tin one, Eddie's, the label worn off years ago — when he heard the burner click up.
High. He heard the cream go in, the whole quart of it, cold into the hot pot, and he heard the heat come up under it, and every one of his nineteen years turned around at once.
"Off," Rory said, already moving. "Off, off—"
He got there as the surface started to shiver, that first tremble before a boil, and he reached past Theo and killed the flame and pulled the pot half off the burner in one motion, and his other hand had closed around Theo's wrist where it hovered over the pot with the spoon, stopping it, and they were both very still, suddenly, close, the steam coming up between them and Rory's hand a cuff around a wrist that was warmer than he'd budgeted for.
"You don't boil it," Rory said. His voice had gone low.
"After the cream. You never— you bring it back gentle, barely a bubble, or it breaks.
It splits. You boil Eddie's chowder and you've got twelve quarts of curdled fish water and you might as well feed it to the gulls.
" He heard the words come out of him in a voice that wasn't his, that was older, that had a laugh in it that belonged to a dead man.
You might as well feed it to the gulls. Eddie's line.
Word for word. He hadn't decided to say it.
It had just been there, kept, like the pepper tin.
Theo wasn't pulling his wrist away.
"Show me," Theo said, quiet. "The gentle part. I don't— I've got the rest. Show me the part that's his."
And Rory should have let go of the wrist. He knew that, distantly, the way you know a thing at three in the afternoon in a warm kitchen with the light off the water.
He didn't. He kept his hand where it was and he moved it — moved Theo's hand, the spoon in it, guided it down into the chowder and through it, slow, a figure-eight, the way you fold heat in instead of forcing it, the way Eddie had stood behind fifteen-year-old Rory and moved his hand this exact way a thousand years ago before Rory had earned the right to be trusted with it alone.
"Slow," Rory said. "You're not stirring it. You're— asking it. Low flame, back on, there. See it? Just a shiver. That's as much as it ever gets. You hold it right there and you count to a hundred and you take it off and you put the cold butter on the top and you don't touch it again."
"Count to a hundred," Theo said.
"Eddie counted out loud. Drove Dee up the wall.
" Rory's throat did something. He let go of the wrist. Stepped back.
Put the distance between them that should have been there the whole time.
"Last thing he taught me was this pot," he said, and he did not know why he was saying it, except that the light was low and the kitchen smelled like nineteen years and the man beside him had asked to be shown the part that was Eddie's, and nobody had ever asked Rory that.
"Two winters ago. When his heart first went.
He couldn't stand at the line more than a few minutes, so he'd sit in that chair"—he didn't point; they both knew the chair—"and he'd talk me through it.
My own chowder. Chowder I'd made ten thousand times.
'A little more thyme, Rory. Off the heat now, Rory.
You're rushing it, you always rush it.' Like I didn't— " He stopped.
The tin pepper was still in his hand. He set it down.
"He just wanted to still be making it," Rory said.
"That's all. He just didn't want to be done. "
The chowder shivered on the low flame. A hundred, roughly.
Rory reached over and took it off, and cut the flame, and set the cold knob of butter on the surface, and watched it start to melt and slick across the top the way it had every single day for nineteen years, the way it would tomorrow, whether Eddie was in the world or not, which he wasn't, and the butter didn't care.
"That's it," Rory said. "That's the chowder."
He didn't look at Theo. He'd said too much.
He knew he'd said too much; he could feel it hanging in the kitchen like the steam, all of it, the wrist and the winter and the chair and the dead man's voice coming out of Rory's own mouth, feed it to the gulls, and he braced for whatever Theo Vann was going to do with it — a joke, probably, deflect it, or worse, be kind about it, that soft sorry town-face Rory couldn't stand.