6. Kirk
KIRK
She doesn't make a sound.
That's what gets me. A different woman would have cried, or yelled back, or stormed off to the far corner and wrapped herself in injured silence like a weapon.
Stella Pincot does none of that. She just turns back to the shelf with her cloth and keeps working, her movements careful and quiet, and the deliberate smallness of it lands like a fist.
I did that. I put that careful, deliberate smallness into her.
I set the tin on the side table and keep my hand on it and stare at the fire and try to remember how to breathe at a normal rate. The fire gives me something honest to look at. It doesn't require anything. It just burns.
Barnaby gets up from his spot by the armchair and crosses to where Stella is working. He presses the full length of his flank against her leg, which is his version of comfort, and she reaches down without looking and scratches behind his ear with two fingers, and he leans into it.
Traitor dog.
I gaze at the fire.
I know exactly what I looked like. Standing over her in that enclosed space, the tin in my hand, my jaw set and my voice stripped to its bones.
I know what that reads as. I grew up around men who used that stance as punctuation, who let the size of themselves do their arguing, and I swore off it by the time I was nineteen years old.
And then twelve years of other things happened, and I came to this mountain to make sure I couldn't do any damage to anyone, because the things those years built into my nervous system aren't things I fully trust. And here is this small, warm woman with her unruly hair and her yellow coat hanging by the door and her bare feet on my floor, and she knocked over a tin, which is the work of ten seconds and costs nothing, and I loomed over her like something that belongs in a cage.
She is working her way down the third shelf now.
She reorganizes by height and type, which is not how I had it but is probably a more sensible system.
She has stopped humming. That's the tell.
She came into this cabin like a radio left on, constant warm noise filling every corner, and now she is quiet, and the house feels different because of it.
Larger. Colder. More like what it usually is.
I don't want it to feel like what it usually is.
I stand up.
She doesn't react, doesn't turn, and I move past her to the kitchen and open the cold cabinet and take stock of what I have.
It's habit, the inventory. My hands know the routine.
Smoked venison from November, dense and dark.
A half-side of salt-cured pork. Root vegetables packed in sand since October, still good.
Dried beans. Rendered lard. Flour. Cornmeal.
Two jars of Meredith Alcott's pickled peppers that I took last autumn because she always makes too many and I didn't want to be rude, though I haven't opened them yet.
I take the cast-iron skillet down from its hook.
It's heavy, three and a half kilos of seasoned iron, and it hits the stovetop with a solid clank that echoes through the cabin.
I set the damper on the woodstove to open, shove two split pieces of hardwood in, and wait for the heat to come up.
The skillet needs maybe ten minutes to get where it needs to be.
I slice the salt pork thin and set it in the pan dry, and it begins to hiss and render almost immediately, the fat going translucent and beginning to smell the way food is supposed to smell.
Not like packets or peel-back lids. Like something real.
I hear Stella stop moving.
I don't look at her. My hands work the venison and slicing it against the grain, thick pieces, and set them on the board. I pull two parsnips and a turnip from the sand, wipe them down, and start cutting.
"Are you..." Stella starts, then stops herself.
I don't fill the silence for her.
"Are you making dinner?"
"Supper," I say. "Yeah."
Another pause. "Can I help?"
I think about the lantern she nearly knocked off the table earlier, and the way she tried to add wood to the stove by opening the wrong door. "No."
She is quiet for a moment. Then, "Okay."
The pork crisps up and I pull it out and set it to drain and drop the venison into that hot fat, and the sizzle is immediate and violent and exactly what it needs to be.
The meat goes brown on the outside in fast, decisive patches.
I add the root vegetables around the edges where the heat is lower and put the lid on and let everything find its pace.
I hear her settle onto the bench seat at the kitchen table.
Barnaby immediately puts his chin on her knee, and she makes a soft sound, the kind that isn't language but means something, and starts running her fingers through the thick fur behind his ears again. He closes his eyes. Absolute, boneless contentment.
The smell of the food fills the cabin fast, bouncing off the low wooden ceiling and collecting in the warm air near the stove.
Rendered fat and venison and the root vegetables softening in the drippings.
I add a scoop of broth from the jar on the cold shelf, let it bubble up and coat everything.
I crush dried thyme between my palms and drop it in. It's not fancy. It's not meant to be.
I'm aware of her the whole time. The table is four feet from the stove. This cabin was built for one person and the kitchen reflects that fact without apology. When I turn to get the board, I nearly put my elbow in her hair.
"Sorry," she says, pulling back.
She didn't do anything, but I don't correct her.
I set two bowls on the counter and fill them, thick pieces of venison and vegetables sitting in dark, fragrant drippings, the crisped pork laid over the top.
I set both bowls on the table and go back for the bread, which is two days old but still holds up, and I cut thick slices and set those down too.
Then I sit across from her, which means my knees immediately make contact with hers under the table.
Neither of us acknowledges it. There isn't room to rearrange.
She shifts her legs to one side and that creates about two inches of clearance, which holds for approximately thirty seconds before the table nudges or one of us moves, and then we're back to contact.
Her knee against my shin. The side of her foot against mine.
Small, unintentional collisions that shouldn't register at all.
She looks down at the bowl.
"Kirk." Her voice has changed again, back toward what it was before the tin incident. Softer. Genuine. "This looks incredible."
I lift my spoon.
She takes a bite and makes a sound that is entirely inappropriate for the situation, and I keep my eyes on my own bowl and eat.
The venison has gone tender from the broth and the fat and the slow heat, and the vegetables have absorbed everything.
It's good. I know it's good. I've been cooking this way for years.
"Okay," she says, "whatever you put in this, I want the recipe. Specifically I want to be able to eat this every day for the rest of my life."
I eat.
"Is it the lard? I think it's the lard. City cooking is all olive oil and restraint and this is the opposite of that in the best possible way. This is olive oil's more successful older brother."
I eat.
"You're not going to tell me, are you?"
I look up at her.
"It's thyme," I say. "And don't overcrowd the pan."
Her face opens up completely, like I've handed her something she wasn't expecting. Bright eyes catch the lantern light and hold it. "That's two pieces of information in one sentence. Are you feeling all right?"
"Eat your food."
She eats. But she's smiling while she does it, and she doesn't try to hide it, and I'm aware of that smile the same way I'm aware of the fire, like a heat source that has a specific location in the room and affects the temperature around it.
We eat without talking for a while and it doesn't feel strained the way silence with most people does.
She doesn't treat it as a gap that needs filling.
She eats with actual appetite, working through the bowl steadily, using the bread to mop the drippings the way food like this is supposed to be eaten.
Our knees find each other and stop fighting it.
Her leg settles warm against my shin and stays there.
I should move. I don't.
The lantern flickers once from a draught under the door and she glances up at it, then back at her bowl.
"I lived alone for two years," she says, without preamble, like the thought surfaced and she didn't bother to filter it.
"My last apartment. Just me and too many books and a diffuser that I told myself was basically a companion.
And I got used to quiet." She drags the bread through the last of the drippings. "I thought I was good at it."
I watch the side of her face.
"I'm not," she says. "Turns out I just hadn't been in a quiet that had teeth yet."
She says it lightly, but there's something real behind it. Something she's not performing.
"This mountain," I say, "has more teeth than most."
She looks at me across the bowl. "Yeah." A beat. "I know that now."
I eat the last of my bread. Barnaby has positioned himself between us under the table and the warmth of him against my leg is familiar and grounding. He's been my only company for years and he chose her in forty-eight hours, which tells me something about her that I don't need to examine right now.
I stand and take both bowls to fill them again without asking, because she's half my size and ate every bite of the first serving, and that is information. I set her bowl back in front of her and she looks up at me with an expression that's somewhere between surprise and something else entirely.
"You don't have to?—"
"I know," I say.
She eats the second bowl too.