1. The Braise
The Braise
SUMMER
The Duckworth Summer Estate | Everhart Hollow, Roena County
“And what does this one mean?" Madeline asked, tracing the gardenia on my forearm, following the curve of each petal.
She was standing in the water in front of me in a bikini the color of sea glass, a green that had no business existing outside of nature, and yet there it was against her brown skin in the late June sun, looking like it had been invented for her specifically.
She had wide hips that made grown men lose their place in a sentence they'd been building once she walked in the room.
The water sat low against her waist, and every time she shifted her weight it moved with her instead of around her.
Sunlight caught the wet skin along her collarbone and ran down slow, the way good oil runs off a hot pan.
She tipped her head back to push her hair off her face and the whole line of her throat went gold for a second, and I had the thought I always had around Madeline Dubois: that beauty like that isn't an accident of genetics so much as a decision a woman makes early and keeps making, every morning, on purpose.
I let my eyes leisurely roam her, because that was the difference between me and every other man on this island watching her – they were stealing looks and I didn't have to steal a damn thing. Madeline was on this island with me, with eyes only for me.
"Are you going to answer my question," she asked with a smirk, "or just stare at me?"
Madeline Dubois knew exactly what she looked like.
She wore it the way she wore everything out here, like it belonged to her.
She wanted me to belong to her too. Had wanted it for a while, and wanting was not a thing Madeline Dubois had much practice hiding, because she'd never needed to.
I could feel it coming off her the way you feel a reduction getting close, that specific heat that tells you something is about to change consistency, about to become harder to walk back from.
Madeline expected I'd fold the way any other man would. She didn't know yet that I don't fold. I fold things. There's a difference, and she wanted me for that difference whether she was consciously aware of it or not.
"My grandmother grew them," I said. "Back fence of her house. Every summer those bushes came back. She'd cut them in the morning before the heat took them and set them in a jelly glass on the kitchen table."
I turned my arm in the light and looked at the ink as I continued.
"She died my first year in Florence. I was in the middle of dinner service. My father called and I couldn't leave, couldn't do anything with it. Just had to keep moving and let it sit in my chest until the shift was done."
I lowered my arm back into the water, finishing the story.
"Went home, sat in the dark on my kitchen floor for about an hour trying to make sense of that phone call, got this the next morning." I watched the water move over the petals. "I’ve never known life without my grandmother, so I put her somewhere I could always find her."
"Dillion." Her voice dropped, gentle. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to —”
"It was a long time ago." I shrugged, and smiled in a way that's meant to move a conversation along more than it's meant to be believed.
She looked up at me and what was in her face was genuine empathy, and that was the thing about Madeline I could never argue myself out of, no matter what else I was working through that summer. She felt things openly. Never once reached for the lid to cover what she felt.
I'd watched plenty of women manage their faces around me, curate the reaction they thought a man like me wanted to see.
Yet, here was one who'd been handed every advantage her family's money could buy from boarding schools in Switzerland, to a passport stamped thin with places most people only see in magazines, a mother who golfed with the mayor's wife and a father whose name opened doors before he'd even walked through them.
A woman who had a whole life built to keep her hands soft and her problems small, and she still came out the other side capable of being moved by something that had nothing to do with her. That wasn't nothing.
"You're more than what people expect when they first see you.”
"Most people are."
"But you…you're thoughtful..gentle. A good son who still has dinner with his parents every Sunday.
You run one of the most exclusive restaurants in this whole county.
" She paused. "And if someone didn't know you, just going off the tattoos and whatever the man's version of a resting bitch face is called... "
That pulled a real laugh up from somewhere I hadn't checked on in a while.
"They'd think you were dangerous," she finished, pleased with herself.
"I can be." I bit down on a smirk before it finished forming.
She smiled like she thought I was being modest. She didn't know about the quiet that comes over me right before. Everybody talks about rage like it's fire, but mine never ran hot. Mine ran like a walk-in at four a.m., cold and orderly, everything in its place, everything labeled.
She didn't know that violence had been the first thing I was ever precise at, before knife work, sauces and before I understood that the same hands that could take a duck apart at the wing joint without tearing the skin could do the same thing to a man who had it coming.
And she didn't know the worst part was that I kept it on the back shelf where I don't look often, and that I never hated it.
There's a satisfaction in feeling something give way clean, built into men like me before we ever had a say in the recipe.
My grandfather knew it when he taught me how to fight properly.
I was twelve the day he caught me swinging wild at Marcus Tillman's boy for something I don't even remember now, both of us rolling in the grass throwing everything we had and hitting nothing.
My grandfather didn't yell. Just walked over, peeled us apart with one hand each like we each weighed an ounce, and made us both sit on the porch steps until we stopped breathing hard.
Then he sent Marcus's boy home and looked at me a long time before he said anything.
"You were mad. Mad is loud and it don't hit where you aim it.
You see how many times you swung and how few times you landed?
" He slowly tapped two fingers against his own temple.
"Get it out and be done with it. Ain't no honor in a long fight.
Long fight just means you started something you didn't finish right the first time. "
He made me hit the bag he'd hung off the oak tree behind his house after that, over and over, until my arms shook, not to tire me out but to make me feel the difference between throwing something and placing it.
"That's what you're learning," he said, watching my form instead of my face. "A man who fights all the time is a man who ain't thinking first."
I didn't understand the rest of it until I was older.
That animals fight because they're mad, and men fight because they decided to, and a man who decides has already made his peace with the cost before he throws the first thing.
That part came later. That summer I just knew my arms hurt and Marcus Tillman's boy wasn't my friend anymore and my grandfather had looked at me the whole time like he was deciding something about who I was going to turn out to be.
I was fifteen the first time it was about the apron though.
Some boy from school, Terrence Odom's older cousin I think, saw me through the pass-through window at the first iteration of Capa Dillion, sleeves rolled, wiping down a station right before close because my grandfather didn't believe in leaving a mess for the morning.
By the following Monday half the school knew Dillion Duckworth did “girl work” after class instead of going to football practice like everybody else.
I fought three boys that year over it. Would've fought a fourth if my father hadn't caught wind and sat me down at the kitchen table at home.
Told me those kids didn't have what I had.
Told me I came from a family building something that was going to outlast every one of them, that they had no future worth protecting and I did, and that one day the Duckworth name was going to mean something in Roena County whether those boys ever understood that or not.
Some part of me resented that kitchen those years, hated it a little even, because it kept costing me something out there in the world I wasn't ready to pay.
I loved my grandfather. Loved the smell of the walk-in and the exact right sound of a knife going through an onion clean.
But loving it meant defending it, and defending it meant getting hit and hitting back, over and over, until defending the kitchen and defending myself stopped being two different things.
My grandfather never once told me to stop fighting over it. What he taught me was how. He'd take my hands in his after, both of them, turn them over slow like he was checking produce, and shake his head at whatever he found there.
"Your daddy gon' turn this restaurant into something one day.
Real bourgeois. Rich folks coming through in they nice cars, talking about wine pairings.
" He'd say it with a little chuckle, just knowing, the way a man talks about a son who's chosen a different road than the one that raised him.
"Junior don't believe in whooping nobody's ass no more.
Thinks that's beneath what he building. And maybe he right, for him.
" He'd shake his head. "But you a Duckworth, boy, same as me, same as yo daddy whether he remember it these days or not, and Duckworths don't take no shit. Never have. Won't start with you."
He'd tap two knuckles against my chest, right over my heart, then bring his hand back to mine, turning it over again.