9. The Watered-Down Version
The Watered-Down Version
Couldn't sleep.
Felt like hell about Madeline, and couldn't stop running the other ledger either on whether Aurelia was going to wake up in daylight, sober of storm, and realize she'd made another mistake. So somewhere in the blue-dark before five, I gave up on the ceiling and went where I belonged.
The kitchen was different at that hour. Just me, a Mauviel Copper Cookware Set and the ghosts of every meal I'd ever cooked to keep from thinking.
I turned on the low lights over what I dubbed my prep station and felt something in my chest come down a degree.
This was my church since I was a young man. When I can't fix a thing, I feed it.
I started the dough I'd had cold-fermenting for three days with patience I'd banked before any of this happened.
I gently shaped it, scored it the way Milan taught me, and got it in the oven.
Bacon went into a low oven to render slow.
Corn off the cob into brown butter in a screaming cast iron, thyme, lemon, don't touch it for the first minute, let the heat kiss it.
Tomatoes I'd been watching all week, blanched, shocked, peeled naked, quartered, salted, left to weep themselves concentrated.
My hands ran the stations on muscle memory.
The the eggs. Six yolks so orange they looked painted, whisked slow with cold butter and a little crème fra?che over a double boiler, low heat, constant motion, that place between scrambled and custard that has nowhere to hide.
My grandfather said you could measure a cook by his eggs.
Easy to ruin. Easy to bore. Nearly impossible to make matter.
I stood there stirring in the dark and understood I was cooking them for his judgment as much as anybody's, the old man watching from wherever he ran his kitchen now, taking my measure on the worst morning of my making.
Then the peach…this one, this one had held. Slowest of the bunch, latest to the door, and when I picked it up it gave under my thumb exactly right, that quarter-inch of surrender that means now. One day either side and it would've been wrong.
I stood there in the blue light holding it longer than a man needs to hold a peach.
Then I halved it, pitted it, and set it face-down in brown butter and brown sugar, and the pan did what heat does to a ready thing, made it more itself. Glossy. Dark at the edges. A minute a side and done, ready to fall apart if you looked at it hard.
By the time the sun was thinking about the horizon, the table was set.
The same table where I'd fed Madeline and lied to her by candlelight.
Eggs, corn, tomatoes, bacon, bread cracking its crust as it cooled, berries under scraped vanilla, juice I'd squeezed by hand.
Butter going soft in its dish. And the peach, plated alone, off-center.
Once I was done, I stood back and looked at everything, hoping it was enough. Enough to show Aurelia how much I cared, and somehow, in the same breath, good enough to work as an apology to Madeline too.
Then I heard her before I saw her.
Careful footsteps coming down the stairs, like she was moving through somebody else's house. Which she was. Which she'd always been, if I was honest about it, I just hadn't let either of us say so. She appeared in the doorway, stopped and took in the spread.
"That's a lot of food." She marveled as her eyes moved over everything. She was dressed and ready to go, armor back on, every inch of her rebuilt overnight. "I suppose it's necessary, since I'm sure the love of your life spent the night. Three is certainly a crowd."
"Sit," I said. "Please."
She came to the table amd stood behind a chair with her hands on the back of it, looking at everything I'd made like it was a language she'd just now learned to read and wished she couldn't. I crossed the room and pulled the chair out for her. She sat and allowed me to push her chair in.
"This is beautiful, Dillion." She picked up a piece of the bread and turned it in her fingers. "So, when did you know?"
I sat down across from her, because she deserved my undivided attention.
"That bringing you here was a mistake?" I ripped the band aid off, knowing she wanted to get right to it.
Because the thing I loved about Madeline, part of what attracted me to her in the first place, was the same thing that sent me away from those stairs with my tail between my legs the night before.
She was a straight shooter. Always had been.
Didn't matter if the truth was gon' cost her something too.
"Yes."
"Day two." I made myself hold her eyes. "Swallowed it down and it came up again by the pool yesterday...pushed it down again."
"But you didn't send me home."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because you’re an incredible woman. That's not a consolation, it's the thing that makes it worse. I liked you, the attraction was there. I’ve enjoyed my time with you, Madeline. There wasn’t anything fake about that.
If I'd been empty inside I'd have sent you home, I wasn't empty.
I was occupied, and I kept thinking if I worked at it hard enough I could evict what was already living there and give the space to you.
" I shook my head. "I know now hat's just a slower way to hurt somebody. "
I sipped my coffee, then set the mug down.
"After sleeping on it, or trying to, I think that teenage boy inside me had something to prove too.
That he was finally good enough to be wanted by you.
Worthy of you. I wanted to make his dreams come true right along with mine.
But let me be clear about something. This ain't about your last name or what I think you could do for me. "
"I know that," she said, and it surprised me how fast it came.
"I wanted you before I understood what a DuBois was in this county, or what it meant.
When I looked up and saw you standing in my restaurant, I thought God was handing me a sign.
Maybe I wasn't ready for you then, but the time was now.
This was my chance. I never imagined I'd fuck it up like this.
I swear to you, Madeline, by the time we reconnected I'd made my peace that there wouldn't be anything between me and Aurelia. It’s why you never heard me say her name, why you never saw her, the door was shut.
I promise you, it was shut. But she pulled up in the middle of that storm.
No call, no warning. And I opened that door not knowing she was standing on the other side.
Once I saw her last night, and we talked… "
She broke off a piece of the bread and ate it as I tried to explain what the hell I'd experienced the night before. Her eyes closed for a second, the way they'd closed on that first sip of at The Perch, involuntary, honest, her body telling the truth her pride was working hard to manage.
"This is so delicious," she said when she opened her eyes, like I hadn’t just confessed to her like she was my Priest. "I can taste the care in it. Every bit of it."
She exhaled slow, like she was trying to pace herself through whatever she was about to say next.
"That's the cruelest part, you know. You cook like this. You know exactly how to make somebody feel like the only person in the world." Her voice caught, just slightly. "I'm just not that for you. There's nothing more I could have done to make you want me."
"Not enough for that," I said. "And you knew it before I said it. You've known it longer than me, probably. Your radar was never wrong. I'm the one who kept telling you it was."
She slowly nodded, reached for the coffee I'd poured her, took a sip, and for a second we just sat there in the wreckage.
"I knew," she said. "On the ferry ride over, I knew. Told myself it didn't matter. That I could make you care if I tried hard enough, was patient enough, understanding enough…me, enough. That I could shift whatever was in you that was pointed somewhere else."
She shook her head and smiled to herself before she continued.
"But you can't shift that kind of thing. You can't make somebody want you when they're already wanting somebody else. I think I knew that at twenty-two too, and forgot it, and had to relearn it at my age in your kitchen."
"Madeline—"
"Half of Westonberry's probably known for years that Chef Duckworth is in love with his best friend.
Everybody there had the good sense to say it out loud except the one person it actually belonged to.
" She looked down at the eggs, "You want to know the worst part?
You lied to yourself so completely you actually believed you could bring me out here and build something on top of it.
You didn't con me, Dillion. You conned yourself first. I was just standing close enough to get burned when it collapsed.
But back to Lavender Hill I go after the summer. "
"I'm sorry." The words felt too small the second they left me.
"I know you are. I can see it in this breakfast. I can see it in the way you're looking at me right now.
But sorry doesn't undo it, Dillion. Sorry just means you understand what you did.
" She picked up her fork. Held it a second without eating.
"It's a start. It's not a repair. Besides, I may as well enjoy the last meal I'll ever eat from you. "
She dug in, and I watched her actually eat the food, and I couldn't tell if it was hunger or something closer to evidence-gathering, tasting the care and the skill on purpose, holding it apart from the lie that had bought her the ticket here, filing it separately in whatever ledger she was going to carry home with her this week.
"Before I take you home, I just want to say something." I let out a breath. "I know I don't deserve an ounce of grace from you. Not one ounce of what you've been giving me all morning."
She looked up from her plate.
"Little sleep I did get, I had to keep one eye open." I let a small chuckle out, tired, real. "Figured if you decided to get a little violent in the night, I wasn't gonna say I didn't have it coming."