10. That Peach Worth It Though #4
"No." She held my eyes, didn't blink, didn't smile. "I just know what it looks like when two men are grieving the same person and taking it out on each other instead of on the thing that's actually killing them both."
I took both of her hands in mine and brought them to my lips, kissed her knuckles.
"Je n'ai jamais eu d'ami comme toi." I said it low, into her skin almost, because I couldn't say it any other way and still mean it all the way through.
I've never had a friend like you.
She smiled, soft, and something in it caught. "Nous avons fait du chemin depuis que tu m'as crié dessus à propos de ta commande. Nous voilà liés pour de bon, maintenant. Pour toujours."
We've come a long way since you yelled at me about your order. We're stuck together now. Forever.
"La seule personne qui me comprenne." I chuckled, but it didn't have much air behind it. "Je ne sais pas ce que mes parents feraient de moi en ce moment sans toi pour traduire tout ce que je ne sais pas leur dire."
The only person who understands me. I don't know what my parents would do with me these days without you translating everything I don't know how to say to them.
She laughed. "Je parle très bien la langue de Dillion."
I speak the language of Dillion really well.
"That you do." I laughed with her, scratched the back of my head, looked anywhere but straight at her for a second because it felt like too much, all at once, standing there. "I'd be lost without you. Especially right now."
"That's what friends are for." She smiled and rose up on her toes to kiss my cheek, quick, easy, the way she'd done a hundred times before.
She had no idea. Standing there with her mouth still warm against my cheek, she had absolutely no idea that I was already gone, had been going for longer than I wanted to admit, falling in a way that didn't have a bottom to it that I could find. Aurelia wasn’t just my best friend.
She spoke my language in a way nobody else had ever bothered to learn.
I breathed easier when she was in a room.
I thought clearer. I laughed more, and meant it more, and the weight of carrying my family's whole legacy on my back felt lighter, somehow, just from her being close enough to share it with, even if she never touched it directly.
She was a handful sometimes, but every woman worth knowing was.
Whenever it was time to ascend to the Heavens her eulogy would have people laughing and crying in the same breath, sometimes the same sentence.
But underneath the handful was the softest thing I'd ever known, a woman who felt everything too hard and hid it behind jokes while still showing up in gravel parking right when I needed her.
And I loved her. My whole family loved her. My grandfather loved her most of all. He was the one who started calling her Ru…
Aurelia had come by to drop off some paperwork I'd forgotten at her place, and she found me in the middle of watching a roux go from something worth saving to something headed straight for the trash.
I had the heat too high. I was talking too much, distracted, telling her some story about a girl I liked at the time, not paying attention to the one thing my grandfather always said mattered more than talent.
She didn't ask if she could help. She just walked behind the line like she'd been hired and took the pan off the heat before I even registered what she was doing, and started whisking it down slow, patient, pulling it back from the edge it was about to fall off of.
"You gotta talk to it while you fix it," she said, not even looking up at me. "Can't just abandon something halfway broke and expect it to fix itself."
"You the one who went to culinary school, or me?" I teased, knowing full well I'd messed up and she'd caught me at it.
"Can't tell." She teased right back, wrist still moving, easy and unbothered.
"You know I'm not much help in the kitchen.
Can barely make a pot of water." She glanced up at me, quick, that grin already tugging at the corner of her mouth.
"But my Granny did let me help with bases. That's as far as I got."
"Damn shame." I chuckled, shaking my head, watching her save my mess.
"Well." She shrugged one shoulder, still not looking up, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "I got a chef for a best friend now. At this point, what do I need to learn for?"
I laughed at that, and for a second the burnt roux and the girl I'd been rambling about didn't matter at all. Just her, in my grandfather's kitchen, fixing something I'd broken like it was nothing, grinning at me like she already knew she'd be doing it for the rest of both our lives.
My grandfather was standing in the doorway of the walk-in the whole time.
I didn't know it till later. He told me after she left that he'd watched the whole thing, watched a girl who'd never worked a single shift in a professional kitchen in her life walk in and save a foundation I'd let go to ruin, like it was nothing.
"That roux was headed nowhere good," he said, wiping his hands on his apron, that half smile he only gave out when he meant something all the way through.
"She the one that held it together. Base of everything else you gon build on top of it.
" He looked at me a long time after that, longer than I understood the weight of back then.
"That's what you call somebody like that.
Ru. Short for the thing that don't get seen, don't get the credit, but everything else falls apart without it. "
It stuck before she even walked back through the door the next week.
He never called her Aurelia again, not once, not even at his own hospital bed the last week of his life when his voice had gone down to almost nothing and he still found enough of it left to say her name right when she leaned in close.
I didn't understand what he meant back then, not all the way.
I understood the food part. Every roux starts the same, flour and fat and heat, and it can turn into gold or it can turn into ash depending on whether somebody's paying attention when it matters.
I didn't understand yet that he wasn't just talking about a sauce.
He was telling me, plain as he ever told me anything, what she was going to be to me, long before I had the sense to see it myself.
Base of everything else you gon build.
He knew before I did. Grandpa always did…
"Ru," I choked out back in the present, my face pressed to her wet hair, and I was crying. Actually crying, in the ocean, like a child, like a man who'd been holding his breath for seven years straight and only just now remembered his body knew how to let it go. "Ru, I—"
"Hey." She pulled back just enough to see my face, thumbs dragging salt and tears I couldn't stop no matter how hard I tried to swallow them back down the way I'd swallowed everything else for seven years. "Hey, Dilly. I'm here. I'm right here."
She was. She always had been, through every mess of mine and every mess of hers, through every version of us that almost worked and didn't. Stuck between the man who'd spent years making her smaller and the man who wanted to hand her the whole world, not understanding yet that the size of what I was offering was exactly what had scared her half to death.
"I thought I'd lost you." It came out raw and ugly. "All them months without you, Ru. I was hurtin'. I ain't never told nobody how bad, I just kept getting up and going to work and I thought..."
Couldn't get the rest past the thing sitting in my throat. Old and thick and finally moving after all these years, like fruit left on the branch so long past season it forgot anybody was ever coming for it.
"I know." Her forehead came down against mine. Both of us shaking. Both of us done pretending it was the ocean making our faces wet. "I know, baby. I know. I'm sorry."
She kissed all over my face. Her eyes running the whole time, and mine, and the salt water, all of it the same salt in the end.
"I'm here. I'm right here." She kept reminding me as I held her even tighter.
Her hands never left my face.
Held me together the same way she held me the night my granddaddy died and she came straight over without me asking and let me put my head in her lap.
I stared at that wall for four hours and couldn't get one tear out.
Too numb for anything to come. She never told me to cry.
Never told me it was alright. Just kept her hand moving through my hair till I fell asleep.
Same hands that held mine when they lowered him into the ground and my knees tried to go.
Same hands that took my coat off me at eleven at night when I came in from a long one with my father and couldn't say what was wrong yet, and she'd wait, and eventually it would come.
That woman was my best friend before she was anything else to me. And them months without her had me out here reaching for whatever would take the edge off, and none of it did.
I thought about that Valentine's night. Part of me would give anything to have done it different. But a peach don't always come off the branch clean. You got to twist it, and sometimes the branch tears with it, and you stand there holding the fruit and the wood both and wondering what you did.
We had to tear something to get here. If we hadn't gone up in flames that night we'd still be standing in that same soft rot we called friendship, the two of us ripe and going over and neither one saying a word about it, telling ourselves there was time.
There wasn't ever time. That's the thing about stone fruit season. It don't wait on you to be ready.
"I love you." I said it broken. Said it like a confession, like something I should've been on my knees for. "I never stopped. Not one day. Not one hour. Not one time did I stop, Ru, and I tried. God knows I tried."