11. Home Cooked #3
He chuckled and rolled his shoulders back.
"How's the wrists?" I asked, dead serious.
That got him. A half-second where the smile slipped before he could catch it and put it back.
"You really fucked my shit up." He held them up, like evidence he still couldn’t believe he was seeing. "In front of my girl too. Then took her."
"She wasn't your girl that night." I kept my hands loose at my sides, kept my weight settled, kept my voice in the register I use when a kitchen's about to go sideways and somebody needs to hear calm instead of panic.
"Wasn't your girl a long time before that night, if we telling the truth out here in this parking lot. "
"That so?" He pushed off the car now, took a step, testing the distance between us the same way I was testing it, two men who both already knew what could happen if either one of them stopped being careful.
"Funny how that works out. I do six years with her, catch two broken wrists for my trouble, get thrown in jail 'bout her.
Only for my homeboys, my own people, to tell me they seen it in The Westonberry Times before I heard it from her mouth.
That she married." His eyes dragged over me slow, top to bottom, like he was pricing something at a pawn shop and coming up unimpressed. "To you."
"Life do that sometimes."
"Life is fucked up is what it is."
"That too."
"She woulda took me back if you ain't get all in her head bout me. Me and her had a good thing going."
I laughed incredulously. "A good thing? What was good for Aurelia?"
"She ain't paid nann bill with me all them years."
"She don't pay none now, that ain’t special. What's your point?"
"You know how many nights I sat up thinking about you, Chef?" He pointed at me. "Thinking about how a man just gets to run off with my girl and everybody in this town act like I'm the villain in it."
"You are the villain in it, Asher." I wasn't raising anything, not my voice, my hands, not my heart rate if I could help it.
"Ain't nobody had to write that story for you.
You wrote it yourself, every single page, and I just happened to be standing there the night you decided to act it out with your hands. "
His hands worked toward fists at his sides, stiff.
Six months out and his right hand still wouldn't close all the way.
I could see it from where I was standing, the last two fingers hanging back a half beat behind the rest, curling stubborn and incomplete like something in there hadn't healed as clean as the doctors probably told him it would.
He caught me looking. Straightened his hand out fast, flat against his thigh, like he could unsee me seeing it.
Good. Let him remember what that felt like every single time he thought about trying me again.
“Fuck you staring at me for?” He had the nerve to ask me.
"You want to do this again?" I asked, almost gentle, which was the most dangerous thing about it. "'Cause I promise you, Asher, I got a wife waiting on me at home and a good night ahead of me either way. Question's just how good a night you got left in front of you."
Asher laughed, real ugly around the edges.
"You got it, big dawg." He held both hands up, surrender or mockery, hard to tell which, maybe both. "Just wanted to come look the man in the eye who took everything from me."
"I ain't take nothing." I held his eyes and didn't blink first. "You handed it over, piece by piece, every time you locked her out the house, made her feel like she wanted too much, got on her or talked to her in a way that made her feel like less than what she was…when all she’d do is ask you for some time and attention, acknowledgement, a little romance and consideration. "
I watched him try to find something, watched him screw up his face, watched six years of blame looking for somewhere to land and not finding purchase anywhere close to me.
"Six years," I said, like I was doing the math out loud for the first time, though I'd done it plenty already. "Never once talked marriage. Never put a ring on her. Never built her a single thing that looked like a future."
I shook my head slow and clicked my teeth before continuing.
"Thank God for small mercies. Gave us both time to get ready for each other.
Because a woman like that deserved better than being stuck to a man who couldn't commit to picking out a couch with her, let alone a life.
Don't lose sleep over it though. She's getting more love than she knows what to do with these days.
We ain't been together long, but date nights, flowers, gifts just because it's a Thursday.
Little things she mentioned in passing one time and I remembered.
" I let that sit. "You know how that is. "
Then I paused, put my hand to my mouth like the thought was just now catching up to me.
"Oh. Right." I let it hang there. "You don't."
I took my time with the rest.
"That's the part you never cared bout…what y'all argued about on Valentines Day, right? You just didn’t give a damn about her needs or desires. You lost her because she stopped believing you were ever gonna hear her. What would’ve been the point of giving you another chance when you showed her for six years who you were?
Getting the girl is one thing, maintaining the relationship and growing deeper is another. Nobody taught you that part, huh?"
For a second I thought he might actually swing, but he didn't. Just stood there taking it, laid out plain by a man who'd built more with her in one month than he'd managed in over half a decade.
"Wasn't a day I was with her that she wasn't with you too. Felt like I was in a damn throuple." Disdain thick in it.
"Somebody had to take care of her. All she wanted was somebody who provided more than money. A man who could support her emotionally, mentally, spiritually, in every way that actually counts. You gave her a roof. She needed a home. Two different things, and you never did learn the difference."
"You that nigga, huh?" Asher shook his head, laughed once, short and humorless. "Best friends, my ass."
"Best friends is what it started as." I met his eyes and didn't look away from it. "Wasn't my plan for it to end up here either, if that means anything to you. But I ain't gon' apologize for loving her right just 'cause you loved her wrong first."
"Whatever, man." He said, heading down the alley.
"You'll find the right one someday too, Asher." I called after him.
He didn't stop walking, but I watched his shoulders tighten up, just slightly, waiting on whatever was coming next, because he knew me well enough by now to know I never end a sentence that clean.
"In hell."
That got him. A hitch in his stride, half a step that almost turned into a full stop before he caught himself and kept moving, didn't turn around, didn't give me the satisfaction, just kept walking with his hands balled up tighter in his pockets than they'd been a second ago.
"Enjoy your wife, Ratatouille."
"Every day of her." I didn't raise my voice. Didn't need to. "Twice on Sunday, after church."
He stopped walking.
I let him stand there with his back to me and work through whether he wanted to turn around. Man couldn't be fool enough to try me twice in one lifetime. Whatever he was thinking about doing, he thought better of it and kept it moving.
"Bitch ass." I said it under my breath, mostly for my own benefit.
I watched him go till the alley swallowed him whole. Then I got in my car and drove home to my wife.
Twenty minutes later I walked into my penthouse smelling like smoke, and not the good kind, like char on a steak or mesquite off a grill. It was the bad kind that makes a chef's whole nervous system stand up straight before his mouth even catches up.
"Ru!!!" I called out in a panic.
"Baby! You're home early." She popped up from behind the kitchen island wearing an apron I didn't even know we owned, flour or something like it dusted across one cheek, hair tied up messy on top of her head.
"What you doing?" I asked, dropping my bag by the door, eyes cutting to the oven, the counter, the general crime scene of it all.
"I was trying to make you dinner." She said it like an announcement. "And I think it turned out good. Just some grease dropped on the bottom of the oven, I think, that's probably all that is."
"That's probably all that is." I repeated it slow, walking toward the kitchen the way you walk toward something you already suspect is worse than advertised. "Ru, the whole penthouse smells like a house fire."
"It does not." She followed right behind me, hands on her hips like she was daring the smoke itself to contradict her. "It smells like effort."
I opened the oven door and a small cloud rolled out to greet me.
Sitting in the middle of the rack was something that had once, generously, maybe, been intended as a chicken, now sitting in a shallow lake of its own rendered fat that had clearly boiled over onto the oven floor at some point during the proceedings.
I looked at the chicken. Looked at her. Looked back at the chicken.
"Baby."
"Don't." She was already laughing, covering her face with both hands, apron and all.
"I ain't said nothing yet."
"You're saying something with your face." She peeked at me between her fingers, grinning, absolutely unrepentant. "It's not that bad. I basted it. I looked up a whole technique."
I couldn't hold it. I laughed right there with the oven door still open and smoke drifting lazy toward the ceiling.
She came around the island and pressed herself into my chest, apron and flour and all, still giggling into my shirt.
I wrapped both arms around her without a single thought about the smell now clinging to the both of us.
"Miss Lorna know how to throw down in that kitchen, and none of it rubbed off on you except them bases you helped your Granny with?" I shook my head, grinning down at her. "Woman raised you around some of the best cooking in Roena County and you came out the other side able to ruin water."