Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Tyler had the chicken out, and the lemon, and his phone propped against the coffee maker with a recipe on it, and the recipe had a problem, and the problem was capers.
“We don’t have capers,” Stella said, on her stomach across the couch with her feet on the armrest, scrolling her own phone. “Nobody has capers.”
“Lindsey likes the lemon thing. The piccata.” He said the word with care. Piccata. A word he didn’t own yet. “The lemon thing needs capers.”
“Why are we practicing? Lindsey’s seen you eat. She knows what she’s getting.”
“She keeps saying we should cook together some night. Her place.” He turned the burner down a notch. “I can run a flat-top grill in my sleep. This has steps. I know pans. I don’t know capers.”
“Romantic.”
“It will be if the chicken cooperates.”
“Search ‘piccata no capers.’”
He typed with one finger. The kitchen already smelled like the garlic he’d started too early, soft and gold in the butter. He scrolled. “This one says I can substitute green olives.”
“Do we have green olives?”
“We have black olives.”
“That feels like a different dinner.”
He opened the refrigerator and took inventory out loud. “Chicken thighs. The recipe says breasts.”
“Chicken is chicken.”
“That’s what I said.” He set the thighs on the cutting board. “One lemon. Half a bag of the shredded mozzarella from the taco night.”
“Mozzarella wasn’t from taco night. Nothing about taco night was from taco night.”
“Butter. Flour.” He shut the door with his hip. “We’re in business.”
Stella’s phone buzzed on the couch cushion. She reached back without looking. “Bea’s doing her hair tonight. There’s a diagram.”
“Of course there is,” Tyler said, and kept scrolling.
The recipe had a story at the top, a long one. He scrolled. “This woman’s telling me about her grandmother’s village. I just need the pan temperature.”
“You have to earn the pan temperature. That’s how those sites work. They hide the actual food at the bottom.”
He scrolled to the bottom. Read. Looked at the refrigerator for a while.
“What?” Stella asked.
“Capers are pickled.”
“Okay.”
“We have pickles.”
Stella lowered her phone. “You’re going to make piccata with pickles.”
“I’m going to try it on us first. That’s the whole point of tonight. You don’t serve Lindsey the first attempt.” He got the cutting board down and minced three pickle chips into pieces the size of capers, more or less, and Stella came off the couch to watch.
The dredging station was a dinner plate of flour, and the recipe said one wet hand, one dry hand, and Tyler used both hands for both jobs, and within a minute the flour was on the counter, the faucet, the front of his shirt, and one cabinet knob nobody could explain.
“You look like you lost a fight with a bakery,” Stella said.
“System’s working.” He pressed a thigh into the flour with both wrong hands and laid it in the pan, and the butter took it with a sound like applause.
The first side of the chicken went fine. The smell got serious—butter, garlic, lemon zest where he’d grated it straight over the pan—and Tyler stood over it with the spatula and did not touch it, because the recipe said don’t touch it, and the woman with the grandmother had been firm about that.
The second side was where it went wrong. He turned to answer Stella’s question about whether Lindsey actually liked capers or just tolerated them, and the butter went past brown while his back was turned, and the smoke came up off the pan quiet and fast, and the smoke alarm went off.
The smoke alarm had waited all week for this.
Tyler got the pan off the burner and the window up, and Stella stood on a kitchen chair and fanned the alarm with a cutting board, and for about forty seconds the bungalow was all noise and lemon smoke and the neighbor’s dog answering the alarm personally.
Then it stopped, and the pan sat in the sink hissing, and the chicken had gone somewhere the recipe never mentioned.
They looked at it together. Stella lifted the camera off the counter and took a picture of it in the sink.
“For Lindsey?” Tyler asked.
“For history.”
“The pickles didn’t do that,” Tyler said.
“The pickles are the only survivors.” Stella got down off the chair. “Freezer?”
“Freezer.”
The pizza went in at 425, and the box said twelve to fifteen minutes, and Tyler set the timer for eleven because he’d stopped trusting appliances in the last five minutes. He scraped the pan and left it to soak, wiped the stove, reset the alarm. Small disaster, back in its drawer.
Then he looked at the two thighs still waiting on the cutting board, and floured one, and did it right—low heat, patient, untouched—while the oven ticked beside him.
It came out gold. He cut it in half at the stove and they ate it standing up with their fingers, and Stella chewed, and considered, and rendered the verdict.
“The pickles work.”
“The pickles stay between us.”
“Lindsey gets capers, though.”
“Lindsey gets the real thing.” He set the empty cutting board in the sink like a man closing a case.
He got two sodas and carried them out to the garage, where Stella had drifted.
The radio out there had the ballgame, low, the announcer going long and unhurried between pitches, and she stood at the workbench under the print line—six frames clothes-pinned over the bench, the pier at low tide in fog, from the morning he’d stood in cold water to get them.
He handed her a soda.
“Lindsey said to tell you the prints came out beautiful,” Stella said. “She said you’d know which ones.”
He looked at the line of them and drank some of his soda. “The fog ones.”
“They’re good, Dad.”
“The third one’s good.” He pointed with the can. “The rest are the third one, worse.”
“When’d you even take these?”
“Couple mornings ago. Swell was junk. Fog was good.” He shrugged. “You work with what the morning gives you.”
She looked at the third one for a while. He was right, and she didn’t say so, and he knew she knew.
“What’s on your card?” he asked, and held out his hand.
She gave him the camera. He clicked back through it with the thumb wheel, the little screen lighting his face in the garage dark—the burned chicken in the sink, a card in a plastic sleeve shot square in window light, a cracked brown loaf on a rack, the specials board with somebody’s name on it, Bernie’s pen stopped over the crossword.
“That’s a lot of other people’s stuff,” he said.
“I didn’t plan it.”
“You never plan the good ones.” He handed the camera back. “The camera knows before you do. That’s the whole trick of it.”
“You shooting tomorrow?”
“I’m shooting tomorrow. I’m shooting the whole thing.” He drank his soda. “Get—”
“Get low. I know. Everybody shoots a graduation from standing height and it’s three hundred people’s backs.”
“That’s mine.”
“It’s been mine for a while,” Stella said.
The timer went off inside, far away, muffled through two doors.
Neither of them moved.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Yeah.”
Stella turned the soda can around on the bench. “Why don’t you ever ask me what I’m doing? After.”
Tyler didn’t say anything for a second. Out on the radio somebody hit something and the crowd went up and came back down and the announcer talked about the wind.
“Do you want me to?”
“Everybody else does. Every single person. Hailey’s mother asked me in a parking lot.” She peeled a corner of the label with her thumbnail. “You’ve never asked me once.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because nobody asked me,” Tyler said. “And I’d have hated it.”
He leaned back against the bench beside her and looked at the fog prints on the line.
“I didn’t know. Nobody knew, and everybody acted like they did, and I skipped the whole thing and went surfing and that was the smartest decision anybody made that year.
” He turned the can in his hand. “You’ll get there.
You’ll get there in about a year and a half and it’ll be something none of us guessed and you’ll act like you always knew. ”
“That’s not an answer.”
She was quiet.
“So what would you say,” Tyler said. “If I did ask.”
And there it was.
She stood there with the soda can and her mouth open and nothing behind it, and Tyler watched her go looking and come back empty, and he had about two seconds to decide what kind of father he was going to be about it.
“Well,” he said. “That was cruel. I take it back.”
“You can’t take it back.”
“I’m taking it back. That’s a dad move, I’m allowed one a year.” He pushed off the bench. “Pizza’s probably done.”
They went in. The pizza had gone past what the box promised and Tyler cut it anyway and they ate it on the couch with the game on low and paper towels for plates, and Stella took a second slice, which he counted as evidence of nothing in particular.
Down the hall the bedroom door stood open and the gown hung on the back of it.
Tyler nodded at it with the crust in his hand.
“Big day. Big navy blue day.”
“Don’t.”
“That’s a dress, technically.” He reached over and nudged her foot off the coffee table with his own. She put it back.
“It’s a gown.”
“It’s got a zipper and it goes to your ankles. That’s a dress.” He took a bite. “Closest I’m ever getting.”
“You’ve seen me in a dress.”
“I’ve seen you in a dress at a wedding, under protest, for ninety minutes.” He pointed the crust at her. “Tomorrow you’re in one voluntarily, in front of the whole town, with a hat.”
“It’s a cap.”
“It’s a hat with a tassel, Stella. There’s a tassel.” He was enjoying himself now. “I’m getting the wide lens for the tassel.”
“I hate you so much.”
“You’re going to move it from one side to the other. In public. There’s a ceremony for the tassel. Or so I’ve been told.”
Stella threw a paper towel at him and it did what paper towels do, which is nothing, and drifted onto the coffee table between them.
“Wide lens,” she said. “Don’t shoot into the gym lights.”
“Now you’re just doing me.”
“I’m doing you badly. You’d have said it slower.”
He picked up the paper towel and set it back on the pile. “I’ll get you a good one.”
“You’ll get me forty and three will be good.”
“That’s the job.”
The game went to a commercial. Stella got up and got water and stood at the sink drinking it and looking down the hall at the door with the gown on it, and Tyler let her do that without saying anything, and then she came back and sat down and put her feet up on the coffee table next to the box.
“Hey,” she said. “The pickles were good.”
“The pickles were inspired.”
“I said good.”
“You said good the first time. It’s gone up since.” He found the remote under a cushion. “It’ll be capers with Lindsey, though.”
“Coward.”
“Strategy,” Tyler said.