Chapter 36
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Tyler’s first act in Lindsey’s kitchen was reconnaissance.
He set the grocery bag on the counter, unpacked nothing, and walked the room once with his hands in his pockets—stove, window, the ceiling by the hallway. He found the smoke alarm, round and white and minding its own business above the door.
He moved a chair under it. He didn’t say why.
“Should I ask?” Lindsey sat on the stool on the far side of the counter, where she’d been installed with a glass of wine and instructions not to help.
“Standard procedure.”
“Whose standard?”
“Mine, now.”
He unpacked the bag like he was setting up a field hospital. His own lemons. His own flour, in a sandwich bag, labeled. His own pan, which he didn’t explain either. Two jars of capers.
“Two?” Lindsey asked, eyeing the caper jars with her eyebrows raised.
“Insurance.”
“Against what?”
“Caper failure.” He set them side by side. “It’s rare, but not unheard of.”
She came around the counter for the wine bottle and stood closer than the task required, reading the label on the capers over his arm. “You’re managing something,” she said. “You over-prepare when you’re managing something. I’ve watched you do it.”
“I’m cooking dinner.”
“You brought a backup jar of capers to cook dinner.” She didn’t move away. “Try again.”
His phone came out of his pocket last and went face-down by the salt. Lindsey looked at it, and then at him.
“No word yet?”
“Nope. Rick’s back in a few days.” He got the cutting board down. “Margo says we do it properly.”
“And properly takes days.”
“Yes, apparently.”
“Okay.” She turned her glass once on the counter. “Then we’re not talking about it. You’ll check that phone every four minutes and burn the butter, and I’ve seen you wait for things, Tyler. You’re good at it through a camera and terrible at it everywhere else.”
He considered being offended. She was right, though, so he floured the chicken instead, and she stayed where she was, hip against the counter, close enough that he had to work around her and didn’t ask her to move.
He’d pounded the cutlets at home, because pounding wasn’t a spectator sport. What was left was the part with an audience—the dredge, the pan, the part with rules. “Stella says there was a practice run,” Lindsey said.
“There was a development phase. And it took a while to get through it. The recipe was on one of those cooking websites with stories. A long one, about a woman’s grandmother and her village and her feelings about lemons.”
Lindsey laughed. “She says I should ask about the pickles.”
“The development phase is sealed.” He laid the first cutlet in, and the butter made the sound he’d been waiting on all day. “You get the real thing. That was the deal from the start.”
She let him work for a while. The breeze came through her window and the scent of the neighbor’s jasmine settled in with the aroma of the lemons. The sun was setting in the distance and he adjusted for the light without thinking about it, the way he adjusted for light everywhere.
“So tell me about the dinner,” she said. “That part already happened. That part’s allowed.”
That part was allowed. He told her about Joey dealing out the pizzas like a card trick—everybody’s exact order, no notes, no discussion.
About the chicken thing that got planned and wisely abandoned.
About the tart, and what the tart was for, and Anna’s face when they set it down.
About two kids laying out a real plan while a man in a collared shirt made the numbers stand up straight.
“And nobody said yes,” Lindsey said.
“Everybody said yes. Anna just said it in paperwork.” He turned the cutlet he’d been leaving alone. “It’s so far from a no, it’s got a filing system.”
“You know this town’s going to lose its mind.” She shook her head slowly. “A bakery through a door in the Shack. People are going to walk down the hill for that on principle alone.”
“That’s the theory,” Tyler said. He plated the chicken and spooned the sauce over it the way the woman with the grandmother had been very firm about, and carried both plates to her small table like they might go off.
Lindsey ate two bites, told him it was delicious, set her fork down, and looked at him.
“Okay. I’ve been sitting on something all week, and I wanted your actual face when I said it, not the back of your head over a pan.”
“Okay.”
“Reeves keeps a file. Projects he shows the new seniors on the first day—this is what the senior assignment can be, aim here.” She put her hand flat on the table.
“He told me, in the copy room, dead serious, that The Beach Shack Legacy is the best senior project he has ever seen. Ever. He wants it in the file. He asked me to ask her permission—he wants to open the class with it. Every year.”
Tyler put his fork down.
He picked it back up, and put it down again.
“Every year?” he asked.
“He literally said every year. First day of that class, from now on, starts with your kid’s name on a screen.”
Tyler looked for the joke. For once it was right there where he kept them.
“I barely passed that class,” he said. “Reeves’ class.
I skipped it to surf. He’d mark me present and then find me in the parking lot at lunch covered in sand and never say a word about it.
” He turned his wine glass as he thought.
“He spent a whole year trying to get me to take the thing seriously. Gave up. And now he wants to open it with my kid. Every fall. Forever.”
Lindsey laughed, the way only somebody who’d spent twenty years in schools could laugh at that poetic flavor of justice.
“She’s the curriculum,” Tyler said. “I’m the guy he uses as the before picture.”
“He does not use you as a before picture.”
“He should. It’s a good arc.”
She was still smiling when he went quiet, and she let the moment stay that way, which was one of the things he loved most about her.
“A year ago I ate standing over the sink and thought I had it figured out,” he said, finally.
“Work I liked. Waves in the morning. I wasn’t unhappy.
” He leaned forward with his elbows on the table.
“I was just stopped all the way down.” He held up a thumb and finger, a hair apart.
“Letting in about that much light. Calling it a life.”
“And then she got off a plane.”
“We got off together, before I knew what together would even mean for either of us.” He looked at the plate, the lemon, the whole small ceremony of it.
“And now there’s a stand with a door coming, and a professor with a file, and she doesn’t need me for much of any of it.
Which is the point. You work yourself out of the job—that’s the whole job.
” He stopped. Started again, shorter. “I keep waiting to feel like I’m losing something.
It won’t come. And I finally figured out why.
” His ears went warm, and he said it anyway.
“Not everything I built this year was for her. Some of it I built so I’d have somewhere to stand when she didn’t need me.
You’re a big part of that. Is what I’m saying. You have been for a while.”
Lindsey looked at him for a long moment.
“That is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me in structural-engineering terms.”
“I have a limited range.”
“It’s a good, targeted limit,” she said—and then she set her wine down, leaned across the corner of the small table, and kissed him, one hand flat against his jaw, unhurried, while the food they’d both stopped pretending to eat went cold.
It was not a first kiss. It had the ease of the hundredth.
But it was the first one he let land without reaching for a joke to put in front of it.
When she sat back she looked pleased with herself, which he was learning was a look she wore well.
They did the dishes at her small sink, hip to hip. He washed. She dried, and rearranged everything he’d said into worse and worse summaries of it, and he defended none of it. The spare jar of capers went into her cabinet, third shelf, where he could find it next time.
The phone stayed face-down by the salt, dark, in no hurry. The answer would come when it came. Tyler dried his hands on a towel with somebody else’s flowers on it and didn’t check the time even once, because everything he’d been waiting for at that moment was already in the room.