Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
NAOMI
I watched him from the kitchen window. At the bottom of the steps he stopped and looked up at the house, then down at his empty hands. He put them in his coat pockets and took them out again, like he couldn't figure out what to do with them.
Then he rang the doorbell. He'd never rung the doorbell of this house in his life.
I opened the door.
"Hi," he said.
"You know you can come in the back."
"I know. I wanted to knock."
He wiped his feet on the mat for a long time. He'd shaved. He was in the gray sweater and old jeans, his ears red from the cold. In the kitchen he stood by the island without taking off his coat.
"Coffee?" I asked.
"I'm okay."
I poured one for myself anyway, in the blue mug, and put the milk in right away instead of letting it sit, because that's what I felt like.
He wasn't watching the mug. He was watching me.
"Okay," he said. He took a breath and put both hands flat on the granite. "What do you want?"
I opened my mouth, and twelve years of Octobers came up in me. Soup. Short ribs. Potatoes. Cabernet. Lemon cake. I could have said it. It would've been the easiest thing in the world. He'd have gone to Esposito's, happy, and I'd have sat at the island watching him do it the way I always had.
But I didn't want to sit there and be served something I'd already had. I just didn't know what I wanted instead.
"I don't know," I said.
It hung there in the kitchen.
I waited for him to jump in, how about this, how about that, the way he would have in the fall. I could feel myself getting ready to say sure, that sounds great.
For a moment he didn't say anything.
"Okay," he said.
He took his hands off the counter, then took off his coat and hung it on the back of a stool.
"We don't have to decide right now," he said. "We can wait till you know. Or we can go look. Whichever."
"Go look where?"
"Anywhere. Ninth Street."
The Italian Market. We used to walk there every Saturday from Passyunk, and neither of us had been back in years.
"It's thirty-one degrees," I said.
"They'll have the fires going."
They did.
We parked on a side street off Washington Avenue and walked up Ninth under the old tin awnings.
The produce stands ran the whole length of the block, with oil drums full of fire along the curb every twenty feet, their smoke blowing sideways.
Men in fingerless gloves shouted prices over pyramids of oranges, crates of broccoli rabe, bins of chestnuts.
The cheese shop had salamis hanging in the window like a curtain.
The whole street smelled like woodsmoke, cold dirt, espresso.
I walked, and Graham walked half a step behind me. He didn't point anything out or say look at those. When I stopped, he stopped, and when I started again, so did he.
At first I didn't know what I was doing there. I looked at artichokes and didn't want artichokes. I looked at a butcher's case of veal chops, thought about my mother, and kept walking.
At the corner of Ninth and Montrose there was a Mexican grocery with crates set out front. Dried chiles in clear bags, brown and red and nearly black. Cilantro standing in buckets of water. A big wooden bin full of tomatillos.
I stopped.
They were still in their husks, pale green, papery, a little torn.
When I picked one up, the husk crackled dry under my thumb.
The fruit inside was sticky and cold. I peeled it right there on Ninth Street, the way you'd peel a clementine.
The husk came off in one piece. Underneath, the skin was hard and shiny green, like a marble.
"These," I said.
"Okay," Graham said.
I looked at him. "You don't want to know what for?"
"Do you know what for?"
I thought about it.
"Something green," I said. "Something hot. Something that cooks for a long time, so the house smells like it all afternoon."
He nodded, took a paper bag off the stack, and held it open while I picked through the tomatillos one at a time, feeling for the firm ones.
"How many?" he asked.
"I don't know. Keep holding the bag."
He kept holding it.
Inside the store I picked out poblanos, jalape?os, two white onions, a head of garlic, and a bunch of cilantro so big it was like carrying flowers. On the shelf behind the register I spotted a bottle of the green tomatillo hot sauce and bought that too.
Three doors down, the butcher, a man in a white paper hat, asked us what we were making.
"Chile verde," I said. The words came out on their own; they'd been in my head since the tomatillo. "I think."
"Pork shoulder," the butcher said. "Bone in. Don't let him buy it boneless."
"I wasn't going to say anything," Graham said.
The butcher laughed, and so did I. Graham looked at me laughing, and for a second his face was so naked I had to look somewhere else.
The car smelled like cilantro the whole way home.
In the kitchen, he didn't take over. For twelve years I'd watched him cook from a stool at the island. Now he set the bags on the counter and looked at me.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked.
"Char the tomatillos. Under the broiler. I'll do the pork."
"Okay."
I cut the pork shoulder into big chunks, salted them, and browned them in batches in the Dutch oven until the kitchen was loud with spitting fat.
Graham spread the tomatillos and poblanos on a sheet pan, slid them under the broiler, then stood at the oven door with the light on, watching them blister, turning them with tongs whenever the tops went black.
The windows fogged. The house started to smell like smoke, pork, green chile. At one point he reached past me for a spoon, and our arms brushed. Neither of us moved away.
Everything went into the blender, the charred tomatillos and poblanos, garlic, onion, a whole fistful of cilantro. It came out a thick, smoky, violent green. When I poured it over the pork, it hissed.
"Salt?" Graham said, holding the box.
"I don't know yet."
He dipped a spoon in the sauce and blew on it, but instead of tasting it himself, he held it out to me.
"You tell me," he said.
It was hot, sour, smoky, and it needed something.
"Salt," I said. "More. And lime."
He added the salt, cut a lime, and handed me half. I squeezed it in. He dipped another spoon and held it out.
"Better?"
"Better."
At 1:15 the pot went in the oven, covered, on low. It needed three hours.
We cleaned up, me washing, him drying, and he put everything back in the right cabinets.
At three o'clock he was sitting on the kitchen floor with his back against the dishwasher, and I was across from him with my back against the cabinets. The oven ticked. The whole house smelled like the inside of that pot.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"Yes."
"What do you want for dessert? You can say I don't know."
I sat there on the cold floor and actually thought about it.
"Clementines," I said. "Just clementines. Cold, out of the fridge. I want to peel them at the table."
"Okay."
He got up and checked the crisper drawer. There were three, and he shook his head.
"I'll go get more," he said. "There's a place on Germantown."
"Graham."
He stopped with his coat halfway on.
"Three's enough," I said. "I only want one."
He took his coat back off.
We ate at the island at 4:30, with the dark already coming on outside.
The chile verde was so tender it fell apart when you touched it with a spoon.
We ate it out of the big soup bowls with warm tortillas from a package, a spoonful of sour cream on mine, and I put the green hot sauce on the table.
He didn't ask why we suddenly had two bottles of it. He just used some.
It was really good. It didn't taste like anything I'd ever had before.
Afterward I peeled a clementine in one long spiral, the way my grandmother taught me, split it, and held half out to him across the island.
He took it.
By then it was full dark outside.
At eight he stood up and got his coat.
"Thank you," he said. "For today. For letting me come."
He was halfway to the mudroom. He hadn't asked if he could stay. He hadn't even glanced at the stairs.
"Graham."
He turned around.
"Stay," I said. It came out too quiet, like a question I hadn't finished asking, and I let it.
He stood very still in the doorway with his coat over his arm.
"Are you sure?"
"No," I said. "Stay anyway."
He put the coat back down on the stool.
Upstairs, I turned on the lamp on my side of the bed before he could reach for the switch by the door.
He looked at the lamp, then at me.
"I want to see," I said. "I'm done guessing."
His throat moved. He nodded.
He didn't touch me right away. He stood at the foot of the bed in the gray sweater with his hands at his sides, like a man who'd shown up to fix something and couldn't find his tools.
So I crossed the room, took the hem of his sweater, and pulled it up.
He ducked his head to help. His hair came out of it standing up on one side.
"You're allowed to help," I said.
"I know." His voice was rough. "I'm trying not to get ahead of you."
When he did reach for me, he was slower than he'd ever been. He undid the top button of my flannel shirt, then stopped with his fingers resting there, looking at me.
It took me a second to understand what he was waiting for.
"Yes," I said.
He undid the next one and stopped again. This time I laughed, a short, shaky sound, and put my hand over his to undo the rest myself.
For twelve years I'd never had to tell him where to put his hands. Now his palm came to rest on my ribs and stayed there, warm, not moving, until I took his wrist to bring it where I wanted it. His breath went out of him in a rush against my temple.
On the bed, he kissed the scar on my hip and looked up at me in the lamplight.
"And this?"
"Yes."
He asked me all night, mostly without words. His mouth on the inside of my knee, paused. His hand at the small of my back, waiting. Every time, I had to decide, and every time I decided, I got a little braver.
At one point I rolled us over so I was the one above him, my knees on either side of his hips, the lamp behind me throwing my shadow across his chest. He went very still underneath me.
"Nay," he said, like it cost him something.
"Wait," I said.
He waited. His hands stayed flat on my thighs, and I could see what it took, the tendons standing up along his forearms. I looked at him for a long time.
The gray in his stubble. The new lines by his eyes.
The man who'd sat outside my sister's building until three without telling me, the same man who'd put his keys back in the bowl.
Then I leaned down to kiss him. I took him inside me slowly, watching his face the whole time.
He didn't move until I did. When I finally did, his head went back against the pillow, and he said my name through his teeth.
It wasn't the rhythm he knew. It was one I made up as I went, uneven, stopping when I wanted to, and he followed it.
When I got close, he noticed; his hand came up to the back of my neck to hold me there.
I came with my forehead pressed to his, his breath on my mouth.
He held out longer than I expected. Then I rocked against him, said, "Now, Graham," and he let go with a sound I'd never heard him make.
For twelve years he'd always known exactly what to do. That night he didn't pretend to.
Afterward he reached for the lamp, then stopped with his hand on the switch to look at me.
"Okay?" he said.
"Okay."
He turned it off. He fell asleep first, with his hand flat and heavy on my stomach. I lay awake a long time in the dark listening to him breathe. I wasn't sure yet what I'd done. I wasn't sorry, either.