Lost Art of Mixing (9781101609187) (20 page)

This was so unlike him—he who had spent his junior and senior prom nights in nursing homes—that he never stopped to consider his actions. And when she finally reached an iron gate that opened to a restaurant and walked down a side path that led to what he could only assume was the kitchen, he simply stopped and waited, despite the aromas coming from inside, a scent that felt like stories that knew where they belonged. As much as he wanted to enter the restaurant, sit at a table and eat for days, he didn't want to risk the chance that she might walk back out while he wasn't there.

It was November. Rain was coming, he could sense it in the way the air was getting heavier about him. He had always liked to run at times like these; he enjoyed the idea of racing the raindrops to his own door. Standing was not nearly as fun, and as the first drops fell he had almost decided to give up when the kitchen door opened yet again and a man in his mid-thirties, a bloody dishtowel wrapped around his hand and a torrent of Spanish coming from his mouth, came quickly down the path.

As Finnegan was opening the gate for the man, he looked up and saw the girl standing in the kitchen doorway, an apron around her waist and her arms crossed in frustration. Finnegan walked through the open gate and approached.

“Can I help?” he asked.

“I don't know,” she said. “Can you wash dishes?”

•   •   •

WHICH IS ALL SHE HAD SAID
to him for the first six weeks he worked at Lillian's. Her name, he found out, was Chloe, and she worked longer and harder hours than even Lillian, coming in early or staying late to try new recipes. Finnegan watched her when he could get away with it, catching a glimpse between stacks of dishes. What he saw when she cooked was equal parts desire to please Lillian and a love for the food itself—sentiments he could well understand, but he wondered when the latter would tip the scale and Chloe would cook for herself.

It was a story worth waiting for, he decided, and after the first few nights in a less than attractive motel, Finnegan found himself a room in a house he shared with five computer science students, who made for occasionally odd but, after Aunt Ailis's social quirks, reasonably familiar roommates. Finnegan ate at the restaurant, so he could avoid the kitchen at home, with its towers of pizza boxes and silver Top Ramen flavor packets, the overflowing sink of dishes that he might have felt a professional obligation to wash. At the end of the first month, he bought himself a futon, then a lamp. A secondhand dresser for his clothes. The box of notebooks stayed in the trunk of his car.

He started running again in the mornings before work. He wouldn't admit that he was hoping to catch sight of where Chloe lived, but the possibility took him farther and deeper into the city, down serpentine streets lined with trees, over hills to neighborhoods of small bungalows snuggled into perfect grids. He never saw her, but he saw enough of the city to know he was comfortable there, where drivers stopped their cars to allow him to cross the street, and running in the rain or the semi-light of early morning was not a solitary occupation. As he ran, he tried to think of things he could say to Chloe. A cooking tip from one of the books he was reading. A comment about the way the color of her hair matched the batter for Lillian's signature chocolate cake. He could say he was collecting stories and ask for hers—but what had sounded sincere with the senior citizens just sounded smarmy when he thought of saying it to a girl his own age. And so he stayed at the restaurant kitchen sink, his back to the cooks, his ears alert for every word she spoke, the knock of her knife against the cutting board.

•   •   •

FINNEGAN HADN'T EXPECTED
to see Chloe on New Year's Eve. He had stayed late at the restaurant to avoid the fact that he had nowhere to go, although he told himself that he was giving the kitchen a special cleaning for Lillian. But then, just as he was finishing, Chloe had come in with the red suitcase in her hand, and his sudden fear that she might be leaving loosened his tongue.

He hadn't really thought about what he was doing when he put the blue notebook in her suitcase. As much as anything, he just wanted to continue the feeling of New Year's Eve—at least the part until she'd dashed out the door. He knew it was a risk; he'd seen how prickly she could be when the produce delivery guy flirted with her, but he did it anyway and waited for the repercussions. So, when he saw the notebook out on the counter one day when he came in to work, saw how full it was of words, his heart leapt. That night after work, he dug through the employee files to find her address, and the next Monday he went to her house, prepared for rebuff. But Isabelle had been there, all smiles and winks, practically shoving Chloe out the door. And the drive to the waterfall had been peaceful, easy, Chloe slowly softening over the hours. He had kept quiet, letting her relax, feeling her shed her protective layers.

He hadn't taken her to the waterfall in order to kiss her—somehow that seemed like the Northwest equivalent of inviting a girl to see your etchings. Nor was it his first kiss—there had been the time when the entire girls' gymnastics team decided that reaching his lips provided an acrobatic challenge sufficient for course credit. But when it happened, when the arch of the rocks and the wall of water pulled them together, he realized it was the first time he had felt truly happy since before his parents had left for Everest.

He should have known she'd change her mind, given even half a moment. Why would she want some altitudinous dishwasher? The silence of the ride home from the waterfall was utterly different than the trip south, the friendly rhythm of the windshield wipers turned into a steady refrain—you blew it, you blew it, you blew it. Chloe scrunched down in her seat and did a questionable impersonation of someone sleeping, while Finnegan drove, wishing as always, but for new and different reasons, that he could make himself smaller.

•   •   •

AND THAT WAS PRETTY MUCH
how it stayed for months, Finnegan and Chloe playing an endless game of keep-away in the restaurant kitchen. In frustration, Finnegan took to the streets, running his way through the pair of shoes Aunt Ailis had packed in his car. He didn't care where he went as long as it was far enough to tire every muscle in his legs, steep enough to make his breath rip through his lungs. When he returned home, he would stand under the hot water in the shower until one of his roommates banged on the bathroom door. After he dressed, he would attack the apartment kitchen, tossing greasy takeout containers, working his way to the bottom of the sink.

He knew he should just give up, or go home or go on, depending. It seemed fairly obvious he wasn't going to get anywhere with Chloe. He had helped with Isabelle's ritual, thinking perhaps if Chloe saw him outside the restaurant, inside her house, it would change her attitude, but she seemed determined to ignore him. Still, he thought, anyone who was so intent on avoiding you had to be thinking about you an awful lot. It was an odd thing to hang your hope on, but it was what he had.

Spring gave way to summer. One morning on his run, he saw a small white-haired figure in purple tennis shoes up ahead. He ducked slightly as he ran by, hoping to pass without notice.

“Finnegan?”

Despite, or perhaps because of, her missing social filter, Aunt Ailis had always insisted he be polite. He stopped and turned.

“Hello, Isabelle.”

“I thought it might be you.”

“Hard to miss.”

“Hard to hide?” She smiled. “Where have you been? You haven't come by the house since my ritual day.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Chloe doesn't know what she's doing—you know that, right?” Isabelle always did seem to get right to the point.

“She seems pretty certain to me.”

“Yes, well. I think I was just as determined to have my husband as Chloe is not to have you. Women aren't always right.”

Finnegan nodded, unconvinced.

“Do you feel like walking a bit?” Isabelle said. “I'd love some company.”

It was the middle of his run, the point where fatigue was starting to hum in his muscles, shifting him from a mental being to a simply physical one, but he nodded again and let her set the pace. He wondered sometimes if anybody who wasn't his height could truly understand what it meant for him to pull in his stride, the way it cinched up his muscles, made every short step feel like he might lose his balance and fall. It hadn't felt that way with Chloe, which had seemed nothing short of miraculous to him.

Okay, Finnegan told himself, that was why he ran, to avoid thinking. He cast about for familiar territory.

“Tell me about your husband,” he said to Isabelle. He could feel a story radiating from her; you could almost see them if you looked, especially in older people who had so many that they seemed to spill out like boxes from a loaded closet. It took only a simple question to open the door.

“We had a daughter,” Isabelle said, “then another, and a son.”

It was intriguing how people came at their stories, Finnegan thought as he listened to Isabelle. He had learned to watch the gap between question and answer, having realized that the less obvious the connection the more interesting the material left unsaid. Diving into the gap yourself was rarely productive, but if allowed to talk uninterrupted, the storyteller would eventually build bridges across it, bridges made of memories that felt safe and familiar, anecdotes that had turned solid and durable with the retelling. After a while, you could go fishing.

So Finnegan let Isabelle talk. He knew, from overhearing Chloe and Lillian in the kitchen, that Isabelle's son was relocating to the Northwest. For an archaeological dig on the Olympic Peninsula, he had said, but Chloe knew it was in order to live closer to his mother, and Finnegan could sense her relief that Isabelle would have family near her again. As Isabelle and Finnegan walked down the sidewalk, Isabelle told him happily about the family reunion at the cabin that Abby was planning, to mark the passing of the keys to Tom and Lillian. Even Isabelle's other daughter, Lucy, was coming, all the way from— Isabelle stopped, frustrated.

“Somewhere warm,” she said. “Far away.

“Kangaroos,” she added triumphantly.

When they reached Isabelle's house, she turned at the gate to face him.

“Would you like to talk again sometime?” she asked.

Finnegan glanced toward the house.

“It wouldn't have to be here. Coffee? You're so easy to talk to.”

He knew when he was being handled, but old habits were hard to break.

“Sure,” said Finnegan.

•   •   •

THE FIRST TIME,
he simply listened, letting her stories wash over him. He could see that Isabelle's gaps were larger than most and not always created by ordinary emotional hesitation. She would approach the edge of a thought and the anecdotes and memories that would have carried her across years before now dissolved beneath her. While she could still find her way to the coffee shop where they met, he learned that standing in line behind her was not only polite but necessary if she was actually to get the coffee she wanted and not what she ordered, which might have unusual, if poetic, misfires in vocabulary—
latte, extra varnish; laughter, extra vacancies
.

On their second “date,” as Isabelle liked to call them, he brought a blue notebook. He had tried to go without, had hoped he could make the transition into solely listening rather than recording, but the stories Isabelle still remembered were so brilliantly alive he couldn't resist.

“Chloe has a notebook like that,” Isabelle said when he set it on the table.

He remembered his joy when he realized Chloe was writing in the notebook, the sadness he felt when it vanished along with any affection she appeared to have felt for him.

“She keeps it on her nightstand,” Isabelle noted casually.

The third time they met, Isabelle sat down with her coffee—
latte, extra vanilla
—and smiled.

“Now,” she said. “That's enough of me. Tell me why you write.”

Maybe it was the blaring steam of the milk frother and the voices of the stroller-moms swirling around them, making him feel as if anything he said would be heard, at best, by Isabelle and perhaps not even then. Maybe it was—and he felt a twinge of contrition about this—the thought that Isabelle would likely forget his stories even before she left the coffee shop and thus they might almost never have been told. But Finnegan closed Isabelle's notebook and began to talk.

He told her about his parents and the big, clear skies of Boulder. The way the clouds of Portland had made him feel at first as if there was yet another barrier between himself and his mother and father, a direct route cut off by weather. He told her about being tall, the way the world could look so much smaller or larger from that height, depending on the day. He told her about Maridel and Hannah. Simon and Jasper and Viola. He told her about seeing Chloe at the vegetable stand, following her to the restaurant. New Year's Eve and all the months since. The way, even with all that, all the confusion about staying or going, the restaurant felt like home.

“That makes sense,” Isabelle said.

“What?”

“You're a lot like her.”

“Chloe?”

Isabelle shook her head. “Although that would make things interesting. I meant Lillian.” She sipped her coffee, seeming to enjoy his puzzlement. “Food, stories. They aren't that different, you know. Speaking of which, I have a favor to ask.”

“What?”

“Could I have that notebook?”

Finnegan was still trying to understand Isabelle's observations, but that was not particularly unusual. Sometimes what she said made sense later, and sometimes it didn't. In any event, this was her notebook, he told himself. She should have it if she wanted it.

But what if she forgot about it? What if she didn't pass it on to her children and the stories were lost? There was no getting them back once they were gone. They would scatter and no one would know where they were or who they had been.