“You mad?”
I shook my head, but there was a hollowness in my chest as I looked at Shane, bent over his food with the rare and passionate appetite of a boy. His hair, thick and long, shone with the brilliance of youth and good living. Candlelight exaggerated the shadows below his high, slanted cheekbones and the strong line of his jaw. He’s beautiful, is my Shane, and so much like his father it’s eerie.
It was only a year until he’d leave me. Probably not to college, not if he didn’t get his grades and life together, but somewhere. He wasn’t the kind of kid who’d hang around a minute longer than he had to. Then he’d be off to the world. The music world, most likely.
And how could I stand not having him at the dinner table every night? I scowled at my margarita and picked it up with determination. “To growing up,” I said.
He looked up at me, my beautiful son, with his father’s brilliant and soulful eyes, and grinned. “If we’re toasting that, I think I deserve a margarita, too.”
“You’re grounded until you’re ninety, so it doesn’t matter if you grow up or not.”
* * *
I was the first one up the next morning. It wasn’t a cooking morning—those were Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—but in spite of the margaritas and the upsets, or maybe because of them, I awakened just after six. A farmer’s sun, bright and clear to shine on all the crops, streamed in my windows, and I lay there and let it cover me, wash against my eyelids and my mouth and my neck. A breeze, cool from the night, blew the curtains up and touched the crown of my head.
The house was silent all around me, and I thought of the males in their various bedrooms, Shane sprawled in a tangle of sheets, his unbelievably hairy legs sticking out of the covers. Michael, neat even in sleep, a single sheet tucked under his chin in the dark room that faced west, a room I’d given him deliberately so he could sleep as late as he needed to.
And Malachi. The unknown quotient. I stirred my legs a little, dislodging cats, and imagined how he would sleep. On his stomach, naked or in a pair of white briefs. That brought up a picture of his beautiful behind clothed only in that thinnest of cotton. Mmm.
The luxury of having the silence of the house and no pies to bake was too great to waste lying in bed. I got up, pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and went downstairs. I ground coffee beans and started the machine, then wandered outside to my aunt Sylvia’s herb garden. There was still rain on the leaves from a fierce, quick storm the night before, and the dampness intensified the smell. I plucked a frond of lavender and held it up to my nose, thinking of the wands she’d made of these plants, wands she sold and gave away, wands we all stuck in our drawers, wrapped in their braids of red and yellow and green string. Nearby, Berlin sniffed along the rows, scenting a squirrel, maybe, or a field mouse. Her fur glinted deep red in the early sunlight.
But while I was doing all of that, there were ingredients tickling the back of my brain. A quiver of roasted garlic. A piquant bite of chili. Onion, of course. Milk? No, chicken broth. Even better, a good veggie broth, something hearty and nutritious for Michael, who would be exhausted today after so much excitement and movement yesterday.
I picked a huge handful of thyme and another of basil, and carried the damp leaves inside to wash in the deep porcelain sink. It was a great sink, and I’ve known a lot of bad ones. Shallow ones with no room to wash anything. Chipped ones that bred bacteria in their rusted wounds. Stainless steel—ordinarily such a great material for anything in the kitchen—abused by harsh cleansers and too much scouring.
But Sylvia’s sinks were elbow deep, two of them, side by side. The porcelain had been carefully tended over the years, so the finish was as white now as it had been sixty years before. Showering the newly harvested herbs with the sprayer, I thought of my uncle Tony carefully cutting the hole for the rubber hose into the old porcelain, and hummed under my breath. The song came to me, a K.T. Oslin tune that made me happy.
I hated cooking without music and in spite of the budget crunch had splurged on a small, portable CD player. For Christmas a couple of years ago, Michael had given me a pair of cordless headphones, and I plugged in the little gizmo they required. From the stack of plastic cases on top of the fridge, I found the Oslin, and “Come Next Monday” danced its way into my head. I took out pots and bowls, singing along cheerfully.
The windows were full of early morning sunlight. This morning, the Swedish ivy inherited from Sylvia gleamed on the wide sill by the breakfast bar, covering Saint Anthony’s feet, and blue bottles stood sentry on either side, the light not so much breaking as expanding within the cobalt curves. Through the window over the sink, I had a good view of the orchards—trees that actually seemed to be putting out a little fruit this year—and from the mudroom, great bucketfuls of soft buttery light poured over the floor.
I chopped and sautéed, singing along, drinking coffee. In the corner on top of a cupboard was a small color television and I turned it on to CNN with the sound on mute so that I could catch up on world events as I slowly browned a head of garlic and a huge onion in olive oil.
Almost nothing makes me as happy as food, cooking, kitchens. Family kitchens, filled with a multigenerational mix of women always talking, gossiping, moving around one another in a little dance. That was where I heard the best secrets, the best advice, the most profound observations of life. The aroma of garlic roasting makes me think of my uncle Joe, who caused a terrible scandal by having an affair with the waitress at Corsi’s Bowl and only crept back to his wife, broke and sorrowful, when the waitress dumped him for an upper management type at the steel mill, a man who wore polo shirts tucked into his slacks, not Joe’s serviceable blue cotton uniforms. Basil leaves make me think of Sylvia’s hands, gnarled and golden and rivered with blue veins even in my youngest memories. And as long as I live, I’ll never smell barbeque sauce without thinking of Michael, I know it.
As great as family kitchens are, restaurant kitchens are even better. The big, gleaming stainless steel stoves and ovens and wide, unbroken countertops. The wealth of knives—gleaming steel attached to heavy black handles: wide, angled butcher’s knives, paring knives, corrugated bread knives, and sleek, small steak knives for customers. As a girl, I’d also loved the big graters with their multitude of sides, loved being given the task of grating piles of hard white Parmesan or soft, gloppy provolone, one of the secrets of the Falconi lasagna. I loved the big slabs of white cutting boards and the deft, graceful movements of an expert chopping vegetables, fingers curved to avoid the knife, the whip-whip-whip sound ringing out authoritively into the air.
I can’t think of a single thing that ever happened to me that doesn’t have some food or cooking memory attached. When I met Billy and Michael, the night air was full of funnel cakes and Polish sausage and beer, the smell of the fair. When I went into labor with Shane, I cooked all night, piles and piles and piles of comfort foods: lasagna and beef stew. I’d even started on tamales when the guys got freaked and insisted two minutes apart meant I needed to go to the hospital.
It’s another thing Michael and I share, this love of cooking and food and restaurants. He’d learned early that restaurant work was easy to get and not too hard to do—and between singing in honky-tonks, he worked as a busboy and a waiter and a bartender.
He’d inherited his love from his father, who cooked all kinds of things to make up for the desultory labors of his mother. Abe was famous for many things, but his Sunday morning breakfasts, country-fried everything, were the top of the list in Michael’s memory, as was his apple pie. I made a mental note to dig out that recipe and make it for dinner tonight. In fact, it would be a good offering for the business, too. In a notebook I kept for the purpose, I made a list of the things I knew I would need, singing absently along with K.T.: “Let’s just stay in bed all day . . .”
Something—not a noise since the earphones muffled everything—made me look up. And there in the doorway to the mudroom, haloed by that gold morning sun, was Malachi. He had on a fishing vest, with lures and mysterious pins all over it. The khaki pockets were lumpy with stuff I wasn’t sure I wanted to know about, though I imagined small, screw-topped bottles of slimy red eggs and an efficient Swiss Army knife. He wore a fishing hat—and not even Malachi could make a fishing hat look good. His was dark blue with a formerly cream-colored band laced with more shiny and feathered lures. At least he didn’t pull it down too low on his forehead.
I yanked the earphones from my head, letting them circle my neck. “I thought you were still asleep.”
He plunked his catch down on the breakfast bar, a shiny bass and a big catfish. I wrinkled my nose. “Been getting up early too long to sleep in,” he said, pulling off his hat. “If you’ve got a good knife, I’ll get these cleaned. Don’t know as the catfish’ll be any good, but we can stick the bass in the freezer and wait to get some more.”
I plucked a good knife from the bar over the stove and gave it to him. “Thank God. I hate cleaning fish. It was always the girls’ job when I was a kid.”
He arranged the fish on the table. “And I bet you were wishing you got to be the one to catch them.”
“Not really. I can’t stand to see them alive and then eat them. I never mind somebody else killing them, you understand—” I strained some olive oil from the pot “—but it grosses me out to have to do the killing myself.”
His grin was easy.
“You hungry?” I asked. “I’m making some soup, but I could cook some eggs or something if you want.”
“Maybe in a little bit. I ate when I got up. Wasn’t sure what the coffee customs were around here, so I didn’t make any.” With those strong hands, he sliced the body of the catfish open, and as if the odor held a magic lariat, suddenly all three cats appeared, crying out for scraps. “Now I’ll know. You like it hefty.”
“Strong enough to walk, your brother says.”
He tossed tidbits of fish belly to the cats, who wove around one another in a frenzy. “Come on, you guys,” I said. “You act like you never eat.” Giovanni, the tuxedo male who allowed himself to be stroked only when he specifically required it, gave me a quelling look with his bright yellow eyes.
Malachi laughed. “D’you get the message clear enough?” He bent, coming down from his great height with three generous chunks of meat for each cat, spreading them apart on the floor so they’d each get their own. Berlin, tail wagging, stayed where she was, but a soft little whine came out of her throat, and Malachi cut her a piece of meat, too, which she took with her black tongue very politely. “Man, you got a lot of animals.”
“None of them are technically mine. The cats came with the house, and Berlin belongs to Michael.”
“I can see that,” he said, going to the sink to wash his hands. “Seeing how she sticks to his side every waking minute.”
“Well, she stayed with me a lot in New York.”
He settled and started efficiently gutting and then slicing the fish, his big hands capable and deft. I took some heavy freezer bags from the cabinet and brought them to Malachi.
“Did Michael live with you there?” he asked. “In New York?”
“No.” Picking over a bucket of red potatoes, I said, “I was trying to convince him, but it took getting the building sold out from under us to move him at all.”
His eyelids came down, hiding whatever emotion that had called up for him. “Glad you were there for him.” The unspoken part was,
when I wasn’t.
“He was there for me often enough.” I carried the potatoes to the sink and started scrubbing them, wishing I didn’t have to turn my body so my too big rear end was exposed. I put one foot on top of the other. “When Billy died, I don’t know what I would have done without your brother.”
“Ah, Billy,” he sighed. “Bad way to go—crack cocaine.”
“Yeah.” The memory could still slice me open after three years, the sight of the cops on the doorstep at eight o’clock in the morning, asking me to come identify his body. “We saw it coming for a year, but it was still a shock—a heart attack at forty-one.”
“I always figured he’d get himself shot.”
“I forgot you knew him.” But of course he had. They’d all known one another. I carried the potatoes to the counter and dried my hands, grabbed a sheet of newspaper from the stool, and spread it out.
“He always did have a bad end written all over him.”
“Think so?” I thought of him, my not-husband, with whom I’d lived for almost a dozen years. “He was driven, kind of given to a temper, but I didn’t see that end waiting for him.”
Malachi carefully layered translucent pink flesh in the bags. “You’d have had to have known him younger than you met him. He did some crazy shit.” He raised his eyes. “Michael probably gave him a solid decade.”
It was so strange to hear another side of an old story that I stopped in the middle of peeling the potato and looked at him. “Really,” I said. Not a question. An invitation for more. I smiled, trying to imagine all of them at Shane’s age. “You had to be quite a bit younger than they were.”
“Seven years.” Then a grin. “But big for my age. I didn’t really have anybody but Michael, you know, so he was good about letting me tag along.”
Seven years. So I was right—he was at least five years my junior. It made me relax, somehow, and stop thinking of my body. Men always want a woman younger than they are. Just read the personal ads sometime. The fifty-seven-year-olds want forty or younger, the thirty-five-year-olds want eighteen to twenty-four. Only eighteen-year-olds want somebody older.
For obvious reasons.
Malachi said, “The night we met Billy, Michael had a gig in this dark, old, tumbledown club in Alabama, singing for a country-
western
band, if you know what I mean—”
I grinned.
“—that tinny, awful stuff, and he made it sound good.” He shook his head, knife still in his hands as he remembered. “I thought he was the best singer God ever made, you know, and I was sitting in the back with a Shirley Temple that Michael made sure didn’t get any liquor in it.”