Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (17 page)

“Mmm-hmm.”

“That’s where we met. He was my roommate.”

“So how did you get into the restaurant business?”

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. Gray today. The blue T-shirt he wore underneath did interesting things to his eyes.

“It was an accident,” he said. “I was supposed to be a farmer. I grew up on a berry farm. Raspberries, blueberries. And hives, too. Lakeshore Nectar.”

“Did you sell honey all over Wisconsin?” She might have eaten it and not even known.

“Not as far away as Manitowoc. I think they changed the name anyway.”

“They?”

“My dad and his new family. My parents got divorced.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It’s all right. Happens to everybody.”

“Well, not everybody.”

He had nothing to say to that.

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen.”

She imagined him back then—his unfinished face and skinny, defenseless adolescent body. Ben with his hands buried deep in his hoodie pockets, hurting.

He glanced at her. “Naw, don’t look like that. It was a good thing. They were fighting all the time.”

A woman passed them with a rolling suitcase. Her intense focus on the ground reminded May to get out of her own head and look around. There was so much water and sky and air up here, she didn’t want to miss it. It was hardly like Manhattan at all.

Ben caught her eye, and one corner of his mouth hitched, maybe at the expression on her face. She felt like a deep inhale, caught and buoyed up.

“Are you an only child?”

“Yeah.”

“And the farm—that’s what you wanted to do?”

Ben stepped around her and pushed her to the outside of the bridge, away from an oncoming bike. “Walking in public isn’t one of your best areas, is it?”

“I’ve managed to survive this long without your help.”

He grinned that loopy grin, and she looked down at her boots, afraid she’d float away.

He’d shaved this morning. In the bright light, against the blue sky, she was having trouble not staring at him. With a few days’ beard growth, Ben was good-looking, but clean-shaven … holy cow. He had a nice square chin, a strong jawline, and since when did she notice a man’s jawline?

When he spends two days hiding it from you
.

Maybe. Or maybe just when the man was Ben.

“I guess that was what I wanted to do,” he continued, ignorant of her jawline fixation. “It
wasn’t something we talked about. It was how things were, with my dad. But then after the divorce, I went with my mom, and all the plans changed.”

“That must have been disorienting.”

“It was … a surprise.”

“Were things better after the divorce?”

“In some ways. But the farm—not really. I couldn’t get along with my dad. When he remarried, he was kind of done with me and my mom. And then after a while he had another whole set of kids. Three boys. I figure one of them will take over.”

“Is that what he says?”

Ben shrugged. “We don’t talk.”

His expression had darkened. May saw the skinny boy again and suppressed the urge to hug him. “Are you close to your mom?”

“Nah. She’s Latvian. Got stuck marrying my dad when she found out she was pregnant. As soon as I went to college, she moved back home.” He glanced toward her, frowning. “How did we get on all this? It’s fucking depressing.”

“I wondered how you got to be a chef.”

“Right.”

They walked in silence for a few beats before he spoke again. “Well, so I went to college on scholarship, where I worked three part-time jobs and figured out fuck-all, and then after graduation I had this buddy who was going to Europe. My mom paid for a plane ticket so I’d come visit her. I thought it would be for a month or so.” He glanced at her. “I didn’t come back for four years.”

The bright daylight picked up colors in his short, dark hair—those scattered strands of gray at the temples, a sprinkling of auburn and gold on top where the sun had brought it out.

Those eyes like rings in burnished wood.

Striking. Handsome in a way that was almost threatening.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’re staring.”

She tripped over a particularly thick pocket of air. Ben caught her by the upper arm and shook his head, amused at her.

“Come on, May. ’Fess up. Did I say something weird? Do I have egg on my chin?”

“You shaved,” she said. And then, when he cocked an eyebrow, “I like it.”

That made the dimple-creases cut deep into his cheeks. Even more devastating without the beard. “I thought you might.”

“You did it for me?”

A shrug. “It was time.”

But as he looked away, his eyes were wrinkling at the corners, and his mouth stayed amused for a long moment of walking.

He’d done it for her, and now she couldn’t stop thinking about how his face would feel under her fingers. His raspy-smooth cheek against hers, or on her breasts. Between her thighs.

“You’re blushing,” he said when he looked back.

“It’s windy.”

May turned around to walk backward so she could look down on Manhattan from up high.

“You’re gonna trip.”

“No, I’m not.” But she turned and walked normally.

They reached the middle of the bridge, where the pedestrian path widened out into a platform. Tourists pulled one another into knots, smiling for the cameras.

Ben cut through the crowd. She hung on to his arm, amused at herself for feeling so smug. She loved her boots and her jeans and the cranberry-red pullover sweater she wore with a black camisole. She loved being on Ben’s arm, feeling like she could pass as local when she was the furthest thing from it.

False pride, but it still felt good.

After they’d moved through the bulk of the crowd, the traffic thinned, and they began heading downhill. The change in elevation registered as a tightening in her hamstrings and glutes. “So is Europe where you became a chef?”

“Sort of. After my buddy and I knocked around for a while, he had to come back, and I moved in with this girl in Sardinia. She lived with her grandmother, and the grandmother made everything by hand. Cooked like the old days, you know?”

“I thought those people were only in movies.”

“Nope. My girlfriend would be working, and I would sit in the kitchen with the
grandma—her name was Bibiana—and she would cook and insult me in Sardo.” A huff of laughter. “She wasn’t so thrilled about having her granddaughter’s deadbeat boyfriend hanging around her kitchen.”

“And she taught you to cook?”

“Eventually. At first I just watched her. I could barely speak Italian, and she mostly spoke Sardo, so there was a pretty big language gap. But I figured out the food words. I got a dictionary and would sit there looking stuff up while she cooked, trying sentences. I liked how she never seemed to be in a hurry. She never looked at a recipe, never doubted herself. Everything seemed really clear to Bibiana—there was Sardinian food, prepared correctly, and then there was crap.”

“Was her food that good?”

“Her food was fucking amazing. But it wasn’t the food that got me first. It was more … I’m not sure. There was this completeness to the way she cooked. The food, the view from the house and the kitchen, the way her hands moved. This wooden thing she had to roll the pasta, like a big skinny rolling pin without handles. It all made sense to me. It felt right. Watching her, and eating that food.”

“So what did she teach you to make?”

“Oh, everything, eventually. This thing called a
panada
, which is like a pasta pie stuffed with eels and—Don’t make that face. You would die if I fed it to you, it’s so good.”

May imagined Ben feeding her an eel pie that was so good she wanted to die. Oddly, it wasn’t difficult.

“At first, though, she wouldn’t trust me to do anything. Not even make the pasta. I had to watch. Then I progressed to cleaning vegetables. It took for-fucking-ever to get her to let me do the pasta.”

“That sounds really neat.”

“It was. But after a while, I got a job at a restaurant in town, and my girlfriend and I broke up.”

“Did you see Bibiana anymore?”

His eyes skated over the top of her head, past her. Far away. “She wasn’t thrilled about the restaurant job. I think she must have been hurt, but I don’t know. She wouldn’t say. She just cut me.”

“What’s that mean?”

“As if we were in the Old World. I came in the kitchen, she turned her back. Like I wasn’t even there.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

“So what did you say to her?”

“What do you mean? I didn’t say anything. I left.”

May turned her face away so he wouldn’t see her surprise.

“The restaurant wasn’t even any good,” he continued. “So I started traveling again, and I got a job in Glasgow washing dishes in this gastro pub that was kind of up-and-coming. I spent four or five months there, then moved on to another restaurant. I did that for three years—Spain, France, Germany, then London, the Netherlands, and one spring with a butcher in Italy. I finally got a job in a French kitchen with three stars, and I stayed there the last year. I was the lowliest of the lowly guys, but I learned a ton. Stop here.”

There weren’t so many people near them now, and he spun her around and slung his arm over her shoulder. “Okay, now I play tour guide. Over there’s the Manhattan Bridge. That’s Manhattan.”

“I know
that
.”

“There might be a quiz later—just wanted to make sure you were listening.”

“Tell me something tour-guidey. When was this bridge built?”

“No idea.”

“How does a suspension bridge work?”

“How the hell should I know? I’m a beekeeper.”

“Well, what else do you know?”

“It goes from Manhattan to Brooklyn. It’s pretty on top. I like it.”

May smiled. “Good enough for me.”

“All right, then.” He turned, and they started walking again. He left his arm slung over her shoulder, his hip bumping familiarly against hers now and then.

After a while, they came down off the suspended part of the bridge onto what amounted to an ordinary concrete walkway between two sides of a four-lane divided road. The sun was more intense here, the landscape blandly urban and unappealing.

Ben didn’t continue his story, and she didn’t push him. She knew the gist of it. More
restaurants, more responsibility. A wife found and lost. Enough pain to turn him bitter when he thought about it.

She didn’t want to sink their day into melancholy a second time if she could help it.

When they reached a crosswalk where a map of Brooklyn suggested various tourist destinations, she asked, “Where to next?”

He smiled. “You’ll see.”

“This place looks like Wisconsin.”

“You think?”

They’d walked for a while, then hopped on the subway to Prospect Park.

“Well, if I squint and ignore the people, and the fence keeping us out of the actual woods, and the fact that I can hear traffic, yes. It’s not so different from the woods around Manitowoc.”

Ben tried it. He’d never been to Manitowoc, but it did remind him a little bit of home. “It’s my favorite park,” he admitted.

“How come?”

“It feels like the real outdoors to me, more so than Central Park. Have you been there yet?”

“Sure. It’s pretty. I liked the rambly bit.”

“The Ramble.”

“Yeah. I didn’t get lost, though.” She sounded disappointed.

“Were you hoping to?”

May ducked her head and looked away, a gesture that was getting to be familiar. She did it when she wasn’t embarrassed but thought she should be. If he teased her at the right moment, she’d glance over at him sideways and give him one of those coy little May smiles that made him want to wrestle her to the ground and kiss her breathless.

Stop. Stop with that
.

He’d been trying all morning. So far, no luck.

“I don’t usually know where I’m going in Manhattan, but I always know where I
am
,” she said. “It’s impossible not to keep track of which way north is when you’re living in a place so tiny. I thought it would be fun to go somewhere I could get completely disoriented.”

“No dice?”

“Sadly, no. I just had to stand still for a minute, and I could hear cars.”

“Shattered the whole illusion, I bet.”

“It did. My illusions are easily shattered.”

They passed a family with a stroller, then a couple holding hands.

“Most of the time it’s not this busy,” Ben said. “This is holiday-weekend busy.”

“I guess everywhere’s going to be like that today.”

“Yep.”

She pulled a few steps ahead, interested by something around a bend. Her hair changed colors as she moved in and out of patches of sunlight. Dull wheat in the shade, but shiny and bright when the sun hit it, falling around her shoulders. The wind had made a mess of it on the bridge. She’d tried to put it right with her fingers, but it still looked disorganized.

He liked it that way. He liked how adaptable she was, how comfortable in this park, with him, even though she’d lost all her stuff and all her plans, and even though New York hadn’t lived up to her expectations. If he were in her shoes, he’d be sullen and pissed off, trying to find somewhere to hole up, but May was rushing around corners, pointing out a neat building or a great view.

She was delightful.

“Did you
see
this?” she said as he came around the bend. “It’s huge!”

It was a big rock. He checked for leprechauns, statuary—anything to make sense of her excitement—but he found nothing but more rock.

“I’ve seen bigger,” he said.

She made an exasperated face. “Men. You’ll say that about anything. My family went to the Grand Canyon once, and my dad had tears in his eyes. He wouldn’t admit it, but I saw them. And by the time he got home and our neighbor asked him about it, he was like, ‘Yeah, it’s pretty deep. So did you get that lawnmower blade sharpened?’ ”

Ben smiled. “What’s your dad do?”

“He’s an engineer at the nuclear power plant. He used to do something extremely boring related to safety measures, and now he does something extremely boring involving the decommissioning.”