Blessed Are the Cheesemakers

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  Kit shook his head in disgust.

  “You never used to have one?” Niamh asked, only half-joking as she backed out of the kitchen.

  Kit slammed the refrigerator door closed and leaned against it. The smell really was vile. Jacey had not eaten dairy, but she’d been a regular at Murray’s on Bleecker Street. It was not the first time a cheese of the week had been left to abduct the atmosphere. This one, though, must have been there for all of three months.

  Thinking of Jacey, he girded his loins as he dived again into the refrigerator for an unopened bottle of Grey Goose. “Never mind the cat, there’s vodka,” he said, his eyes watering as he spied another two bottles in the pantry, “and vodka.”

  “And in here?” Niamh had retreated to the open-plan living space, where Grace’s toxic fumes couldn’t reach her. She bent down to inspect the innards of a low-slung wall unit she assumed contained a cocktail cabinet.

  “Vodka,” said Kit, watching her as she ferreted around in the cabinet and returned to the kitchen, vodka bottle in hand.

  “I guess it’ll be vodka, then,” said Niamh, putting her bottle on the counter, then grabbing the two Kit had retrieved from the pantry and the one he was still holding from the fridge. He stood by, helpless and humiliated, as she unscrewed the tops off all four bottles and started to pour the contents down the sink. He really wanted to do something to stop her, like hit her on the back of the head with Jacey’s cast-iron frying pan, but the thought that he was thinking that only made him feel more wretched.

  “Come on, Niamh,” he said, cringing at the pathetic catch to his voice. “Do you really have to go that far?”

  “You’re the one that’s gone too far, buster,” she said, viciously sloshing the liquor into the sink. “You know, I have got better things to be doing than cleaning up after you and your wreck of a life, Kit, but luckily when it comes to boozers I do have some prior experience, and because of that I will impart some advice for your benefit. Now, sit down.”

  Kit pulled out a bar stool and sat at the kitchen counter, resigning himself to a lecture, knowing he deserved it, hoping it would be over soon so he could go out and get a drink.

  “I come from a long line of alcoholics,” Niamh said, dumping the empty vodka bottles in the trash, then replacing the moldy coffee in his machine with a fresh supply and turning it on. “I am not going to bore you with the sordid details but the good news is you are not necessarily one yourself.”

  She paused to let this sink in, even though Kit was too busy wondering if she had left any dregs in any of the bottles to really hear what she was saying.

  “Your drinking though, Kit, has got to stop.” She pulled out the other bar stool and sat next to him. “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Kit. “The drinking has got to stop.”

  “Right,” agreed Niamh. “And why is that?”

  “God, Niamh, don’t make me go through the list,” he answered, aggrieved. “I’ve been fired, I’m losing the apartment, my refrigerator smells like one of those dumps kids live on in Brazil. You know, I don’t really need reminding that my life has suddenly turned to shit.”

  Niamh’s eyes narrowed and a flush crept up her neck toward her face. “Your life hasn’t suddenly turned to anything, you complete and utter eejit. You’ve been on a collision course with disaster ever since—” She stopped and regained control, taking a deep breath and sitting up straight. “Look, Kit,” she said in a softer voice, “drinking has messed up your life and in case you haven’t noticed, you’re kind of short on people who give a damn. Now get a grip and help me out here. Help yourself, for God’s sake. Can you do that?”

  As her words sunk in, Kit realized how grateful he was that she was his friend, that she did give a damn. He didn’t deserve her.

  “Have you thought about going back to Burlington?” she asked gently.

  He leaked out a sigh and shook his head. “There’s nothing for me in Vermont,” he said, feeling sick that he even had to contemplate the thought.

  “Well, there’s family,” Niamh said. “Times like this they can come in dead handy, you know. Can’t you at least think about going home?”

  It had been five years since Kit had been back to Burlington and, in truth, he hadn’t called it home for a long time. He’d always kept quiet on the subject of his family, surrounded as he was by people who were born into money and style. His own background had been plain in comparison. He wasn’t ashamed of it at all, but he preferred to keep it to himself, to protect it from the scorn of his colleagues. His dad, Ben, had been assistant manager at one of Burlington’s biggest hardware stores for more than twenty-five years before being laid off in the mid ’90s, a blow from which his pride had had trouble recovering. Ben Stephens was a good man and Kit loved him deeply and dearly. Ben had never had big dreams for himself, all he had wanted was a happy and healthy family. But he was so proud of his oldest son and what he had achieved.

  “My dad’s kind of retired,” he told Niamh, “and he doesn’t have a lot of money. He thinks I am great, Niamh. He thinks I have really made it. If I go back like this? I just can’t.”

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  “What about your mother?”

  Greta. A vision of his mother dancing with his dad outside on the grass at some long-forgotten barbecue flickered through Kit’s head like an old home movie. Greta had been the most wonderful mom a kid could ask for. Gorgeous and glamorous and the kindest woman he knew, she’d made him the man he was—or the man he had been. He was glad she would never know about his downfall.

  “My mom’s in a home,” Kit said, awkward with the words. “She has an early onset form of Alzheimer’s disease, you know, dementia. She’s been there for a while.”

  Kit had always sensed, despite her gregarious nature and even temper, a solitary sort of sadness in his mother. There were moments when he caught her in a dream world, a faraway look in her eyes and a secret smile on her lips. “Away with the fairies,” she would laugh when he was little and interrupted her private dreams. “Away with the fairies again.”

  As she got older, the sadness, or the secrecy, seemed to grow darker and Kit could see that his mother was spending more and more time away with the fairies and less at home with her husband and two sons. Eventually the visits to her faraway world became permanent, and no one ever saw the real Greta again. She lived now in a home with locks on the doors because her wandering, combined with her confusion when found, made it impossible to guarantee her safety. She didn’t know Ben, she didn’t know Kit and she didn’t know his brother, Flynn, either.

  “I am so sorry,” Niamh said when Kit told her all this. “I had no idea. Where’s Flynn now?”

  Kit’s ache grew. “At law school, courtesy of yours truly,” he said, cringing and banging his forehead with his closed fist. “He’s a pretty bright kid, you know. He only just missed out on a scholarship but he is going to be a great lawyer one day. He really is. What am I going to do?” He was desperate now. “Jesus, how could I let this happen? They all rely on me.”

  “You pay for your mom’s nursing home, too?”

  “Yeah, and I kind of supplement my dad, although he doesn’t know that. I have a deal worked out with the local tennis club where he does odd jobs. You know he visits her twice a day, even though she doesn’t know who he is?”

  He was crying again, unstoppable tears of anguish. Niamh, her own eyes shining with compassion, leaned over him and rubbed his back.

  “Aren’t there uncles or aunts or grandparents? Anyone else you could go and stay with for a while maybe?”

  “Mom didn’t speak with her folks,” he said, wiping his tears and cursing the headache that came with them. “They had some falling out before I was born and Dad wasn’t real close to his brothers either, although I do know where they are. I just don’t know if I could turn up on their doorstep saying ‘Hi, you barely know me but I’m your messed up, boozehound nephew Christopher. Got a room?’”<
br />
  Niamh laughed, despite the hopelessness of it all. “I can’t believe you’ve been doing all this without saying anything,” she said, jumping off her stool and heading for the coffee machine.

  “What’s to say?” said Kit. “It’s no big deal. It’s one of the good things about having money. I’m hardly Mother Teresa, I’m just trying to look after my folks because I always thought they’d done a pretty good job of looking after me.”

  “It’s not the end of the world losing your job, Kit. You can sort yourself out and start somewhere new. You’re basically one of the good guys, you’ve just come off the rails.”

  She plonked a steaming mug of coffee in front of him and he stared at it without much enthusiasm. He didn’t feel good. He felt far from it.

  “The question is,” said Niamh, taking a sip of her own drink then blowing on it to cool it down, “how are you going to sort yourself out?”

  The possibilities had been swimming around Kit’s head along with all his other tortured thoughts, but so far nothing had risen to the surface. He pulled the co-op envelope out of his pocket and ripped it open. There were no surprises there: Unless he paid the last month’s outstanding rent within eighteen hours he would be evicted. He sighed and handed it over to Niamh, who bit her bottom lip as she read it.

  “I probably know the answer to this already,” she said, slapping the letter down on the counter, “but do you have any money at all?”

  Kit thought about his different accounts, both in the country and offshore, and his smorgasbord of stock options. The truth was the past few years had not been as good as he might have hoped. His company, like so many others, had still been hurting from the crises in Russia and Asia, when the World Trade Center tragedy shook them even further. On top of that, Jacey had been expensive to run. He had chewed through his cash entertaining her and had let his accounting slip even further in the past couple of months.

  He could have paid the rent, should have, but had let it slide, like so much else. He had assumed that one day things would get better and then he would sort it out.

  “I can get my hands on some,” he admitted, “but enough to pay Flynn’s fees, look after my mom and pay the rent on this place?” He looked around at the shrine to style in which he’d lived so happily for the past year and shook his head. “We’re talking seven grand a month here.”

  Niamh looked at him, her face impossible to read. “I might have a solution,” she said slowly, “but you’re not going to like it.”

  Kit laughed. How could Niamh possibly help him? Her salary was a tenth of his, a twentieth even, a fact that had long embarrassed him given her devotion.

  “Tom Foster could sublet the apartment,” she said, flooring him.

  “Tom Foster? What’s he got to do with anything?” he spluttered.

  “I talked about it with him earlier,” said Niamh, squirming uncomfortably. “Ah, don’t look at me like that, Kit. It’s not what you think. It’s just that—” She looked around at the kitchen walls as she carefully picked out the right words. “It’s just that, well, Tom and I have been seeing each other for a few months. You know, as in going out together.”

  She let that hang in the air for a moment.

  “You’re dating him?” Kit finally asked, incredulously. “And he fired you?”

  “No, Kit. I’m just dating him. You’re the one that got fired.”

  The trapdoor that had been threatening to open under Kit’s feet all day finally swung down and swallowed him up. “But you were crying in the cab,” he said, trying to figure out what was happening. “I thought you’d been— What was that all about?”

  “Well, sue me, Kit, but I’m allowed to feel sorry for you. Everybody feels sorry for you. You were the golden boy, the great white hope, everybody’s darling, and now it’s all down the bleeding toilet. I’m allowed to feel something, you know. You mean a lot to me. You really do.”

  Suddenly, it all fell into place. Niamh, far from being the tireless supporter, was in fact here because she wanted to check out the place for her new boyfriend, Tom Foster. How could Kit have been so stupid as to think she would stick by him in his hour of need? He cursed his naiveté and the drained vodka and stood up.

  “You can go now, Niamh,” he said, trying not to sound as hurt as he felt. “And you can tell Tom Foster I will torch this place to the ground before I let him set one single, solitary foot in it.”

  To his surprise, Niamh got up and rammed the stool he had stepped away from into the back of his legs, forcing him to sit down again with a thud.

  “Don’t be so stupid,” she said forcefully, still standing, her face flushed again with emotion. “It should come as no surprise to you what I want and how much I want it, because you wanted it all yourself once, too. I’d love to give you my undying support and throw in the towel just because Jacey screwed up your life but I have worked way too hard for that. Now, sit there and listen to me for a moment, will you?” She sat down again and regained her composure, her face returning to its normal color. “Think about it this way: Can you really afford to blow Tom off right now? I mean, it’s not just about money. You need to get away for a while. Sublet the apartment to Tom, Kit. You know it makes sense. Jaysus, you can probably cream an extra few hundred dollars a month from the man, he’ll be that thrilled with the address.”

  Kit gave her a long, hard look. She was so much tougher than she looked. Than he had ever realized. She left him for dead.

  “And what about me?” he asked pitifully, cringing at how he sounded.

  “There must be somewhere you can go, Kit,” she said, blowing again on her still too-hot coffee. “Or there’s rehab.”

  She let the suggestion hang in the air for a split second before she heard it clang to the ground where it lay on the kitchen floor in a crumpled heap.

  “I’m going to have to put some milk in this coffee,” she said, getting up off her stool and heading for the Princess’s tomb, a sour look of apprehension on her face. “Is it safe?” She opened the door and gagged at the smell. “Jaysus, Kit. What the hell is that?” She pulled a twisted, tortured pizza toward her and risked a nostril-full before throwing it back on the shelf and grabbing the Princess’s bag. She hurled it into the sink.

  “Right,” she said. “Out you go, whatever you are.” She reached gingerly for the bag and picked it up, but its bottom had become weak and sodden in the vodka-sluiced sink. As Niamh swung the bag high away from her nose toward the trash, it split and the Princess plummeted to the floor, landing on the marble tiles with a wet slap.

  “Jaysus!” shrieked Niamh. “It’s alive! Will this never end?” She snatched a paper towel and crouched next to the Princess, her eyes watering with the cheese’s angry stench. Not enough, though, to keep her from reading the label: Coolarney Farmhouse Cheese, Schillies, Co Cork, Ireland. Niamh sucked in her breath and blew it out again with a rush, as though she’d been surprised by a whack to the stomach. Staring at the cheese as it leaked onto Kit’s floor, she slowly rose to her feet. “I don’t bloody believe it!” she said.

  “Believe what?” Kit said, agog at the foul-smelling mess still lying there.

  “Believe that the horrible smell in your fridge is going to save your life,” answered Niamh, suddenly and excitedly searching the room for her handbag.

  “I hate to break this to you,” said Kit morosely, “but somebody’s already discovered penicillin.”

  “If you trust me with this,” said Niamh, thumbing through her address book looking for the right page, “I will get your life back.” Her perfectly manicured finger scrolled down the list of names and addresses until it found the right one. “You, my friend, are going to go somewhere far out of temptation’s way that does not involve locked wards and group therapy.”

  Kit looked at her, mystified.

  “Here we are. Avis O’Regan. I don’t know why I didn’t think of her before. She’s dried out two uncles and a cousin twice removed—that I know of—and trust me, Kit, you
will not be bumping into anyone you know where she is.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Kit. “And where is that?”

  “A mile out of Schillies. County Cork,” said Niamh, picking up the kitchen telephone and starting to dial. “What time do you think it is in Ireland?”

  “Ireland?” Kit repeated dazedly.

  “Ireland,” Niamh confirmed with a thrill of certainty.

  The Princess, splattered and reeking on the floor, burped an extra stream of steamy gray ooze, which was her way of smiling.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Without starter, the milk would still turn into cheese but the wait could kill you. The starter gives it a shove—and we all need a shove now and then, God bless us.”

  Joseph Feehan, from The Cheese Diaries, RTE Radio Archives

  Abbey sat at Imi’s kitchen table, scratching her head and trying to work out how many times 57 went into 3,970.62. This quite often happened when she wanted to make a special effort on the food front, although, of course, the numbers differed. She could pretty much guarantee, though, that it would be long division, and she hated it just as much as Imi’s nephew Junior did—which was why he was plucking her chicken and she was doing his homework.

  “So if 7 times 57 is 399, then—” she mumbled. “Oh, feck it, Imi. What is 6 times 57?”

  Imi was reading American Vogue and paying little attention to the mental athletics going on across the table.

  “You want chicken, you do hum-wok,” she said witheringly, not even bothering to lift her eyes from the glossy pages.

  “Yes, I know I want the chicken,” said Abbey, “but the homework is too hard. Why can’t he just use a calculator like everyone else?”

  Imi shrugged her shoulders and lazily flicked another page. Abbey scratched out another doomed calculation on the notepad Junior had left her and swore loudly when it failed to help the final solution.

  “’Scuse please!” Imi interjected. Usually, she swore like a trooper herself but reading American Vogue unleashed uncharacteristic ladylike behavior. “Junior be plenty cross if you bungle hum-wok,” she warned unhelpfully, shaking her head as she perused the favored shades of lipstick for the American fall.