Then the woman whose back was directly toward him moved to a display on the other side of the store. She moved behind the display quickly, but not before Joseph caught sight of her. Fair, creamy skin with high cheekbones. Tiny nose, slim eyebrows, full lips, and gleaming blue eyes. Slender neck that gave her a sense of regality, and thick, lustrous, shoulder-length black hair that gave her a sense of uncommon warmth. Though the woman was no longer visible, he could see her face in a variety of poses: enraptured, compassionate, surprised, delighted, thoughtful, and sorrowful.
Compelled more than he had been since he awoke, Joseph stepped quickly toward the woman, who’d bent to examine a card at the bottom of the display. She looked up at him when he approached and her eyes met his. Her brown eyes. Which offset her olive complexion. The hair and the cheekbones were the same as he’d envisioned a moment earlier, but this woman looked different in most other ways.
“Hi,” she said when Joseph stood five feet from her, his momentum stopped suddenly.
“I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else.”
“Nope, just me.”
Joseph began to back away, feeling incredibly foolish. “Sorry. Very sorry.”
“No problem.”
He turned to seek out Will, directing the teen toward the door. They passed the woman again and she smiled at Joseph. He tried to return the smile, but he was relatively certain it came across as more of a cringe.
“I saw her,” he said when he and Will were back on the street.
“Where? In there?”
“Just now.”
“Then why are we standing here? Shouldn’t we be, you know, reuniting the two of you?”
Joseph shook his head quickly. “No, no; she wasn’t in there.”
Will struck his signature head-cocked, hand-in-pocket pose. “You want to start this conversation over again?”
Joseph started walking back in the direction of the car. “I got a quick glimpse of a woman in the store. For some reason, I turned her face into another face – my wife’s face. It was so familiar; I can’t believe I forgot it for even a second.”
Will stopped and pointed back toward the store. “But it’s definitely not the woman in there?”
“No, she looked nothing like her.”
Will’s knee bent, a half version of “the pose.” “You do realize you’re confusing the hell out of me, right?”
“I saw my wife while we were in the store, but my wife wasn’t in the store. A woman there had some of her features, and the rest just filled in.” He closed his eyes and allowed the face to take over his vision. “I can see her again. I can finally see her again.”
“I don’t suppose you can see her holding a piece of mail with her address on it, huh?”
Joseph opened his eyes. “No such luck. But this is good. She’s with me now, more than she was before. We need to get on the road again.”
“Okay, which way.”
Joseph followed the planes of his wife’s face, hoping for a clue. “I have no idea. I’ve seen her, though, Will. As beautiful as I knew she would be. She’s out there. Let’s go find her.”
FOURTEEN
Her Talented Assistant
. . . The baby was playing with the peas on his high chair tray. Antoinette smiled, noting that she was fairly sure that not a single pea had made it into his mouth. Batting them around the tray and onto the floor seemed so much more interesting to the little boy. When he got older, she’d let him know that it was inappropriate to play with his food and that eating it was actually much more fun. Not now, though; he seemed to be having too much fun.
Antoinette kneaded butter and flour together to make the beurre manié for the chicken stew she’d been simmering. “This will help flavor and thicken the sauce,” she said to the boy, who she noticed had managed to mash some of the peas on the tray. He was now examining the pulp on his right palm with extraordinary interest. “I use different thickening techniques,” she said with a grin she could not have suppressed under any circumstances. “Sometimes I’ll use cornstarch, sometimes arrowroot. It all depends on the recipe. This approach is the most elegant, though.”
With a few rapid shakes of his hands, her baby boy had managed to fling the crushed peas back onto the tray. Now he was using his index finger to create lines with them.
“Are you telling me that you’d like to make pureed peas with me? I was planning to sauté them with onions, but a puree could be nice, also.” She knelt down next to the high chair so their heads were at the same level. “What do you think? Should we mash them with some cream and cinnamon?”
The baby cackled and ran his fingers through the green mass he’d created. He then reached his hand toward Antoinette’s mouth. She let him feed her some of the pea mash, which he seemed to enjoy doing.
“Umm, delicious!” She pretended to consider the taste carefully. “We might want to add a little more salt, don’t you think?”
He waved his arms wildly again, which Antoinette interpreted as “And maybe a little white pepper.”
“Very good point! Proper seasoning is an art and you already understand it. I knew that my baby was a genius.”
She stood up to finish the meal. Both sides of the family – eighteen people in all – were coming over today to celebrate her sister Rachel’s birthday. That meant multiple entrees, four different side dishes, an elaborate salad, and the chocolate cake with raspberry filling her sister had specially requested. Antoinette had been cooking since seven this morning. She knew she would be exhausted tonight and hoped that Don would offer up one of his luxurious foot massages, but right now she was working with the energy that she always felt whenever she was preparing a big dinner party. Her son had been with her for most of the work, sometimes in his high chair, sometimes crawling around on the floor, often in her arms. Throughout it all, she’d described everything she was doing to him, looking forward to the day when he would become her talented assistant in the kitchen.
Having a baby had turned out to be so much harder than she and Don expected. She’d even begun to believe that it would never happen, though her heart broke every time she allowed herself to think that. Now that her beautiful little boy was here, though, she knew that the wait had delivered its reward. When she’d held her son for the first time, she didn’t think she had ever seen anything so perfect, and she still felt that way – even if at the moment her perfect child had green mush in his hair. She’d let him get as messy as he wanted right now; they would be taking a bath together in a few minutes anyway.
An hour and a half later, everyone was seated around the elongated dinner table. Don raised his glass, and everyone joined him, except the baby who was too busy trying to stuff a slice of bread up his nose. Yes, she had work to do with this one about the proper appreciation of food. It was going to be difficult to give him this lesson, however, if she giggled through the entire thing, and, above everything else, the boy knew how to make her giggle.
“I’d like to wish my sister-in-law the happiest of birthdays. Somehow all the women in this family look younger every year. I’m not asking how it happens, but I did want you to know that I noticed.” Everyone laughed and Rachel thanked Don and told him that he’d just earned an extra night of babysitting from her. Glass still raised, Don turned toward Antoinette. “And to my remarkable wife, I want to offer a toast to the wonderful food she’s made for us today. Hannah, you never cease to amaze me.”
Cheers went up around the room, but then ended quickly, as people set out to fill their plates. Antoinette knew there would be little conversation for the next fifteen minutes or so, other than the occasional comment on the meal. They would linger at the table for at least an hour afterward, catching one another up on the events of the week or the news outside their doors, but while they ate, they said little. Antoinette took that as the ultimate compliment . . .
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to accept that the lucid moments are going to become briefer and less common.”
&nb
sp; “I’m not sure how much briefer they can be. I can barely get a good fifteen minutes with her now.”
“This is never easy. I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve never come up with anything to say to make family members handle this any easier.”
Antoinette opened her eyes to find her son standing next to her bed with one of the doctors. She could tell that Warren was worried about something. Ever since he was a baby boy, he’d worn the same expression – a look of total confusion – whenever he was upset.
“Hey, Mom,” her son said when he saw her looking at him. “Dr. Cantor was just checking on you.”
Antoinette’s eyes moved to the doctor, who reached out to take her hand.
“How are you feeling, Antoinette?”
“I’m lovely,” Antoinette said, thinking back on the birthday feast she’d just enjoyed with her family.
The doctor squeezed her hand softly. “I’m very glad to hear that.”
“Do you want to sit up, Mom. I was trying my hand at Rachel’s Cornish Hen with Spring Vegetables.”
It was nice of Warren to cook for her, but Antoinette was still full from the meal. “I don’t think so, honey. I’m going to close my eyes again, if that’s okay with you.”
“It’s okay, Mom. You rest.”
FIFTEEN
Closely Intertwined with the Taste
Warren placed the electric skillet on the dinette table and turned it on medium high to preheat. The electric pressure cooker was there as well, along with the electric rice cooker. Warren hoped he didn’t blow a fuse with all of these electrical appliances. The Treetops staff had been extremely understanding about his cooking in his mother’s apartment the past six weeks. Several people even asked him what he was making whenever he walked in with groceries. They’d probably be less understanding, however, if he knocked out the power down the entire hall. Still, he could only accomplish so much on two burners, so he’d expanded the kitchen the only way he saw possible. That he was spending money on all of this equipment while he still wasn’t sure what he was going to do for income once his severance ran out was something he preferred not to consider. At least while he was doing this, he felt as though he had a purpose. It was getting tougher to feel this way about the hours he put in networking, distributing his resumé, and cold-calling.
Today’s dish was an exercise in orchestration that he’d been hesitant to make until he got his skills up: Paul’s Potent Beef. Mom had named it after Warren’s best childhood friend. Growing up, Paul hung around for dinner at least a couple of times a week to avoid the enervating combination of his mother’s pallid cooking and his father’s cutting dismissiveness. Though Mom liked having just about anyone in their extended circle around for dinner, she was especially fond of Paul because of his over-the-top effusiveness about her meals. That Paul was deliberately doing this to guarantee that Mom kept stuffing him mattered little to her, and she’d paid him the ultimate compliment when she gave this dish its name.
Paul loved big flavors and Mom loaded them on here in a manner that rivaled her most extravagant offerings: beef braised in rice wine, soy sauce, and hoisin sauce, served on a bed of ginger and scallion rice, and topped with a sauté of blackened corn, red bell peppers, cherry peppers, and dramatic levels of garlic. She would then top that with frizzled shallots. She first made Potent Beef the day after Paul’s thirteenth birthday. That night, Paul spoke with Warren in all seriousness about the possibility of Warren’s parents adopting him. This wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation, but it was by far the most insistent time. The dish became Paul’s day-after-birthday meal every year after that through Paul’s final year in college. Mom even made it a second time that year to celebrate Paul’s graduation a week after Warren’s.
What she didn’t realize at the time was that this would be the last meal she ever made for the kid who’d spent so much time at her dining table. Paul left for Southern California only a few days after college ended. As it turned out, a location across the country wasn’t nearly far enough away from his parents. He moved south of the border and married and divorced a Mexican woman within nine months. After that, he was in Costa Rica until he turned twenty-six, his letters becoming far less frequent and his details of debauchery becoming far more alarming. A year later, Warren heard that Paul had wound up in a Colombian jail on a drug charge. Though Warren tried to learn more, he never heard from or about Paul again. It still mystified Warren how the relationship with the best friend he’d ever had ended with such a whimper.
For years after Paul disappeared from Warren’s life, the idea of eating Paul’s Potent Beef seemed wrong. While it was a great dish, and while Warren had himself requested it a couple of times on trips home from college, he couldn’t do it once Paul was gone. Feelings about losing his best friend were too closely intertwined with the taste of the dish. As the years went on, though, the memory mellowed, and Paul’s Potent Beef became a reminder of basketball games played, girls lusted over, cars raced on the highway, and lengthy philosophical conversations about things teenaged boys found deadly serious. Mom seemed glad to put the dish back into the family rotation, and it showed up several times at the twice-monthly Sunday meals Warren shared with his parents.
As was the case with so many of the lunches he made in his mother’s apartment, Warren hadn’t eaten Paul’s Potent Beef in years, since his mother had stopped cooking. Still, his memory of it was especially strong. To cook it today, he made a few modifications to Mom’s recipe. She’d always used chuck roast; he was using boneless short ribs instead. He replaced the cherry peppers with fresh Anaheim chilies because they looked good to him in the store. She’d always simmered the meat in a low oven for hours; he was using the pressure cooker because long simmering meant sitting – in all likelihood alone, given his mother’s current condition – in her apartment all that time. Otherwise, he would try to make it the same way she always had. His imitations of her work had been getting better. The tastes he was able to coax from the kitchen seemed increasingly similar to the tastes his memory generated.
The electric skillet was hot now, so he added a considerable amount of canola oil and, a half-minute later, the thinly sliced shallots. While they fried, he tossed the vegetables on the cooktop, tasted, and added a bit more ground coriander. He actually could have cooked the shallots on the cooktop as well, as he had an available burner, but things never got particularly hot there. Warren guessed this was by design, as it minimized accidents among the elderly – though, as he knew from experience, it couldn’t prevent all of them. Regardless of how much progress he’d made as a cook, the memory of his first smoky mess persisted.
Warren took the shallots out a minute later, draining them on some paper towel. He looked at the mass of machinery and cutlery around him. Cleanup was going to be a bear this time.
All to make a meal for himself.
It had been nearly two weeks since his mother last ate anything Warren cooked. In the brief periods when she was both awake and lucid while he’d been with her, she’d been willing to eat very little, usually some crackers and a bit of fruit juice. He’d continued to hope that the smells in the room would pull her back – it had happened before; it could happen again – but he’d been able to generate no such magic recently. She’d taken a sharp decline both physically and mentally and Warren was beginning to lose any sense of optimism for her revival.
He put a mound of rice on a plate and added two short ribs from the pressure cooker, which he’d cooled and depressurized. On top of this, he spooned vegetables. Warren remembered asking his mother if it wouldn’t have made for a neater presentation to put the vegetables on top of the rice and the meat on top of that. Mom acknowledged that it would but that such a presentation wouldn’t be anywhere near as exciting. Back then, this hadn’t made terribly much sense to him, but as he plated the food himself, the logic kicked in – she wanted the dish to seem as though it were toppling from sheer overload. Finally, he scattered shallots over t
he plate by hand.
The food looked and smelled great. This had been by far his most complex project to date and he was pleased that – at least by appearances – it had turned out so well. A forkful later, his taste buds corroborated.
He walked with the plate to the entrance of his mother’s bedroom, waving the scent in her direction with his hand. It was a stupid attempt at “sorcery” and it had the predictable results. Mom’s body remained inert.
Warren sat to eat, feeling that his culinary accomplishments today had been especially hollow. No one made meals like this to eat alone. He took another bite, wondering if it made sense to continue to pretend that cooking this way had some function. He put down his fork, suddenly wondering if even eating the food he cooked had some function. Caught between the quality of his accomplishment and the emptiness of eating alone under these circumstances, he stood up, grabbed his mother’s keys, and walked down to Jan’s office.
The nurse who was definitely the Treetops staffer he’d gotten to know best had obviously just returned to her desk with her lunch. She was reaching into a drawer to pull out a spoon when he arrived.
“Step away from the yogurt and no one gets hurt.”
Jan looked up at him, spoon aloft.
“That’s not really lunch,” he said. “I have a significantly better alternative for you.”
Jan held up the yogurt container. “You have something better to offer than Yoplait Banana Cream Pie? How is this possible?”
Warren gestured with his hands to suggest that the container go back on the desk. “Trust me. Will you join me for lunch?”
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