Will had pulled up to the equivalent of a diner, even though it wasn’t a freestanding building. The interior looked like a luncheonette from the early fifties, complete with Formica countertops and waitresses in crisp black uniforms. Joseph had been to places like this before, though of course he couldn’t remember a single one. It looked like the perfect restaurant for Will to get the simple food he seemed to prefer. Joseph had tried to challenge the kid to eat something with more flavor, but he’d been entirely unsuccessful. By this point, Joseph figured he’d just let Will eat whatever he wanted. Will was a big boy and he certainly didn’t need Joseph standing over him telling him to eat his vegetables or try something exotic.
As expected, Will did a quick scan of the menu when they sat down and then turned his attention to the tableside jukebox.
“Let me guess: mac and cheese?”
“Burger and fries,” Will said, intent on the song choices available. “You have a couple of quarters I can use?”
Joseph reached into his pocket and gave Will the coins, then perused the menu looking for anything that suggested a personal touch from the chef. Even places as simple as this sometimes had a specialty of some sort. As he searched, a powerful cooking smell seemed to rise out of the menu. Joseph looked up from his reading, now noticing that the smell seemed to fill the entire restaurant. It was intense, bordering on overpowering, but it also awakened his appetite in a surprising way. There was garlic – quite a bit of it, it seemed – and something smoky. And some kind of meat; maybe pork, maybe chicken.
Joseph hadn’t been particularly hungry when he got out of the car. Now, though, he definitely wanted to order whatever was filling his nostrils. The only problem was that the item didn’t seem to be on the menu anywhere. There was no shortage of choices – sandwiches, meat loaf, roast turkey, Salisbury steak, and many others – but absolutely nothing that suggested the intensity of that aroma. Nothing sounded anywhere near that good.
“What do you think that is?” Joseph said to Will, who’d made his music choice and was tapping out his accompaniment on the jukebox.
“What do I think what is?” the boy said absently. He obviously had one more choice left for his money and he flipped through the available selections.
“That smell.”
Will raised his nose to the air and then shrugged. “Diner smell?”
“Have you ever smelled anything like this in a diner before?”
Will smirked. “Only in every diner I’ve ever been in.”
Frustrated, Joseph turned back to the menu. When the waitress came, he asked her to tell him what was cooking in the back. She looked at him blankly, and Joseph attempted to describe the aroma to her as clearly as he could. Like Will, she didn’t seem to smell it. He asked her to go in the kitchen to find out if the cook was doing anything special, maybe trying out something a little different, and she laughed, saying, “Mister, we haven’t had something ‘a little different’ in here in fifty years.”
Joseph wasn’t satisfied with this answer and the waitress’s casualness miffed him. The scent had awakened something in him that went beyond hunger or simple interest in a new taste. He didn’t just want to try this food; he wanted to experience this food. If the waitress wasn’t going to help him – and it was obvious that she didn’t intend to do so – he’d help himself. He stood up and headed toward the kitchen. This caused the waitress to call out after him. Ignoring her, he went through the double doors that separated the kitchen from the dining room.
On the other side, three men in white shirts stared at him simultaneously. One was frying burgers on a grill. Another was chopping up vegetables for a salad. The third had been pulling plates from a dishwasher. None seemed to be associated in any way with the smell that had driven Joseph here. He took another step toward the flattop, hoping to spy something that he couldn’t see from the entrance to the room.
A woman came around the corner. Like the others, she was dressed in white. Though she was dressed the same, she carried herself in a way that made it obvious that she was in charge. “Can I do something for you?”
He walked over to confront the woman. “You’re cooking something.”
She put a hand on her hip and gazed at him blankly. “That’s very perceptive of you.”
Joseph ignored the sarcasm. “You’re cooking something that isn’t on the menu. I’d like to order that, but I don’t know what it is.”
The woman looked at him as though he were talking another language, then turned to the other men. Then she faced Joseph again.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Joseph stopped for a moment. The scent was still very strong in the air. It was impossible to miss. “You don’t smell that?”
The woman switched quickly from baffled to resolute. “Look, mister, we don’t let customers into the kitchen. We could get in trouble.”
Suddenly, Joseph was angry. He was convinced they were hiding something from him, though he had no idea why a restaurant would ever hide food from a customer. The woman had come from around the corner. Maybe there was another cooking station there. He brushed past her and then veered off to the left.
All he saw was a door. Thinking that, for some reason, there might be another kitchen behind this one, he opened the door – which led outside to a dumpster and a small parking lot. He took a few steps out, trying to make sense of this. When he looked back at the door, the woman was there.
“Mister, you’d better not come back in here. Like I said, we don’t let customers into the kitchen. And I don’t take kindly to people bumping shoulders with me when they walk past.”
With that, she pulled the door closed, leaving Joseph in the dimming twilight.
He stepped beyond the dumpster and onto the lot. The lot was fenced off, and on the other side of the fence was another shopping center. The cooking smell intensified as he moved closer to the fence. Maybe there was a restaurant over there as well. If so, they should apologize to their neighbors on this side for filling the air with something so much more appealing than anything the restaurant over here was serving.
Joseph stopped at the fence in an attempt to get a better look. He put his hand on the top of a post.
But the hand he put there wasn’t his hand. It was wrinkled, bony, and age-spotted. Like his father’s when he was an old man.
Joseph stared at the hand, and as he did, he began to bow forward, as though gravity were suddenly exerting stronger pull. His muscles slackened and his knees bent of their own will. His breath felt short, though that might have been because of the crazy things that were happening to him. With his left hand, he touched his cheek, feeling lines he knew weren’t there this morning.
He staggered to the curb and sat, covering his face with his sinewy hands. Through it all, the smell was still there. Chicken, not pork. Bacon. Tomatoes. And more garlic than it seemed possible to put in one dish.
My son was always asking my wife to make this for him.
Joseph opened his eyes and stood. He looked at his hands again, finding them smooth. His knees felt strong. His posture was straight. He took a deep breath, reveling in his ability to draw in so much air, and filling his soul with a smell that was both indescribably delicious and terribly bittersweet.
Then he made his way back around to the front of the shopping center, reentering the diner from its customer entrance.
Will looked at him with a start. “You went through that door,” he said, pointing, “and you came back this way. Did you suddenly feel like going for a walk?”
Joseph studied the boy, seeing him fully now for who he was. He wanted to hug him, but he was sure it would make Will uncomfortable and maybe even cause a reaction he definitely didn’t want.
Instead, he dug into his pocket, put some bills on the table, and said, “Come on. I know where we’re going now.”
TWENTY-THREE
Something in Swahili
Eventually, Warren got around to cleaning up from lunch. He
’d left the chicken cooking on very low heat for three hours, during which he’d reached out to a number of new job resources and watched an Iron Chef America battle on the Food Network. He’d added water to the sauce a couple of times, but it still seemed overdone and unappealing when he finally unplugged the electric skillet. These would not make good leftovers. Instead of putting them in a container, he would have been better off throwing them out, but he stored them anyway.
Unsurprisingly, his mother didn’t move in her bed the entire time.
It was nearly five o’clock. Traffic was going to be awful on the drive home because he was leaving Treetops so late. The twenty-minute trip back to his apartment could easily turn into forty-five at rush hour, and rush hour was unavoidable at this point. Warren wondered if Jan was still around. He knew she got to the facility early, which suggested that she also left early. He could easily imagine her becoming involved with one of the residents and losing track of time, though, which meant she could certainly still be on the premises.
He wasn’t sure how he would get by right now in his life without their daily lunches. The weekends seemed endlessly long here when she wasn’t around. At this point, spending time with her ranked as one of his few reasons to look forward to any day. His mother was slowly disappearing in front of him, his work prospects were fading in the same way, and Crystal continued to spar with him, even though their divorce was now official and negotiations were therefore meaningless. If not for Jan and the lunches he shared with her, he would be utterly directionless right now.
A couple of nights ago, he’d gone out for a drink with Steve Wilkins, a friend from his old office who’d been downsized at the same time as Warren. Like Warren, Steve had not found another permanent position, but he’d managed to put together a series of consulting assignments that were bringing in more money than the company had been paying him. After Steve spent the first half hour of their conversation trying to persuade Warren to consider consulting – something that made little sense to Warren under his circumstances – the conversation moved on to the rest of their lives. This quickly led to Warren’s telling Steve about his cooking exploits and his lunches with Jan.
“Hey, it’s good to see that you’re back in the game, my man. How long have the two of you been dating?”
“Oh, we’re not dating.”
Steve looked at Warren as though he’d just said something in Swahili. “You have lunch with this woman every day.”
“Well, not weekends, but yes.”
“And you talk with her about stuff that actually matters to you.”
“More and more often, yeah.”
“Is she okay looking?”
“I could look at her all day.”
Steve laughed uproariously. “But you’re not dating her.”
It seemed ludicrous when Steve put it in that context, but Steve was ignoring some key factors. One was that Jan was a nurse responsible for Warren’s elderly and very sick mother. For all Warren knew, Treetops might strictly forbid their dating. Another was that Warren didn’t feel anywhere near ready to get involved with another woman. The slow fade he’d experienced with Crystal had left romance an increasingly distant sensation. It wasn’t so much that he’d lost interest in having a new relationship as that he’d tamped down the feeling. He’d once heard that people who experienced chronic pain slowly shut off the nerve endings responsible. Any healing that came after that usually involved a sharp spike in agony first, as the nerve endings came back online. Did he really want to have any part of that?
At the same time, it was ludicrous for him to think of Jan as a casual lunch date. People didn’t have lunch together five times a week casually. They’d both approached this in a nonchalant manner, but at this point, Warren was building his day around it. A few weeks earlier, a crisis regarding one of the other residents had slammed Jan and forced her to skip their lunch that afternoon. Warren had felt completely thrown by the experience, unable to enjoy anything the rest of the day. He’d even had trouble eating, which usually only happened when he had a fever over a hundred and two degrees.
He wondered what Jan thought of all of this. He knew she hadn’t been seriously involved with anyone since she’d split with her live-in boyfriend a little more than a year ago. They’d been together four years, and when she spoke about him, her sentences slowed and her eyes drifted downward. Had she sworn off men because of this? Were their lunches together an ideal social exercise, allowing her the flirtation and storytelling that came at the beginning of a relationship without the burdens of the relationship itself? If he suggested that they go to a movie together some night, would she run from the room?
It was so hard to know.
It didn’t help, of course, to have grown up in a household with his parents. They were always touching, teasing, and engaging each other. The parents of most of Warren’s friends seemed to have relationships that ranged from business arrangements to indifference to open hostility. Not his. The married couple in his home had actually seemed to like each other. They’d seemed to revel in the time they had. This had become even clearer to Warren when he’d went off to college. The first time he returned from school, his parents fussed all over him, but they also catalogued their exploits during the time he was gone. They were like kids who’d been left with the run of the house.
Warren knew that living with this had provided him with a very solid foundation. But it had also set the bar for romance very high. He never dated as much as his friends, and for a long time, he couldn’t understand why. Ultimately, though, it dawned on him that he’d subconsciously decided that a relationship was only worth pursuing if he believed it had the potential to match his parents’. For a while, he’d thought he had that with Crystal, but it turned out not to be the case at all. How did you ever really know?
Maybe it was time to stop thinking this way. Lowering his standards could make his future considerably easier than his past had been. But then he thought of Jan again and realized he didn’t want to stop thinking this way. What he wanted was to believe.
Warren was about to scoop the rest of the chicken into a food storage container to bring home (where he would likely throw it out, eventually) when he heard movement from his mother’s room. The sheets rustled and the bedsprings creaked. Putting down the container, he went to her door to find Mom sitting up in bed, her legs over the covers, staring directly at him.
“Hey, Mom,” he said, finding himself surprisingly anxious at the sight of his mother in an upright position.
The expression on her face languidly morphed into one of surprise, as though she were operating in slow motion. This compounded Warren’s feeling that this was all somewhat surreal. Was he having some sort of hallucination brought on by his desire to see his mother awake again?
Her face shifted again, this time to a smile that formed as slowly as before. The smile wiped years from her face and Warren found tears coming to his eyes. Earlier, he’d wished for one more meal with her. Now he realized he’d be satisfied with this smile. He wouldn’t be greedy enough to wish for anything more.
“You’re here,” she said, her voice honeylike, the voice he remembered from his schoolboy days when she would greet him as he came in from the bus with an enveloping hug followed by a glass of milk and one of the baked goods she was always making.
No longer stuck in place, he went to her bedside. “Yes, I’m here, Mom. Can I get you anything?”
But her eyes didn’t follow him. Instead, they stayed fixed on the doorway, still bright and still accented by her smile.
“You’re here,” she said again.
That’s when Warren realized that she wasn’t seeing him.
TWENTY-FOUR
Right Here
“You’re here.”
Antoinette knew she wasn’t dreaming this. She could feel it in her body. She reached her hand outward. The effort required to do so, and the shakiness as she held it aloft, confirmed this for her. She felt so horribly weak. This didn�
�t matter now, though.
Don was here.
He walked to the side of the bed as quickly as his arthritic knees would carry him, the strength in his eyes as powerful and embracing as she remembered it.
“I’m here, Hannah.”
He bent slowly toward her hand, kissing it gently, and then returning it to her side, so she didn’t need to try to hold it up any longer. Thankfully, he didn’t let go.
He looked across the bed compassionately. Antoinette followed his eyes and saw that Warren was staring at her, speechless. He obviously couldn’t see his father, which was a shame for both of them. A reunion, no matter how brief, would have been good for both of them. She wanted to say something to ease Warren’s mind, but she couldn’t seem to get the words out. She hoped he understood.
She turned back to Don. He was looking at her now, telling her everything she needed to know through his eyes. That had always been the case. Even as the years had withered his physical strength and lined his face, his eyes had retained their brilliance and their ability to communicate in a language that spoke to her intimately and with complete clarity.
“This has been a very long five years,” she said.
Joseph seemed stunned. “Five years? I’ve only been gone five days.” He looked around the room, his brows lowering. “But you’re here. And Warren has gray at his temples now.”
He dropped his head, displaying the thick, silver hair she remembered running her fingers through on the last day they had together before today. “Five years.”
“I’m glad you made it back.”
Don’s eyes softened further. “Me too, Hannah. You don’t know how much. I think I’m only visiting, though.”
Antoinette tried to squeeze his hand, but she did-n’t have the strength. “I know, my love. I wish it weren’t so, but I’m sure it’s true.”
She looked away from him, glancing down at the foot of the bed where her old housecoat lay. “I don’t belong here anymore, either.”
Don leaned across and kissed her forehead. She smelled the summer they’d spent on Candlewood Lake when Warren was a baby. “Maybe it’s time for both of us to go home.”
The Journey Home Page 12