When in Doubt, Add Butter

by Beth Harbison

  It hurt more than I was prepared for. At two centimeters dilated, I was in agony, but part of me didn’t feel I deserved comfort or relief. Or maybe I felt other people didn’t think I deserved it. At any rate, it was an excruciating physical experience compounded in countless ways by the myriad emotions that swam around it.

  I was not the smartest teenager ever. Obviously. I made a lot of mistakes and a lot of poor judgments, but one thing I think to this day that I did right was I did not look at the baby or let them tell me if it was a boy or a girl.

  To some, that sounds callous, but for me, it was the only way to survive. I could not spend my life remembering and potentially magnifying a moment of perceived eye contact with the baby. I could not spend my life wondering if that boy was my son or that girl was my daughter. I could not second-guess my decision ever, much less forever, and details would only have fueled my imagination.

  Thirty-six hours after I went into labor, I was back home in the bedroom I’d grown up in with nothing to show for the past nine months except a stomach that felt like jelly and a hole in my heart.

  But it was the right decision. I know, to this day, it was the right decision. And I try to keep the wondering from becoming obsessive, because I set the conditions and I know I will never know.

  Not hard to figure out how I ended up in the business of nurturing people I would never be closer to than an employee, is it?

  Romantic relationships are unreliable at best. A smart woman had to find satisfaction in other things, and then, if some great guy came along and added quality to her life, it was reasonable to consider the question of commitment.

  I think Mrs. Rooks would agree.

  So far, for me, that guy had not come along. Every serious relationship I’d had contained some element that made me lonelier with the guy than without. Casual dating was fine; even that first promising glow of excitement worked for me, kept the idea of possibility going in my mind.

  But nothing ever went beyond that for me. Something always threw a roadblock in the way. And, I know, many people would say that was a personal psychology issue that had more to do with my past than my present or future, but honestly, I sincerely disagree. Okay, I will admit that when I’m not feeling bitter and being called a spinster, I’ve seen plenty of evidence of good relationships out there. I know they can work; I’m not against them on principle at all. But I think the right fit is more rare than people think, and though hope might spring eternal, eventually skepticism does find its way in.

  And it’s not that I’m some fiercely independent woman who doesn’t like intimacy. I love intimacy. I love sex. Granted, it took a long time to get over Cal’s betrayal, and perhaps over isn’t even the right word. Around might be better—it took a while to get around Cal’s betrayal.

  But I did. Eventually. I really did.

  It didn’t make me bitter for life. The prospect of truly being in love and having a life partner to nurture and take care of—and be taken care of by—has held strong appeal for me ever since I was a kid and first saw Maria and Captain von Trapp dance the ländler on the patio. That’s probably what led me so neatly down Cal’s garden path in the first place. Obviously, he wasn’t the perfect boyfriend. When it comes down to it, he didn’t even really love me. And maybe I didn’t really even love him. I don’t know.

  But I wanted to.

  And there are times when I want that kind of love still. When I want someone to watch TV with in my ugly pajamas, and who offers to order the Chinese food and doesn’t have to ask what I want. I want someone who gives me something better than the initial thrill of a first kiss; I want someone who gives me the peace of a best friend with a lot of hot sex thrown in to elevate it.

  But I don’t know how to look for that. Maybe it’s foolish, but I’d like to believe that if it’s out there—that kind of love—that it’ll find me somehow.

  But romantic ideals are easier to imagine than to achieve.

  A perfect meal, on the other hand. Well, that can be done, start to finish, in a matter of hours or even minutes.

  Chicken must be cooked perfectly so it’s moist, not dry, and tender. No hard spots on the outside.

  The difference between good shrimp and rubber is about ten seconds.

  Cheap steak can be made better by dry aging in the fridge, but old steak is beyond hope.

  Freezer burn is not dangerous to food, but it takes away flavor and reduces crisp vegetables to marbles.

  In short, there are far more considerations than the average person thinks about to making a truly scrumptious meal. And that’s where I come in. That is my passion, and I get great satisfaction from a job well done.

  So in that sense—in that very real sense—I can succeed every single day.

  And if I don’t, I’m in trouble.

  This is just one more thing I love about cooking. Recipes are certain. Use good ingredients, follow the directions, be sure your oven temperature is true and monitor your stove properly, and you are assured success. There are not many variables once you understand how cooking works.

  Life, on the other hand, is full of variables. Nothing is predictable. Not the weather, not other people, not traffic, not even our own bodies. We are like seaweed, whipped around in the current of an erratic ocean.

  I’d rather work with nori and know how it’s going to come out.

  Chapter 4

  It was my first Lemurra-free Friday in months. Despite the financial panic that was growing in me, there was a certain thrill to not having to deal with Marie’s antics anymore. I never would have been irresponsible enough to throw away good work because of a personality conflict, but I was able to see that maybe this was a blessing in disguise.

  Especially since, by sheer coincidence, Lynn and I both happened to have the night off.

  It had been too long since I’d done something just for fun. I’d gotten in a rut, so when she called, I took it as a sign.

  “Everyone’s talking about a new bar down in Woodley Park,” she said when we talked by phone Friday afternoon. “I can’t remember the name of it, but I can Yelp it.”

  “No Plans?” I’d driven past it and watched its construction every day since I started at Mr. Tuesday’s. I loved the name.

  “Yes! That’s it! And my place is just a few blocks away, so you can come stay with me and we’ll have a sleepover and it will be just like old times.”

  “I don’t remember us having slumber parties.”

  She laughed. “I mean really old times. Like sixth grade. When we hadn’t met yet. Come on, you have to do it! I love that neighborhood, and I haven’t been since Jared and I broke up.”

  “Which one was Jared?”

  “The one who lived in Woodley Park. I met him right after my divorce.”

  “Which one?”

  “Second. Right before I met you. And you were dating that actor.… Shoot, what was his name?”

  Oh God. “Skye.” His name wasn’t really Skye, of course. No one’s name is really Skye. At least no one I knew. He had unashamedly told me that he’d decided on that stage name because of his—wait for it—“sky blue eyes.” He thought it would help casting directors remember him.

  As far as I knew, the only thing he was ever cast as was Scooby-Doo at Kings Dominion.

  “Don’t remind me. He’s one of the many things that are wrong with dating.”

  “That’s what you said about Alex with the hair plugs and the teddy bear.”

  My dating history is not dignified.

  “Stop,” I said. “Seriously, or I’ll never leave my place again.”

  Lynn laughed. “This is exactly why you need to get out. So are you in for tonight?”

  Given the week I’d had? No question. “I’m in!”

  By nine that night, Lynn and I were cabbing it to No Plans. Maybe it was just the bubbles in the Prosecco we’d split while we were getting ready, or maybe it was sheer lack of responsibility for the night, but I felt good. I felt confident. And considering that
every Friday for what felt like a very long time had been occupied by the peacock-purchasers, I felt kind of like I was playing hooky.

  So that put us teetering on our bar stools, laughing crazily at the guy who had just hit on us. Us. At the same time. He was about an inch shorter than me, and the buttons on his shirt were straining a little, but he acted with the confidence of Javier Bardem. He had licked his lips at Lynn, bit the air at me, and invited us back to his “pad.”

  Unfailingly polite, I had smiled and told him, “No thanks, I have an … early morning.…”

  But Lynn had just looked at him like he was insane until he wandered off.

  “I think that the first hit-on of the night demands a celebration.” She raised her hand and called, “Yoo-hoo!” at the bartender. Charmed by her as people usually were, he smiled and came over to us.

  “What can I get for you ladies?”

  “Two applesauce shots, please.”

  I gaped at her. “Shots? God, what are we, in college?”

  She moved her wavy brown hair out of her eyes. “No, we don’t have to be in college to have what I’m sure”—she looked at the bartender—“will be a fantastically prepared, perhaps overflowing shot.”

  He laughed with a shake of his head. “You got it.”

  “It’s delicious,” she said to me. “Goldschläger and something else. I don’t remember. But it totally tastes like applesauce.”

  “Why would anyone want to drink applesauce?” But I was already wondering if it could be reduced to a glaze for pork chops, and made a mental note to find out what was in it.

  When the bartender returned with the two slightly-bigger-than shots, we took them. I let it spin my head for a second, and then opened my mouth to tell Lynn she was right, they were delicious, but her attention had already been diverted by a tall, smart-looking guy in a T-shirt and glasses across the room.

  “Is that—?” I started.

  “Jared!” She nodded. “It’s fate! Do you mind?”

  I laughed. “Go for it.”

  And there it was. Suddenly I was no longer the carefree college kid but instead the rapidly-approaching-middle-aged woman sitting at a bar alone on a Friday night.

  Of course, I remembered this from college, too. I’d never really been a partier; it didn’t come all that naturally to me. I was always the sort who’d be happier at home with a good book than out drinking and dancing.

  But I’d come with Lynn tonight because that routine was getting old, so I had to give this night out a fair shot. I looked around at the mint-condition bar. The lights were blue, and all the surfaces were slick with black lacquer. The lights cast dramatic shadows on the happy-looking crowd. I looked around at them all, wondering who there would be going home together, and who would be breaking up. Who was meeting his or her soul mate, and who was just there to have fun and not meet anyone new.

  Like me.

  It was always easy to fit people into these types of categories at the bars, and when I was out with Lynn, it was something I often had time to do.

  “Here, have this!” Lynn showed up at my side and handed me a plastic cup with an orange on the rim.

  “What is it?”

  “Sex on the Beach!”

  “Oh my God, I haven’t had one of these in years.”

  “Honey, we all need more sex on the beach!”

  I laughed and sipped from the straw as she turned back to Jared.

  I looked back around the room. In one corner was a red pool table. The men playing on it were all in suits, clearly just off work. I always kind of liked that look. The jacket off, the sleeves rolled up, the loosened tie … it worked for me. One of them—tall, thin, with dark blond hair—took a shot and sank two balls into two different pockets. I took another sip. That always worked for me, too. There’s just something hot about a guy playing pool.

  Then, as if he could read my thoughts, the guy suddenly looked at me. Startled, I swallowed the wrong way and coughed, sloshing some of the liquid onto my leg. I sopped it up with my napkin and looked back up to see him smiling. It did something wonderful to his already handsome face. When he smiled, it just made me … I don’t know what exactly, but suddenly I felt hot, and couldn’t tear my gaze away.

  After another second, one of his friends evidently said something to him, and the moment was over. I looked back at Lynn, who was laughing heartily at something Jared had said.

  With a moment of cheek-warming humiliation, I wondered if Pool Player had been looking at her and not me.

  I rarely felt jealous of Lynn, but this time … I had really wanted him to be smiling at me. I slurped up the last of my Sex on the Beach and got the attention of the bartender again.

  “Another applesauce shot?”

  “Comin’ right up, beautiful.”

  Well, at least I had that.

  One shot and fifteen minutes later, Lynn was standing with her finger wound around Jared’s belt loop, and I was wondering if I should just take a cab back to my place and get my things from her apartment tomorrow. I felt like a cockblock. But then I looked at Lynn, who seemed not to be feeling blocked, and decided that no, I was just kind of bored.

  I glanced back to the rest of the room and saw Pool Player coming toward me. I looked around for something to stare fixedly at. But before I had a chance, he was in front of me.

  “You wanna play?”

  “What?”

  He gestured back at the pool table.

  “Oh,” I said, feeling a little stupid. “Um … I’m just awful.”

  “I’m not.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Well, that just doesn’t sound like a fair game, does it?”

  He grinned again. “Nope. And I’m not gonna go easy on you, either.”

  I couldn’t say no. “Fine. Then I guess I’ll just really have to try, then.”

  That was all I could come up with to say. It was lame, but I’d been out of this game, as well as pool, for a long time.

  “You want another drink first?”

  “Sure.”

  He nodded at the bartender and he came over. “What was it you spilled all over yourself?”

  I smiled. “Applesauce. Oh no, that one was a Sex on the Beach.”

  “Which do you prefer?”

  “Drinkwise?” I laughed. “Applesauce.”

  He looked amused, and then repeated the drink order. “I’m Mack,” he said then. Or Max. I wasn’t entirely sure.

  “Sounds like an alias,” I said stupidly. God, what was with me?

  He laughed. “An alias? I can assure you, I haven’t done anything interesting enough to need an alias.”

  “Disappointing.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  A few feet away, Lynn giggled a coquettish laugh and lay a hand on Jared’s chest.

  “She’s having fun,” Mack observed.

  “Yes. She is.”

  “Are you?”

  Until this moment, I had been fighting a growing desperation to be out of there. Now, I was content to stay just where I was. “Of course.”

  “Good.” He took the drink from the bartender. “Then you won’t be upset when I kick your ass on the pool table.”

  I laughed, decidedly less coquettishly than Lynn, and followed him. As we made our way through the crowd, he took my hand. Maybe it was weird, but it didn’t feel that way. Once we had emerged on the other side, he let go and replaced it with a cue.

  “You wanna break?” he asked as he began to rack the balls.

  “I’m a terrible breaker.”

  “Then we’ll rerack until you get it right.” He pulled away the triangle and grabbed his own cue.

  Luckily, the balls scattered across the felt on my first try. I even got in a solid.

  “Beginner’s luck.” He took a swig from his Sam Adams.

  I missed the next ball I tried to get in, more due to nerves than anything else. I glanced up to see Lynn looking thrilled at me. She gave me a thumbs-up, and I was glad that he had already started
to shoot.

  When he finally missed one, I gave an uncharacteristically victorious “Ha!” and took my next shot. Miraculously, I made the next four in a row.

  “Phew,” I said, making my way to my drink. “All this winning is making me parched.”

  I leaned my back against the wall to steady myself and take a sip. He was smiling again, and sauntered over to me. He put a hand on the wall behind me. My heart skipped, but I tried to look like it hadn’t.

  “So, you’re a pool shark. And you just draw losers like me in from across the bar. Only to beat them after giving them the ol’ oh-you-wouldn’t-wanna-play-me routine. Huh? Is that your game?”

  I smiled, my straw still in my mouth, and looked up at him. He had light brown eyes and dark lashes. “Yup. Sucker.”

  I didn’t know if it was the shots that were doing it, but I had as much confidence as I had had in college. It felt like slipping into old stilettos.

  He bit his bottom lip and moved just close enough to me that I got that chill you get when you’re about to be kissed. But then he just tilted his head slightly to the side and said, “This isn’t over yet, Applesauce.”

  And he pushed away from the wall, and went back to the table.

  We got down to the eight ball, my yellow seven, and his striped number eleven.

  Right before I took my shot, he placed a hand on my arm. “Wait, there’s nothing in the pot.”

  “Hm?” I stood up straight.

  “We need to raise the stakes here. What do you get if you win?”

  I gave a laugh. “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, what do you want?”

  I swallowed my first answer and said, “A drink. Whoever wins has to buy the other a drink.”

  He considered it. “So cliché. But that’s fine.” He stepped backwards. “My drink’s running low, anyway.”

  “So’s mine.” But I knew it was ill-advised for me to have another one.

  I took my shot and missed. He took his, and sank his eleven effortlessly. He didn’t look up at me, but he knew I was looking at him and he grinned.

  “Left pocket.” He gestured with his cue stick where he was going to aim the eight ball. Another smooth shot.

  He stood up and splayed his arms in a gesture that clearly meant What can I say?