“And your house. It needs a paint job.”
“My house looks fine.”
“Not on TV, it doesn’t.”
Erica paused halfway down the hall to the dining room. “How would you know what my house looks like on TV?” she asked, bracing for an answer she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear.
“How do you think I’d know? I saw your house on TV.”
“When?”
“This evening, at the end of the five o’clock news. Lacy McNair, you know her? The reporter on Channel 4. Of course you know her. You talked to her.”
“I did?” Lacy McNair must have been one of the reporters who’d invaded her property that morning. “She didn’t introduce herself.”
“Why should she? She’s Lacy McNair. Everybody knows who she is.”
“Everybody in Boston, maybe. I don’t watch Boston news shows.” Erica cautiously resumed her walk down the hall. She halted in the living room. The curtains on those windows hung wide open, revealing the twilit vista of her front yard, the site of that morning’s press siege. Which one had Lacy McNair been? Did it even matter?
“She was talking about some box. It didn’t make any sense, but there you were in the spotlight, saying you hadn’t opened the box yet. You looked kind of washed out, sweetie. Then they showed your garden, and forgive me, but it’s a mess.”
“I haven’t finished planting it yet.” Great. Now all the Channel 4 viewers in the Greater Boston Area had seen her half-completed garden. She would never be able to hold her head up in Brookline again.
“So this box, it was in the garden?”
“If that’s what Lacy McNair said, she got it right.”
“And why aren’t you opening it?”
“I don’t want to break it. It’s an antique, I think.”
“So…what? You’re never going to open it?”
“I’m going to open it when Avery Gilman gets here. He was a professor of mine at Harvard, and he’s—”
“See? This is what I’ve been telling you. You went to Harvard, you worked with professors like this Avery person, the top people in their fields, and for what? So you could earn nothing in that provincial little town in the middle of nowhere.”
“It’s not in the middle of nowhere,” Erica argued. It’s off to one side of nowhere, she added silently. “Mom, I know you don’t approve of the choices I made, but we’re done having that discussion. Okay? I’m here because I want to be here, because this is where I belong.”
“You belong in civilization, honey. Not up there with all those ‘Live Free or Die’ maniacs.”
“They’re not maniacs.”
“They hunt. They own guns.”
“Not all of them.” She sighed and continued to the dining room, taking comfort in the stack of work sheets, the red and blue pens lying on her table. She was a teacher, and she belonged in a town where her teaching skills were valued. Brookline was full of teachers with Ivy League degrees. In Rockwell, she could contribute something unique. She could offer a new perspective, and have her own perspectives rearranged. She could learn that people who hunted and ate the game they brought down were not evil, although she still felt a little uneasy about all the antlers decorating walls in town.
A knock on the kitchen door startled her. If she owned a gun, she could hold it while she greeted whoever her visitor was. Probably some pesky reporter again; maybe her good buddy Derrick Messinger, whom she’d spotted skulking around the schoolyard that afternoon.
“Mom,” she said, angling her head to peer into the kitchen from the dining-room doorway. “I’ve got to go. Just tell me, I wasn’t on the news yesterday, was I?”
“Shouldn’t you have been? You’re the one with this fancy box that you won’t open.”
“The reporters didn’t arrive until today. Why did you phone me yesterday?” Peeking through the window, she made out the silhouette of her caller and sighed. It wasn’t a pesky reporter. No such luck. It was her next-door neighbor.
She’d resolved to stay away from Jed, hadn’t she? Just so he wouldn’t kiss her again. Just so she could avoid putting her willpower to such a severe test.
But there he was, standing on her back porch. He must know she was home. Lights were on in the house. Her car was in the shed.
“I’m not allowed to call and say hello?” her mother said with feigned innocence. “I’m not allowed to want to hear your voice?”
“Why did you call?”
“Your cousin Suzanne met this friend of her fiance’s and said he’s perfect for you. Robert Goldstein. Yale Law School. You could go to the Harvard-Yale games and bicker.”
Erica laughed. “Don’t be a matchmaker, Mom.”
“You’re never going to meet anyone up there.”
That’s what you think, Erica munbled, her gaze locked onto the shadowy figure on the other side of her kitchen door. Oh, she’d met someone, all right—someone she would have been better off not meeting.
She was probably the only person in Rockwell who locked her doors—old habits died hard—but it seemed downright unneighborly not to let Jed in. She pulled the door open, tried not to react to his smile as she beckoned him inside and then headed down the hall to her bedroom to finish her conversation with her mother in private. “I really can’t talk, Mom,” she said. “I’ve got a pile of math quizzes to grade. Just tell me, did that woman on the news—Stacy…?”
“Lacy McNair.”
“Right. Did she say anything worthwhile in her report?”
“Just what I told you. And I’ve got to say, Erica, my phone has been ringing off the hook. All the neighbors saw you. And your ninth-grade English teacher, Ms. Wexler, remember her? She called. She said she was so proud that you had become a teacher. She thinks she inspired you.”
Ms. Wexler had been about as inspiring as overcooked pasta. Which reminded Erica of the leftover pasta primavera sitting beneath a sheet of plastic wrap on the bottom shelf of her refrigerator. Had Jed come over in search of food? Just what she needed in her life: a tall, outrageously attractive version of Randy Rideout. Maybe she’d give Jed a handful of chocolate chip cookies and send him on his way.
“Mom, I’ve got to go.”
“Please warn me if you’re going to be on TV again, honey. I’d like to set up the VCR so I can get you on tape.”
Erica considered that a fine reason for her not to warn her mother if she was going to be on TV again. To be sure, she’d had no idea she was going to be on today. “You seem to know more about my TV appearances than I do,” she joked. “I’ve got to go.”
“All those math quizzes,” her mother muttered, as if she didn’t believe they existed. “All right, Erica. Go take care of the quizzes. Dad sends his love.”
“Bye.” Erica disconnected the phone and returned to the kitchen. The room was empty. She glimpsed Jed in the dining room, his hands in the pockets of his jeans as he perused the math exam on the top of the pile. “Do you want to grade them?” she asked from the doorway.
He straightened and turned to face her. “God, no. Long division and I have never been on good terms.”
Falling silent, he smiled slightly. If he’d come here hoping for her to offer him dinner, he was going to be disappointed—partly because feeding him two dinners in a row would set a bad precedent, but mostly because she’d feel kind of weird entertaining him in her home, offering him the leftovers of a meal that Fern had prepared. If only Erica had mastered a few more recipes; if only she could chop vegetables with Fern’s panache; if only she could bake loaves of herb bread, kneading the dough and getting flour on her wrists and knowing what the hell she was doing…
Even then, she wouldn’t want to feed Jed. She’d kissed him once; she was too smart to tempt fate by spending more time with him.
He still didn’t speak. His gaze wandered over her and she wondered whether he’d dropped by for another kiss, or to transport her to where they’d obviously been heading last night. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “I�
��ve got a bottle of merlot at home. I’m not sure how good it is, but I bought it to share with you. I was going to bring it over here, but then I thought that would be kind of presumptuous of me. So I’m inviting you over to my house, instead.”
“Your house.”
“We could throw together some supper. You fed me so well last night I owe you one.” He shrugged. “I’d take you out, but that might not be a good idea. It’s so public.”
“People would gossip,” she agreed.
“Plus the reporters. You’re the story they’ve all come to Rockwell to get. If we went out for dinner they’d find us and drive us nuts.”
“Maybe they’ve all gone home by now.”
“As of this afternoon, they were still out in full force downtown.”
Erica would hardly refer to Rockwell’s sleepy Main Street as “downtown,” but Jed’s point was well taken. “So,” she said slowly, not sure how she felt about it, “you’re going to cook me dinner?”
“We could fix it together. I’m not the world’s greatest cook.”
“Neither am I,” she warned. “Maybe we should give Fern a call.”
“Fern’s got other fish to fry.”
Erica felt her eyes widen. How would Jed know more than she did about her best friend?
“I needed to buy a skillet, because my father stole my grandfather’s, and while I was driving home I saw Fern hanging out by the Hope Street Inn.”
“The Hope Street Inn?” That was the bed-and-breakfast where Erica had reserved a room for Avery Gilman. Why would Fern be there?
“Derrick Messinger and his crew are staying there. I think your buddy was doing the groupie thing.”
“What? You think she was going to offer herself to Derrick Messinger?” Erica’s laughter sounded hollow. Offering herself to Derrick Messinger was just the sort of thing Fern would do.
Jed held up his hands as if to ward off any criticism. “Hey, it’s not my business. All I’m saying is, I don’t think you ought to count on her driving out this way to cook a meal for us tonight.”
Erica shook her head. She thought Fern had been hot for Jed. But then, as she recalled, Fern had reacted to Derrick’s phone message yesterday with a lot more enthusiasm than Erica had.
“So, you want to take your chances at my place?” Jed asked.
Say no, the voice of wisdom inside her cautioned. She ignored it.
THE KITCHEN of the old farmhouse next door was much larger than hers. The cabinets were polished knotty pine, the floor featured checkerboard tiles of black and white, instead of a quease-producing foamy green pattern, and the ceiling fixture infused the room with sunshine brightness. A large four-burner gas range stood in one corner, a double-basin stainless-steel sink occupied a space beneath the window and the refrigerator was a relatively new model, with side-by-side doors and a built-in ice dispenser. Erica gazed around, wondering if her awe was visible. This was the kitchen she should have had. It was a kitchen an earth mother could bake bread in—assuming the earth mother knew how to bake bread.
Jed lifted a bottle of wine from the table at the center of the room. “We’ll probably need this,” he said, carrying it to a counter and pulling a corkscrew from a drawer, “given that neither of us can cook.”
“I can cook,” Erica argued, crossing to the stove and lifting a large Teflon-coated skillet from one of the burners. The bottom of the skillet was a pristine shining silver. This must be the new pan Jed had bought. “I’m not as good a cook as Fern, but I’m learning. Why did your father steal your grandfather’s pan?”
“Because it was there?” Jed guessed with a shrug. He levered out the cork, which made a happy little pop as it came free of the bottle. “He was just helping himself to whatever caught his eye. You’d have to ask him why he chose the pan.”
“It’s just that pans are not that valuable.” She lowered the new pan to the burner.
“He’s a junk dealer. What does he know about the value of things?” He filled two goblets with wine and handed one to her. “I picked up some chopped beef, but burgers don’t go with merlot. You think we could come up with something more interesting to do with the meat?”
“Sure,” she said, once again aware that it was an answer destined to lead her into trouble. If she were Fern, she could take chopped meat and assorted other ingredients and whip up a marvelous meal. She wasn’t Fern, though.
She’d have to fake it. She could brown the meat and season it, and throw in some vegetables if he had any, and turn the mixture into a stew. With enough wine to wash it down, the dish might not taste too bad. “Do you have any spices?” she asked.
He swung open a cabinet to reveal an array of small jars. “I have no idea how old some of this stuff is,” he said. “For all I know, my grandmother might have bought these, and she’s been dead more than ten years.”
Erica pulled some of the jars down from the shelf and stared at them as if she knew what to look for. Spices didn’t spoil, she was pretty sure. They might lose some tang, but they didn’t rot or turn moldy.
Jed removed the meat, a loaf of bread, a carrot, a bell pepper, a tomato, an onion and a couple of potatoes from the refrigerator. “Let’s fire up the stove and see what happens,” he said.
He seemed awfully cheerful, as if this potentially doomed project was a great, joyous adventure. Erica decided to cheer up, too. As long as they were cooking, they’d be too busy to kiss. In fact, she didn’t sense much sexual heat coming from him, not like last night, when they’d sat too close together on the porch swing. This spacious kitchen gave them plenty of room to evade each other.
“So, did you do any interviews today?” he asked as he set to work cutting the pepper.
She sipped her wine, then dumped the meat into the new pan and turned the heat low under it. “Just this morning’s little press conference outside my house. My mother saw it on TV.”
“What?” He stared at her.
“That was who I was talking to when you showed up at my house. My mother. She said one of the reporters broadcast a report about the box on the local news out of Boston.”
“What kind of report? What the hell could they have said?”
“That I dug up a mystery box and its contents haven’t been revealed. You know what TV newscasts are like. They report on the weather, the sports scores, a burning building, a controversial new diet, a celebrity divorce and a cat that walked a thousand miles to get home from a campsite in Montana where it had been abandoned by accident. What better way to end the broadcast than with a story about a mysterious box found in a schoolteacher’s garden?”
The beef began to sizzle. Erica stirred it, feeling Jed’s gaze on her and wishing she looked more adept with a spatula. “Isn’t that a little cynical for you?” he finally said.
She shot him a glance. He was regarding her with a blend of curiosity and amusement. “I’m not cynical,” she defended herself.
“I didn’t think you were, but…”
“But what?”
He smiled. “You’ve got your edges.”
What edges? What was he talking about? She’d had plenty of edges while growing up outside Boston and matching wits with Ivy League intellectuals, but now she was a wholesome, holistic country girl, learning to garden, learning—not nearly fast enough—to cook, learning to center herself in Rockwell’s cozy environment.
If she still had edges, it was only because she hadn’t yet succeeded in becoming the person she wanted to be: an unedged woman.
She stirred the meat as it browned. With what she hoped resembled flair, she reached for a jar of garlic powder, opened it, sniffed and detected the faintest whiff of garlic, and shook some onto the meat. If she’d been at home and alone, she would have searched for a recipe, dug out her measuring spoons and practiced precision. But with Jed as her witness, she wanted to appear as if she knew what she was doing.
“So, should we stick this pepper in with the meat?” he asked, displaying the chunks of green on his cutting bo
ard.
“Why not?” she said bravely. It would all cook together, like her mother’s stuffed-pepper recipe. She recalled that her mother used tomato sauce with that. “You have any tomato sauce?”
“Maybe.” Sipping his wine, he perused the contents of a cabinet. “Tomato paste,” he said, producing a narrow can.
Erica had seen tomato paste on the supermarket shelves, but she’d never had any idea what to do with it. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s put some of that in.”
They fumbled along, adding onion, ginger powder and dense globs of tomato paste that gradually thinned in the heat of the pan. Jed peeled and sliced the potatoes and she tossed them in. Everything simmered together into a disgusting-looking hash. It didn’t smell too bad, though, and the wine added a pleasant shimmer to the proceedings. Jed cut the tomato into wedges and the carrot into sticks. He set the table with two plates, silverware and squares of paper towel in place of napkins. “I can’t find where my grandfather kept napkins,” he explained. “I don’t know, maybe he never used them.”
“The paper towels will work. Fold them so they look like napkins,” she suggested. Jed dutifully folded them in half and centered the forks on them. “I guess this is done. Pasta primavera it’s not.”
“Who wants pasta primavera? We just had that last night,” Jed remarked, making her feel better.
She ladled the slop onto their plates. Jed added the bread and a tub of butter to the table, then carried the half-consumed bottle of wine over and gestured for her to sit. She dipped the tines of her fork into the meat and licked them off. Not too wretched. She’d be able to eat it without gagging. “I’m not a very good cook,” she told him again.
He shrugged. “Neither am I,” he assured her once more. “This looks fine.” He scooped up a manly forkful, ate it, swallowed and nodded. “It’s fine.”
“Thank you.”
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