Afternoon Delight

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Afternoon Delight Page 16

by Anne Calhoun


  “It’s a sunk cost,” Trish said as she poured out the rest of the bottle into Sarah’s glass.

  “It’s a what?”

  “A sunk cost. You’ve already spent the time. You can’t get it back, but continuing to invest in it doesn’t make sense, either. You cut your losses and walk away.”

  Sarah considered this as the setting sun drenched the Manhattan skyline in shades of orange and gold. She still wasn’t sure how she felt about the city. It was growing on her. Maybe. If she were being reasonable, she couldn’t hold the whole of New York City responsible for her dinged heart. “How do you know if a sunk cost is truly sunk or a project that just takes a little more time to develop?”

  “In my old job the answer would be inside information masked as intuition,” Trish said, scrolling through Twitter on her phone. “Which is, under no circumstances, to be mistaken for wishful thinking.”

  “I liked him,” Sarah said after a while, to no one in particular. “He loved New York. He loved this city. Worked hard to take care of it. I liked that about him.”

  Trish tossed her phone on the coffee table and finished her wine. “I’m meeting some friends in Tribeca tonight. Want to come?”

  “After all that cleaning? You’ve got more energy than I do. I’m going to stay home and nurse the sunk cost with wine and binging on The Tudors.”

  One more night of regrets and nursing her wounded pride, and then she’d move on.

  ***

  She got up the next morning to an incipient red wine headache that demanded water or coffee or both, stat. The shower was running, so she stumbled toward the scent of strong, fresh coffee. A guy wearing boxer shorts and a Ramones T-shirt sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and skimming something on his phone.

  “Morning,” he said. “I made coffee.”

  “Bless you,” she said. “Want me to find you the Economist?”

  “Is that the preferred reading material for strange men you find at your kitchen table?”

  He had kind eyes and a smile she liked. “Maybe,” she said. “The guy who was reading the Post didn’t get asked back.”

  “Wall Street Journal?” he asked, waggling his phone. “I’m good, thanks.”

  She poured the rest of the coffee into a cup and started a fresh batch.

  “Are you Sarah?”

  “I am.”

  “I followed-slash-liked-slash-friended Symbowl’s social media after I met Trish last night. Quite a few people have signed on for the new sauce tasting event.”

  She shoved her hair out of her face, took the proffered phone, and scrolled through posts and tweets. “Huh,” she said. AnonEMT had tweeted Can’t wait to try something spicier than Infinite Heat. Tim swore he wasn’t behind the tweets, and she believed him. Still, the support was nice, and went a long way toward making her feel even more at home in the city.

  “Trish said you’ve only been here a couple of months. Where are you from?”

  “San Francisco,” she said, and sipped the coffee.

  “Not bad,” he said, reclaiming his phone. “But there’s the earthquakes. Major fault zone. The eastern half of California is going to crash into the ocean in the next hundred years or so. New York is better.”

  “For the hurricanes and the howling winter storms,” she agreed.

  “Earthquakes come without warning,” he said. “You can plan for hurricanes and blizzards.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “What do you do?”

  “Risk management for a commodities brokerage.”

  Suddenly the focus on natural disasters made sense. “If this is what you’re like after coffee, I hate to see you before.”

  “It’s all cowls and scythes and long bony fingers of death,” he agreed.

  Trish padded in dressed in yoga pants, a camisole, and a big smile. She toweled her wet hair. “Sarah, this is Brandon. Brandon, Sarah.”

  He had a name. A very good sign indeed. “If someone goes out for the ingredients for mimosas and French toast, I’ll make brunch,” Sarah said.

  “Deal,” Brandon said, and tried to slide his phone into his pocket. It clattered to the floor.

  “Pants,” Trish said. “You had pants last night, right?”

  “Pretty sure,” Brandon said.

  “Don’t forget powdered sugar,” Sarah said. A few minutes later the door closed behind them. She gave herself a few minutes to be grateful for friends, old and new, who would take care of her as she’d taken care of Aunt Joan, and to regret that keeping her promise to her aunt meant moving on from Tim. Then she got up to start scrambling eggs and heating the pan.

  ***

  Sarah’s recipe for split pea soup on his phone’s screen, Tim stopped in the grocery store’s sliding doors, scanned the recipe again, then opted for a cart rather than his usual basket. The vegetables were easy enough to find, carrots, onions, celery all up front. When he asked for a ham bone, the guy in the meat department looked at him like he was crazy, but produced one. Split peas, where the hell were the split peas if they weren’t in the frozen section? A taciturn clerk informed him were in a bag in the dried section (who the fuck knew?). He found the garlic, bagged his own groceries to speed this along, and headed home to make something from scratch for the first time in . . . well, in forever. Back in his apartment everything went into the stock pot he had only because when he made pasta he made too much to fit into a regular pot. Then he let it simmer while he started on the brown bread.

  What did Sarah like about this? He paid attention to learn. It was an investment in the present, and in the future, he decided as he measured flour and water. Cooking occupied the immediate moment: cutting vegetables, waiting for soup to simmer, adding spices at the right time to create a particular flavor. It rewarded patient attention with savory smells as carrots softened and the soup took on the sweetness of the onions. As the dough rose, his whole apartment smelled like yeast, a smell he hadn’t taken in since his grandmother died several years earlier. The sticky dough clung to his hands until he worked in enough dry flour to absorb the moisture, and he ended up with flour all over the floor, but the smell of rising bread more than made up for the mess. This time he was cleaning up the mess of life, not the mess of sickness or death.

  But it wasn’t just about the present. Cooking was a bet on the future, on shared moments with family, friends, a lover. Sarah cooked to carve out time now, and in the future, to make sacred shared moments. It was different from bringing over takeout, too. Cooking meant you thought about the food and the person more than dialing a phone number and handing over a credit card. Takeout had its place, but cooking . . . cooking built a future, one meal at a time.

  He could do that, use the present to build a future. He might be slow off the mark, but once he made up his mind, he could hold his own in the kitchen. It was surprisingly calming, slicing vegetables, adding spices, watching the slow boil. This might be exactly what he needed to ease the strain of the job.

  He wasn’t asking for forever, although if he wanted forever with anyone, Sarah and her skirts and clogs and wild hair fit the bill pretty damned well. He wasn’t really asking for anything. He just wanted to show her he wasn’t a lost cause. Even superheroes had a right to hang up the cape every once in a while, to live in the moment, leave the city in capable hands.

  Anyway, he was no superhero.

  He took the stairs two at a time and borrowed a paper box from his upstairs writer neighbor. Back in his apartment, he lined the box with a towel to absorb spills and retain heat, then slid the fresh bread into paper towels and wedged it on one side of the stock pot. The salad ingredients went into the other side. He tucked the box against his hip and went downstairs to hail a cab.

  ***

  Mimosas and brunch extended into the early afternoon. After cleaning up, Brandon and Trish decided to burn off the calories with a walk in Prospect Park, an early movie, then dinner, so Sarah wasn’t expecting the buzz on the intercom in the early evening.

  �
�Did you forget your keys?” Sarah asked when she answered the intercom’s buzz.

  “It’s Tim.”

  She stared at the speaker as if she could see him through the vent. “Tim?”

  “Tim Cannon,” he said uncertainly, as if there were any other Tim in her life. “Can I come up?”

  She pressed the buzzer and opened the door to the landing. Tim came up the stairs carrying a box, but the smell preceded him. Fresh bread and . . . split pea soup?

  “Hi,” Sarah said.

  “Hi,” he said back.

  “What’s all that?” she asked, because her nose must be misleading her.

  “Homemade soup.”

  “Homemade soup,” she repeated.

  “Split pea soup, to be specific,” he said.

  “It smells like my soup.”

  “It is your soup. I got the recipe off your blog. Can I come in?”

  She stepped back and let him into the apartment. He set the box on the counter and felt the towel, probably checking for spills, not quite meeting her eye.

  “It’s not your bread, though,” he said. “I made Mrs. Cohen’s recipe. Brown bread. It’s pretty dense. I’m not sure if I did it right.”

  “It smells fantastic,” she said, almost daring to hope. Almost. “Um . . . why are you here?”

  He turned to face her, leaned against the counter, legs crossed at the ankle. “I’m sorry. I was a total jerk when I told Jonesy I didn’t care if he asked you out. Watching your face when you realized what I’d done . . . after what we’d just done . . .” He swallowed hard, his throat working, and looked away, then looked back at her. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, the words spoken with an intensity she’d never seen before. “I didn’t mean it. I care. I really, really care, and I really don’t want you to go out with him. Not that I have any right to tell you what to do, after what I did, but . . . don’t. Please don’t.”

  “If you do care, why didn’t you say that?”

  He took a deep breath. “Because you scare me.”

  Her brows drew down. “I scare you.”

  “I can’t point to one terrible thing that happened to make me start speeding through life. It just accumulated. The job. Taking care of my grandparents. Suddenly it was easier to get really fast, really good at my job, and ignore everything else, until you slowed me down. In a really good way,” he added hastily.

  “Tim, I didn’t think you were lying when you said you had a difficult day at work. Your best day on the job is still someone’s worst day of their lives. Moving too fast to feel the pain is one way of coping with that kind of constant stress. It worked,” she said gently.

  “But there’s a price to that kind of coping,” he said. “Relationships need time and attention. They need the opposite of speed. When I was with you, it didn’t feel so hard. I thought it was the challenges. The sex. It wasn’t. It was you. Us. When I’m with you, life doesn’t feel so heavy.” He blew out his breath and looked at her. “I need to find a new way of coping. I love my job. I don’t want to get callous about it. I really don’t want to lose you. I hope I can make your burdens a little lighter, too,” he said, as if he wasn’t sure the soup and bread made that clear.

  She smiled at him. “You’re not going to lose me.” She stepped forward, put her hand on his hip, and tipped her face up to his. He bent his head and kissed her, slow and sweet, taking his time, letting it linger until the reality of the promise seeped through her veins, into her bones.

  She lit the burner and lifted the pot from the box. “It smells really good,” she said.

  “I hope it is.”

  “Can we eat in the squashy chairs, like heathens? The sunset is really beautiful behind the Manhattan skyline.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  Sarah ladled out bowls of soup and put together an assortment of fresh fruit while Tim sliced and buttered the bread. They turned the chairs to face the big windows, pulled a table between them to hold the food and glasses of wine, then sat down to eat just as the sun was setting.

  “It’s perfect,” she said after a couple of spoonfuls of soup.

  “Not bad. Needs less salt. I’ll keep that in mind for next time.” He nodded at the skyline, burnished in shades of orange and sunset-red. “How do you feel about the city now?”

  She smiled at the view, then at him. The setting sun gilded his beard to gold. The strands glinted as he smiled back at her, soft and easy, full of hope. Hope for a future together, in the city he loved. She set her soup on the table between them, then leaned across the chair’s arm and kissed him. “You know, I really think I’m going to like it here.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to Megan Mulry for brainstorming and beta reading, Robin L. Rotham for the beta reading, and my constant companions in the #1k1hr Twitter hashtag for company as I wrote. The editorial team at Berkley/InterMix always does a wonderful job, but with this particular book the development and copy edits were especially helpful. Many, many thanks to Leis Pederson, Kate Hurley, and the rest the book-loving professionals behind the scenes who always improve my work.

  Keep reading for a preview of THE LIST, the next novel in the Irresistible Series from Anne Calhoun, available March 2015.

  Summer Solstice—10:50 am

  The window air conditioning unit clicked twice, then whirred to life. The building on Washington Square was too old to have central air. The cold air drifted through the swath of sunshine that faded the ancient Oriental rug’s reds to a brick shade. Special Agent Daniel Logan took up position at the left end of the love seat and braced his elbow on the arm as he noted the way light fell on the monument in Washington Square Park. When he was a rookie officer with the FBI he’d trained himself to note not just date and time but the weather, moon and astronomical events in his reports to anchor things in his memory. It was useful when he testified in court.

  At this very moment the sun was at its highest point in the sky, and the summer would only get hotter.

  Today he noted the solstice not because he’d been called to testify, but because he’d met Tilda the preceding summer solstice. One year had passed, the year of Tilda. They’d met, started dating or whatever Tilda called it, gotten married, and were now sitting in front of a marriage counselor, because Tilda thought they needed to divorce.

  She folded herself into the opposite end of the love seat like complicated origami in a sleeveless black sheath, her bare legs crossed. No wedding ring. No birthday bracelet. The therapist, a tall, thin man with dark brown eyes and a turban covering his hair, shook both their hands as he introduced himself as Dr. Bhowmick, then settled himself across from them.

  “Daniel,” he said in a lightly accented voice. “Do you prefer Daniel, or Dan?”

  “Daniel.”

  “The interpreter of dreams,” Dr. Bhowmick said. “Word origins are a hobby of mine. What do you do?”

  “I’m with the FBI.” It wasn’t all that different from interpreting dreams. As an agent assigned to investigate white collar crime, he reconstructed people’s dreams after they’d been stolen.

  Dr. Bhowmick transferred his gaze to Tilda. “And Tilda. An unusual name.”

  “It’s short for Matilda,” she said, but she lacked her usual smile.

  “Ah,” the therapist said genially. “Do you know the origin of your name?”

  “I do,” she said. “It’s German and a combination of two words meaning strength and battle.”

  Her face wore her most pleasant expression, as if she bat away idle observations and trivial facts all day, deflecting the conversation down shallow gullies until everything they had left dissipated into the air.

  “What brings you here today?”

  “I think we need to divorce,” Tilda said.

  “I think we don’t,” Daniel replied.

  She smiled at Dr. Bhowmick. “And there you have it.” Crisp, clean, precise, the upperclass British accent the same temperature as the room. She must be freezing in her sleeveless sheath. Daniel wa
s comfortable in his suit, and he ran much hotter than Tilda, who lived like she could spontaneously combust at any moment but was always cold.

  Dr. Bhowmick turned to a clean page in his legal pad and wrote something at the top. Daniel’s gaze flicked to the words. He could read most handwriting upside down, but Dr. Bhowmick appeared to be taking notes in some form of shorthand. Tilda was also studying the pen and paper, but Daniel doubted she was trying to read the handwriting. Cheap legal pad and a ball point pen that came in packs of ten at the Duane Reade is what Tilda, who owned an upscale stationery store, would see.

  “How long have you been married?”

  This information was on the intake assessment Daniel filled out before the appointment. He’d do the same thing to a suspect or witness—take information, ask again from a slightly different angle, then ask again from another. It’s how he pieced together the stories that solved crimes. Simple or complex, financial or physical, a crime was always about a story. People had goals, motivations, conflicts that escalated into theft and violence. Stories and numbers were his specialty. “Six months,” he said.

  Dr. Bhowmick halted mid-scrawl. “You’ve been married six months? How long have you known each other?”

  “A year.”

  “Eleven months,” Tilda clarified.

  Daniel slid her a look. “It’s the solstice. We met a year ago today,” he said, standing on the only solid ground in his earthquake-rattled world. That day was written on his bones, as real and solid as the love seat under him, the light on his skin, Tilda’s even breathing beside him.

  “So you’ve been together for almost a year, and married for most of that time. Why don’t you want to be married to Daniel any longer?”

  She looked away, out the large rectangular window in the living room. The therapist worked from his home, and had a nice view of Washington Square. NYU students crossing the square, pausing by the chess games going on at the south end of the park. Daniel remembered his student days, the freedom to explore everything body and mind had to offer. Tilda, four years younger, hadn’t crossed his path.

 

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