There was one lady who bought it.
“I thought she was so smart,” said Mr. Harmon.
“I asked her what she did with it.”
She said, “Mr. Harmon, it makes my hair so shiny.”
“I said, ‘Try it on the arugula.’ You know what she said? She said, ‘Arugula? What’s that?’”
Slowly the little store, like all little stores, became a reflection of its owner. Slowly, Mr. Harmon’s love of food and his sense of order became apparent in the aisles.
Everything was prepped in the back by Estelle, so everything out front looked perfect. There were cauliflowers so pretty you could use them as centrepieces. There were regular beets, and golden beets, and striped beets and baby beets. There were heirloom carrots and twenty-eight varieties of tomatoes.
And pacing up and down the aisles in the middle of it all, like an orchestra conductor, was Mr. Harmon.
Under the old man’s tutelage, Sam finally found something he was good at.
Facing the tomatoes.
It meant organizing the cans of tomatoes perfectly. The cans had to be lined up to the front of the shelf, labels facing out, no spaces. Sam loved the primary colours of the labels—the bright yellow and red cans beside the bright green ones. San Marzano tomatoes from Italy.
“The greatest tomato in the world,” said Mr. Harmon. “You know why?”
“The water?” said Sam.
“Yes,” said Mr. Harmon. “And …”
“The climate,” said Sam.
“That too,” said Mr. Harmon.
“What else?” said Sam.
“The volcano,” said Mr. Harmon. “The mountain of Vesuvius. The volcano has conferred fertility on the land. You are eating fire. There is a bit of ash in each one.”
Tomatoes from Naples. Figs from Argentina. Grapes from Chile.
Sam was learning geography in the best way possible. With his stomach instead of his brain.
The first time Mr. Harmon cooked pasta at lunch was the first time Sam ate it without meat sauce. Mr. Harmon served it with olive oil and garlic and lemon.
“This is so good,” said Sam, sopping up the olive oil with a crusty piece of baguette. Crusty baguette that tasted of fire, black on the bottom, brown on the top, soft and airy in the middle. The crust so hard it hurt his mouth.
“It tastes like burnt caramel,” said Sam. “Except sour.”
“Because it’s made from sourdough,” said Mr. Harmon, reaching for the salt.
Mr. Harmon showed Sam how you could tell by the bottom if the bread had been made by fire or by factory.
“If it has tiny circles on the bottom, it means it rode a conveyor through a factory oven.”
He taught Sam how to dip the bread in olive oil instead of using butter. Sprinkling some of the flaky salt on the oil first.
Sam said, “You love salt, Mr. Harmon.”
Mr. Harmon smiled.
Mr. Harmon said, “Flaked sea salt. From England.”
After lunch Sam stood in front of the shelves of pasta and stared.
Pasta di semola di grano duro. Brown paper bags with cellophane windows: capellini, bucatini, spaghettini, linguine. And on a shelf of honour, all by itself, farfalle. Pastas shaped like bow ties, each one dyed with squid ink and beet water. Red-and-black-striped bow ties. So perfect you could wear them. They made him smile.
Now he had a favourite job and a favourite section.
One day Mr. Harmon said, “You’ve been here three months. You qualify for a professional discount. Twenty percent.”
That night Sam took home a bag of pasta and a box of sea salt.
He finally felt like he belonged.
Not long after that, Mr. Harmon made Sam his first coffee.
A cappuccino.
Mr. Harmon made one for himself every morning. This morning he put one down beside Sam. He had sprinkled sugar on the surface of the foamy milk. Drinking the coffee through the sugar-foam made it taste like the bread. Burnt caramel.
“I like it, Mr. Harmon.”
He felt grown up.
“You like this too,” said Mr. Harmon. The two of them were sitting on their milk crates in the little kitchen at the back, a plate of greens covered with ribbons of salty Parmesan on their laps. Mr. Harmon was holding a bottle over the cheese.
“Balsamic,” said Mr. Harmon. “From …?”
“Modena,” said Sam. “Eighteen years old. Thick, like syrup.”
Mr. Harmon smiled.
“And?” said Mr. Harmon.
“You can pour it on your vegetables,” said Sam.
“Drizzle,” said Mr. Harmon. “You can drizzle it on your vegetables.”
Mr. Harmon held a wedge of the cheese in the air.
Sam said, “The whole milk from the morning is mixed with the skimmed milk from the night before.”
“The naturally skimmed milk,” said Mr. Harmon. “And aged?”
“For two years,” said Sam.
“We want to educate people,” said Mr. Harmon.
But it was Sam’s education he was most concerned with.
“Fresh herbs,” Mr. Harmon said, waving a sprig of thyme in the air.
“Fresh herbs breathe life into everything,” said Sam. “Add them to cheese, you have a spread. Add them to stock, you have a soup. Add them to greens, and you have a salad. It’s like magic.”
“Fresh spinach.” There was no stopping Mr. Harmon once he got going like this.
“Speak firmly and it wilts.”
Mr. Harmon threw handfuls of fresh spinach into nearly everything he cooked: soups, omelettes, sandwiches. It didn’t matter.
A piece of grilled fish on a bed of wilted spinach. Easy. Nutritious. Delicious.
“And no planning required,” said Mr. Harmon.
Potatoes!
What can a potato not do? Fry it. Mash it. Roast it.
Shred it into soup and it tastes like cream.
“The chameleon of vegetables,” said Mr. Harmon.
Sam’s friends came and visited him at the store.
He was embarrassed that they saw him, in the too-large apron, looking like a popsicle.
But what they saw was that he had a job.
“How much do you make?” they asked.
“Minimum,” he said. “Plus tips.”
“My parents won’t let me get a job,” said Aiden. “How much is minimum, anyway?”
Jonathan bought a juice.
Louis said, “I’m going on break.”
Sam had to cash them out. “$1.27,” he said. “One, two, three cents makes thirty, two dimes to fifty, two quarters to a toonie.”
They looked at him with awe.
“Did you do that in your head?” said Jonathan.
One day, when Sam and Mr. Harmon were eating their lunch, Sam said, “Mr. Harmon, working in your grocery store is like living in a cookbook.”
“I like that,” said Mr. Harmon. “Louis, did you hear what the boy said?”
He was sautéing rapini in olive oil.
“Someone bring me garlic,” he called.
This was the moment he’d been waiting for.
The next day, Mr. Harmon said, “I’m going to the doctor tomorrow.”
He was holding out a key.
“I want you to open,” he said.
There are moments in every life when things change … forever.
When boy meets girl. Or girl meets boy. And there is a rustle somewhere far away. The sound of a page turning, of the cards being reshuffled, of a great flock of birds fluttering into the sky.
A coming together.
Or maybe it’s a coming apart. Not a hello at all, but a goodbye. And the birds don’t flutter, they wheel into the sky, twisting and turning so that you never see them again.
Or maybe you’re working in a grocery store. Maybe you’re a boy working in a grocery store and the owner gives you the key to the store and tells you he wants you to open in the morning.
Sam woke at six, an hour earlier than he had t
o. He tiptoed downstairs and sat at the kitchen table by himself, eating a bowl of Rice Krispies.
As he was leaving, his mother came down in her pyjamas.
“Good luck,” she said.
He got to the store forty-five minutes early. He slipped the key in the door and ran to the alarm. He punched in the numbers that Mr. Harmon had written on the small piece of yellow paper.
He held his breath until the flashing red light turned to a steady green. And then he exhaled and went about his business. He turned on the lights. He uncovered the vegetables. He fetched the float from under the potatoes in the walk-in cooler. He put out the berries and other fruit. He set the sandwich board on the sidewalk.
And then, everything done, he made a coffee the way Mr. Harmon had taught him, frothing the milk in the stainless-steel steamer.
Finally, he opened the door and took the coffee over to the cash register and sat on the stool and waited.
He knew the day was going to be crazy until Mr. Harmon got there. He also knew he could handle it.
It was a lovely feeling—sitting in the quiet by himself.
It was a feeling he’d never had before. Like being onstage before a play. Or on a sailboat waiting for the wind.
A feeling of being grown up.
As it happened, the first customer was a young man. Older than Sam. But still, young. A university student.
The young man wandered around and then brought his basket to the counter, staring at his stuff tentatively.
“Cooking supper for a girl,” he said.
Sam looked at the order and then up at the university boy.
“It’s her birthday,” said the boy.
Sam nodded. Then he pointed at the box of spaghetti and said, “May I … make a recommendation?”
Sam walked around from the cash and over to the pasta section. He came back with a brown paper bag of the bow-tie farfalle and a little jar of homemade pesto.
He said, “I think this will make a bigger impression.”
Then he said, “One more?”
The university boy nodded.
Sam picked up the iceberg lettuce and came back with a bunch of arugula and a small piece of Parmigiano-Reggiano.
He said, “Do you have a vegetable peeler?”
The university boy nodded.
Sam said, “Use it to peel the cheese. Let the pieces lie on top of the arugula like ribbons. Then drizzle it with some balsamic.”
The university boy said, “Balsamic?”
“From Modena,” said Sam, reaching for his coffee.
He was beaming.
If there’d been a thought bubble hanging over his head, it would have said, This. Is. Awesome.
Just as Sam was handing the young man the bottle of balsamic, Mr. Harmon arrived outside the store. He brought his hand up to shade his eyes, trying to identify the bottle through the window. He couldn’t tell. Olive oil, maybe. Balsamic? A slow smile lit his face as he watched Sam place one hand into a brown paper bag and lower the bottle in with the other.
Hiring is a tricky business. It’s hard to get it right. But Mr. Harmon had known this one was going to work from the start. There was something special about the boy. He had an openness, a softness, an innocence. He wouldn’t always work in a grocery store. Mr. Harmon had no illusions about that. But the things he was teaching him—to have pride, and to take care, especially with the small things—he would remember them all. And he would remember his first coffee, and how to slow-roast tomatoes, and the secrets of pasta. A boy could carry worse things with him as he began the long journey into manhood.
JIM AND MOLLY
On New Year’s Day, Dave’s neighbour, Jim Scoffield, called his mother in Nova Scotia. The conversation was brief—Jim’s mother is anxious on long-distance calls. She grew up when long-distance was an extravagance. She still watches the clock when she’s talking to someone from away.
So, as usual, when Jim called her, they talked just long enough for Irene to give him an update on her sciatica and to report on the price of bananas at the Lawrencetown grocery. Pretty soon after that, it was time to say goodbye, and Jim and Irene slipped into the same exchange they’ve had every New Year’s since Jim was in his twenties.
“Well. Anyway. Happy New Year,” said Jim.
“It will only be happy for me,” said Jim’s mother, “if you find yourself a wife and settle down.”
Now, Jim is what people used to call “a confirmed bachelor.” It’s a designation, and a life, with which Jim is entirely comfortable. He’s had various relationships over the years, but he’s never met anyone who could convince him that he’d be any good at marriage.
Marriage, Jim suspects, is something that is not in his genes.
Jim grew up an only child. The only child of a single mom. He lived alone with Irene in the Annapolis Valley, South Mountain.
When Jim was small Irene told him that his father had died from a wound he received in the war. She said he died shortly after Jim was born.
Discretion was not a skill possessed by many of Jim’s extended family. Jim learned the truth from his uncle during a Thanksgiving dinner. It was the Thanksgiving Jim turned nine.
One night, when Jim was only a few months old, his father had, apparently, sat up in bed and announced matter-of-factly that marriage wasn’t at all what he’d imagined it to be. Before Irene could wipe the sleep from her eyes, he had packed a small bag and was out the door. He never returned.
Despite her insistence that Jim should be married, Irene never remarried herself. “I’ve had my kick at the can, thank you very much” was all she said when the topic came up.
But it wasn’t his parents’ failed marriage that convinced Jim to avoid one of his own. It was his grandparents’ reputedly happy marriage that really put him off.
Married for over fifty years in the end, Lloyd and Edna Hickocks ran their marriage like an ongoing siege. The “happy” part of Lloyd and Edna’s happy marriage came from the occasional victories they scored in the war of their lives; the happy part was the small acts of torture they inflicted on each other.
Every Sunday night, for example, Edna produced the only dessert of the week—a warm pineapple upside-down cake. She made pineapple upside-down cake because Lloyd had once said he hated it.
In the summer, after everyone else had eaten their dessert, Lloyd would take himself down to Miller’s general store and buy an Oh Henry! bar as consolation. In the winter, he would remain indoors and wallow in self-pity.
But Lloyd never wallowed for long. Because at precisely eight p.m. each evening, just as Edna had finished the dishes, just as Edna was sitting down to relax for the night, Lloyd would produce his bagpipes and serenade her for half an hour.
“Serenade” was not a word that Edna would have used to describe it. Edna said the sound of Lloyd playing the bagpipes was like having an ice pick driven into her ears.
As Jim got older, he grew to admire his grandparents’ combative creativity. But he knew that he didn’t have the fortitude to engage in that kind of marital bliss. So Jim is content, quite happy in fact, to find himself on the far side of fifty and living alone. Well, that’s not entirely true. Jim doesn’t live alone. He lives with Molly. Molly is Jim’s twenty-year-old cat.
Now most people who meet Jim wouldn’t peg him as a cat man, and he isn’t. In fact, Jim never had any intention of having pets. But one afternoon he went out to the garage to find his stepladder, and while he was rummaging around back there he heard a pathetic mew from the alley. He went out to investigate, and there was Molly, perched on top of a garbage can—tiny, dirty, thin, and sad. When she saw Jim, she began to mew with such intensity that Jim did something completely out of character: he picked her up.
He took her inside and gave her some canned tuna and a bowl of water. After a few phone calls and visits to the neighbours, Jim printed handbills and tacked them on telephone poles and at local businesses around the neighbourhood. He called the Humane Society.
No one came forward to claim Molly.
In the end, Jim felt this was for the best. During the short while they’d been together, Molly had made herself thoroughly at home. Despite her forwardness in the alley, she turned out to be more or less self-sufficient. She expected her food dish to be full and her litter box empty, but other than that she seemed to expect nothing from Jim. When she was feeling particularly friendly, she might sit next to him on the couch and allow herself to be petted. Sometimes, especially if the house was cold, she would sleep at the foot of Jim’s bed. But most of the time she ignored him. Or at least gave the impression that she was tolerating his presence, in her house.
That was twenty years ago, so it shouldn’t have been such a surprise at their last checkup, just before Christmas, when the vet announced that Molly was failing.
“Her thyroid,” said the vet, “is underactive. She’ll need medication. Every day.”
And then he added, “Her kidney function is down, too.”
Jim came home from the vet with a bottle of pills and a sense of foreboding. He set her little cage on the kitchen floor and opened the door. Molly stayed put.
Jim got down on his hands and knees and peered into the carrier. Molly was lying at the back of the dark box.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were sick?” said Jim.
He stuck a little butter on the end of his finger and wiggled it in front of the door of the cage. Molly stood unsteadily and licked the butter. When she finished they both curled up on the sofa and took a nap.
Jim gave Molly her first pill that evening. It was a battle of heroic proportions. The only instructions the vet had given Jim were to put the pill at the back of the cat’s tongue. He didn’t mention how you were supposed to get yourself to the back of a cat’s tongue, especially an angry cat. By the time Jim managed to get the pill into Molly, his hands were covered in tiny bite marks. He looked as if he’d been stapled to something.
At two pills a day, he’d be shredded by the weekend.
By the third day, however, Jim had figured out how to get the tiny pill, thoroughly engulfed in a glob of butter, down Molly’s throat. “And I don’t care what it does to your cholesterol levels,” Jim told her.
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