What Can't Be Undone

by dee Hobsbawn-Smith

  Lance is a good boss. He puts up with me without ever getting past so much as a simmer. I’ve been working the lunch and prep shift here since Jared started school, five years now, a lifetime in the restaurant world, where cooks and chefs come and go like yesterday’s menus. Lance tolerates my occasional short-notice absences with good grace when Jared is sick and can’t go to school. My kid is too old for day care, too young to leave home alone. Still young enough to fling his arms around me when I come home with the pungency of onions and garlic clinging to my skin

  “Taste everything,” Lance said when he hired me. I was a good cook then, but green, no experience in a professional kitchen. He looked up at me from his cluttered desk in the corner of the kitchen, his face serious. He’s not a laughing kind of guy. “Build benchmarks of flavour and balance, an internal reference library. Write things down and keep mental notes too. Eventually you won’t need a cookbook.” I’ve mastered pastry and desserts in the time I’ve been here at the Blue Heron. That peanut and chocolate tart is our most popular dessert, a real challenge. Its flavours revolve around a burnt orange caramel sauce infused with rosemary. If I can’t balance it, if I sprinkle too many salt crystals on top of the chocolate as it sets, all those expensive ingredients, all my effort and time, it’s all wasted. You can’t undo things. He’s taught me how to build nuanced layers of flavour as elegant as a debutante’s ball gown. But if my palate doesn’t come back, I’m sunk. We change the menu on Tuesdays, so every week begins fresh, a new collection of dishes to try. No map. Just my appetite.

  When I get home, the message light on the kitchen desk phone is blinking. Jared. Game cancelled, gone to Omar’s for supper and a sleepover, tomorrow is Saturday, Mom, okay? His voice like toffee. I eat mechanically, standing at the fridge door, leftover cold chicken and Shanghai noodles, then lie down for a few minutes on Jared’s bed. The reeky boy-scent that clings to his duvet and sheets gets through, and I close my eyes. Just for a minute.

  I wake to the shriek of the phone.

  “Stacy. You coming in?”

  Damn. I slept through the night on my son’s bed. My eyes are grit and glass in the slanted sunlight, long angular rays like faded hopes, a wan puddle on the kitchen counter. This time two years ago, Matthew was buying me orchids to keep the dark at bay. My skin smells like yesterday’s food. Hate that stale air hanging on my clothes. Matthew always said he didn’t mind the odour, but I do. The past, reluctant to let go.

  The bus stop is two blocks away, air biting as I wait, long teeth like javelins. Weekday mornings, Jared rides with me to school, one arm around my neck, standing on the floor beside my seat, eye to eye, level grey, like the sea in a storm. “Maybe he’ll be back today, Mom.” He says the same thing every day. Every morning, I kiss my son and watch him walk up the path into the school. Then I go to work, cooking food that tastes like dust and ashes.

  Lance is at the counter when I arrive, a boning knife in his hand. “Sorry, sorry,” I say, button my whites and pick up my knives from the toolbox under his desk.

  “Yeah yeah. Be gentle with that pastry,” he admonishes as I grab my favourite rolling pin. Half an hour later, the pastry is cooling on the rack and the chocolate ganache is setting in a smooth brown pool as I bend close to the counter, sprinkling salt flakes. The caramel is bubbling on the stove behind me, slowly turning amber.

  “Stacy! Get on with it!” Lance, at my elbow, shakes his head in frustration. “Get a grip, woman. We have the rest of the ducks to take apart for confit and brunch prep to start.”

  I turn back to the tart, keep my cringe invisible. Philip, going past with cutlery to polish, brings me a cappo on his next trip. My good friend.

  On Monday, as I strain the chicken stock, I tease Maurice, sleek in narrow black shirt and fitted brocade vest. “Snazzy duds. That the Mediterranean influence?”

  He grins. “A man learns things in Europe. Ever been to Ireland? The roads are a foot wide, the cars are tiny, it rains, sheep everywhere, everyone drives like they’re in a rally. On the wrong side of the road. Like Italians, only crazier. Harrr-der to on-derrr-stand.”

  I laugh. The chicken carcasses jut out of the sieve, angular as runway models, all bone and tendon, flopping to their broken knees as I toss them into the garbage bag. “If that’s the worst thing you did in Europe, it can’t be too bad.”

  “No. But I don’t miss Europe.”

  “That’s the first time I’ve heard you laugh all year, Stacy,” Lance comments from the doorway. “Somebody buy this guy a coffee.”

  “Here, let me help you.” Maurice says, grabs the bag of chicken bones and heaves it into the trash. “I can run you home later, no prob. Jared might want another ride in my jalopy before it snows. Separated, eh? A year?”

  When I turn my head away, my eyes are swimming. He leans forward, pats my shoulder.

  Maurice adopts the habit of driving me home each afternoon before doubling back to Philip’s apartment in Hillhurst. I’m glad of the company. Relieved too, that he doesn’t hit on me. Friendship, I can bear. He cracks bad jokes and talks non-stop, tells off-colour stories about his cruise ship adventures and European nightclubs. Some days, Jared’s bus arrives in front of the apartment just as we pull up, and Jared leaps into the Corvette and insists we go around the block, black gravel spitting like curses behind the car’s rear tires. Even though it’s months until spring, he’s begging for ice cream. I sigh and shrug. Maurice spins us around the corner and insists on buying. Eating ice cream is an act of hope. Maybe this time it will taste like caramel on coffee. But no. My espresso ripple is dull, flat black. Bitter-sweet grapefruit sorbet for Maurice. Jared is still caught in his infatuation for blue bubblegum. When we get home, azure is smeared across his cheeks like a badge of honour.

  Winter arrives. Snow heralds the cold, and I braise Indian lamb shanks and Moroccan goat, simmer chickpea and lentil stews loaded with roasted garlic and leeks, get home from work in the dark, my skin stained orange from turmeric, my mouth still tasting only bitterness, most days arriving to find Jared home ahead of me. He has his own key, my latchkey lad, locks the door right behind himself. I have taken to cooking from books, following instructions to the letter, no longer adventuring, trust gone. Lance says nothing, just raises his eyebrows as he dips his tasting spoons into my pans. But one day I overhear Philip above the hiss of steam from the cappuccino machine.

  “ … used to make the most amazing soup of feta and cinnamon and eggplant, but she stopped. Nothing she makes is as good as it was. I feel sorry for her. And that pinched-off kid of hers — ” Maurice says something I can’t make out, a low-pitched interruption. “No, she never mentions him. He never comes around.”

  I drop my sauté pan on the countertop with a clatter. Philip’s voice abruptly halts. I poke my head around the end of the cappo machine. “For Chrissake,” I mutter.

  “What? I was just raving about your cooking, you poor doll. And telling Maurice how that cad hubby of yours just up and left you both high and dry.”

  Maurice interjects. “Never mind, sweetie. I’ll take your kid for ice cream. That’ll cheer you both up. And maybe a whisky float for me, I could use a little coddling.”

  “It’s too cold for ice cream, you idiot.” But I am laughing, and Maurice is as good as his word.

  After school, Jared clamours for ice cream when I mention Maurice. I demur and stay home, drinking herb tea, and shake my head as they enter the apartment, Jared stumbling over the doormat like a clumsy colt, Maurice neat-footed and efficient, cones clenched in their hands.

  “We brought you a tub of coconut, Mom, look, it’s pee-yellow,” Jared giggles.

  “Put it in the freezer, you goof. I’ll have some after supper.”

  Another Sunday. My day off. Maurice shows up, raises his thin eyebrows and Jared’s jacket is on before they are out the door. I barely look up from my book. I’m reading food science, tomes by Harold McGee and Diane Ackerman, hunting clues on scent and taste.

  Half
an hour passes before Jared comes back in alone and goes straight to his room.

  “Hey, kiddo. Where’s my ice cream?” No answer from down the hall. Oh well. There’s still sorbet in the freezer. I turn back to the pages of the science book.

  Jared’s in a funk by supper. I coax and crack bad jokes, but he’s morose, insists his dad is sure to drop by, complains about my lentil soup — why don’t I ever make dishes that his dad likes?

  “What’s wrong, sweetie?” I ask, but he kicks the table-leg, fidgets, pulls away from hugs and slices of chocolate tart.

  I finally snap at him when he sulks for the fifth morning in a row. He’s still sullen when I arrive home in Maurice’s Corvette, and it takes effort to convince him say bye when Maurice leaves.

  A week later, Maurice blows off his lunch shift. Just before service starts, Philip walks into Lance’s office, white and shaking, and emerges a few minutes later with Lance’s hand on his shoulder. Philip looks directly at me. “Stacy — ” His eyes slide away.

  “Not now, Philip.” Lance’s voice is curt. “Get on the phone, will you, and see if Ian has classes today. Maybe he can work a shift.”

  I try to catch Philip’s eye, but he ducks out to the dining room, then leaves in a flurry of gloves and scarf when lunch is done, so I drag a sack of onions across the tile floor to the counter and start slicing. The rhythm of my knife biting through each orb sends me into a trance that is undisturbed until Lance scrapes his chair across the floor to sit beside my workspace.

  My mouth is thick. Finally. This must be it. My cooking has not improved. My mouth still cannot distinguish between spices and sensations, bitterness trumping, but this feeling of fear, this is unmistakable. He is going to fire me.

  “Stacy.” I ignore him, walk to the back door and pull on my jacket. “Wait! Stacy, what are you doing?”

  “Sorry, Lance. I’ve done my best.” My voice is flat.

  “Stacy! This is not about you. Well, not directly. It’s about Maurice. Sit down.”

  “Maurice? He didn’t come to work. So?”

  “Philip says he’s been arrested.”

  “Why? What’s wrong? What’s he done?”

  “The Irish police are starting extradition proceedings. He’s been charged with sexual assault.” Lance raises his head, looks me straight in the face. “Well, child molestation, actually. A boy. About your Jared’s age.”

  Lance is still speaking but I don’t register the words as I fly out the door, cell phone in hand.

  Ordinary people look ordinary. So do the less ordinary, with their unusual, un-ordinary hungers. I was naïve, maybe arrogant, but I always assumed that I would be able to identify cruelty. Just by looking. But that sense failed me, too. What did happen is a mother’s nightmare, that my blithe unseeing faith in my own radar put my son at risk.

  Jared insists that nothing unusual happened between him and Maurice. “Ice cream,” he says when the cops ask straight out, repeating it when I ask more hesitantly. “We ate ice cream. That was all.” But I watch closely and see how my son holds himself within his body differently, tentatively, as if he is collecting and controlling his memories. Or his hurt. I can’t tell which. My prodding and prying might do more harm than good. How can I ever know how much salt to add, when enough is enough?

  The blue jay is haunting the feeder as usual this morning. Jared is asleep. He’s sleeping later, since Maurice.

  When I went back to work after the cops were done talking with my kid, Lance asked me what else was going on. “With your cooking, I mean,” he added. He was trying to be gentle, but under my whites my back started to sweat. So I told him. Simple as that. Now Lance is reading his own copies of McGee and Ackerman, and he stands behind me, tasting spoons ready. No recriminations. I wonder if the result would have been the same if it weren’t for Maurice. I’d hate to feel anything like gratitude for that man.

  The espresso pot’s on the stove. Maybe this time my coffee will taste black as night, sweet as sin, bitter as love.

  The Pickup Man

  TODAY WE’RE GOING TO SEE THE chucks in the desert near Drumheller, at the best small-town rodeo in Alberta. To celebrate, Clarisse is wearing a pink straw cowboy hat, clutching its satin cord around her neck as she spits cherry pits out the open window. I’ve been teasing her about that hat ever since we rolled outta Calgary, working hard to get a smile out of her, trying to keep her from fretting on our destination. “Lookin’ for a cowboy, Clarisse?” I say now. “You, a buckle bunny?”

  Before we left Calgary, I promised her that we’d bypass downtown Drumheller. She don’t ever want to drive down Main Street. Their house has too much of her blood in the floorboards for her to ever want to see it again. Just before the land dips down into the coulee and we turn east at the water tower above the prison, I see her shiver. I dunno if it’s concern for Aidan, facing the dangerous temptations of teen life, or realizing every man locked behind those bars has a wife or mother who’s watched his fall. Or knowing Gavin’s there in the slammer for a good long time. Looking at the water tower, I feel a river of regret, missing the Gavin I knew as a kid, the big brother who protected me from Dad’s fists. That’s not the Gavin Clarisse lived with, and she ain’t likely to believe me if I describe him to her.

  We’re quiet until we pull into the parking lot at the rodeo grounds. Aidan gets out of the back seat slowly. I’ve noticed that, he don’t run into things. He holds back and assesses the lay of the land. That sure ain’t what I see in most of the teenagers who hang out near the drop-in centre where I work security. Some of them run toward trouble with both arms open.

  The parking lot at the top of the coulee has a rail fence and closely cropped grass underfoot. Next to it, a big marquee tent for supper and dancing. The track is on the flatland at the bottom of the hill. It’s an open-air place, a natural theatre, wooden benches set into the hillside in a half-moon above the track. When the horses get going, the sound of their hooves will echo from the far wall of the coulee. You can go right down to the rail and hang over, your nose inches from the rigs. Drumheller is the stripped-down version of the Calgary Stampede — if you can cowboy here, you can cowboy anywhere.

  I grab a quick look at my watch, then point down the hill to the benches.

  “Down there, Aidan. Things don’t start ’til four, we’ve got half an hour yet, but I want you and your mom to meet my boss Linda. I ain’t seen as much of you two as I’d like since the move, and workin’ for Linda is most of the reason why.” I hope I don’t sound apologetic even though I mean the words as one, an explanation wrapped in a sunny day spent together. There haven’t been enough of ’em for my nephew and me.

  He lags behind as I lead Clarisse down the hillside. Her flimsy sandals slip on the grass and I want to scoop her up and carry her. Instead, I grab her right elbow, gentle as I can.

  “Thanks, Troy.” She don’t flinch, just pats my hand, then pulls her arm free.

  “Linda, here’s my sister-in-law Clarisse and her kid I told you about.”

  Linda’s sharp eyes squint a bit as she gives Aidan, then Clarisse, the one-up-and-down. My boss is surrounded by a gaggle of older gals all dolled up in exactly the same outfit Linda’s in. Tooled black leather cowboy boots and bare legs. Denim skirts. Denim jackets, each with orange blossoms stitched on the front, ‘Wild Lilies’ on the back in swanky red lettering. I watch Clarisse turn that thin neck of hers and study the women sitting in rows, their cushion-softened benches protecting their asses from the desert, and I wonder if those ladies seem like calm laying hens on soft fat roosts to my worn-thin sister-in-law.

  “You’ve never been to the chucks, Clarisse?” Linda asks.

  Clarisse turns back to Linda and shakes her head, a narrow movement that flicks her brown hair across her throat. She’s finally grown her hair again, the first time in years it’s hung past her ears. When Gavin and I met her sixteen years ago, she was a pretty thing, dancing up a storm at the St. Louis bar on the east side of Calgary, her hair
in a long braid that swung over her shoulder. She cut it short right after Gavin grabbed her by the braid when she was pregnant with the kid. She never did explain why she chose Gavin over me. Maybe it was my cowboying. Or the booze. But after she cut her hair and I didn’t call Gavin on it, I felt I lost the right to even ask.

  Linda smiles. “Well, allow me to enlighten you.” She hands Clarisse a beer, then lobs ginger ales from a cooler to Aidan and me, the tins beaded with cold. She waves at the women sitting close by. “We’re old hands, aren’t we, girls? We just love cowboys.” Without cuing, a well-padded blonde stands up, turns a Rockettes-type of spin to model her outfit, the other women hooting and hollering. Her skirt rides halfway up her brown thighs. Beside me, I can feel Aidan heat up, eyeing her skirt and fancy boots while Linda snorts, a little like a horse herself. “Chuck wagon drivers are auctioned off each spring,” she explains. “We girls, we’re all lawyers in Calgary. We all like the Stampede, so five years ago we put together this consortium, we do it every year for the chuckwagon auction. The lucky driver’s rig wears our tarp for the length of the circuit. We get the cowboy, he gets us. We’ll have worn him out by then, right, girls?”

  Clarisse, her hatband stained dark with sweat, perches next to one of the women, who smiles at her and starts telling a story about last year’s cowboy, a guy I know from Indian Head, tall dude, the biceps of a farrier. I half-expect Clarisse to make a sideways face at the skanky descriptions of body parts, but she simply laughs, her back slouching into a relaxed curve. I nudge Aidan, slumped between us, his gaze drawn back to the Lilies. “Look, another dumb-ass t-shirt. ‘Save fuel. Ride a cowboy.’ Ha.” He shrugs, but his cheeks are red as he stares at the women.