AFTER THE MEAL I went home and left them to dinner service. They were all just getting their second wind, the servers whisking away the plastic tablecloth we’d eaten off of and rearranging and resetting the dining room tables. One by one they disappeared and returned with their neckties neatened or lipstick applied. The cooks were in high gear in the back, yelling about a béarnaise someone should have prepped. I snuck out the back door. The dishwasher waved to me.
At home I drank a beer and then took a long bath. There was a message on my machine from Jill, but I didn’t call her back. I was feeling virtuous. If I went out and got home late or drank too much, I’d look like a lightweight. Anyway, I felt warm and relaxed now that I’d bathed. I put on my thick terry cloth robe and lay down on my couch with a book and the menu I’d borrowed from the maitre d’. Coulis, ganache, mille-feuilles. I didn’t know how to make any of this stuff yet, but I planned to learn it all.
Outdoors I heard cars go by, trailed by waves of music. I missed my car stereo. Across the street my landlord’s car pulled in and rumbled to a stop. The landlords weren’t so bad, actually. They liked to talk my ear off if one of them cornered me in the laundry room, mainly about the neighborhood association. I had this place for another month, longer if I wanted it, but I was trying to think ahead. I missed living with someone, or at least having neighbors to visit. I decided I’d start looking soon, just to give myself plenty of time. I could do better than this if I tried.
I set my alarm for five, and went to bed.
I WOKE UP AS the people downstairs came trudging up to their door. It was four thirty, and I lay there and watched the sky lighten for a while before I had to get up and go to work.
For a long time after Kate died, I forgot that I didn’t believe the dead visited. I kept trying to picture her, a diaphanous form at the foot of my bed, in the door of my bedroom.
I glanced at the alarm clock. Almost time to get up. I had promised Jill we’d go for a drink after I finished my free-labor stint for the day. I thought I might call Mark, but I had seen him a few days ago for the ravioli. We’d had fun, but I wasn’t quite sure how this was going to go. I didn’t want to be all over him. We seemed to be doing a dating sort of thing now, and who knew how that was supposed to work? I had managed to avoid dating like a normal person for nearly two years.
At five I got up and showered. I put on jeans and my most comfortable tennis shoes, a T-shirt under a fleece jacket. Once I was in the hot kitchen, the T-shirt would be plenty.
Outside it was cold and still a little dark. It was almost November. I started walking toward the restaurant, figuring it would take me about half an hour to get there. I could have driven, but I thought the walk would wake me up. And it did; it felt good to be out and moving, my breath freezing in the air. The sky lightened. Around me the tree branches began to shiver as birds and squirrels moved through them. I could get up to do this every day.
When I arrived I went up the fire escape to the back door. It was unlocked. A guy in whites was dumping butter into a huge mixer. He glanced up as I came in and said, “Hey. You Bec? I’m Chris.” He offered me a floury hand. “Coffee’s by the door.”
When I came back with my mug he had me cutting apples for pastry and measuring flour. Then I chopped hickory nuts and walnuts in a food processor, its bowl dusted with oily crumbs. I glanced at the recipe card clipped to the edge of the shelf, looked around to find the brown sugar and cinnamon. This kitchen was easy to get comfortable in, much easier than it had seemed in the chaos yesterday.
In the morning, it turned out, the kitchen was calm and peaceful. The room grew warmer and more humid as we opened and shut the oven door, filling a rolling rack with trays of chocolate tart shells and croissants. It smelled of cinnamon and baking apple, coffee and lemon zest. Even after my walk I was still stiff from my apprenticeship from the day before, so I stretched my back out and rolled my neck to shake off the soreness. I felt my joints warm up and roll smoothly.
Maybe I should be a baker. I thought I could spend my days like this forever, and maybe this week I’d learn to make a better croissant than the ones I’d tried at home. But I still wanted to know the rest of it, the roasting and stock making and pâté sieving. And this was just the French stuff. I hadn’t gotten started on Indian, or Japanese, or Thai.
I went back to chopping, keeping the tip of the knife on the board and letting the blade do the work. I would have to buy more knives, and now that I had handled a really good one, even better than the ones Kate had used, I knew what to look for.
The knife edge slid right through apples and pears, quick and smooth. I kept my knuckles forward to guide the flat of the blade, my fingertips curled in toward my palm, my thumb tucked under and protected. It wasn’t actually so different from the cooking I used to do for Kate—or actually, for me. It hadn’t fully occurred to me till now that she had rearranged a whole section of her life just so I could have that, the dinners with caregivers, the elaborate meals for only Evan, or only me.
I finished the apples and pears. I brought a big stainless steel bowl filled with them over to Chris, who was tucking dark chocolate inside croissant dough, his fingers shining with butter. He glanced into the bowl and nodded. He stepped back, wiping his hands on the towel tucked inside his apron string.
“You want to finish these?” he said. “I can start the apple ones. Just follow what I did here. But work pretty quickly. If the butter in the dough melts it won’t be flaky.”
“Okay,” I said. So that was why my croissants had been such doorstops.
I sounded more confident than I felt. Le Champignon’s pain au chocolat was something of a city institution. I wondered if someone had given Chris the idea that I had a lot more experience than I did. On the counter lay several more trays of satiny, cream-colored dough, cut into rectangles and resting on parchment paper. I took a couple chunks of chocolate and laid them in the center of one, then folded the dough around it. I worked quickly, and tried not to handle it much to keep the heat from my hands to a minimum. It looked lopsided, so I neatened it up as best I could and went on to the next, working a little more slowly but still briskly, and tucked it—prettily, I thought—into a rectangle. This one looked neater, more professional. It wasn’t that difficult, though admittedly I hadn’t done the hard part, the dough-making. But I didn’t want to get caught up in that yet. I’d learn it, eventually. It was better to give yourself a moment to get your bearings. You had to find that rhythm, and have your plan set out in front of you. The day I’d first cooked at Kate’s house, putting together the food for the party, had felt something like this. You set your ingredients and your tools before you; you drank some cold water or some good coffee and breathed in the fragrance of tomato stems or olives or runny cheese. You fortified yourself.
I did another croissant and then another, the heady chocolate scent rising into the heat of the air. As I worked I realized I’d been hunching over the trays, my neck bent and my shoulders rounded. There was no need to be so tense about it, I thought; no need to be the crabbed figure in the corner of the kitchen. I straightened up and continued working, letting my mind drift while my hands lifted, spread, and folded. I listened to the streets starting to move with traffic, and the vendors setting up for the market. Butter and sugar were browning in the ovens. I knew how to do this. I felt the ease settle back into my muscles, and the memory of the work came back to me.
Table of Contents
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
>
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
You're Not You Page 31