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“Mind if I use the bathroom to weed-whack my face?”
“Not at all,” she said. “Need warm water? I have extra from my tea.” She extended a white mug to him, “Big Spender” scrawled across it in curvy gold script. Paul must love that one.
“Thanks,” he said. Grant took the mug carefully from her hand and made his way through the freezing bedroom into the bathroom. He hunted through Paul’s bathroom drawers until he found shaving lotion and a razor and got to work. A few minutes later he wiped his shorn face dry on a towel and rinsed the soapy remnants down the drain.
He joined Melinda as she loaded a large wooden tray with their breakfast.
“Let me carry that,” he said.
“No, you have to move that beastly coffee table so we can eat.” She swished past him with the laden tray.
As if he would allow her to carry a four-course meal in her damaged condition.
“I can do both,” he replied, intercepting the tray and gesturing that she precede him into the den. Grant watched the sway of Melinda’s hips until she stepped between the couch and the coffee table. Grant laid the tray on the table, crouched to grab the table’s turned legs, and gently positioned it between the sheepskin rug and the couch. “Here okay?” he asked.
“Perfect.” She dropped more quickly than he would have liked her to sit, her back against the couch. Two stoneware bowls full of steaming oats wafted their wares amid smaller dishes full of chopped nuts, dried fruit, and strips of pale somethings that were frankly questionable. Beside them waited a small stoneware jug, a jar of honey, and a jar of cashew butter. His dad would be so proud. Hell, a bed and breakfast would be proud. All it lacked was a sprig of lilac.
“This looks professional,” he said. He crossed his legs to sit opposite her on the floor. “But did we need the sliced albino ears?”
Melinda giggled and drizzled honey on her oats.
“Those are dried pears, I’ll have you know,” she said with pseudo-indignation, or so he hoped. “Some snowbound guests consider them a delicacy.” She accessorized her dish with nuts, fruit, and whitish liquid from the pitcher. “Almond milk du box,” she said to his questioning look.
“Of course,” he said. Grant added fruit and nuts to his own bowl and dug in.
“Another masterpiece,” he swallowed and said after a while. “Who taught you how to cook under fire?”
She burst out laughing and Grant’s chest warmed when she didn’t flinch. “That’s a good way to put it. I think...I think it was my mom, actually. My dad’s Indian, West Bengali, and I got my love of sweetness and spice from him. Plus coconut milk, soaking things, sprouting things, all the concoctions. But my mom taught me to stare down a kitchen, make friends with it, and become one with it.” She laughed and took a bite of her oatmeal. “That’s abstract, I guess, but that’s the essence of it. She took any twist you threw at her, fearlessly.”
Melinda swirled her spoon around her bowl to capture the last bite, then continued, eyes on the air between them. “She and my dad used to have fun in the kitchen together. His collection of family recipes plus her inventiveness meant they’d be in there arguing, laughing, combining, you name it. My brother and I learned to stay the heck away when they were in the kitchen together. But there was also this sweet magic about it, so sometimes we’d end up tiptoeing to the doorway and watching.”
Grant watched her face come alive as she spoke of her family. But what had she said? Used to.
“Do they not cook together anymore?”
He cursed himself for a fool as her face shuttered and closed.
“My mom left when I was fifteen and my brother was twelve. She never divorced my dad, never tried to, but she also never came back. They’re still married.”
Her broken expression twisted his gut.
“After my brother and I were born, my mom got pregnant again. Their third. Planned. She lost the baby at seven months along, when I was seven and my brother was four.” Melinda’s spoon froze in the air. “After the initial shock, she seemed okay. Like, for years she seemed okay. But it did something to her that she couldn’t recover from. And how could a seven-year-old fix heartbreak like that?”
The question was rhetorical, and Grant knew it.
“When I was about thirteen, she kind of...snapped.” Melinda’s face had gone blank. “She started criticizing us all the time. Telling us all the problems we had and stuff we did wrong. She was a psychologist and had always been so amazing at letting me have my own experience and not telling me how to feel, all that psychology crap. That completely changed. She was like an attack dog about every decision I made. I was so confused, and I was so pissed.”
She laughed without mirth and the sound tore at his chest.
“‘Resentful’ is the grown-up word to use. I felt resentful. It was all her shit! All of her pain, her loss, her confusion at...at...”—she hunted for words—“at being alive when her poor baby had died. Our sister,” she finished. “Our poor baby sister.”
Melinda set her bowl on the coffee table and sighed. “My dad didn’t know what to do, and of course he was getting her attacks, too. He was ‘too stubborn,’ ‘too locked in tradition,’ ‘too hard on us,’ ‘too easy on us,’ too everything. She was relentless. Eventually she moved out. Blamed him for some made-up thing.” She toyed with her necklace. “He’s close with his family, but he’s hardly locked in tradition. We celebrated the major Indian holidays, but in no way was he into any archaic inhibiting behavior from anyone’s tradition. Nothing she said made sense.”
Her eyes flashed with hurt as well as anger.
“You were fifteen when she left?”
“Yeah.”
