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fifteen
Sean had never bought tofu in his life. The only vegetarian he had ever known had been a girl in high school named Karen who ate fish but claimed it didn’t count because it “wasn’t meat.” When pressed with how she could be a vegetarian if she ate living creatures, albeit from the sea, she gave a lengthy explanation about grazing cows and methane emissions, plus chickens with shaved beaks crammed into small spaces, versus the freedom of the open ocean.
Even at that age, Sean had a good bullshit detector, which meant he knew that Delaney was probably the first real vegetarian he had known. Despite thinking he knew what a vegetarian was, he still texted her about a dozen times that day, making sure he was on the right track.
Are you vegetarian or vegan?
Vegetarian.
So you don’t eat meat but you’ll eat cheese and eggs?
Correct. Though I do get my cheese and eggs from a local farm, rather than the big chains.
So it’s about the animals for you. You want them to be treated with respect.
I try to treat everyone with respect. We’re all animals. I don’t differentiate.
Sean realized he’d gone down a twisty, turny rabbit hole, one he would not mind spending more time in if Delaney was going to be there, but for now he just needed to know what to fix for dinner. He backpedaled out of the murky ethical swamp.
Ok. So no meat. But eggs, cheese, dairy, honey are all ok?
Honey? Are you using honey in your dish? #impressed
Shit. Not only did Delaney think he was using honey, she’d called tonight’s dinner adish. A dish implied a whole lot more than the current situation going on in Sean’s kitchen, which involved a block of extra firm tofu, a couple bunches of broccolini—which he guessed was a fancy word for skinny broccoli—and white rice, which any idiot could pull off. He also had some fresh ginger and a couple cans of stir-fry vegetables, which had those baby corns you saw in Chinese takeout. Sean wasn’t sure why he’d bought them, other than the baby corns seemed like the hallmark of stir-fry, which was what he was trying to pull off.
What’s your favorite food?
Sean realized it was probably too late for that question, which should’ve come before the tofu, snobby broccoli and baby corns but it was probably too late for a lot of things, such as cultivating the ability to knock Delaney’s socks off with his cooking skills.
Peanut butter.
“Seriously?” Sean tossed his phone down and glowered at his recipes. Not only could he have made Delaney a peanut butter sandwich without going grocery shopping, he knew exactly how to do it without poring over online videos.
Callie, who’d been prancing around the countertops, hoping Sean would stop what he was doing and feed her, glared at his sudden mood swing.
Sean had no idea how he was going to work peanut butter into his dish. He’d already spent more than an hour today watching the videos. He’d even bought a wok, thinking maybe this would prompt him to cook stir-fry more than just once. If he was wrong, the worst thing that happened was he was out sixty bucks trying to impress a beautiful woman.
He got out his mini blender, which he’d only used for protein shakes, and threw in some of the fresh ginger, chopped, along with a couple of garlic cloves and an assortment of things from jars, like soy sauce and rice vinegar. He squinted at the recipe on his iPad, trying to remember if the olive oil went in now or later, saw it was now, added it, then hit Blend. After a minute he opened up the blender, stuck in his pinky and gave it a taste. Not bad. He poured the marinade over the tofu, which he’d cubed into a bowl, and figured he just might pull this off. He’d eaten a crumble of the tofu earlier, and when it tasted like absolutely nothing, Sean had turned to the internet and found out that this was the whole point of tofu. It was supposed to taste like nothing. That was the magic, one article declared. With a little bit of preparation and a lot of playfulness, you could make tofu taste like anything you wanted!
“I don’t know what’s playful about it,” Sean grumbled, “but the sauce is good.” He stuffed the tofu into the fridge to marinate.
Last step was to clean. Callie watched, stiff in her cat statue pose, while Sean hustled around the apartment, dusting, vacuuming, swishing the toilet. He set the table with the nice dishes, which meant they weren’t paper plates, but the actual dishes his sister, Mary, had given him after his divorce. They were blue with yellow and orange stripes. Mary said, “These are the most masculine dishes I have. I never use them,” and set them on the counter of Sean’s new bachelor pad, along with some groceries, a chocolate Bundt cake and two pieces of wall art, both religious in nature.
She’d regarded her little brother over her black-rimmed glasses and Sean had waited for a comment full of veiled disappointment that Sean hadn’t stuck out his marriage with Kim. “Kim didn’t have enough drive for you,” Mary had said, surprising him. “It wasn’t particularly noticeable until she refused to have your children and start a respectable family. I could tolerate her lounging and laziness before that, but after a certain age, that behavior becomes unseemly and unacceptable. I hope she finds her path, the good Lord willing, but I’m pleased you are no longer being led into Satan’s Valley.”
Sean hadn’t known what to say to all that. In all his youth of being forced to go to church he’d not once figured out what Satan’s Valley was, though it had always sounded a little pervy. One thing he did know was that of all the negative places you could be where Mary was concerned—the corner, the doghouse—Satan’s Valley was the worst. She had too many years on him to be like a sister and was too busy being a mother to her own children to have much space to offer Sean. She approached raising him as a responsibility assigned by God, not to be questioned, only enacted with a firm hand. Sean had long ago stopped trying to connect with her and had just taken his relationship with his sister for what it was worth: lucky he hadn’t been in the foster care system. “Okay,” he’d said about the plates, the cake, the advice on Kim and the Jesus wall hanging. “Thanks.”
Sean hadn’t cared much at the time, but he was glad to have the dishes now. He couldn’t serve Delaney tofu stir-fry on paper plates. He set out forks and napkins and then finished off the table with a vase full of pink and green flowers, hoping they would provide a distraction from the apartment, which was uncluttered but not superclean.
Callie broke her statue pose and leaned forward into a stretch, her eyes closing as she pushed her peach chin into the air. “You like it?” Sean stroked along her back as she purred. “Don’t come around at dinner, expecting treats. There won’t be any meat tonight.”
She flopped on the counter and offered her tummy for pets.
“Very accommodating of you. Wish me luck.”
Delaney rode the Rebel to Sean’s apartment. The complex was in an older section of town, probably been there twenty years, with a crowded array of parking spots that weren’t numbered. Delaney might’ve spent some time trying to find a spot, but that was another benefit of riding a motorcycle—you could park in places even the most compact of cars couldn’t dare to go. She found a slot in the back of the complex, next to a streetlamp, and wedged herself near an old four-door with a sheet of plastic serving as the driver’s side window. She removed her helmet and stripped her gloves, relieved to be free of them in this humidity, and used her mirror to fix her hair as best she could. She’d pinned it back before leaving home so mostly she just needed to revive the smashed helmet look. Once she was satisfied, Delaney turned to the building and wondered where number sixteen might be.
A group of teenagers milled around an old sedan across the lot, their cigarette smoke heavy on the summer wind and their laughter punctuated with curse words. The sounds of their voices slowed as she neared them, approaching a stairwell that had numbers and arrows, like halls in a hotel room. The teens gave Delaney a once-over while she found number sixteen. They looked like they might call out, whistle or make a comment, but then, as was often the case, they thought better of it, based on whatever they saw. They resumed their conversation as she climbed the stairs to the second level. In a dark hallway that reeked of tobacco and spicy food she found Sean’s place—a red door with black numbers—and rapped with her knuckles.
