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“Hope so.”
41
Molly
The Day I Made Soup
I wasn’t sure what to do without Donovan. It was like someone had reached inside my brain and turned a switch off. Was this how co-dependent girls felt without their boyfriends?
I walked on the treadmill for a few minutes, but I didn’t enjoy doing it alone. I only tolerated it because it was an excuse to watch Donovan jogging shirtless on the treadmill next to me.
I left the gym and walked the loop around my floor, just like I had done before Donovan and I had hooked up. But every time I walked by his door I began worrying about him all over again. I changed my route and walked down the stairs to the first floor, around the pool, up the elevator to the second floor, into the lounge, then back up the stairs to the third floor. That route kept me from having to pass his door.
But it didn’t stop me from thinking about him.
My news podcast was focused on the pandemic, becauseof courseit was. I’d been listening to updates every day for the last three weeks, but now it was no longer an abstract idea. The descriptions of helpless patients hooked up to ventilators now carried a grim reality.
I turned off the podcast and listened to music instead. That worked for ten minutes before my mind drifted back to what Donovan had told me. He didn’t have a dry cough or a high fever. His only real symptom was that he was tired.
“He’s going to be fine,” I said out loud, just to hear someone’s voice. “He has to be fine.”
After spending the last three weeks together, being without him was excruciating. It was a taste of what things would have been like if I had been stuck in the hotel alone. It made me realize how lucky I was to have found him.
Mom would have called it fate, if she were still here.
At exactly noon, I knocked on the dividing door. “Rise and shine. What do you want for lunch? And don’t you dare tell me you’re not hungry.”
“Soup is fine,” came the muffled reply. He sounded even more tired than before.
“Do they have, like, cans of Campbell’s downstairs?” I asked. “The kind you dump in a bowl and microwave?”
He laughed weakly and said, “I’ll text you directions. I promise it will be easy.”
I went downstairs and followed his instructions. I diced up a carrot with one of the kitchen knives. Donovan had a fancy way of chopping veggies, but my way was slow and clumsy. Then I boiled dry spaghetti in a pot of chicken stock. I chopped up some of the leftover chicken Donovan had cooked for dinner last night and dumped it in the pot with the carrots.
“How much of these spices do I add?” I asked him on the phone.
“A pinch or two of each.”
I stared at a ring of measuring spoons. “What’s a pinch?”
“How much you can grab between two fingers. You know. A pinch.”
“But the thyme is fresh,” I replied. “It’s not like pinching a bunch of salt.”
I heard him laugh on the other line. “Maybe I should come down and finish it…”
“No!” I insisted. “I can do it for you. I’ll figure it out.”
I hung up and added a little bit of ground pepper, oregano, thyme, and basil. I stirred it together then tasted it on the spoon. I winced—I had used too much of something, but I wasn’t sure of what.
I tinkered with the soup for ten minutes, adding more broth and salt, before deciding it was as good as it was going to get. I filled a bowl with the steaming soup, placed it on a plate, and carried it upstairs.
I knocked on the partition door between our rooms and said, “It’s not as good as what you make, but it will have to do. I added some crackers. These aren’t your normal saltines. These are fancy Italian crackers I found in the pantry. I went the extra mile.”
“Put it in the partition,” he replied.
“I’m wearing a mask. I can bring it in to you.”
