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“You,” she says after another bite and a happy sigh. “No false modesty. You just expected me to say it was good.”
“I’ve made this before. I know it’s good, so I didn’t expect you to say it, but your assessment doesn’t surprise me.” When she only laughs again, a smile flickers at the edges of my mouth. “All right, I appreciate you saying so.”
“Better,” she says.
We talk easily for the next few minutes as we eat, and I ask questions about her store. What kind of customers come in? How do they act? What do they buy?
“Why all the interest?” she asks when I want to know the average age of the customer. “Are you a secret Handy’s Hardware investor I should know about?”
This pulls another small smile out of me, and I know it probably looks sheepish. “Occupational hazard. I’m fascinated by all kinds of microcultures.”
“You’re an odd dude.”
“Not the first time I’ve heard it.” Not by a long shot. People don’t often say it with their words, but they say it with their expressions. I rather like that she’s put it out there so baldly. “Did you leave room for dessert?”
She grimaces. “I tried but someone made me eat my greens.”
“Out of neighborly concern,” I remind her. It sounded almost fatherly, the way she said it, and I don’t care for her viewing me as on par with Evie’s Poppa Dub—especially when I’m closer to Paige’s age than his.
“Can we take a breather?” she asks. “Maybe pace ourselves before we tackle the panna cotta?”
“I suppose.” I’m not entirely sure what a breather constitutes. If it means sitting around making small talk while we digest, well . . . perhaps I’ll change my answer.
“Would you be willing to show me around the house?” she asks. “I’ve wondered what the rest of it looks like.”
“Oh.” I’m surprised she wants to see it. I don’t often find people to be as interested in my spaces as I am in theirs, but for me, the more I learn about a person’s environment, the more keys I have to decoding their morphotype. “Yes. Let me clear this, and then I’ll give you a tour.”
She gets to her feet and helps, taking her own plate. I probably shouldn’t let her, but I suppose when someone is a friend, you do that. Clearing other people’s places is for formal guests, and already Paige and Evie both feel more familiar than that.
When we’ve washed and set the dishes in the rack to dry, I wave to indicate the room around us and say in a professor voice, “This is the kitchen.”
“You don’t say.”
“Indeed. It’s the center of the middleclass American suburban home where families gather to interact informally and to share news of their day as part of a dinner time bonding ritual.”
“Fascinating,” she says, playing along. “Do go on.”
I lead her through the rest of the first floor, making up cultural “facts” on the fly. “This is the bathroom, an odd word given how many of these sanitation chambers lack not only a bath, but even a shower, another common apparatus for washing. In Britain, these rooms are simply referred to as the toilet, which seems more fitting given that one of these indeed may always be found in the misnamed ‘bath’ room.”
I pass the stairs to the second floor, indicating with a wave that above us are the sleeping chambers, which are underutilized in the sleep-starved modern society. I wouldn’t mind showing them to her, but it would mean showing her my own room, which feels awkward, frankly.
The only time grown women see my personal bedroom, it’s . . . not for a tour. The idea of her peering into it is odd in a way I can’t explain, so I simply brush past it, showing her my grandfather’s office and ending in the living room.
I conclude my lecture on the use of shelf space for the display of “mementos that always reveal far more about their collectors than they generally intend.”
“Most illuminating,” she says, “and yet not. I don’t see much of your fingerprint in any of these spaces. Why is that?”
“My contribution was that completely asinine faux lecture.”
She grins. “I enjoyed it. You sounded like a documentary narrator trying to keep a serious voice in a film about monkeys when they’re flinging their poop.”
I blink rapidly. “I don’t know what to say to that.”
“It means you have about the driest sense of humor I’ve ever heard.”
I smile. Most people don’t realize I’ve cracked a joke half the time. Actually, half is probably a low estimate. “Thank you.”
We’re smiling at each other now, and then somehow, in a way someone has surely explained with science in a dusty dissertation, the mood changes in the space of a couple of heartbeats. Our eyes catch and stay there, and my smile melts away, leaving us simply staring. It’s intimate. It would be like that with any human. As a species, most of us are surprisingly bad at prolonged eye contact.
