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I ignore the compliment and gesture towards the freezer. “Pull out the shrimp for me. They’re in the door.”
She pours the shrimp into a colander and sets it in the sink under a cold drip, but her eyes never leave me for long. When she slides back into the bar stool, the interrogation continues. “Who taught you to cook?”
“Gordon Ramsay.” She frowns and I explain. “Cooking shows. Cookbooks. It’s pretty straightforward if you know how to follow instructions.”
“Take it from someone who tried: it’s not that easy.”
I chuckle as I arrange my minced garlic into neat rows. “Are you telling me you’re not a stereotypical housewife, then?”
“Only if you want to come home to find your house on fire,” she admits. “I almost burned the trailer down twice, so I stuck to cereal and canned beans most of my life. Once a month, Clara and I would pool the money from the odd jobs we worked around the trailer park and treat ourselves to McDonald’s. That was our version of a home-cooked meal.”
“Jesus.” I wince. “McDonald’s. Even just saying the name tastes bad.”
“Hey! We used to look forward to those meals. It was the highlight of our month.”
“And no one ever called Child Protective Services?”
She smirks. “In Corden Park, being able to afford McDonald’s separated us from the riff-raff. We were high class. Crème de la crème. Queens of the trailer park.”
I pause my chopping and look at Paige. “Do your parents still live there?”
The smile dies on her face almost instantly. Her breathing hitches, as though the thought of her parents still existing out there, somewhere in the world, has her on edge.
“Last I checked,” she admits at last in a voice with none of the easy laughter it had a few moments ago. “But that was ten years ago. I don’t even know if they’re still alive.”
“Do you have reason to believe they might not be?”
She considers that for a moment. “Mama smoked like a chimney and Dad drank like a fish. So… who knows?”
She doesn’t look sad, exactly, but I can see the regret that things aren’t different. I want to free her from it.
“You don’t have to feel guilty for not keeping in touch with them,” I tell her. “They made you fend for yourself when you were a kid. They can take care of themselves. It’s every person for himself in this world.”
“But you don’t actually believe that,” she says with a pointed look at my dog tag. “Everything for the family.Isn’t that what you believe?”
I turn away and check to see if the shrimp are thawed. Satisfied, I overturn the colander and let them splash into a chili lime marinade. “My situation is different.”
“I don’t see how. You never talk about your family. I don’t even know if you’ve seen them since we met.”
“I’ve been… busy.”
“But if they’re nice people—if they love you—they’re worth the effort, right? I’d kill to have a family who loved me.”
I lift my gaze to hers. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“Bullshit,” she retorts flatly. “You care about them. I know you do. Your mom, your sister, your nephew, his mother. But for some reason, you don’t want to be around them.”
“This conversation is counterproductive to the stress relief cooking provides for me,” I tell her through gritted teeth.
“Are you going to cut me out of your life, too? I guess that’s just what you do with people who care about you.”
I decide to ignore her admission that she cares about me. “It’s nothing personal. I don’t like being around people.”
“You seem to be okay around me.”
I shoot her a dagger-like glare. “That’s debatable and something I’m reassessing as we speak.”
She rolls her eyes and then rests her chin in her palm. I can feel her eyes boring into me, trying to penetrate the walls I’ve fastidiously built around myself. To my irritation, it seems to be working.
