The Burning Side(16)
And this is how we remain, stone-still and draped in lilacs, two pillars of a ruined temple.
In the morning, Leo is gone.
APRIL
2014
LEO IS GRADING PAPERS WHEN I get home. The windows are open to air out paint fumes, and the evening sun waltzes in. I sneak a peek in our entryway mirror, cleaning a smudge of makeup from my eyelid.
“Hey, how was it?” he asks.
I sigh. “Not great. I haven’t found the right book yet.” I have a challenging new student. But it’s one of my favorite parts of the job, matching the book to the person.
“What about you?” I set my bag down. “How was your day?”
It’s been a few short months since we got married, and we’re still new to setting things down in a shared home at the end of the day, reaching feelers out to ask, How are you, and who are you, and are you actually happy here with me? And then going beyond that into the sexless audacity of the mundane: Is the dishwasher clean, and are leftovers okay tonight, and is that really where you’re going to leave your shoes?
Leo stretches. “Not bad. Introduced the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Only one kid nodded off.”
I notice Leo’s handwriting on some pages tucked beneath his student papers, and I ask, “Working on your book?”
“Not really.”
I bite my lip. “I have an idea.”
He waits.
“Have you heard about that new local bookstore, Ellipsis? Since I need a book for work and you need time to write, should we go check it out?”
He hesitates, so I backpedal. “Or not.”
“No, it sounds great. It’s just, no pressure if you don’t want me to tag along.”
“I do, that’s why I suggested it.” It’s an early-days dance, so careful of each other’s toes that we stand miles apart.
We slip into our shoes and close the windows. On the way out the door, Leo gets a whiff of vanilla. “Ay, cabrón.” He jogs across the room and blows out a candle. “Almost forgot.”
I elbow him playfully. “Don’t burn down our house.” I look up. “Your fresh white ceilings.”
He grabs the keys. “Yeah, it’s the wrong white. I need to repaint.”
“Isn’t white just white?”
He shakes his head. “April, April, don’t you know how many types of white there are?”
I smile. “I’ll take your word for it.”
And I do. Then I take him to Ellipsis in search of more words. It’s an unremarkable evening plucked from the timeline. Nothing to burn its mark on our memories, just a day that will lift away like so many, happily swallowed in nonspecific domestic life.
A couple of hours later, I walk back through the door of our home with a book in one arm and my husband in the other. Leo kisses my temple and clicks on a lamp. A rosemary white-bean soup is almost ready in the slow cooker. And our car sits in the long driveway off FM 407, engine cooling, home from the bookstore.
Home, where we need to redo the tile in the half bath.
Where the ceiling is not yet the right white.
Where we will learn what lasts and what doesn’t.
Where a window has been left open, and a breeze becomes a wind.
DEB
Two Days After the Fire
ONE OF MY BEST-KEPT SECRETS is that on occasion I resent all the cooking. This resentment simmers as I scramble eggs for children and grandchildren. I stand at the stove with tension in my jaw and a fantasy life scrolling through my mind. In my alternate life, I married a chef. We have an expansive kitchen island and a butler’s pantry, and I watch him chop and sauté.
My jaw grows tighter as guilt bubbles. I’m lucky, I know this. I have comfort and family and even pasture-raised eggs. Plus, it’s my own fault I’m in this position—I shooed my kids out of the kitchen a million times over the years, never patient enough to let them loose with a bag of flour.
But I’ve been a caretaker since I was seventeen years old, when Mom got sick and Dad went glassy-eyed with sorrow. After her funeral, I watched the television remote become affixed to his hand. I watched him add notches to his belt to hold up his pants. I watched the kitchen grow dark and darker, with spoiled milk and curdled love. So I tied my mother’s apron around my own waist and blinked back the sting of tears—she had always let me help in the kitchen, cheerfully singing show tunes while wiping my oil spills or plucking my eggshells out of cake batter. With the chasm where my mother once was, I began to skip movies and concerts with friends. Instead, I brined and basted and broiled and blanched. I caramelized and creamed, pulverized and poached. And my dad—glory be—started eating again. He loosened his belt and let us leave the TV on mute. I was single-handedly bringing a man back to life, and it made me feel like a god.
It was a natural progression from father to husband to children, each of them with their preferences for eggs or how toasty a piece of toast should be. In food, I found two things I needed: comfort and control. Eventually, neighbors, friends, and friends of friends started commissioning desserts. Food became my thing, and I became the de facto chef. Mostly, I’m happy with it, but this doesn’t mean that I don’t tire. That I don’t once in a blue moon imagine a George Clooney lookalike cooking eggs how I like them, seasoning them while instructing me to take a load off, after nearly forty years of being the spinning nucleus of my family.