This Book Made Me Think of You(14)

She shakes her head as she recalls the memory. “You always were a terrible liar. But a great cook. Your sloppy joes were perfect, of course. I remember you saying you wanted to give my family the full American experience so made coleslaw, potato salad, and homemade Tater Tots too.”

As she thinks back to that meal, her stomach lets out a loud rumble. Her appetite has been all over the place since Joe’s death. Sometimes she completely forgets about dinner, but on other days she turns to food to try to fill the emptiness, ordering takeaways and bingeing on biscuits and slabs of bread and butter. Grief has given her a yearning for carbohydrates.

She turns on some music as she cooks, the flat filling with a backing track of cheesy pop and the smell of actual cheese as the macaroni goes under the grill to crisp up. Since her visit to the bookshop, she’s felt lighter than she has in weeks. She hadn’t felt tempted to browse, despite having dipped her toe back into reading with Matilda. But she did feel welcome, the warmth of the shop and the conversation with the staff like a blanket draped gently over her shoulders.

As she waits for the meal to cook, she flicks through the book. It is geared to novices like her; there’s even a page on how to make the perfect slice of toast. She adds page markers to the recipes she’d like to try, her stomach rumbling again at the thought of crunchy roast potatoes and warming stews. Despite Joe’s encouragement in his letter, she isn’t sure she is ready to host a dinner party without him. She wouldn’t be able to get past the empty chair. But maybe he was right about making some proper meals for herself. Takeaways and pesto pasta don’t exactly make for a balanced diet.

Her attention catches on a recipe for pumpkin pie, remembering the Thanksgiving with Joe’s family after they’d got engaged. Joe waited the three months between the engagement and their trip because he’d been keen to tell them in person, over Thanksgiving dinner. “Because this year and every year, what I’m thankful for is you.”

But the announcement had gone terribly, ending with Ellen making her feelings about the engagement perfectly clear, Joe yelling, Ellen fleeing the table in tears, Hank following after her, and Tilly comfort eating five slices of pumpkin pie. She hasn’t been able to eat it since.

Thinking back to that trip, she remembers with a pang that it wasn’t just Joe and Ellen who had argued. She and Joe had fought too…They were down by the lake after dinner, and she remembers trying to keep her voice down, not wanting the sound to travel back to the house and to give Ellen the satisfaction of knowing that despite the ring glistening on Tilly’s finger, they weren’t without their problems…

Before she can go too far down that spiral, the timer pings. She pulls the dish out of the oven, the surface of the macaroni sizzling and bubbling. She may have slightly overcooked it, but aside from a few burned patches, the surface is golden, the Parmesan crust enticing.

She sets the dish triumphantly on a mat and instead of bothering with a plate, reaches for a fork.

So you can cook, she imagines Joe saying with a raised eyebrow, blue eyes glinting. Maybe you set fire to that meringue pie on purpose so I’d offer to cook everything after that. For health and safety reasons.

“Hey, you were the one who insisted on always cooking. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten how you’d always sing and dance about as you cooked as though the kitchen was your personal dance floor, flapping me with a tea towel if I tried to help, telling me you were in the zone. It was just a bonus that your food always tasted so amazing. Or maybe food just tastes better when someone else cooks it.”

She pictures him sniffing the air, eyes closing slightly in appreciation.

This smells amazing, though, Mouse.

Even though deep down she knows the voice is just inside her head, she still flinches at the sound of his old nickname for her. No one has called her Mouse in what feels like a very long time.

And you didn’t need to get the fire extinguisher out even once, she imagines him adding.

“It does smell pretty great, doesn’t it?”

After giving it a moment to cool down, she sinks her fork into the dish, cracking through the crunchy, cheesy topping and scooping up a hearty portion of the creamy pasta, strings of melted Gruyère dripping down as she pulls the fork toward her mouth.

Her eyes close in pleasure as she takes a bite of absolute comfort, the taste bringing back a memory—as suddenly and vividly as if it weren’t four years ago—and Joe is humming tunelessly, a wooden spoon held in his hand as he stirs the sauce.



* * *



—

They are due to go out for the fourth night in a row, ax throwing, of all things, for Joe’s friend Leo’s birthday. Joe gets his energy from being around other people and doesn’t always understand Tilly’s need for a quiet evening in with a book where she doesn’t have to speak to anyone.

It has been a long day at work, brainstorming ideas for a memoir that is being pushed through quickly to coincide with a sex scandal that has just broken. Despite wanting nothing more than to change into her pj’s and flop into bed, Tilly doesn’t want to disappoint Joe. She is just wondering whether he’d mind going on his own when she steps into the living room to find the furniture entirely rearranged. The coffee table and dining table are pushed against the wall, the sofa turned around and draped with blankets that fall to the floor, weighed down by cushions. The lights are dimmed, the fairy lights around the bookshelves glowing. Joe is in the kitchen but turns around at the sound of Tilly approaching.