* * *
—
There weren’t a ton of people in the bar that night, but we had the best time—your dad and Tony and James and me. We were ravenous afterward—especially your dad, who could never eat before a show—so we spent everything we made on pizza and cheap wine. With the taste of Chianti on his lips, your father told me he loved me for the very first time. The guys went home and we went out dancing until the sun came up, letting our bodies come together and apart as the music ebbed and flowed.
“Isn’t the world beautiful?” he whispered to me, as we walked home in the glowing morning light.
And even though I still missed my mother more than I could express, even though she was the one person I most wanted to talk to about making music and my new keyboard, my new love—with my heart still high on performing, my body still buzzing with music and with wine and with him, I had to agree that it was.
9
“We should go pregnancy grocery shopping,” Ezra said, as he and Emily walked home from the subway, past the supermarket on their corner. “More protein and calcium, no cold cuts . . . I’m trying to remember what else I learned during my ob/gyn rotation. I’ll look for my notes tonight.”
Emily laughed. She’d had enough friends who’d been pregnant recently that she knew the rules by heart. “No alcohol, no unpasteurized cheese, no raw fish—no raw animal protein at all, really—limited caffeine, make sure you wash all your vegetables thoroughly.”
Ezra looked at her, puzzled. “Wash all your vegetables thoroughly?” he echoed.
“Toxoplasmosis,” Emily answered. “From the dirt they’re grown in.”
Now it was Ezra’s turn to laugh. “Good point,” he said. “We’ll wash all our vegetables thoroughly. And I’ll eat what you eat. No fair that you have to give up alcohol and sushi and deli meat if I don’t. No more alcohol for us.”
Emily kissed Ezra’s cheek. “You really don’t have to do that,” she said.
He turned and kissed her on the lips. “But I want to,” he answered.
* * *
—
In the grocery store, Ezra and Emily decided to buy the ingredients for homemade spaghetti and meatballs. One of the things they’d registered for when they got married was a pasta machine, which Ari and Jack got them, along with a series of classes on how to actually make pasta. “It didn’t make sense,” Ari said, “to get you something you wouldn’t know how to use.”
They’d made pasta maybe ten times in the last two and a half years. Emily had to admit that without those classes, they probably wouldn’t have made it at all. They used the bread maker and the waffle iron even less.
* * *
—
Emily loved watching Ezra doing things around the house. He was remarkably domestic but did everything with a doctor’s concentration, with medical precision. He sewed torn seams in their clothing as carefully as if he were suturing a child, using the same zigzag stitch he’d learned in medical school. He excised rotten spots in apples as if he were cutting out a tumor, making sure it had clean margins on all sides. And he followed recipes only if they made sense, questioning any step that seemed like it might cause a culinary problem down the line. They even adjusted recipes that had been passed down from his great-grandmother. A glass of flour, one read.
“Well, that’s ridiculous,” Ezra had said, the first time he tried to make his nana’s chocolate squares. “Does she mean a tall glass or a short glass? A mug? A tumbler?”
“Maybe she means about a cup?” Emily offered. “It’s probably an old recipe. One that wasn’t written in the U.S.”
Ezra looked at her, then at the recipe, then at the oven. “Huh. Well, we’re going to find out how much we should really use,” he said.
That day, they made three trays of chocolate squares. One with a cup of flour, another with ten ounces, and another with twelve—the amounts that their two glasses held. They’d decided that the juice glasses, which held only about four ounces, probably would be much too small. All three options tasted good—but the consistency of the ones with ten ounces of flour seemed the best. So Ezra fixed the recipe.
* * *
—
Emily was making those same chocolate squares for dessert, while Ezra made the meatballs for dinner, because the smell of the raw meat made her gag.
“It’s like someone turned up the volume on my nose,” Emily said. “Do you have cinnamon gum in your pocket?”