All of that meant that Daisy was exhausted the night that Hal picked her up for dinner, sleep-deprived and footsore. Not to mention starving. For the past three months, she’d been sticking rigorously to her diet. She ate an apple and a spoonful of peanut butter for breakfast, a salad with grilled chicken breast for lunch, and a Lean Cuisine for dinner. At work, she avoided the carb-heavy staff meals. One of the sous-chefs was always happy to roast her some chicken breast or salmon. She’d chew spearmint gum while she cooked, and allow herself just a taste of even her favorite dishes. At bedtime, after her mom had gone to bed, she would sneak into the kitchen to slug down a shot of the vodka that she kept in the freezer, with a squeeze of fresh lime. Without that final step, she faced a night lying in bed, listening to her mom snuffling and sighing and sometimes weeping through the thin bedroom door, tormented by thoughts of everything she wanted to eat, when she started eating again: brownies with caramel swirled on top, and a sprinkling of flaky sea salt on top of that. Spicy chicken wings; garlic with pea shoots; spicy tofu in sesame honey sauce, curried goat—from the Jamaican place she’d discovered—over rice cooked with saffron. Vanilla custard in a cake cone, topped with a shower of rainbow sprinkles; eclairs; sugar cookies dusted with green and red; and hot chocolate drunk in front of a fire.
Hal lived in Philadelphia, but when she’d offered to meet him halfway, he’d said, “Absolutely not. What’s your favorite kind of food?”
“Oh, I eat everything.”
“What’s your favorite?”
She’d bitten her lip, then mentally shrugged and told him what she’d been craving, which was ramen. One giant bowl of perfectly cooked ramen in rich, golden pork broth, densely packed with noodles and with an egg, boiled to just the right degree of softness, perched on top, beneath a sprinkling of bright, crunchy green scallions. She could almost taste it, and feel it in her mouth, the rich glide of egg yolk, the chewy, toothsome tangle of noodles, the sharp bite of scallion, and the comforting warmth of the broth, as salty as the ocean.
It wasn’t until Hal asked, “Are your folks in the same house?” that she realized he thought she was living in the same place he’d visited as Danny’s classmate, all those years ago. She filled him in as briefly as she could—dad dead, house sold, brothers living elsewhere, she and her mom in West Orange, in a small, dingy apartment （she left out the “small” and “dingy” part）。 “I’ve been staying with my mom this summer,” she’d said brightly, hoping her tone would suggest a lighthearted college girl who’d gone to a state university instead of the kind of liberal arts college her brothers had attended because she’d wanted a school with a reputable football team and a big Greek scene, and was living with her mother out of kindness and not necessity.
Judy Rosen had been thrilled when Daisy gave her the news. Before Hal arrived she looked her daughter over with a critical eye, smoothing a lock of hair, which was shoulder-length that year, cut to feather around her face. She adjusted the straps of the dress Daisy wore with a cap-sleeved white T-shirt, frowned at her black suede sandals with their chunky platform soles, and said, “I hope you have a wonderful time.”
At six o’clock, Hal had arrived. Her mom had opened the door, revealing a compact, well-built, dark-haired man, in a navy-blue suit and a red silk tie. He looked very mature to Daisy, a world away from the college boys in Birkenstocks and cargo shorts.
“Hal Shoemaker,” Daisy’s mother said. She’d touched his face and kissed his cheek and then, just as Daisy had feared she would, started to get a little sniffly. Hal represented a better time, a lost Eden, a golden-hued era when her sons had been boys; when home had been a near-mansion in Montclair and not an apartment in West Orange, when she’d been a mom, and not a single mom. He was everything she’d loved that had been so cruelly taken away, in a five-foot-nine-inch package.
He’d brought tulips, and as Judy wiped her eyes, he held them out to her, stiffly, his expression bewildered.
Quickly, Daisy swooped in. She took the flowers, put them in a water glass, and ushered Hal to the living room while her mother went to the bathroom to freshen up, and probably take a Valium.
“Sorry about that,” Daisy said. “She still gets upset by… well. Pretty much everything.”
“It’s okay. You two must have been through a lot.” He looked around the apartment, then at her.
“Danny’s little sister. Look at you, all grown up.”