“Oh my God,” Daisy had groaned. “That’s a terrible line!” But she could already feel the voices of her roommates receding, the warnings they’d given her—what does a guy that old want with someone our age?—subsiding. Hal was mature enough to know what he wanted and confident enough to get it. When he pulled her close, murmuring, “I just want to be a good man. A good husband and father,” she decided that she was lucky that he’d decided he wanted her.
She’d registered for all the kitchen basics that Hal had never acquired, and he’d told her to buy whatever she thought the house needed, from carpets and couches to dishes and glassware, outdoor furniture for the backyard, art for the walls, and everything she wanted for the kitchen. She’d made missteps at first—she still cringed when she thought of the first party she’d held, for a few of the firm’s other lawyers and their spouses. Hal had said, “It’ll just be casual. Just buy stuff to throw on the grill,” but Daisy had prepared for weeks. She’d gotten the butcher to grind a mixture of filet mignon and chuck steak for the burgers, and had blended in mushrooms and blue cheese; she’d ordered hot dogs from Chicago, which came delivered in a cooler of dry ice. She’d made her own barbecue sauce, plus dozens of elaborate canapés, slivers of smoked salmon on cucumbers and a refined version of onion dip, where she spent an hour caramelizing onions. The day of the event, she’d gotten her nails done, and donned a brand-new Lilly Pulitzer sundress and Tory Burch flip-flops in a complementary shade of hot pink.
The party had not been a success. The guests had nibbled at the appetizers, praising the food to the heavens—“You’re so creative!” “You have to give me the recipe for this!”—but the only thing they’d eaten with any enthusiasm were the hot dogs. Her smoked salmon was ignored; her fancy dip, barely sampled; and the burgers had come back untouched. “Because not everyone likes blue cheese!” Hal said. He wasn’t yelling, but his voice was clipped in a way that suggested he wanted to yell. “I told you, Daisy. I told you, just get regular burgers, and regular hot dogs, and make regular onion dip from the Lipton soup mix, like everyone else does…”
“I don’t want to be like everyone else!” Daisy hated her warbling voice; hated that she was practically crying. Her party had been a failure, and she suspected that all the couples were talking about it on their way home—how desperately hard she’d tried, how pathetically eager to please she’d been. “This is what I do, Hal. I cook. I’m not a lawyer, or a psychologist, or an art therapist, I don’t do global outreach for Penn. I don’t even have a college degree!” The other women had been polite about it; nobody had gone out of their way to make her feel bad. Daisy had been perfectly capable of doing that all on her own.
“It’s fine,” Hal had said, his voice remote. “You’ll learn.”
She had. “They’re stupid white people,” Hannah would tell her, usually through a mouthful of whatever dish Daisy was cooking.
“You’re a white person,” Daisy would tell her, and Hannah would say, “But, hopefully, not a stupid one.” Hannah, like Hal, had grown up in a household where salt and pepper were the only seasonings, but she loved all kinds of food, the spicier, the better. “Fuck ’em if they can’t appreciate you.”
Daisy looked around her kitchen, at Beatrice, gobbling peanut butter, and the sunlight, streaming through the window over the sink. She’d gotten the kitchen of her dreams: a six-burner stove, imported from England, with navy-blue trim and gold-toned hardware. A deep, expansive farmhouse sink; new cherrywood cabinets, a new backsplash, tiled in shades of cream and gold and celery green. She’d ripped up the old granite counters and replaced them with limestone, with an inset made of butcher block, for chopping, and another made of marble, which stayed cool when she was rolling out pastry. In one corner was a dining nook, with built-in benches on two sides, and in the middle of the room was Daisy’s very favorite thing: an enormous fieldstone fireplace that opened to the kitchen on one side and the den on the other.
Hal had been away a lot the year of renovations, overseeing a trial in Virginia and another in Florida. Daisy sometimes suspected that the kitchen was a kind of apology–cum–consolation prize, a way for Hal to say sorry for his absence, and how she’d been the only one at school concerts and parent-teacher conferences and at Bea’s soccer games, where the girls would run up and down the field in a cluster, kicking each other more often than the ball and hardly ever scoring. Sometimes, she suspected that maybe there was something else Hal was apologizing for—something that might have happened when he’d been out of town. But she’d never asked, and he’d never volunteered. On such silences are marriages built, she’d told herself at the time. Certainly she’d never seen her own mother evince any interest in her dad’s business trips. And the kitchen was undeniably gorgeous. She kept her eyes on the skylight and tried not to sigh as Beatrice clomped over to the freezer and started rummaging around.