Pinch of Love (9781101558638) (28 page)

When they're out of view, when we can't hear the scrunch of their snowshoes, Arthur turns and looks me straight in the eye. “Spread his ashes?”

“Not yet,” I say, swallowing a lump in my throat.

He nods.

“Not yet,” I repeat, a little louder this time. He grips my shoulder and pulls me tight, and we sit locked in a sideways hug for a long time, until my toes and nose turn numb.

 

 

A FEW EVENINGS AFTER THE MIDMASS HIKE, I wake slumped at my drafting table. Before me is the outline of a spleen I started. I drooled on it, apparently. So I tear the paper from the clips and ball it up and hurl it at Hank.

My heart hammers wildly, then slows, as Gladys sings about neither one of us wanting to be the first to say good-bye.

I realize I'm hungry. Ravenously, deliriously hungry. So I go downstairs. I root around in the refrigerator, knocking over a pickle jar, a jelly jar, a tub of butter. I open the freezer door, and behind a stack of frozen Polly Pinch meals, I notice the small white package labeled FAIRY GOAT MOTHER FARM. 100% ORGANIC. MADE WITH LOVE BY TRUDY KNOX. It's the goat cheese that Trudy gave me that first time I visited her house and saw the Barn.

I lean against the counter. “All this time,” I say in Ahab Voice, “and you've been settin' on buried treasure.”

First, I thaw the goat cheese in the microwave. Next, I preheat the oven. An image leaps to mind: Nick's mystery present, blazing away on the top rack.

They say fire is therapeutic. Cleansing.

“Ha!” I shout.

My fridge has one of those old-fashioned egg savers—a dozen roundish indentations on a built-in tray. In one of the little indentations sits not an egg, but a lime. I pluck it; greenish gray mold clings to the very bottom. I slice off the moldy part and grind it up in the garbage disposal. “Mere jetsam, lads!” I say. “Cast it to the gray water. Arr.” I juice the remainder of the lime, unsure of the role it will play.

Next, I survey the cans in my cupboard. Great Northern beans? No. Artichoke hearts? Pass. Pineapple rings?

Hmm. Pineapple rings.

I open the dusty can and drain the juice. I arrange the rings in a casserole dish and smear goat cheese on top. I pour the lime juice over it. Next I reach into the cupboard and pull out honey and drizzle it on, long and slow and thick.

“Into the fire it goes! Yarr!” I put it in the oven.

Minutes later, I slide my hands into my dollar-store camo oven mitts, courtesy of Garrett, and watch the timer tick off the few remaining seconds until—ding!

I reach into the oven. I lift the lid off the casserole dish. The pores of my skin open as fragrant limey steam rises.

After it cools, I taste it. It's not quite a winner yet. And besides, it lacks Ingrid's special touches, her contributions.

But it's a start.

It's a g.d. start.

 

 

WINDOWS DOWN. Icy wind whipping. Heat blasting. I fly up Main Street. In the passenger seat sits the casserole dish.

I stick my head out the window and howl into the flying-by night. I howl all the way to Trudy's house.

 

 

INGRID'S AT THE KITCHEN COUNTER doing homework when I walk in, and she slides off the stool and runs to me and smashes her bony little body into mine. I hold the heavy dish out to keep my balance.

“Hold on,” I say. “I don't want to break Garrett's rules.”

“What do you mean?” Trudy says.

“I have a baking question.” I set the dessert on the counter.

Ingrid pushes her books and papers aside. “For the Warm the Soul contest? You got something?”

I nod. “I need your opinion, Ing.”

Trudy peers over her glasses at the dessert. “I hereby declare that I am making an executive decision to temporarily lift the ban on baking, so that Ingrid and I can direct our friend in her endeavors.”

Ingrid claps.

“Now, mind you.” Trudy turns the dial on her gas stove until flames lick the pan of hot chocolate. “I'm no longer the authority on such things. I'm old. I've passed the torch.”

“What torch?” wonders Ingrid.

“To who?” I ask.

“To
whom,
” Trudy says. “The Muffin Man, of course. He's more of a success than I ever was. After all, as the saying goes, ‘Those who can't do, teach.' ”

“I'll take it to him.” I lift the lid off the dish. “But right now I want you guys to test it out.”

Ingrid licks her lips. “Smells scrumpy.”

“I don't think it's quite there yet,” I say. “But almost.”

Trudy hands me a butter knife. It sinks through the layers of goat cheese, pineapple, and gooey, hot honey. I transfer a small portion to a red glass plate, which Trudy extends to me.

Elbow sharply raised, pinkie extended, Ingrid carves out a small bite with a fork. She lets her lips close around the tines.

“Well?” I say.

She swallows and folds her hands in her lap. “Assertive. Tangy. Creamy. The goat cheese balances the acidity of the pineapple quite nicely.”

I stare at Ingrid. Trudy throws her head back and cackles, witchlike.

Ingrid shrugs. “What?”

“Nothing,” I say. “So do I have something?”

“Oh yeah,” she says. “You have something. Your turn, Trudy.” She pushes the plate toward her.

“Be brutally honest,” I say.

Trudy raises a wiry gray eyebrow as Ingrid offers her the fork.

She takes a bite, nods enthusiastically, and crosses the kitchen to pour hot chocolate into three fairy mugs. “It's delicious,” she says. “Now, you see? All those experiments you thought were failures weren't really failures at all. It's because of those quote-unquote failures that you were able to create
this.
You understand?”

There she goes again, getting all Master Yoda on me. “I do understand, Trudy,” I say.

She sucks her dentures. “I think—and this is only my opinion—I think it lacks presentation. First of all, it needs a crust. As it is, it's way too messy looking. A crust would hold it all together. And also, you need to fem it up a little bit.”

“Fem it up?” Ingrid takes a slurp of hot chocolate. “What does that mean?”

“It means, make it girly,” Trudy says. “Make it your own.”

“Right,” I say. “Make it my own. Got a big cookie sheet or something, Trudy?”

“Please,” she says. “You've come to the right place.”

She sets a cookie sheet on the counter, and I dump the contents of the casserole dish onto it. It slowly spreads to the edges.

“Uh, I'm not quite sure where you're going with this, Zell,” says Trudy, mug paused halfway to her chin.

“Color,” I say. “It needs color. It needs . . .”

Ingrid and Trudy search each other's faces for ideas.

“Berries?” Ingrid suggests.

Trudy snaps her fingers and pulls a bowl of raspberries from her fridge. “I just thawed these babies this morning. Picked 'em over the summer and froze 'em. Want 'em warmed up?”

“Nope. Chilled. Just like that.” My fingers sink into the cold berries, which stain my fingers. I sprinkle them on the dessert.

“Now, how about brown sugar?” I say. “Just a dusting.”

Trudy pulls a box of brown sugar from a cupboard and hands it to me. The crystals fall from my fingers and catch the light.

“Don't forget Polly Pinch's most important rule,” Ingrid says. “ ‘Give it something unexpected.' ”

I reach for the pepper grinder by Trudy's stove, next to the fairy trivet.

“Ooh,” Ingrid says as I grind away. “I love me a pepper grinder.”

“Knife me,” I finally say.

Trudy slaps the blunt butter knife into my palm, and I shape what's left of the warm, peppery, limey, honey-smothered, raspberries-and-brown-sugar-topped, pineapple, goat cheese mélange into a two-humped cartoon Valentine heart.

“Now, that's what I call femming it up,” Trudy says.

Ingrid claps. “Don't forget that pinch!” She mimics Polly's slowly batted eyelids, her slowly parting lips.

As if playing charades, Trudy takes the lid off an imaginary canister and offers it to me. I dip my fingers into it and flick them over the dessert, sprinkling it with a pinch of love.

“What do you call it?” Trudy asks.

“I haven't thought of a name, actually,” I say. “The real question is, What
is
it?”

“I got an idea,” says Ingrid. She clears her throat. “Why don't you use the word ‘scrumpy' in the title? ‘Scrumpy' is my favorite adjective. I made it up. It means, ‘scrump, but better.' ”

“I like it,” says Trudy. “Scrumpy Pineapple Pie?”

“It's not really a pie, though,” I say.

“Throw a crust on it and it will be,” says Trudy.

“It's more like a pudding,” I say. “Ish. ‘Scrumpy Pineapple Pud-dingish Pie'?”

Trudy shakes her head. “Who the hell would eat that?”

Ingrid gets somber. “How about we name it after Ahab? What's his full name again, Zell?”

“Captain Ahab's Midnight Delight.”

She mulls this over, drumming her fingers on the counter. “So we could call it ‘Scrumpy Delight.' For Ahab.”

“Scrumpy Delight,” I repeat. “And so it is.” I flick a little more love to christen the lopsided concoction. It's lost its heart shape and now looks as pitiful and lumpy as Old Man Bedard's cat. “A dessert only a mother could love,” I say.

Trudy sighs. “Let's hope not.”

WE POLISH OFF THE REST OF THE SCRUMPY DELIGHt. It really does taste pretty good, but I make a mental note to include less lime juice, to cut back on the wateriness.

Ingrid finishes her homework and goes to bed. But she's reading, I know, because when I go to the bathroom, I see the light on in the spare bedroom.

Trudy and I drink hot chocolate. She spikes hers with two thimbles of Dr. McGillicuddy's Peppermint Schnapps, which she keeps locked in a liquor cabinet she made when she first became interested in working with wood. She offers me some schnapps, but I decline because I've got to drive home.

Trudy, in the rocker next to the wood-burning stove, grows tipsier with each sip. She becomes philosophical, which even a little schnapps is bound to do to a person who doesn't drink often. She talks about how grateful she is, every day, that she's able to be a Renaissance woman and pursue her various “blisses,” as she says: chain saws, goats, fairies. She wonders aloud whether it's chance, or fate, or somehow both, that bring people where they are in life.

Trudy and I don't talk for a good long while—we just sit, sip, and listen to the mantel clock tick.

As I get up to leave, she throws both arms around me, rests her chin on my head, and steers me to the door. “Well, Zell, there's only one thing I know that's harder than death,” she says. She helps me into my coat. “And it seems to me like you're doing a pretty decent job at it.”

“What's that?” I say, yanking on my mittens.

“Life.”

W-H-E-E-E-E-E-E-Z-E.

Eight o'clock Saturday morning. I rub the sleep from my eyes, stumble downstairs, and answer the door yawning. Garrett's on my porch. Ingrid sleeps in his arms; she's still in her pajamas.

“She got up early to watch cooking shows,” he whispers. “But then she fell asleep on the couch. She looked so cute, I just couldn't wake her. I need you, Zell. I'm really in a bind, here. Trudy fell repairing the goat fence. She tripped on the ice.”

“Oh no,” I say. “That's horrible. Is she okay?”