The All You Can Dream Buffet (23 page)

This was why old ladies had too many cats, Ruby thought. She scooped the food onto the dish, and the kitten delicately ate one tiny bite at a time, chewing each three hundred times, like a proper lady. When Ruby ran her fingers over the cat’s spine, she arched upward, purring between bites. Her fur was as
soft as a powder puff Ruby had as a little girl. Someone once brought scented talcs to the hospital ward, and the girls all smelled like sweet musk and baby powder for months after.

The feeling of Ninja Girl’s fur, the sound of her little purr, eased the wild craziness of Ruby’s mood. She settled on the floor with her laptop and checked her email, thinking maybe Liam would have followed up, but there was nothing, of course.

She wished she had a mother or a sister to talk to, someone to whom she could confess her incredible foolishness and finally hear an answer. She wanted advice, a map to follow, a drug to take, something that would sever her connection to a man who did not love her anymore.

As she mulled it over, Ruby suddenly realized it was classically calm Ginny to whom she could unburden herself. She opened an email and wrote:

She poured out everything that was weighing on her, asked for advice, and sent the email. Then she leaned back against the cupboards. Ninja Girl licked her paw, black tail curled around her other feet, the white socks peeking out from beneath it.

After a few minutes Ruby got to her feet, feeling the dampness of her clothes. She could change in a little while. The edges
of her tongue fluttered with flavors—onions and garlic, rich broth, peas and carrots. She would make a shepherd’s pie for their dinner, for everybody. On the counter, she lined up her ingredients: olive oil and potatoes, a good boxed vegetable broth since time was too short to make her own. She lacked a bottle of red wine—of course, she didn’t buy it now, because she was pregnant—and she knew from long experience that it made a big difference in the depth of the dish. She called Lavender’s cell phone. “Hey, do you have a bottle of red wine?”

“Of course. I bought some yesterday. But you’re not drowning your sorrows, are you?”

“No! No way. I’m making dinner for everybody, and I need some wine for it.”

“Ah. I’ll send a bottle over, then. What time is supper?”

Ruby glanced at the Felix the Cat clock on the wall, which reminded her that Felix was a tuxedo cat. She grinned at Ninja Girl. “Around six. I’ll bring it over when it’s finished.”

“What can we add?”

“Bread and salad—fruit or vegetable, it doesn’t matter.”

“Done.”

When she hung up, Ruby pulled up a cooking playlist and set it to
play
on the speakers. Humming along with Pink, she smashed garlic cloves and peeled them, slid the wrapper from an onion and set it aside. The carrots and celery were slightly limp, so she put them in a bowl with ice water to crisp up.

A knock at the door sent the kitten skittering for a hiding place. She scrambled in one direction, tried to get under the stove, streaked behind the table.

“It’s me, Ruby,” Noah called. “It’s raining out here, you know?”

She yanked open the door. “Sorry! Come in. I was making the world safe for a certain Ninja Girl.”

His head and shoulders were soaked, and he leapt up the steps and into the trailer with a bottle of wine in hand. Water dripped down his nose, and Ruby laughed again. “I am sorry.” She gave him a dish towel and he handed over the wine.

“Oooh, good one,” Ruby said, reading the label. “Thanks for bringing it over.”

Noah rubbed his face and shoulders. Then, in a move that took her completely by surprise, he leaned in and shook his curls, sending water all over her.

Ruby shrieked and held up her hands. “Ick! Stop, stop!”

He grinned, the curls falling around his face in black ringlets. His teeth were not quite perfect but they were very white, and his tanned skin glistened with the rainwater. “You gonna drink that whole bottle yourself?”

“I’m not drinking any of it,” she said. “I’m pregnant!”

“How about pouring me a glass, then, and I’ll be your sous chef.” He lifted his chin at the unchopped veggies.

Ruby smelled him over the onions—cloves and sweat and a note like the breeze over the ocean. It made her think that his skin would taste like the ocean, like the tang and salt left after a wave swept over your body. “There’s not a lot of room in here.”

“You mean you want to be alone to brood.”

She shrugged, touched the swell of her belly. “More like think things over.”

“What things, sweetheart?” He took the bottle out of her hand, opened a drawer and then another until he found the corkscrew. “How bad you feel?” Expertly, he sliced the foil, slipped the cork from the bottle, waved it under his nose, and gave a small nod. It surprised her somehow. She would have said he was a beer man, or maybe whiskey. Most soldiers weren’t big on wine. “Is that thinking making you feel better?”

She sucked her top lip into her mouth, let it go. “Not exactly.”

He opened a cupboard, finding glasses on the first try, and poured a substantial amount into a highball glass, then gave her the bottle. “Let me help you.”

His eyes were almost copper colored, like a river in late summer, and when he looked at her, she almost thought she could see the rippling currents. “There really isn’t room for two,” she repeated.

“It’s fine.” He tasted the wine, a very small sip. “Mmm. That’s good.”

Ruby gave him a knife. “Chop the onions.” She took out another cutting board and stood beside him. “Where did you learn about wine?”

“I worked vineyards a lot as a teenager. Napa, Sonoma. You learn a lot.”

She nodded. “Did you know Valerie was a wine blogger before her husband died?”

“Huh. Quite a Renaissance woman—maybe I should talk to her. I keep thinking it would be a kick to try some vines here. With the bees and the lavender—could be interesting.” His hands were deft and strong, with long fingers and good technique. “She quit?”

“Yeah. She says she’s not sure she wants to write about it anymore. It makes her think of her old life.”

“I can see that.” He scraped the diced onion into a bowl and plucked a celery stalk out of the water. “How much celery?”

“Couple ribs. Thinly sliced.” Ruby poured the onion into the olive oil and stirred it. The heat was not high. She added the garlic, stirred again, sprinkled in a little bit of sea salt, then took a carrot from the bowl and began to trim it. “When I think about her life and everything she’s lost, it makes me feel like a stupid little girl for all my whining.”

“It’s not a contest.” Painstakingly, he sliced the celery, making
sure each piece was the same size as the next. “And you haven’t had an easy time, either.”

“I know. She’s just so together, really, so brave. Even at the funeral, she was dignified.” Ruby made a face. “Not my forte, I guess.”

“You’re not a drama queen, though. You’re a very cheerful person.”

“Am I?” She looked up at him, suddenly vulnerable. “I want to be. It seems like a waste to be grouchy if you have a single new day on this earth, but since I broke up with Liam—or, rather, since he broke up with me—I’ve had a lot of days of wallowing.”

He pulled another rib of celery out of the water, cut off the end, and took a crunching loud bite, then offered it to her. To her surprise, Ruby leaned forward and snapped off the next bite. “I love celery,” she said.

“Me, too.”

He was really very close, those heavy ringlets asking to be twined around her fingers, that triangle of throat asking for lips. To her absolute amazement, she reached for a curl. “You have the prettiest hair. But I guess you hear that from all the girls.”

“None as pretty as you.”

A red-tinted glow filled the air as they stood there. Noah looked at her mouth, and for a minute she thought he might kiss her. She thought she might kiss him.

But a new love affair wasn’t the answer. Not until she was over the old one. She turned back to the onions and gave them a stir, added the carrots. “I sometimes use parsnips in this dish, but they are a little sweet.”

“I am pretty sure I’ve never had a parsnip in my life.”

“They look like giant white carrots.” From the corner of her
eye, she spied a black nose sticking out from the cupboard. “Don’t look now, but Ninja Girl is slipping out of hiding.”

He shifted with great care, and they both watched the kitten ease very, very slowly out of the closet and into her potato-box bed. She settled, paws turned under her chest, and blinked at them. “Wow,” Ruby said, “she’s just got me.”

“They do that. Kittens and cats, puppies and dogs. I love that pack of dogs that follows Lavender around.”

“Do you have any cats or dogs?”

“Two cats at the moment.” He sipped the wine, put his knife in the sink. “I had a dog in Iraq, but he got killed.”

“Oh, dude. That sucks.”

He swallowed. “Yeah. It’s been a while now, but I miss him. His name was Duke, and he was a beautiful black German shepherd. Smarter than most people, and loyal as hell. And you know, it’s just good to have a dog in that world.”

“I can’t imagine that world, not even a little. I can’t imagine why anybody wants to go.”

“I was eighteen and didn’t have a lot to look forward to. Not like somebody was going to send me to college, and I wanted out of the fields in the worst way. Army gave me an out.”

“You were in Iraq?”

“Three times; once in Afghanistan.”

“You never got injured?”

“Yeah, but never bad enough to get sent home. They send you to the hospital, give you a break, and then you go back.”

“Hand me the vegetable broth, will you?” She popped it open and poured it into the pot, along with the wine. “Oh, crap. I just realized I don’t have mushrooms! What was I thinking?”

“We can run down to Gaston. It won’t take ten minutes.”

“Yeah? Let’s do it.” She pulled off the apron she wore, hung it
on a hook, and turned the heat off beneath the pot. She eyed the glass, from which he’d taken only a few sips. “You drive.”

He tugged his keys out of his pocket. “I can do that.”

In the truck, she said, “I didn’t mean to cut you off. About Iraq.”

“It’s all right. I don’t really talk about it that much.”

“But
I
am a good listener.” She gave him a sideways grin. “You probably want to tell me everything.”

He laughed softly. “Do I?”

“You do. Everybody does. I get the most amazing stories from people. Once, on a ferry, this man told me about coming out to his wife and every single thing that happened that night.”

“Ugh. Why didn’t you stop him?”

Ruby propped her elbow on the window ledge, thinking about that stooped little man in a very expensive suit, his thin hair brushed carefully over his pate. His eyes were watery and brown and kind, which was why she’d sat down next to him. “I didn’t want to stop him. It was an honor to listen. Now I can carry it with me, right? And somebody heard him.”

Noah glanced at her, then had to focus on the left turn onto the county highway. Once he got on the road, he flipped on his lights to guide them through the gray afternoon, the windshield wipers slicing back and forth, back and forth. “Who do you tell your stories to?”

“I don’t.”

“To your boyfriend?”

“Sure, some of them.”

“The cancer stories?”

“No.” She shifted, wiggled a foot, crossed her arms. “I don’t like to be defined by that.”

“I get that. But, you know, as much as I don’t want to be defined
by my years as a soldier, there’s no getting away from it. I came to the farm to sort through it.”

“Like Duke the dog?”

He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Yeah. Like the dog. Like the guys who died, and all the little kids, and all the things you do and wish you hadn’t in a war.”

Ruby watched his face for a long minute. “When I first found out that I was sick, I told my best friend, and she told her mom, and then we couldn’t play together anymore.”

“Dude.” He looked at her. “That sucks.”

She nodded.

They hit the outskirts of a very small village. She saw the lights of a grocery store shining through the rain. Noah parked in front, turned off the car. “When I got my orders to deploy the fourth time, I seriously thought about wrecking my car into a lamppost and hoped that I would just get injured, not killed.”

“Dude,” she said, and smiled. “That sucks.”

Again she made him laugh. “Come on, let’s get your mushrooms.”

When they got back from the grocery store, Noah carried the bags into the trailer—they’d picked up more than just mushrooms—the weight of them showing off the veins and cords in his forearms. He settled everything on the counter and said, “Now what?”

He took up too much space, that was what. “I’m fine, Noah,” she said, taking mushrooms and more onions out of the bags. He lined bottles of Pellegrino on the counter.

“But I have wine to drink, remember?” He picked up the glass and took a sip, a wicked smile on his mouth.

“You’re in the way.” She turned the heat back on beneath the pot.

“I’ll make myself useful.” He grabbed the porcini mushrooms. “These need slicing, I guess?”

She felt sparks along the side of her body that was close to him. They were sharp and pointed, like the pricks of sparkler stars. “Fine,” she snapped. “Slice them.” She whirled around to put the bottles in the fridge and had to slide them in on their sides.

When she stood up, he was a bit too close again, and she had to duck around him, her hip grazing his hip. It was like this, cooking. She’d grown used to it, learned how to ignore the accidental brush of a hand over a butt or a breast or any number of other intimate combinations that could occur in a kitchen.