The Journey Home (11 page)

“I'm afraid you're going to have to accept that the lucid moments are going to become briefer and less common.”

“I'm not sure how much briefer they can be. I can barely get a good fifteen minutes with her now.”

“This is never easy. I've been doing this a long time and I've never come up with anything to say to make family members handle this any easier.”

Antoinette opened her eyes to find her son standing next to her bed with one of the doctors. She could tell that Warren was worried about something. Ever since he was a baby boy, he'd worn the same expression – a look of total confusion – whenever he was upset.

“Hey, Mom,” her son said when he saw her
looking at him. “Dr. Cantor was just checking on you.”

Antoinette's eyes moved to the doctor, who reached out to take her hand.

“How are you feeling, Antoinette?”

“I'm lovely,” Antoinette said, thinking back on the birthday feast she'd just enjoyed with her family.

The doctor squeezed her hand softly. “I'm very glad to hear that.”

“Do you want to sit up, Mom. I was trying my hand at Rachel's Cornish Hen with Spring Vegetables.”

It was nice of Warren to cook for her, but Antoinette was still full from the meal. “I don't think so, honey. I'm going to close my eyes again, if that's okay with you.”

“It's okay, Mom. You rest.”

Warren placed the electric skillet on the dinette table and turned it on medium high to preheat. The electric pressure cooker was there as well, along with the electric rice cooker. Warren hoped he didn't blow a fuse with all of these electrical appliances. The Treetops staff had been extremely understanding about his cooking in his mother's apartment the past six weeks. Several people even asked him what he was making whenever he walked in with groceries. They'd probably be less understanding, however, if he knocked out the power down the entire hall. Still, he could only accomplish so much on two burners, so he'd expanded the kitchen the only way he saw possible. That he was spending money on all of this equipment while he still wasn't sure what he was going to do for income once his severance ran out was something he preferred not to consider. At least while he was doing this, he felt as though he had a purpose. It was getting tougher to feel this way about the hours he put in networking, distributing his resumé, and cold-calling.

Today's dish was an exercise in orchestration that he'd been hesitant to make until he got his skills up: Paul's Potent Beef. Mom had named it after Warren's best childhood friend. Growing up, Paul hung around for dinner at least a couple of times a week to avoid the enervating combination of his mother's pallid cooking and his father's cutting dismissiveness. Though Mom liked having just about anyone in their extended circle around for dinner, she was especially fond of Paul because of his over-the-top effusiveness about her meals. That Paul was deliberately doing this to guarantee that Mom kept stuffing him mattered little to her, and she'd paid him the ultimate compliment when she gave this dish its name.

Paul loved big flavors and Mom loaded them on here in a manner that rivaled her most extravagant offerings: beef braised in rice wine, soy sauce, and hoisin sauce, served on a bed of ginger and scallion rice, and topped with a sauté of blackened corn, red bell peppers, cherry peppers, and dramatic levels of garlic. She would then top
that
with frizzled shallots. She first made Potent Beef the day after Paul's thirteenth birthday. That night, Paul spoke with Warren in all seriousness about the possibility of Warren's parents adopting him. This wasn't the first time they'd had this conversation, but it was by far the most insistent time. The dish became Paul's day-after-birthday meal every year after that through Paul's final year in college. Mom even made it a second time that year to celebrate Paul's graduation a week after Warren's.

What she didn't realize at the time was that this
would be the last meal she ever made for the kid who'd spent so much time at her dining table. Paul left for Southern California only a few days after college ended. As it turned out, a location across the country wasn't nearly far enough away from his parents. He moved south of the border and married and divorced a Mexican woman within nine months. After that, he was in Costa Rica until he turned twenty-six, his letters becoming far less frequent and his details of debauchery becoming far more alarming. A year later, Warren heard that Paul had wound up in a Colombian jail on a drug charge. Though Warren tried to learn more, he never heard from or about Paul again. It still mystified Warren how the relationship with the best friend he'd ever had ended with such a whimper.

For years after Paul disappeared from Warren's life, the idea of eating Paul's Potent Beef seemed wrong. While it was a great dish, and while Warren had himself requested it a couple of times on trips home from college, he couldn't do it once Paul was gone. Feelings about losing his best friend were too closely intertwined with the taste of the dish. As the years went on, though, the memory mellowed, and Paul's Potent Beef became a reminder of basketball games played, girls lusted over, cars raced on the highway, and lengthy philosophical conversations about things teenaged boys found deadly serious. Mom seemed glad to put the dish back into the family rotation, and it showed up several times at the twice-monthly Sunday meals Warren shared with his parents.

As was the case with so many of the lunches he made in his mother's apartment, Warren hadn't eaten Paul's Potent Beef in years, since his mother had stopped cooking. Still, his memory of it was especially strong. To cook it today, he made a few modifications to Mom's recipe. She'd always used chuck roast; he was using boneless short ribs instead. He replaced the cherry peppers with fresh Anaheim chilies because they looked good to him in the store. She'd always simmered the meat in a low oven for hours; he was using the pressure cooker because long simmering meant sitting – in all likelihood alone, given his mother's current condition – in her apartment all that time. Otherwise, he would try to make it the same way she always had. His imitations of her work had been getting better. The tastes he was able to coax from the kitchen seemed increasingly similar to the tastes his memory generated.

The electric skillet was hot now, so he added a considerable amount of canola oil and, a half-minute later, the thinly sliced shallots. While they fried, he tossed the vegetables on the cooktop, tasted, and added a bit more ground coriander. He actually could have cooked the shallots on the cooktop as well, as he had an available burner, but things never got particularly hot there. Warren guessed this was by design, as it minimized accidents among the elderly – though, as he knew from experience, it couldn't prevent all of them. Regardless of how much progress he'd made as a cook, the memory of his first smoky mess persisted.

Warren took the shallots out a minute later,
draining them on some paper towel. He looked at the mass of machinery and cutlery around him. Cleanup was going to be a bear this time.

All to make a meal for himself.

It had been nearly two weeks since his mother last ate anything Warren cooked. In the brief periods when she was both awake and lucid while he'd been with her, she'd been willing to eat very little, usually some crackers and a bit of fruit juice. He'd continued to hope that the smells in the room would pull her back – it had happened before; it could happen again – but he'd been able to generate no such magic recently. She'd taken a sharp decline both physically and mentally and Warren was beginning to lose any sense of optimism for her revival.

He put a mound of rice on a plate and added two short ribs from the pressure cooker, which he'd cooled and depressurized. On top of this, he spooned vegetables. Warren remembered asking his mother if it wouldn't have made for a neater presentation to put the vegetables on top of the rice and the meat on top of that. Mom acknowledged that it would but that such a presentation wouldn't be anywhere near as exciting. Back then, this hadn't made terribly much sense to him, but as he plated the food himself, the logic kicked in – she wanted the dish to seem as though it were toppling from sheer overload. Finally, he scattered shallots over the plate by hand.

The food looked and smelled great. This had been by far his most complex project to date and he was pleased that – at least by appearances – it had
turned out so well. A forkful later, his taste buds corroborated.

He walked with the plate to the entrance of his mother's bedroom, waving the scent in her direction with his hand. It was a stupid attempt at “sorcery” and it had the predictable results. Mom's body remained inert.

Warren sat to eat, feeling that his culinary accomplishments today had been especially hollow. No one made meals like this to eat alone. He took another bite, wondering if it made sense to continue to pretend that cooking this way had some function. He put down his fork, suddenly wondering if even
eating
the food he cooked had some function. Caught between the quality of his accomplishment and the emptiness of eating alone under these circumstances, he stood up, grabbed his mother's keys, and walked down to Jan's office.

The nurse who was definitely the Treetops staffer he'd gotten to know best had obviously just returned to her desk with her lunch. She was reaching into a drawer to pull out a spoon when he arrived.

“Step away from the yogurt and no one gets hurt.”

Jan looked up at him, spoon aloft.

“That's not really lunch,” he said. “I have a significantly better alternative for you.”

Jan held up the yogurt container. “You have something better to offer than Yoplait Banana Cream Pie? How is this possible?”

Warren gestured with his hands to suggest that
the container go back on the desk. “Trust me. Will you join me for lunch?”

Jan got up from her chair and began to walk with him down the hall. “I have to tell you that I've been jealously smelling whatever you've been making for the past hour – some of the residents are starting to get envious, by the way – and when I went to get lunch
nothing
seemed good to me. That's why I got the yogurt. I was trying to convince myself that I was getting a treat.”

“Hey, I've been there. Did you know you can make popcorn seem like dinner if you sprinkle enough parmesan cheese on it?”

Warren opened his mother's apartment door for Jan and directed her toward the couch as soon as he realized that the dinette table was too much of a mess to allow two people to eat. He put together a second plate from the various cooking implements and put both of them on the coffee table.

“This looks amazing,” Jan said when he sat across from her. She shifted her eyes toward his mother's bedroom and her expression softened. “She's just sleeping through it again?”

Warren nodded slowly. “She always does now. I don't think I had her for more than five minutes today.”

Jan looked back in his direction. “I spoke to her doctor yesterday.”

“I'm sure what you talked about wasn't any more encouraging than the conversation I had with him two days ago.”

“I'm afraid not. Sometimes people rally.” Jan
pursed her lips before she continued. “It's not common, though, Warren. I'm not going to try to kid you about that.”

Warren appreciated the honesty, though he really would have appreciated Jan's honestly being able to offer him a sunnier scenario. “I know. I'm working incredibly slowly toward accepting that.”

“Have you thought about a nursing home?”

Warren cringed. “Have you ever seen a nursing home?”

Jan dropped her eyes. “I know.”

Warren let the thought linger for a few seconds. Then he moved forward in his chair and reached for his plate. “I didn't ask you here to bring you down. I can mope on my own. This is about lunch.” He pointed toward her food. “Why don't you give it a try?”

Jan offered him an expression that he interpreted as compassion over the difficult exchange they'd just endured and then picked up her plate and tried the beef. Her eyes grew wide. “This is incredible.” She let the taste linger. “And there's a whole lot going on here.”

“Mom was shooting for layers of flavor when she concocted this. That, after an immediate punch in the mouth.”

“I definitely felt the punch – and the layers. Is that Anaheim chili?”

“Wow, yeah. Are you a chili head?”

Jan flipped her bangs. “I'm more of an everything-edible head.”

Warren surreptitiously examined Jan's slim form and wondered how someone who professed to love food that much could be in such sensational shape. “And yet you were going to have yogurt for lunch.”

“I don't think you heard me. It was
banana cream pie
yogurt.”

“Does that really matter?”

Jan took another forkful of meat, digging into the plate to get some corn, some pepper, and some rice at the same time. “I didn't know this was an available option,” she said before putting the overloaded bite in her mouth and pretending to swoon.

“This is always an available option.”

“Don't make promises you can't keep,” Jan said around her food. Very few people looked good talking while they were eating. Jan happened to be one of those people.

“I'm serious.”

Jan met his eyes. Warren's immediate response was discomfort. He'd meant the comment to be a casual one, but it didn't sound that way coming out of his mouth.

“I really am serious,” Warren said, deciding to plow ahead. “Look, I think the only thing sadder than me taking two hours to cook lunch and then eat alone is you having yogurt at your desk. I think we have the potential for a win-win situation here.”