Chapter Eleven

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Kieran

After three months of recipe writing and testing, Ellie and I had warmed up to each other, and the weather followed our lead. Now it was the end of May, all long, hot, blue-sky days, with citrus and dark greens giving way to piles of strawberries, cherries, and raspberries at the farmers' market.

I knew my ghostwriter a lot better now. When she was in the middle of a task, she would make up these dorky little nonsense songs with no tune at all, telling asparagus it was delicious or ordering chicken to cook faster. A tortoise could still dice vegetables quicker than she could, and tortoises didn't even have thumbs. She'd read pretty much every book about food and cooking, and she remembered it all. If they could give out a degree in knowing about food, Ellie would have a PhD.

She also had a routine that she stuck to like superglue. When I came in the door in the mornings, the air would smell like freshly ground coffee and buttered sourdough toast from her breakfast, her hair would still be wet from showering after yoga, and someone would be singing old jazz songs on her speaker. She would have checked through her to-do list, washed all her dishes, and sharpened all her knives.

Every time I went to her, my shoulders relaxed as I walked the blocks from BART, knowing she'd greet me smiling and that a hot cup of coffee with extra sugar would be waiting for me. It helped that her place was about a thousand times cleaner and nicer than my apartment, and it was good to talk about food with someone who listened so closely to every word I said and who had interesting things to say back. Who had a smile that made me feel warm and toasty inside.

Maybe we could be close friends, the way that Jay and I were close. Even if I'd never dreamed about Jay's bare shoulder peeking over my comforter, begging for my kiss.

Jesus, fantasizing on public transportation was a new low.

My train had just pulled into Oakland's bright sunshine when my pocket buzzed. Brian. I couldn't let him ruin my good mood, but my thumb slipped and pressed the green button instead of the red one. Shit.

"Kieran? You there? Hello?" my brother said.

Too late. I leaned my head against the window and put the phone to my other ear. "Hi, Brian."

"At last, the Happy Pirate Leprechaun finally answers his telephone, to be sure."

I pressed my knuckles hard into the glass, hating his fake Irish accent with everything I had. "That's not fucking funny."

He said in his normal voice, "Speaking of not funny, you haven't returned any of Mom's calls. Are you too famous now?"

The sun was still out, but as far as I was concerned, the gray, miserable fog had rolled in. "If you want me to stay on the phone, a guilt trip isn't the way."

"OK, OK. I'm sorry," he said quickly. Unlike the rest of our family, he almost always backed off when I told him to.

"How's Houston?" I said, trying to keep my voice easy.

"Fine, as far as I know," he said without much enthusiasm. "I'm too busy to get out much, and I was on a project in Omaha last month."

"I guess they have software to troubleshoot in Nebraska, too."

"Yeah. Windowless offices are pretty much the same everywhere. Did you get Mom's emails about the anniversary party?"

Damn, I thought that might be why he'd called. I'd opened them so that the red number wouldn't show up on my inbox, but I hadn't actually read them. "Uh-huh."

"So you're coming?"

"Nope."

"Kieran!"

"Don't say my name like I'm eight and broke your Nintendo again."

"But it's our family," he said firmly. "It's what we're supposed to do."

It was so easy for Brian to talk about what we were supposed to do when he could, you know, do it. He wasn't the one who'd been screamed at every damn day. "When have I ever done what I was supposed to do where our parents are concerned?"

"Ah, but then you doing it would go against their expectations. So you'd wrongfoot them anyway."

I couldn't hold a laugh back. "I see your reverse psychology and raise you ‘I have billions of better things to do.'"

Suddenly Brian sounded serious. "Kieran. Listen to me. You have to come."

My back stiffened. "I'm twenty-seven years old. I don't have to do a damn thing."

"No, listen. It's supposed to be a surprise, but the party's for you."

I looked at the phone like it had turned into a guinea pig. "What?" I said, totally confused.

"I mean, not all for you. It's still their anniversary. But they want to celebrate you winning Fire on High, too."

I stared at my phone. Had I had this all wrong? Had they been trying to reach out to me and I'd been blind? "What's the catch?" I asked slowly.

"No catch. They think it's a big deal. They think you're a big deal."

I closed my eyes, trying to center myself. To save my sanity, I'd closed every stupid childish wish I'd had about my parents in a box, then taped it shut and shoved it into the back of my mind's attic. But all of a sudden, something pushed its way out of the box. Something that looked a lot like hope, pale and shaky from no light or air. "They're proud of me?" I couldn't keep the question out of my voice.

"Why would they throw a party if they weren't?"

That was Brian, always optimistic when it came to our family.

This was too big a change to digest in ten seconds on a train. "I'll think about it," I finally said. "Honestly, I didn't know that we were on speaking terms again."

He sighed. "You're the one not speaking to them. Anyway, they're doing a fancy party at the house. You'll need a suit, and Mom said she wants us for breakfast the next morning."

I rubbed my neck, trying to get the tension out. "If it goes wrong, at least it'll make my next dentist appointment super fun in comparison."

"I assume you'll come on your own for this?"

God, he could be so patronizing sometimes. "I guess," I answered, my voice bratty.

But then I thought about being there by myself. I'd be surrounded by people who'd known me when I was a teenage dirtbag, Mom's librarian friends and Dad's golf buddies. My old teachers. Brian cared more about making them happy, so who knew how much help he'd be.

If things went south, I'd be all alone.

"Is Mom giving you shit about bringing someone, too?" I asked quickly to distract myself.

"Of course she is. She told me that no little O'Neills running around is unacceptable. It's like me turning thirty made her lose it."

"Bri?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you think you'll ever bring anyone home?" He'd never had a girlfriend, or a boyfriend. He'd lived at home during college and spent all his time on his computer, and even after he moved to Texas for work, he was always on the road fixing software.

His pause filled my ear, then he said, "I don't think so. But I don't know how to tell them that. You were hard enough for them to deal with as it is. But two strange sons?"

I jerked back in my seat. Brian could be bad at reading me, but that was below the belt. "Thanks a lot, asshole."

"Shit, Kieran, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that."

"North Berkeley," the announcer called.

"I need to go," I said, desperate to be outside, away, far away.

"OK." Brian sighed. "Just read your damn emails, please. Mom is relentless."

I was grateful for the walk from the station to Ellie's. I needed all that fresh air to get my balance back. When I knocked, she called warmly, "It's open."

I couldn't repress the sigh of relief at being back here. It was bright and tidy and smelled like oranges. Ellie stood at the sink wearing an old-fashioned sundress, navy blue with red roses, with a deep V that showed her upper back. Brown beauty spots dotted her creamy skin.

What would they taste like?

The grumpy voice I'd had in my head since Brian called lost the attitude and instead started to list reasons why kissing Ellie's neck would be amazing. The dip of her waist would be perfect to rest my hands in. She'd smell like Earl Grey and clean sheets, and taste like salt and citrus. She'd turn in my hold, rest her arms on my shoulders, and her soft blue eyes would flutter closed like they had when she'd tasted that blood orange at the farmers' market.

Reality smothered my fantasy. Even if she liked me that way, she wouldn't kiss me in a million years. We were coworkers, and Ellie was a professional.

"Good journey?" she asked over her shoulder, soaping up a mixing bowl.

"Yeah," I said, trying to remember to breathe. Breathing was definitely the first step to being a professional. "BART was quiet, and not in a creepy way."

She rinsed her hands and dried them on a cherry-printed kitchen towel. "Your timing's perfect. I just reran the duck and orange recipe. I'll make you a plate."

"What did you do this time?" Ellie had suggested a few weeks ago that we rework the "breakfast textures" duck-orange combination as a salad with raw oranges, and this was the second version she'd tested.

"I thought it needed something really bitter, so I tried arugula. I figured the hot duck would wilt some of it, and then the rest would be fresh for contrast. Like a salade lyonnaise. It's pretty, isn't it?"

She was right—the deep green of the leaves played well against the browns and oranges of meat and fruit. But when I took a bite, salt burned my tongue. "Where's the duck confit from?" I asked hoarsely.

She raised her eyebrows. "I bought it ready-made from a guy at the Grand Lake market. If you can get a Saturday morning off, I'll take you."

"Ah," I murmured after I chugged half a glass of water.

"Is it bad?" Her voice was suddenly small.

I swallowed. "He's using too much seasoning. It's a little like corned beef right now. Have you ever made duck confit yourself?"

"Nope," she said tightly.

"You just need to get past the whole poaching something in a fuck-ton of oil. And if we do it ourselves, the readers can replicate it exactly instead of hoping their duck tastes like what we bought." I took another bite. "One other thing. You didn't supreme the oranges. There's a lot of pith."

Her shoulders slumped a little. "I don't know how. As you probably noticed, I don't have your knife skills."

"It's not hard."

"I'm sure it's not. Are you going to eat the rest of that?"

I sat back. "I shouldn't. We're testing a bunch of other stuff today, right?"

"Yeah." Her back was straight and tense when she scraped the salad into the compost.

Another thing I'd learned? Ellie really hated getting things wrong. It was like she thought that overspiced duck and bitter oranges meant she was a bad person.

"Ellie, it's OK," I said gently. "We'll figure it out. Don't stress."

Her eyes didn't meet mine. "I shouldn't have tried to take a shortcut. Stupid of me."

For the next ten minutes, she banged around the kitchen and gave brittle one-word answers to any question. I didn't know how to soften her again.

But when she went to the bathroom, I saw the bunch of asparagus on the counter and had an idea.

Ellie

When I came out of the bathroom, trying and failing to push down my frustration at screwing up the recipe, Kieran was washing dishes and humming. It sounded weird. A little choked.

"Kieran?"

He turned around, and I slapped my hand over my mouth. Asparagus sprouted from behind his ears, and he'd shoved stalks in his bandanna, too. For the piece de resistance, he'd jammed an orange slice into his mouth so the peel filled the whole space.

"What on earth?" I said through my fingers.

The goofball wiggled his eyebrows at me. He was absurd. Ludicrous. And then he crossed his eyes, and that was me gone.

"What?" he half-said through the orange.

"You look, you look," I gasped with laughter, pointing at him, just barely holding myself up with a kitchen chair.

He spat the orange into the sink. "This is, like, a new style? Though some people say it has to be, like, white asparagus behind your ears?"

My giggles bent me in half, my stomach muscles tight. "Stop, stop, you're such a dork."

"I am awesome, thank you very much. You all right there?"

"Fine, fine, just dying. Oof. I didn't know I needed that." I wiped tears from my eyes. "How did you know I would laugh at that?"

He plucked out the spears from around his head. "I guessed from how you smirked when Hayden force-fed me honey. You can appreciate when a situation is totally ridiculous. Do you feel better?"

My frustration was gone. "I do." And why was I blushing now, at the focused way he looked at me? He'd just tried to cheer me up.

"Now I want to show you how to supreme an orange," he said. "Come on over."

I went around to his side of the counter, grabbing an orange from the fruit bowl on the way.

"So start the same way you prepped them. Cut the top and the bottom off, then follow the shape of the orange to take off the peel."

It was like a hand had turned the volume way down on the hum of anxiety that always buzzed in my head. He was all calm competence. He knew what to do, and he'd tell me how in that dark-brown-sugar voice, and I could just be .

I slowly followed his instructions. He leaned in and I got a whiff of white soap and pine forest. "Closer," he said softly. "Cut closer."

He could whisper in my ear, he was that near. His scarred lower lip so close to my skin. Focus, Ellie. "I don't want to lose half the orange," I murmured.

"Have a little faith," he murmured back.

I couldn't help but smile at his smartassery. "That's my line." But I did what he said.

"Now follow the divots to trim out the segments."

The tip of my tongue stuck out as I slid my blade into the fruit, millimeters from my fingers.

"Careful," he coaxed.

Any notion of knife skills evaporated out of my head as all the blood in my body rushed either to my cheeks or between my legs. I couldn't think, I could only want. I wanted him to coax me, to be so careful with me.

But we weren't in bed. We were at the kitchen counter, and I still had a sharp knife in my sweaty hand. "So I cut right to the middle?" I forced out.

He cleared his throat. "One second. May I?" He held out his hand.

I reached out to meet him. The juice had made my fingers sticky, and they clung to his just a little. "Sorry," I said, awareness of him shortening my breath. I gulped. "Messy."

"It's fine," he said quickly, pink coloring his white skin. "You just need more of an angle. Like this." He grabbed his paring knife and with two precise cuts, extracted a perfect crescent of fruit and dropped it on the board. "See?"

I tried to focus on anything but his soft voice. "Your tattoo," I said, staring at the delicate black outline on his forearm.

He glanced down, confusion on his face. "It's been there the whole time. Did you just notice?"

"No. That," I said, pointing to the knife he held, "is your tattoo. Most chefs have a huge knife on their arms. Or even a cleaver. Not their paring knives."

He twirled it slowly. "This was my first good knife. Ximena and the other senior chefs at the Pacific had rolls full of these beautiful blades, and I only had cheap-ass plastic-handled ones. I tried to keep them sharp, but I still mangled and wasted ingredients. So I ate a lot of ramen and canned beans, and on my day off I drove to this kitchen store in Chinatown in LA. When I picked up this tiny thing for the first time, it felt like I could do delicate stuff and get it right."

The way he said "delicate" made me think of him doing nonculinary things. Like kissing me. Like tracing his fingertips over my skin, whispering sweet words as he mapped me.

But Tad was depending on me. And kisses and touches wouldn't keep us on task. "You need to stop saying these things when I don't have my phone recording," I said as lightly as I could. "That's gold."

His mouth quirked. "You'll remember. You try, now."

"OK. Here goes." My first segment was more ragged than his.

"Good," he said softly. "Again."

I shivered.

"You cold?"

The opposite. I imagined taking an ice bath in a blizzard and said calmly, "I'm fine." I spun the fruit slowly, making neater and neater cuts, until the last segment was exactly right.

"Nice," he said approvingly. "That's how you supreme."

"That's not too bad to describe to a home cook, but doesn't that leave a lot of fruit behind?"

"Yeah, but watch." He held his hand out for the fruit's skeleton. When I gave it back, I didn't linger on how my skin stuck to his again.

But now he was still, and this was too much eye contact for coworkers. "Kieran?"

He shook his head hard and the link broke. "Sorry. Pass me that little bowl?" A trickle of red juice fell into the bowl when he squeezed as hard as he could. "See? No waste."

"That could be the start of the vinaigrette."

"Exactly. Though the blood orange is pretty sweet. It would need something really sharp to stand up to all the olive oil. Like…"

I tapped my lip. "Some sherry vinegar? Or mustard?"

"Definitely the first one. But we don't want a sweet mustard vinaigrette."

"Wouldn't be much. Only half a teaspoon. It'd help the dressing emulsify."

He shook his head. "It should come together without that."

"With a lot of practice, definitely, but it's good to give the cook a safety net. They're not going to get it right every time."

"So it's like making the recipe a little more forgiving?" he asked.

I nodded. "Exactly."

He thought for a second, then smiled. "We all need that sometimes. We'll do it your way."

"Thank you." His trust settled over me like a soft blanket. I let myself savor the breakthrough for a second, then called up my spreadsheet that tracked my tests of all the recipes in Whatever You Want . "OK. Buy duck legs and a lot of oil for next time. And I'll think about the proportions for the vinaigrette recipe. But right now we should rerun the asparagus salad for ‘Refresh' and the pavlova for ‘Treat.'"

I called out ingredients, and Kieran pulled more asparagus, eggs, and fruit out of the fridge. While I put a pot of water on for boiling and blanching, Kieran grabbed both our knives and ran the edges over a porcelain wand to sharpen them.

"Did you ever think about writing your own book?" he asked as he worked.

I carefully split one of the eggs and put the white into one bowl, the yolk into another. The bright orange yolk would become mayonnaise, and the white would make meringues that we'd top with whipped cream, raspberries, and roasted rhubarb. "I have a proposal, but it's never really gone anywhere."

He shook his head. "Well, that's their loss. I'm sure you wrote something awesome."

I grimaced at the bowls instead of looking at him. "No, like, I've never submitted it. I don't have an agent or anything."

"Why not?"

I bit my lip. "I was working on it before Max died, and it's probably old news by now. Three years is a long time in food."

He turned to the sink and quickly washed his hands. "I want to see it."

"I don't know—it's a mess. You'll probably cringe at it."

His eyebrows shot up as he grabbed a towel. "Come on, Ellie, why would you think that?"

Because Max would look briefly at recipes I'd worked on, but he was a lot more interested in eating the food. He would ask how I'd spent my days, then just nod at my answers. Over time I began to say, "Fine," instead of telling him details, and I'd ask him about his day instead. I hadn't had his knack for storytelling, anyway.

"I don't know." I lied now, pushing away the less-than-glowing memory.

"Please, pretty please, with a cherry on top?" Kieran said in the present, giving me puppy-dog eyes and a trembling lower lip.

But Kieran wasn't Max. He cooked too, and food had made us both, in different ways. Maybe he'd get it. "OK."

He clapped. "Yay, I get to see cool Ellie stuff."

What a sweet goof he was. I washed my hands, smiling, then opened the proposal and turned my laptop toward him. "Here you go."

I knew reading would take him a while, and there were always more dishes to wash when we were testing. I stood over the sink and let hot water and suds flow over my hands, but I couldn't help but listen to the tap of my keyboard as he scrolled through the pages, seeing Hank's fettuccine Alfredo with pops of green pea and scallion, Max's towering devil's food birthday cake, the roast lamb leg scented with herbs de Provence that Diane used to serve to guests' oohs and aahs. Seeing pictures of Nicole pretending to be the Spaghetti Monster, of Ben carving a chicken with a huge grin on his face, of little Hank with a fat streak of turquoise frosting through his light blond hair.

"Why are you calling it Nourish ?" Kieran asked.

"I think feeding people goes deeper than just filling their bellies," I said. "I think it makes us feel connected. Safe. So it's not just about physical hunger."

He studied me. "Food is love, for you."

I blushed under his gaze. "Yeah," I said simply. "Always has been."

He looked back at the screen. "No wonder you take it so seriously," he said. "Max was a lucky guy."

I shook my head. "I was the lucky one. Max could have had anyone, and he picked me."

"But you could have had anyone, too."

The way he said that, with such calm certainty. I tried to rub the blush out of my cheeks. "Incorrect. I was fresh out of high school and hadn't been anywhere. Totally rough around the edges. Diane taught me how to dress and how to be." I'd had to get used to my new reflection in the mirror, but I'd liked the way my cheekbones looked sharper with short hair, how my skin warmed with wearing colors and prints instead of basic gray and navy. Max's wolf whistles hadn't hurt either.

A minute later, Kieran closed the laptop. "I like this a lot, but something's missing."

"What? A recipe?"

"No. There's not a lot of you in it. No pictures of you, no recipes you make for yourself."

I resisted the urge to shy away. "There aren't really any pictures of me as a child. And I like everything in that proposal. I wouldn't have put it in if I didn't." Which wasn't quite true. I liked the way cooking the recipes made me feel. I liked the satisfaction of watching someone else relish my food. I wouldn't choose to eat everything in there, but that wasn't the point.

"Seriously?" Kieran said. "My parents took thousands of pictures of us." His mouth turned down. "When we were little kids, anyway."

I tried to shrug. "My parents were super hands-off. My dad left for good when I was nine, and my mom worked a lot. When she wasn't working, she needed time to herself."

His mouth tightened. "They had you, but they didn't want to raise you? That's some bullshit."

I heard Hank's scorn in his voice, and I tried to lower the temperature. "Mom did the best she could." Which was terrible. "I don't blame her. She had me when she was twenty." She hadn't grown past that point, though. "I didn't know much of anything when I was that old, let alone how to care for a kid." But I'd known enough to marry a good, loving man with a solid career who'd actually wanted to be a dad someday.

Kieran's hand lifted and moved an inch toward mine, then stopped. "Thank you for trusting me with that," he finally said. His eyes on me were so soft, and for a second all I wanted was to bury my face in his neck.

"At least my parents were hands-on, even if it wasn't great for me," he said. He exhaled hard.

His tension stretched out between us. "What's the matter?"

He rested his head on his arms. "Brian called when I was on my way here. My mom has been bugging me to come down for this party in June, and I've been saying no. But now he says that it's not just for their anniversary. It's a party to celebrate me winning Fire on High ."

"I mean, that's great." But he wasn't exactly brimming with excitement, so I toned mine down. "Do you think it's great?"

He sat up and rubbed the back of his neck, grimacing. "I don't know." He half-laughed. "I can't help hoping that they've changed a little. If they haven't, I would be alone with all their judginess, and that would suck."

"What would they judge you for?"

"I don't value the same things as them," he said with a shrug I didn't buy. "They're big on pretending. Smiling big even when things are shit, dressing up. My parents want me to wear a suit to this thing, and I really hate wearing fancy clothes."

Which was the surprise of the century, given that I'd only seen him in old jeans and worn-out concert T-shirts. "What's wrong with dressing up?"

He gestured to me. "I don't mean you. Your dresses always look comfortable and pretty…" He swallowed. "I mean, nice. Pretty nice. But suits are scratchy and too hot and I don't know which asshole invented ties, but they're torture, not clothing." As he spoke, he scratched his neck like he could feel the constriction.

I didn't want him to feel trapped. How could I let him out? "What if I could take you somewhere you could get a suit you loved? Something that would make you feel comfortable, not like you're being suffocated?"

He shrugged dismissively again. "Thanks, but that suit doesn't exist. I'll just go to T.J.Maxx and buy whatever. I won't waste my money."

But there was something under the dismissiveness. I remembered how for years I had dressed in plain baggy clothes to make myself invisible, and how Diane had shown me that cotton and jersey and silk could be a source of confidence instead. "Don't buy the suit for them, Kieran," I finally said. "Buy the suit for you . Because it makes you look like a million bucks."

He blinked. "A million bucks, huh?"

I nodded. "There's a tailor in North Beach my father-in-law goes to for super-special occasions. I could take you there on your next day off and he could measure you."

"You want to give me a makeover?"

I smiled. "Not a makeover." I waved my hand in his direction, "Just something to make you look on the outside the way you are on the inside."

He leaned forward on the counter and grinned widely. "How am I on the inside, Ellie?"

Smart. Talented. Funny. Dashing, to use an old-school word. But I couldn't tell him any of that. "Not a complete pain in my neck," I said lightly.

A little smile snuck across his lips, and I told myself it wasn't any more attractive than his huge Pirate Leprechaun grin that he handed out to everyone. "Fine. Take me to your magical tailor."