New W-I-P, Part 4

[mbranesf]

 This next (rather delayed) segment is short. I was going try to get the remainder of the story posted in one or two big chunks and be done with it, but the section that immediately follows this one is giving me trouble. Here the dinner is served and something is learned about Ledger's background. (Anyone who was following along but forgot what was happening since last post was like 10 days ago can find the earlier installments by way of the "personal writing" tag).

 

"Love Me," He Said, and Turned Away Forever  (Part 4)

 

Dinner came together easily, in several pieces between cocktails. Beans simmered, forming a silky broth, and tamales steamed. I pulverized roasted chiles and tomatillos into a blistering, piquant sauce, and shredded a small, perfectly pale green cabbage. I quartered more limes, planning on many more drinks. And eventually, when enough time had passed, Ledger came back inside. He surprised me by standing close to me at the stove, peering into my pots and inhaling their aromas. “I’m really hungry,” he said. I still had neither invited him properly to dinner nor done anything to ameliorate my earlier rudeness. But we seemed to have moved past all of that by unspoken agreement.  “I hope you are,” I said. “We’re going to have a lot of food.” I opened the refrigerator and handed him a beer. Peace in our time.

            He seemed to want to say something but couldn’t get it out for a minute. Finally he asked if it was OK if he took a shower there, and then he looked very embarrassed over having asked. “But I’m really sweaty and dirty,” he admitted. “I probably shouldn’t come to dinner like this.” I was charmed that he viewed this situation as a dinner that ones comes to, as opposed to simply eating, especially in this wholly shabby kitchen. “I have other clothes in my backpack.” I had not noticed that he even traveled with a backpack, but then there it was, a green camo thing lying in a corner of the room next to the trash can. This reminded me of my son: he was always digging stuff out of a backpack. He carried so much stuff in it that I had imagined it to be some sort of civilian-model TARDIS, way bigger on the inside than the outside.

            The shower ran for a long time and I continued to cook. I gently pulled open the banana leaf wrappers of the tamales and laid sauce over them, and a snow of crumbled cheese. I slid them under the broiler. I fried all the cabbage I had shredded earlier and much of it went into the yellow rice, while some of it was soaked in a dressing of lime juice, olive oil, crushed garlic and minced jalapeno. I had little decent to work with as far as serving dishes, but I managed it. Soon everything was sprawled over the kitchen island, a buffet large enough to feed at least a dozen.

            Ledger reappeared, refreshed. He was dressed identically to the way he had been—white t-shirt, camo cargo shorts—but the clothes were clean now. His hair looked as if it had been slicked with pomade and he now wore glasses—or had he all along? I couldn’t remember. I vaguely remembered that he had been wearing sunglasses outside. Perhaps they were prescription, like mine.

            “I have never seen this,” he said.

            “Seen what?” I handed him a drink.

            “Food that looks like this in somebody’s house. It looks like it’s in a restaurant.”

            I told him, briefly, about my culinary background, and added, “Brace, the guy who hired you for this job, and I used to own a restaurant.”

            “What is this?” Ledger bent down, his nose close to a bowl full of a bright orange sauce, studded with black pips and rounds of scallion green and bits of cilantro leaf, and shiny with a drizzle of olive oil. “It smells really good.”

            “I’m not quite sure what to call it,” I said. “It’s an experiment. I made it from that weird 'kudzu fruit.' A kudzu fruit salsa, I guess? Taste it.”

            With the corner of a tortilla chip, Ledger lifted a big blob of the salsa to his mouth and ate it hungrily. His eyes widened, as if surprised.

            “Is it too hot?”

            “It’s good!” he said. “Only thing anyone around here ever does with those things is make pies out of them.” He ate a couple more bites of the salsa and then sat down on a stool at one end of the island evidently ready to dine in earnest. I served him, filling his plate with some of everything.

            He tasted the rice and then the beans. Then he looked at me and said, “You don’t say a prayer or anything before you eat, do you?”

            “No,” I said.

            He nodded, and went back to eating. But I had to know: “Do you?”

            He shook his head. “I don’t. Not since I moved away from home. But my dad always did. I could never pronounce all of it, but he usually just said the short version: Cthulhu fhtagn!”

            He returned to eating, but I stared at him, surprised. A Cthulhu cultist! This kid seemed so ordinary in most regards that I hadn't expected him to be of any kind of non-mainstream religious practice. But, as if anticipating my next question, he said, through a mouthful of tamale, “But I don’t believe in that. That’s my dad’s thing.”

            “Of course,” I said, suddenly finding my employee and dinner companion a bit more interesting.

[to be continued]