Pinch of Love (9781101558638) Read online

  “Flourless peanut butter cookies,” I say.

  Dennis scribbles.

  “Why?” Ingrid leaps off the porch, clearing all four steps and landing with a crunch in the snow.

  “I was making them for you,” I say. It isn’t exactly true, although I might have brought over a dozen, if they turned out all right. After all, I would’ve had to test my contest entry on someone.

  “I’m allergic to peanuts,” she says. She smacks her gum.

  Russ releases Ahab to me and shoves the doggie oxygen mask back into its case. “Ahab should be back to normal in no time,” he says.

  I look around and realize that I’m surrounded by the people who went on The Trip with Nick. There are Russ and Dennis on the sidewalk a few feet away, Chief Kent sitting right next to me, Officer Frances leaning against the porch railing, and inside, EJ, whom I can hear rummaging around because, to rid the kitchen of smoke, someone propped open the front door.

  Ahab takes a few careful steps toward me but stops when the girl throws her arms around him and kisses his forehead.

  “Ahab likes you,” Russ tells her. “You should deliver the mail when you grow up. Like me.”

  “I’m going to be a chef on TV,” she says.

  This cracks Russ up. He laughs like a doofus and yanks his suspenders and lets them slap against his puny chest. “Well, I’ll be back tomorrow with your mail, Zell,” he says once he’s collected himself. “Hey,” he adds. “Tomorrow’s Friday.”

  “Our standing lunch date,” I say. Russ has been bringing me lunch every Friday since Nick’s memorial service. He’s a few years older than me and he’s always been big brotherly; in grade school he designated himself my “bus buddy,” sitting next to me even when his friends called him to the back of the bus.

  “What do you want to eat?” he asks.

  I try to smile, but I don’t quite succeed. I mean, I used my oven for the first time in years, and I ended up with firefighters in my kitchen, a cop on my porch, and a reporter on my lawn. Granted, I’ve known most of these people for years. But still.

  “Surprise me,” I say to Russ, even though I expect nothing other than Orbit Pizza or leftovers generously donated by his wife. Which is fine by me, because otherwise I’d probably just skip lunch, like every other day.

  Russ nods. “I’m full of surprises,” he says, and galumphs to Engine 1747.

  The radio at France’s hip squawks. She turns the volume down and sighs. “Gotta go, Zell,” she says. “I’ll call ya later, okay?”

  “Okay. See ya.”

  She tips her cop hat to Chief and Dennis, trots to the cruiser, and drives off.

  “Thank you, Officer Frances,” Ingrid yells after her. She scratches Ahab’s back. Her fingernails are chewed and sparkly with old nail polish. Ahab sidles up against her; his back meets the level of her waist.

  Her eyes fling wide. “He’s leaning on me.”

  “Greyhounds do that,” I say. “It’s his way of giving you a hug.”

  Ahab’s big for a grey: ninety pounds. But he’s so gentle that she hardly even sways at his touch.

  Chief Kent chuckles. “Nice hat, kiddo.”

  She shoves the hat, which slipped to the bridge of her nose, up toward the crown of her head. “Thank you.” Then to me she says, “Do you like to cook?”

  “I love to cook.” It’s a lie, of course. What I love is the thought of winning twenty thousand dollars. For Nick. For New Orleans. I never met those hurricane survivors, but he did. And because of them, he was a changed man. Maybe even a better man.

  “You like Polly Pinch?” she asks.

  I think of the impossible-to-avoid Polly Pinch. Her glowing face decorates cracker boxes in grocery stores all over America; she “pinches” a cracker between thumb and forefinger, holding it teasingly above her open mouth. In her most recent Big Yum Donuts television commercial, her breakfast in bed arrives on a silver tray and consists of only a foamy latte. With a sleepy half smile, she blows the steam, swallows, and moans her approval.

  Polly Pinch is about the furthest thing you can imagine from the bifocaled, orthopedic-shoed Ye Olde Home Ec Witch—Mrs. Chaffin, who taught home economics at Wippamunk High School eighteen years ago. And until today—as I pored over the magazine and learned all about this dessert contest—I never knew how much I liked her. Polly Pinch, that is.

  “I adore Polly Pinch,” I say.

  “You gonna open your present?” Ingrid asks. She points at the hard cube in my lap—the present from Nick that apparently was hidden in my oven for at least a year and three months.

  I don’t answer.

  “Come on,” she says. “Don’t you want to know what’s in the box?”

  “Oh, there’s nothing in it,” I say.

  Chief and Dennis exchange glances, which I pretend not to notice.

  She skips over to me; Ahab, who was leaning against her, shuffles on the ice.

  “There is too something in it,” she says. Playfully she snatches the cube from my lap, holds it to her ear, and gives it a shake. It makes a solid knocking sound, like a toddler’s toy, or wooden spoons.

  “Please give that to me?” I stand barefoot on the icy sidewalk. The blanket pools at my ankles.

  She hesitates, giggling. But I’m not playing. “Give it back,” I say.

  “Easy, Zell,” Chief says. He stands and steps toward me, patting the air.

  “Come on, Zell,” says Dennis. “She’s only teasing you. You need to put shoes on.”

  The bottoms of my feet burn on the ice, but I can’t take my eyes off the warped cube in the small, honey brown hands of my girl neighbor.

  Chief positions himself between me and her. He gives me a stern look and gently takes the cube from Ingrid, who gives it up easily. As bravely as she can without crying—I know she’s swallowing tears because I recognize the effort—she whispers, “I like your dog.” She stomps up her steps and slams the door behind her.

  My feet are now totally numb. I kick the blanket.

  And then EJ, from my kitchen, hollers, “I think we’re all set, Chief.”

  I hear EJ walk around inside. I hear the legs of my kitchen table and chairs scrape the floor.

  “There’s nothing in it,” I say.

  “Okay,” says Chief, handing me the oven present. “There’s nothing in it. Whatever you say, Zell. Whatever you say.”

  “Of course there’s nothing in it,” says Dennis. “Now, cover up your feet before they get all frostbit.”

  I sit back down on the steps and wrap my feet in the blanket. I set the cube in my lap and finger the lid, melted and gnarled like a swollen lip. Ahab whines and steps toward me. I stroke his head and lower my face to kiss him. A tear sneaks from my eye and is absorbed in the dense, whiskered pucker of fur that is the equivalent of a dog eyebrow.

  “Ay, Chief!” EJ calls from inside.

  “Can you please get EJ out of my kitchen?” I say. “I just can’t—I’m sorry, but—”

  “Sure,” Chief says. “Sure thing, Zell.” He sighs and goes inside.

  Dennis unclips his press pass and stuffs it into his pocket. He grips my shoulder in a fatherly gesture. “Be well,” he says. A moment later, I watch his car bounce down the road.

  Soon EJ and Chief emerge from my house and tromp down the steps.

  “Zell?” Chief says—meaning, good-bye.

  EJ doesn’t speak to me, of course—he hasn’t since The Trip. I think he’s afraid of me. I can’t blame him, because since Nick died, I haven’t exactly been approachable, despite my efforts.

  EJ stoops and softly tugs the blanket from my feet. Our eyes don’t meet.

  He and Chief join the other firefighters aboard Engine 1747. Russ drives, skinny, bare-armed Russ at the oversize steering wheel, bouncing down potholed High Street. Engine 1747 turns the corner. Puffs of gray, greasy exhaust hang over the street and fade, and the world is quiet again.

  And save for Ahab, I’m alone. Just like that.

  Ahab
follows me into the kitchen, where I admit the new guy was right: There’s no damage at all. The odors of smoke and fire extinguisher linger, but the room doesn’t look any different than it did before the fire, except maybe a bit cleaner, somehow.

  I smell something else. Coffee. Apparently, EJ brewed a half pot. Not for himself, I know, because I don’t find any used mugs in the sink or dishwasher. He brewed it for me. I pour some and drink it black.

  Ahab wants cookie dough. He cocks his head, dipping the eye-patch side of his face toward the floor. He doesn’t really have an eye patch, but his fur’s Holstein pattern makes it look so.

  I pinch a dollop of dough and drop it into his elevated dish. He laps it up and nudges my hand for more, so I give him another peanut-buttery blob.

  “Arr, Zell. I woulda chowed all yer treats. Cooked or uncooked. Every last bloody one. With or without a noggin o’ rum. Yarr.”

  I think of Garrett Knox’s daughter and her peanut allergy. She doesn’t know what she’s missing: peanut butter’s salty-sweet creaminess. I’ll bet she doesn’t even have a memory of peanuts—no memory, no taste. A clean slate, a blank wall.

  I put Nick’s camo apron back where I found it, under the sink. And there I discover, in the trash can, heaps of soot-blackened paper towels. EJ, all that time, was cleaning my oven, cleaning my kitchen.

  I notice the magnetic notepad on my refrigerator. The top sheet bears slanted, blocky man-handwriting: HEY, ZELL, TIME WE TALKED, COME DOWN TO THE MUFFINRY, ANYTIME, PLEASE.

  EJ’s business card is tucked under the magnet, as if I don’t know where the Muffinry is. The card reads,EJ “The Muffin Man” Murtonen!

  Come to Murtonen’s Muffinry at 900 Main Street in beautiful Wippamunk, Mass., for the best muffins and coffee west of 495, or your money back!

  FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS NOW, my heart does this weird thing, at weird times. Like now: four in the morning. The weird heart thing is sort of like being a widow—familiar by now, and yet completely foreign.

  My heart thumps fast and hard. I sit up, gasping, and press my back against the headboard, which Nick trash picked and I painted midnight blue with silver stars of different sizes. Next to me, Ahab lifts his head. His eyes flash in the dark.

  I count the seconds that pass during the spastic beats: six. Then the beats stop altogether, and I count the seconds that lapse during that weightless absence of internal thump: five.

  My heart goes back to normal, plodding along steadily, calmly, unremarkably.

  I turn on the light; I won’t sleep. Ahab knows it, too, so he stands and eases himself down, daintily stepping on the footstool Nick trash picked for Ahab’s exclusive use because, as he got older, jumping from our bed proved challenging, and a few times he slid right off the mattress and crashed to the floor, his legs splayed beneath him.

  He follows me down the hall. I stand in the doorway of my office—I draw medical illustrations for a living—and inhale the scents of wood, wax, and eraser. I caress the slack jaw of the skeleton that hangs from a wheeled stand just inside the door. “Hi, Hank,” I whisper.

  Hank was Nick’s name for the skeleton.

  I’m hit with a Memory Smack; they plague me quite frequently. I was erasing something—an errant pencil mark alongside a tibia, or maybe I misspelled “brachiocephalic”—when Nick poked his head in my office door.

  “You need a break,” he said. He sang “Welcome to the Jungle.” He took Hank down, held his wrists, and made him dance like Axl Rose: legs kicking out to the side, arms waving, hips swaying.

  That was when we first moved in.

  As so often happens when you’re a widow, one Memory Smack leads to another, without regard to sequencing or time, and this second Memory Smack is from a trash night not so long ago: Nick beeped the horn and backed our crappy blue car into the driveway. Ahab and I watched from the door as he filled his arms with loot from the trunk. He smiled, took the porch steps two at a time, and planted a noisy kiss on my lips.

  “Hope we like Gladys,” he said.

  “Who?”

  That sharp autumnal smell clung to his dark hair. That smell of outside things receding into cold air. We in Wippamunk appreciate that process—it could be said we worship it—the annual beauty of fading, withering, and disappearing. That’s our New England style.

  Nick dropped his trash-night loot on the couch. We inspected it: a turntable, and a milk crate containing a complete collection of vinyl records by Gladys Knight and the Pips—in total, thirty-six albums.

  The turntable and the albums were the very last things he trash picked.

  The Memory Smack ends. Its edges turn black, and the scene shrinks until I can no longer see it, or smell it, or hear it.

  Real time, real place.

  Next to me, Ahab sniffs Hank’s kneecap.

  “Blimey, Hank!” I say softly, in Ahab Voice.

  We continue downstairs, leaving Hank swaying slightly.

  I Velcro Ahab into his gray fleece coat and tuck his ears into the elastic face hole. I tug a neoprene booty over each paw.

  I zip my boots over my pajama pants, bundle my coat and scarf tight. I retrieve the warped, singed cube from a shelf in the living room, where I left it among Nick’s dad’s pottery. Even as the cube’s contents knock around inside, I tell myself it’s empty. The present feels heavy, though it probably weighs only a couple of pounds. I tuck it under one arm and clip on Ahab’s leash.

  We step outside, and the cold knifes through the thin cotton covering my legs. We slip and slide down High Street, past a uniform row of prefab colonial-style homes, all painted shades of tan, though in the dark they’re a luminous, moonish color.

  We pass Bedard’s Orchard. Here Ahab sniffs expectantly for Mr. B.’s fat orange cat, which he loves to try to chase, but the cat’s not around tonight.

  We pass the three-room police station and turn left onto Main Street. Ahab tries to cross because he thinks we’re headed for the high school football field, where I let him off leash to run around. But we aren’t headed for the high school tonight. Instead we climb Main Street, past the junction of Route 331. No cars. No traffic to speak of.

  I feel the skin on my face tighten. I try to smile. I try to frown. It’s so cold, I can’t do either.

  We pass the town hall and the town common and the cemetery, where gravestones from the eighteenth century tilt like bad teeth.

  Ahab has no idea where we’re going, but he takes the lead anyway, heading past the Congregational church, the Cumberland Farms, Wippamunk Gift Shoppe, Big Yum Donuts, and the gas station.

  Main Street is dark, still, and lifeless—except ahead, where a traffic light blinks in front of Murtonen’s Muffinry. Its windows are steamed. The smells of coffee, warm butter, and sugar waft into the empty gravel parking lot, and inside, yellow lights glow. From behind the building the butt end of the Muffinry van sticks out. I can just make out its edible-looking letters, the bite marks in the y.

  EJ’s massive shape moves inside the Muffinry’s big bay window. He takes chairs down from tables.

  Ahab and I continue on. But I stop abruptly when he growls. He never growls.

  I scan my surroundings, trying to see what he sees—what makes him growl. But it’s so dark, I can’t see much, even with the blinking light. I realize I shouldn’t have stopped, because now—standing in the parking lot with my breath hovering over me in icy puffs, stupidly gawping at Murtonen’s Muffinry’s gray-and-maroon-striped awning—I lose my nerve. Maybe I’m not ready to talk to EJ. Maybe I’m not ready to open Nick’s present.

  The air smells of gasoline, salt, and sand from the road, and EJ’s muffins. EJ “The Muffin Man” Murtonen’s delicious, cakey, moist, huge, Best of Wippamunk Award–winning muffins.

  In my chest, the bottom drops out again, and my heart is suspended in beatless silence. Four frozen seconds. Five frozen seconds. Six. I really should call back Dr. Carrie Fung. But maybe if I don’t, something bad—bad enough—will happen. After all, there’s a lot fo
r the human body to sabotage, so many gloriously fatal mistakes it can make. If I never return Dr. Fung’s calls, some bad-enough heart episode might occur, and the event will lift me right off my feet, straight from this parking lot, straight up from Wippamunk, straight up from life. I’ll float around beautifully—like dandelion fuzz spinning off a stem, like a tangle of Ahab’s fur swept along the kitchen baseboard by cold wind when I open the back door to let him in. I’ll be reunited with Nick. And we’ll float around together, stunningly.

  But the heartbeats return, as they always do: fast at first, then normal.

  I’ll walk home. I’ll cue Gladys and the boys and fall asleep with my lips resting in the little indentation behind Ahab’s ear.

  “Ahab!” I whisper. “Come on, Cap’n.”

  He growls once more toward the parking lot, but he comes to me, because he always comes to me. And we head out again, back the way we came, toward High Street. Toward home.

  “Harr, Zell, yer a yellow-bellied milksop,” I say.

  EJ

  Three and a half hours past midnight. Main Street is a black-and-blue ghost-town version of its daylight self. It’s a strange time to know the world—firmly settled in neither night nor day. And just as the Muffinry van groans with protest when he turns the key, EJ himself needs a little coaxing. He rubs his face with both hands, allows a few body-shuddering yawns, and forces his palms to grip the numbingly cold steering wheel. (Finnish Americans are too tough for gloves, his dad always said.) He lets the engine idle for a few minutes, backs from his driveway into the bruised-looking world, and drives to the Muffinry.

  Once there, he preheats the ovens. Turning the knobs—slippery with grease even after a good cleaning—he thinks of Zell’s sooty oven. He’d known for years that Nick hid Zell’s presents there. EJ knew she wasn’t much of a cook, but he didn’t know she never cooked. And the fact that it took her, presumably, at least a year and three months to discover this particular present, whatever it is—the fact that she hadn’t touched the oven in that long—well, that fact makes him feel for her even more.