Food for Thought (2 page)

“What did she do?”

So he’d told the story about growing close to someone for an entire school year, of thinking the two of them had a future, and of making promises to get back together as soon as school started again.

And of unreturned phone calls and texts, and of getting back to school to find that the person you thought you’d loved was now with someone else, and the whole world thought they were the perfect couple.

He’d told Vinnie’s mom everything….

With the exception of one or two teeny little details.

And Flora had been the one person who’d known, including Emmett’s father, whom Emmett visited once a week. It stayed that way until Emmett told Vinnie the story at Christmas. He’d been better by then, not quite so thin and wild-eyed, and Vinnie had given him a brother’s hug, and told him about Angela.

And nobody had ever challenged him on those one or two teeny little details, until right now.

“Emmett?” Flora said kindly.

“What else do you want me to do?” Emmett asked, smiling gamely. He had a good smile—his face was sort of plain, bony, with a long jaw and teeth not quite bucked enough for braces—but he knew when he smiled, his full lips eased the harshness, erased the impression of his slightly crooked teeth, made him beautiful.

“I want you to tell me something real about this girl,” Flora said gently.

Emmett thought carefully, trying to find a detail that would make Christine good enough for the only mother he really remembered. “She wears these really skinny black skirts,” Emmett said. “They look severe, and businesslike, right? And she wears blazers over them, even in the summer. But underneath, she buys these adorable little shirts with cartoon characters. Unless she has a meeting or something, she’s a grown-up wearing Hello Kitty! Or Dora the Explorer. And she likes to watch those shows at night, when she’s working. That’s her background noise, and she knows all the episodes.”

His smile relaxed, and he nodded hopefully into Flora’s eyes. “It’s really cute.”

Flora regarded him sorrowfully. “You’re leaving tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” Emmett said, feeling bad. “You know, low man on the totem pole—don’t get to take the whole week off.” He was in the marketing department at Intel, along with Christine. They’d started dating when she needed a plus-one for her sister’s wedding, and everybody had been so nice to him—Christine’s dad had wanted to talk stocks and her brother had wanted to talk sports. Her sisters had wanted to talk television shows and her mother had wanted to talk cooking. It was, in fact, a lot like Vinnie’s reunion, except Emmett knew all of Vinnie’s relatives, and Vinnie’s dad didn’t keep asking him how serious he was about his daughter.

Emmett, who hadn’t been in the market to date
anyone
had immediately started asking Christine to movies and out to dinner. Yeah, the good-night kisses were sort of tepid, and she kept hinting that she wanted a sleepover, but whenever she got too grabby, he just got her started about the sister who got married and how her other two sisters were planning
their
weddings and how her two brothers wanted kids and suddenly, she wasn’t interested in sexy times anymore, she was interested in
babies
, and he figured that they could manage the sexy times when there were babies at the end of it.

Babies meant
family
, and yes, Emmett was a fan.

Flora pursed her mouth. “So she wears cute cartoon character T-shirts. How big are her boobs?”

Emmett could swear his eyes did the “A
yooo
ga!” thing, like the cartoon characters on Christine’s shirts. “I don’t know!” he floundered, moving his flour-coated hands a lot. “Standard size, I guess!” He thought about it. “Uhm, smaller than Angela’s.”

Flora raised her thin, gray eyebrows. “All my daughters are smaller than Angela’s. Are they smaller than Cecily’s?”

“I don’t know!” Emmett burst out, waving more flour around the Tomiche’s kitchen. “I don’t look at your daughters’ boobs!”

“A
ha
!” Flora crowed, like she’d caught Vinnie stealing pies. (Vinnie had stolen a lot of food in Emmett’s name when they’d been kids. Flora had finally gotten wise and started
asking
Emmett if he’d gotten the pie or the cookies or, in one case, the half of a wedding cake. When Emmett gave her the blank stare before sputtering and trying to cover for Vinnie, Vinnie had gotten into a
lot
of trouble as well.)

“Aha what? What’s aha?” Emmett looked around the kitchen wildly, taking in the old yellow wallpaper, the peeling veneer on the pasteboard cabinets, and battered tan tile. A showcase, this place was not, but Emmett felt like he’d been ambushed in his place of safety. “Why would you yell ‘Aha!’ at me? I thought you liked me!”

Flora’s deep brown eyes—so much like Vinnie’s—were nothing but kind. “I
love
you, Emmett. That’s why I want you to be happy. Honey, you don’t have to be a chauvinist pig to look at a pretty girl’s boobs. The fact that you were
surrounded
with pretty girl’s boobs and you didn’t notice a
little
? That makes me think that maybe pretty girls aren’t what you’re looking for.”

Emmett swallowed, touched and, weirdly enough, near tears. But there were a hundred people gathering on Flora’s lawn, and he didn’t feel like talking about Jordyn and Christine and about his next-door neighbor who wasn’t like either of them.

“I, uh, should wash my hands if I’m going to help Vinnie with the barbecue,” he said, hoping she’d just drop it.

She sighed and shrugged. “You do that, Emmett, but I’ve got you until tomorrow, and this isn’t over, you hear me?”

“Gotta go unbury the pig, Flora—catch you later!”

He ran away then, retreated without shame. He’d been there the night Vinnie’s mom had cornered Vinnie in the living room about marrying Angela because the poor girl couldn’t see that he was an idiot and Flora wanted what was best for her idiot son, even if it was more than he deserved.

But standing next to Vinnie and downing a beer while Vinnie prodded the ribs and dogs on the barbecue was not the haven Emmett thought it would be.

“So, Christine,” Vinnie said, gingerly poking a rib and sticking out a full upper lip when it appeared to spring back. Emmett had spent a lot of his adolescence fantasizing about Vinnie’s lips, until he’d snapped out of it and grew up. You didn’t think about another guy’s lips. That was kid’s stuff.

“What about her?”

“She as cute as Jordyn?”

Emmett grimaced. “You know, I was trying to forget that name.”

“Is she?”

“Christine?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s nice, you’d like her.”

“Why would I like her?”

“She likes action adventure movies.”

“Yeah,” Vinnie said grimly, leaving the poor ribs alone for a minute. “But you like romances.”

“I like action adventure movies!” He
did
. In fact, he was starting to like them more now, because romances were
icky
with girls! Or, uhm, watching them with his girlfriend was icky. Uncomfortable. Watching romances with his girlfriend with whom he had not yet consummated the relationship was uncomfortable. “I, uhm, like their mood,” he said weakly, smiling into Vinnie’s eyes the same way he’d smiled into Vinnie’s mother’s eyes.

Vinnie stared back at him, long Italian face unmoved and unimpressed.

“Their mood.”

Emmett smiled brightly. God, he’d wanted to tell Vinnie about Jordyn—he really had. But Vinnie had been so excited about Angela, and Emmett hadn’t wanted to bring up the stupid way he’d fantasized about Vinnie’s full lips and warm brown eyes when they were in junior high.

“Their mood. I like their mood.”

“You know, Emmett, you could still come to the family picnic and to Christmas and Thanksgiving if you, uhm, brought a date who didn’t have boobs, you know that, right?”

At that moment, Vinnie’s uncle Jimbo walked by, a “Marriage is for one man and one woman” T-shirt proudly stretched tightly across his prodigious man-maries. Emmett looked pointedly at Jimbo and then back at Vinnie, who shrugged, unimpressed.

“Mom loves you more than Uncle Jimbo,” he said, without batting an eyelash. “In fact, she loves you more than most of her other children. Except Cecily. She’s the baby, and Mom loves her best—and that’s okay. But you, she loves.”

Emmett couldn’t keep looking him in the eyes anymore. It was getting embarrassing, and his eyes were starting to water.

“I… uhm, you know. You’re like my only family,” Emmett said. He didn’t want to say any more, didn’t want to think about his dad, with his slow smile and his outsized hands, and the way he’d wait outside on his front porch for Emmett to show up on his Sunday visits home from college. Emmett still found himself, Sunday mornings, waking up excited about driving to visit his dad, and not able to remember why he couldn’t do that anymore until he was in his underwear, making coffee.

Which was usually why Keegan came over on Sunday mornings, but nobody knew that but Emmett.

“Emmett,” Vinnie said gently, “you’re my brother. And you’re not going to be any less of my brother if you and this girl don’t work out.”

“You’d like her,” Emmett said with conviction. But Vinnie liked everybody. Hell, Vinnie would probably like Keegan, too, and Keegan was an acquired taste.

“I’m sure I would,” Vinnie said grimly. “But I’m not the one who has to sleep with her, so the question is, do you
want
her?”

“That hot dog is burning,” Emmett said a little desperately.

Vinnie just shook his head and sighed, and Emmett held out the plate so Vinnie could unload the dogs. The ribs still had a ways to go.

B
UT
IN
spite of the constant prying into Emmett’s love life, the reunion was a success. Happy children, mildly drunk adults, and nobody set themselves on fire during the pyrotechnic portion of the show. The next morning, after the giant after-meal of waffles and bacon, Emmett retreated to Vinnie’s old room to pack. (Vinnie and Angela lived in town—they just
drove
to and from Vinnie’s mom’s house, and Emmett was always surprised at how venomously he envied his friend for something that simple.)

Flora came in after him.

“Here,” she said without ceremony, and dropped a book on his suitcase.

Emmett eyeballed the book and then picked it up gingerly. “Flora, this looks really
old
.”

“Well, yes—it’s sort of an heirloom. Somebody’s grandmother’s aunt’s cousin or whatever. Made five copies, gave one to each child. And then my aunt gives it to my cousin who gives it to me.”

Emmett picked the book up with a little bit of reverence. It was battered, hand-bound, hand-typed pages tied together with what looked to be old leather lacings, with a leather cover. On the front, he read,
Recipes for the Heart: Mystical Meals and Dangerous Desserts, by Granny B.

Carefully, Emmett started to leaf through the yellowed pages, surprised when they didn’t just disintegrate into powder.

“
For Rainy Days
,” he read, smiling a little. “
For Courting
.” He turned the page to the next section. “
For Thought
. This is a cookbook?”

“Yes, it is—but it’s an unusual one.”

Emmett found that the thing seemed to purr in his hands, like a kitten. He wanted to wrap his arms around it, holding it to his chest.

“Why unusual?” he asked suspiciously.

“Because—the sections aren’t the usual ones for one thing. There’s no ‘Entrée,’ ‘Chicken,’ ‘Dessert,’ or any of that. And for another, well… you simply need to try a recipe. They’ve all been added to. You want family, Emmett? This is the advice of
generations
of families, all in one cookbook.”

Emmett swallowed, wanting that book so much his mouth watered. “I can’t take this,” he said, trying to be a good guy. “You’re going to want to give it to Angela or Cecily—”

“Angela has her own family recipes,” Flora said, sounding philosophical about it. “And Cecily has cooked from this book since she was very small. It’s her writing in some of the margins, childish as it is. Even Vinnie had something to say.”

Emmett wanted to cry more than ever. “Then I
really
can’t take it,” he said gently, and to his surprise, Flora laughed.

“You go ahead and try to leave it here,” she cackled, and then kissed him on the cheek. “You’re a good boy. I’m going to go make you some sandwiches for the trip.”

Emmett spent a few minutes leafing through the book. There was a shortbread recipe, which seemed to be the only thing relatively untouched by comments.
Awesome, fattening, and fricking easy.
That looked like Vinnie’s handwriting right there—leave it to Vinnie to comment on the obvious.

He ended up in
Food for Thought
. “‘Beet Porridge,’” he read, and then scrawled next to the Beet Porridge, in different ink, were the words
clarifies things
. He laughed to himself and read some more.
Chipotle sauce, start the night before.
There was an arrow to that and a scrawled comment:
You can buy the cubes now, which keeps your house from becoming a tear
-
gas repository for two days.
Wow—this must be some clarifying recipe if people were willing to go through
that
. Reluctantly, Emmett stood up and set the book down on Vinnie’s bed.

Yeah, he was curious… but… but… it wasn’t
right
that he should take the book. This kind of book—that was
family.
And if Emmett knew one thing for sure, it was that as of yet, he didn’t have a family of his own.

H
E
SET
his duffel on the front floorboard of his Toyota hybrid, and the package of sandwiches on the seat, then went to hug Vinnie’s entire family who had arrived to see him off.

God, he loved these people. He’d played board games with them on rainy days, and they’d gone to each other’s track meets and baseball games, chess games and theater productions. He’d held the girls through broken hearts and congratulated the guys on getting the guts up to go to prom.