Pinch of Love (9781101558638) (23 page)

And just a few hours after that, I awoke to Nick kissing me good-bye. “Don't get up,” he said. “Keep sleeping.”

He thunked his suitcase down the stairs. “I'll be back before you know it,” he called. “We'll have epic reunion sex.”

“I love you,” I called from bed. “Be safe.”

I watched out the window as Nick shook Chief Kent's hand and plucked a Big Yum Donuts doughnut hole from the carton Russ offered, as EJ shook his head in mock disgust. It's the last time I saw Nick alive: He loaded the suitcase into the interfaith van, popped a doughnut hole into his mouth, and blew a powdery kiss to the house.

Without warning, Bergie leaps to the floor and bolts under the table. Real time, real place. France gets up and stands next to me so our shoulders touch. She crosses her arms. “In a way, it
was
beautiful,” she says. “Nick's last night in Wippamunk.”

I think about what Nick told me, about the carnage and the car parts strewn everywhere. France saw all that. How could she say that?

“Beautiful?” I say, trying not to sound angry. “How do you figure?”

“Well. Nick came home. To you.”

I never thought of it that way. But she's right, of course: Technically, Nick's last memory of Wippamunk
wasn't
what happened on Old Rutland Road. It was coming home.

“Right?” says France.

I nod and try to smile. “Right as rain.”

On top of the radiator, I spy something that confuses and startles me: Nick's handwriting. His message of congratulations fills the cardboard backing of a picture frame turned to face the wall.

“Is that the photograph Nick took of you?” I ask. “On your academy graduation?”

France passes me the frame. I study the close-up of her face—slanted smile, scarred skin. The stiff brim of her cop hat tilts above asymmetrical, unplucked eyebrows.

“Why'd you have this backwards?” I ask.

“Why would I want to look at a picture of myself?” She studies her chewed fingernails. “Why was Nick always so nice to me, Zell?”

I return the frame to the radiator, so Nick's handwriting faces the wall. “Because Nick was a nice guy,” I say. “Because he was a good friend.”

France glances at her portrait. She hasn't changed much since that day. Not physically, anyway.

“Because it was an important day,” I add. “You realized a lifelong goal, and Nick wanted to mark the occasion.”

“I miss him,” France says.

“I know.” The familiar heat gathers behind my eyes, but I don't want to cry, so I quickly excuse myself and go to the bathroom, even though I don't really have to pee. I rest for a while on France's cushiony blue toilet seat, which always struck me as very un-France. But then, that's France. The litter box is in here, on the floor in the narrow linen closet, which doesn't have a door.

When I go back into the kitchen, France offers me the sleepy, purring Bergie. I take him in my arms. He licks and nibbles my neck, then closes his eyes.

“Where were you walking to, anyway?” she asks. “You usually just walk up to the high school. I never see you this far up Main Street.”

“The Muffinry.” I kiss Bergie's incredibly soft head.

“Wow.” She knows EJ and I haven't spoken since The Trip. I'm sure she's thought of orchestrating a meeting—an intervention of sorts—but she's not one to meddle.

“Well,” she says. “Why don't you let me drive you the rest of the way?”

“It's only a block and a half down the street. But thanks for the offer.”

“You shouldn't be out walking around this time of day.”

“The only other person I ever see on Main Street at four in the morning is you, France.” I place Bergie on the kitchen chair. He doesn't wake up.

“It would make me feel a lot better if I drove you,” she says.

I smile. “Okay, Rosco.”

She throws an arm around me and walks me to the door, doing her best impression of the famous Rosco P. Coltrane laugh: a guttural yet high-pitched chortle.

A moment later I'm hopping into the back of the cruiser. Ahab wags his tail once, greyhound style. His nose twitches a few times against my ear, his version of a kiss.

France drives slowly up Main Street, past the Congregational church, the Cumberland Farms, the Wippamunk Gift Shoppe. The cruiser hums along smoothly, and before long we swing into the gravel parking lot of Murtonen's Muffinry.

“Thanks for the ride,” I say.

“My plezs,” says France.

“I loved meeting Bergie.”

In the rearview mirror France's eyes smile. “He's a keeper, isn't he?”

“I hope the rest of your shift is uneventful.”

“I hope you have a good talk with EJ. I'm really glad you're going to talk to him. You know?”

“I know.” I follow Ahab as he steps from the car and makes his way over the pointy stones in the lot. Around us drift the smells of warm butter and sugar. We approach the striped awning, and when we're standing underneath it, France pulls onto Main Street and turns left.

I press my face to the window, but I can't make out much through the steam. Inside, music plays; a Nirvana song ends and a Guns N' Roses song starts. Everybody listened to that stuff in high school. Nick played it in our attic for hours. For years. EJ Murtonen still spins it.

Ahab whines.

“Go on, ya yellow-bellied tick sucker,” I say in Ahab Voice. “Or I'll stove in yer old woodblock.”

I try the door. It's locked.

Inside, a rounded six-foot-three shadow approaches. A muscular, tattooed forearm swipes the condensation, and EJ's close-set blue eyes peer through the glass. He looks older; his blond eyebrows seem bushier than I remember.

“Zell?” he says.

My teeth chatter, but it's not because I'm cold. It's because I'm nervous.

The door opens. Sweet, delicious smells engulf me. It's painful to look at him.

A Bruins bandana covers his scalp. A grease-smeared apron stretches tight across his belly. Flour dots his clogs and black-and-white houndstooth pants; his goatee looks like it's been dipped in flour.

He looks me up and down. “You okay? It's four in the morning.” “I know. I'm fine.”

“Hi, Ahab. I smell good, don't I? Good boy.”

Ahab closes his eyes and leans against EJ's legs. “How's your kitchen?” he asks.

“Oh, fine. Thanks.”

He unclips the leash, and we watch Ahab dart inside. He sniffs all twenty-four table legs in Murtonen's Muffinry, then curls up in a corner behind the cash register.

“Jeez,” EJ says. “We haven't talked since well before your fire. Not since—”

I hold up my mittened hand. “Let's not.”

He nods.

“Listen,” I say. “I need your help.”

For a moment he doesn't move, just stands there watching Ahab. Eventually he crosses the floor, lifts two chairs from a table, and sets them upright. “Sit.”

He goes behind the counter and returns with two plates, each holding a steaming, sugar-sprinkled doughnut-pouf. “It's a beignet,” he says. He takes a seat and sighs. “Southerners know how to make a goddamn doughnut; I'll tell ya that much. I think I've perfected them. Almost, anyway.”

We eat our beignets in silence. I realize I'm tasting the delicious Cajun doughnuts Nick described, the ones the café owner—Charlene—taught EJ to make.

We slurp coffee from paper cups. It's strong, toasty, and nutty. That's how he makes it since The Trip, he explains. “It's got chicory in it.”

I try not to look at him.

Ahab gets up. He whines and pants and puts his head in my lap; he's telling me I forgot to take off his coat and booties. I strip them off and place them under the table, and he curls back up in the corner. His tail rests over his snout, covering his eyes.

EJ glances at the wooden-spoon clock. “Travis is late,” he says. “Again.”

“Travis?”

“My newest indentured servant.”

We watch out the window as snow falls. It covers the parking lot with white.

EJ checks his ovens and returns with a carafe. He refills our cups.

“Did he mention anything to you about a present?” I ask. I don't say Nick's name, because with EJ, I don't need to.

“A present?” EJ asks.

“A present that he bought for me.” I blow on my coffee. “That maybe he was going to give to me when he got back from The Trip.”

He lifts his cup to his nose and holds it there, breathing in. “You're wondering what almost burned your house down.”

I can't see EJ's mouth, but I know he's smiling, because the outside corners of his eyes crinkle. “He hid stuff for you in the oven all the time,” he says. “I knew that.” He takes a long drink. “Fairly hilarious, when you think about it.”

“Yeah.” I smile. I almost even laugh.

“As for a specific present? No. No, I'm sure I would have remembered, had he told me about anything specific. And if I knew there was a present waiting for you all that time, in your oven, I would have said something.”

I sigh. “I was hoping you'd be able to tell me what the present was. But I kind of knew you didn't know.”

“That's what you came here to ask me?”

“No, actually. That was just sort of a bonus question.”

“There's something else?”

I force myself to look at his face. “There's something else.”

He cracks his knuckles. His eyes dart all over the place. I know he doesn't want me here, and for a second I consider leaving, just getting up and walking out the door.

But it spills out of me. Everything. And as soon as I speak, relief seems to wash over EJ. He watches me the whole time I talk. He strokes his goatee and sips his coffee.

I confess my adult life of frozen meals and take-out dinners, and the contest I feel destined to win because the prize is twenty thousand dollars, the same amount Nick specified in his e-mail. When I mention the dollar amount, EJ nods slowly.

I recount Flourless Peanut Butter Treats, Banana Cocoa Milky Way Cookies, Oatmeal Brownie Upside-Down Cake, and on and on. How every baking disaster made the lips purse, the tongue prickle, or the eyes water; left the mouth oversaturated or dry as dust, left the stomach too empty or too full, left the soul decidedly unwarm.

I tell him about Trudy and the Barn, the chainsawed bobcat, the Boston skyline. I describe Ingrid. How she thinks Polly Pinch is her mother, but Garrett says she isn't. How she resembles Polly Pinch, in the eyes mostly, and the mouth, and how the hue of Ingrid's skin seems a perfect fifty-fifty blend of Garrett's and Polly's together. Garrett doesn't want Ingrid to bake anymore, I say, because she's been slacking off in school and doesn't have friends her age, and the baking incites her Polly Pinch fixation, which Garrett thinks is unhealthy, although I'm not quite convinced it is.

I talk so long, my throat actually hurts, but it's a good hurt, as if I opened a little valve somewhere and let out some stale air. I probably haven't spoken that much since Nick died. I push my cup across the table, and EJ refills it again, wrinkling his brow. “I'm still stuck on the part where Ye Olde Home Ec Witch fires up twelve chain saws and carves a bobcat out of wood.” He laughs, and the laugh seems to surprise him. “Did you see the article about her in
The Wippamunker
?” he asks.

“I don't read it anymore.”

“Yeah. I figured that.”

Outside, headlights sweep the parking lot, but it's not Travis, just some guy turning around.

Usually I don't sweeten my coffee, but I shake three packets of sugar and stir them into my cup. “The Polly Pinch contest is for amateurs,” I say. “I'm one hell of an amateur; that's for shit sure.”

“But I'm a professional,” says EJ. “If I help you, we would be breaking the rules.”

“I know.” I sip my coffee. “I don't want you to
help me,
help me. I just need a little inspiration.”

He nods. “How much time do you have until the deadline?”

“A few weeks.”

He clears his throat and crosses his arms. “I'll speak plainly, Zell: You're never going to win over Polly Pinch with Milky Way bars, brownie mix, and instant oatmeal. You ever watch her show?”

“All the time, lately.”

“She likes balance. Flavor. No heavy stuff. And nothing you can buy in a box or in a wrapper. She likes
food.
She's class. All the way.” He swipes his bandana from his head, revealing thinning blond waves. “I'm not so sure you've come to the right person for inspiration. I mean . . .” His voice gets soft, and he twists the bandana in his lap. “I'd do anything for you; you know that. It's just that my skills are pretty limited in this area.”

“In what area?”

“The
foodie
area.”

“EJ, you're the only student ever—
ever
—to receive an A-plus in Ye Olde Home Ec Witch's class. That's got to mean something.”

He blushes and waves his hand. “That was high school. Small-time stuff.”

“But you went to Johnson and Wales,” I say. “You're the Muffin Man. You're
the
Muffin Man.”

“In Worcester County, I can't be beat. Probably in all of Central Mass., I can't be beat. That much is true. But next to Polly Pinch?
Polly effin Pinch?
” He frowns and leans back in his chair, balancing it on two legs. “Next to Polly Pinch, I'm a ham-and-egger. Hang on a second.”