CHAPTER THIRTY

She had been preparing it since five o'clock.

The chicken recipe of her mother was just a personal one. It had never been written down her mother wasn't the kind of person who would write down recipes, she was a person who worked by feeling, by reminiscences through senses, and by the special kind of intelligence of a person who believes food is a form of attention, a means of saying: "I am attending to you quite enough to make this properly". She got to know it through watching, then making mistakes twice, and after that, doing it right. The one she now had was the unchanged one, with the particular balance of the preserved lemon to olive to garlic that created the scent that only the people working hard can recognize.

She spatchcocked the chicken as her mother had taught her the backbone taken out, flattened down, the whole thing spread up so it would cook evenly in the covered pan before finishing in the oven. She braised it slowly with the preserved lemons and a quantity of olives she would not have chosen for any other dish and enough garlic to alarm someone who did not know what it was for. She allowed the liquid to concentrate. She observed the color of the skin changing from white to golden to the precise dark-gold of something that had been granted enough time. She baked bread to go with it. The plain type  not the braided Christmas bread, not any fancy one, just the regular daily bread that her mother had made twice a week for the years when the house was still hers, when the kitchen was warm and full of the purpose and smells of yeast, warmth and the ordinary, beautiful life of a family that was doing it right.

Marianna showed up at six on a made-up errand, hesitated at the kitchen door, and took a deep breath. "Your mother's, "

she said. Not a question. "Yes, "

"I always recognize it. There is a certain something about food prepared with sorrow that differentiates it from food prepared with other emotions. It is not worse. Very often it is better. But it is different." "Today was a difficult day, " Aria mentioned.

"I know." Marianna looked through one of her eyelids. "He was cool. The confrontation. 

He was he didn't let his personal feelings disturb the need to get the information. That is really tough, especially when the person is family."

"I know, " Marianna said.

"He's changed, " Marianna whispered. "While you have been here over the last months, he has changed. Ways in which he has changed that I have been waiting seeing for fourteen years with you. I just want you to understand this."

She exited with her fabricated excuse presumably fulfilled.

Adrian got there at seven fifteen, which was fifteen minutes later than she had said, which she had expected because she was learning his particular relationship to time always by recalculating what he still needed to finish, always slightly optimistic about how long finishing would take, always late by the exact amount that suggested he had tried. She had timed the chicken to this.

He stood in the entrance to the kitchen. Then she heard him step back.

She was at the island making the bread slices and she did not turn around. She gave him the moment the scent of it, the warmth of the kitchen in the November dimness, the special character of a home that is being lived in rather than just occupied.

"It smells, " he said, and stopped as if to find the right word not just the first one that came to mind, "like the inside of something good."

"Like a home, " she said.

"Yes, " he said. "Exactly."

They decided to eat right there at the kitchen island, making use of the nice plates she had discovered in the cabinet above the fridge. These plates were not the fancy set reserved for the 'performance' version of their lives but rather the everyday ones which still had that slight charm and uniqueness due to the hand-making process. She poured wine for him and water for herself. While she was tearing the bread and distributing it without waiting for him to ask, he took the bread and ate it and for the first ten minutes neither of them spoke, because the food was the conversation and it was saying everything that needed to be said.

Words spoken: you made it here. You managed to get through the day. There is comfort and food and there is a person sitting opposite you who prepared this meal especially for you, not out of a sense of duty but because they recognized that this is what the day called for.

"I must admit, this is the best meal I've had in this house, " he said after a while.

"Marianna will be heartbroken."

"Marianna will definitely catch the point. She cooks for both sustenance and presentation. This is entirely another matter."

"My mom used to cook for guests, " Aria replied. "There's a difference in those as well."

"Indeed." He took a piece of the bread. "So, what was she like? Cooking?"

Aria took a moment to reflect on this. She pictured her mother at the kitchen island and how she would move to the different components of the dish with the calm, almost silent concentration of someone who found cooking truly engaging rather than it being simply a necessity. How she mixed her storytelling with cooking, always talking to the person sitting at the table, as if the cooking and the conversation were one uninterrupted thing. "She was like a motor that kept running, " Aria explained. "She didn't stop talking. She always chatted with whoever was in the room. She was telling stories, asking questions, commenting on things and the food was just there, perfectly cooked, because she had made it so many times that her hands knew what to do without her even looking."

"Sounds like a very special type of intelligence, " he remarked. "Oh indeed she was very smart. She had such a sharp mind that even the people who didn't know her gave her a lot of credit, because she was not a formally educated person and she was not a professionally accomplished woman and she spent her adult life inside a household that her husband controlled. But she was the smartest person in most rooms she occupied and she knew it and she chose not to make anyone uncomfortable about it."

"Why?" "Because she was in love with my father. Actually for a long time she was in love with him, and she decided that the marriage was the thing she was working on and she was going to do it the right way, which meant not winning every argument and not revealing her whole hand all the time and putting the survival of the relationship above being right."

Aria hesitated. "In the end, she was wrong about that. The relationship was not worth what she sacrificed for it. But she did not realize that yet." He looked at her across the kitchen counter. She returned his gaze.

"She seems like the type who unfortunately didn't get the life she deserved, " he remarked.

"Yes, " Aria replied. "She definitely deserved it. She even realized, at one point, that things were going downhill for her. That's why she left that diary behind. She wanted it to be clear to me that she recognized it."

They remained silent for a while. The kitchen was cozy, the chicken had almost been eaten, the bread was down to the last slice and outside the city was going about its November night business with the lights and a kind of sound of a city that does not believe in silence.

"Adrian, " she said.

"What?"

"I'm happy to be here, " she said. "It isn't the contract. It isn't the arrangement. I am glad for the fact that I am here, in this kitchen, on this specific hard day, of all days."

He stared at her for quite a while. The look on his face did the strange thing it usually does when something unexpected arrives.

"Me too, " he said. Softly. Honestly. Without explanation, as he was still not the kind of man who could explain such things, but he was a man who could say such things, and that was she believed a big enough thing.

She sliced the last piece of bread. Without saying a word, she passed half of it over to him. He accepted it.

They lingered on the island until well after midnight, having one of the longest conversations they had ever had. Afterward, she thought she would remember it in the most precise way the scent of it and the warmth of it and the exact character of a tough day that was properly fulfilled, with food and truth and the gradually increasing thing between them that she was not yet calling but that was real and was growing and was, she thought, starting to be aware of its own form.