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Gerald's retirement card from Hendricks Pipe and Fitting sat on the mantel for a month before he turned it face-down. It had forty-one signatures and a cartoon golfer. He had never once played golf. The Monday after the party, he woke at five forty-five from forty years of muscle and lay in the gray light listening to Norma's side of the bed not moving.
He found the peeler finally behind a clay pot of dried-out pens - orange-handled, the blade rusted to a color he associated with old nails. The drawer itself stuck, and when he yanked it the Chinese menu flew out and landed face-up: General Tso's, $8. 95 - a phone number with the wrong area code. He stood there holding the peeler like it was evidence of something.
He called Dana at eleven and she picked up chewing something. She talked him through the garlic first - smash it flat with the back of a spoon, she said, it's not surgery - and he could hear her kids in the background and the particular laugh she had when she was trying not to. He wrote *medium heat* on the back of the Stop & Shop receipt, pressed so hard the pen went through at the ampersand, and held the torn paper up to the window to make sure he'd gotten it right.
He turned the heat down without meaning to - just his hand doing it, the way you flinch from a sound before you know what made it. The smell came up through the steam - butter and something darker underneath, something older - and he stood there with the wooden spoon held sideways over the pan, not stirring, not anything. His mother had worn a yellow housecoat on Sundays and kept the radio on the windowsill above the sink - and he hadn't thought about the yellow housecoat in forty years, and now here it was, rising off a twelve-dollar pan in a kitchen in Glastonbury, Connecticut. He put one hand flat on the counter the way you do when a room tilts.
He set the bowl on the rooster placemat and pulled out the chair with the electrical tape on the armrest and sat down. The cutting board leaned in the drying rack behind him, still damp - the afternoon coming through the window at an angle that lit the grain of it. He took one bite and chewed, and then another, and the fork clinked against the ceramic when he set it down to look at nothing in particular - the salt shaker, the window, the salt shaker again. Outside a truck went past on Birchwood and then it was quiet enough to hear the refrigerator running.
He folded the receipt along the torn line - the hole where the ampersand had been letting through a sliver of the window behind him. The drawer held a rubber band ball gone gray at the crown, two AA batteries with a strip of masking tape that said *test* in Norma's handwriting. He smoothed the receipt flat against the bottom with his thumb, the way you'd press a photograph back into an album. Then he pushed the drawer shut, not all the way, and left it.
He bought a second onion the following Thursday and a bunch of thyme he didn't need yet - the rubber band still around it, and set them both on the counter next to the rooster placemat. The thyme sat there through Friday. Saturday morning he cut the rubber band off with the kitchen scissors and pressed his thumb into the thyme until the smell came up, and stood there doing it longer than made any sense, the scissors still open in his other hand.
He opened it to page forty-three because the spine cracked there, the page held a brown ring from someone's mug - and the handwritten note in the margin said *add more salt, Frank disagrees*. He stood at the counter reading it twice with his reading glasses pushed up into his hair. Frank, he thought. Then he got the salt.
He called the number on the spine of the book on a Tuesday and a woman named Carol answered on the second ring and told him the class met in the basement of St. Anthony's, bring a knife if you have one, parking in the back. He drove past the church twice before he saw the sign - and when he went downstairs twelve people were standing at stainless steel stations under fluorescent lights, and the woman next to him had her own apron rolled up under her arm, printed with lemons, worn pale at the waist where she'd been wiping her hands for years. Gerald put his knife down on the cutting board and it was the wrong knife, too small - and he could see from the instructor's face that she saw this, and she handed him a bigger one without comment the way you'd hand someone an umbrella in a doorway.
He made the same dish three Tuesdays in a row, the cookbook open to page forty-three each time, the brown ring on the page deepening where he kept setting his glass down in the same spot. The woman with the lemon apron - her name was Bette, he'd learned - though she wrote it on her station card as *Bette * - had left a note in his jacket pocket at the end of the last class, a recipe card, handwritten, for something called a soffritto, the ink running a little where she'd wiped her hands first. He found it Tuesday morning in the breast pocket when he was looking for the Stop & Shop card - unfolded it over the sink, smoothed it flat on the counter next to the thyme. He stood there reading her handwriting in the light from the window, the refrigerator running behind him, the onion already out.
He drove to the library on a Wednesday and came home with four cookbooks checked out on a card he hadn't used since Norma made him return the James Michener. He stacked them on the counter by height, then by color - then left them in a pile that made no sense and opened the one on the bottom. There was a photograph on page twelve of a copper pot he would never own, and he stood looking at it the way you look at a photograph of a place you went once and won't go again. He wrote *copper pot??
He called Dana back on a Thursday with flour on the receiver and asked her what her grandmother had put in the mashed potatoes, the ones with the gray bowl, and she went quiet for a second before she said, *I don't know - Dad, cream cheese maybe, why* - and he said never mind, just wondering, and set the phone down on the counter next to the open butter dish without hanging up - and stood there, and after a moment he could hear her breathing on the other end, not saying anything either, and neither of them moved to end it.
