I liked that he’d dropped into my store unannounced. I got the feeling he didn’t do much, if anything at all, spontaneously. He must have driven himself to the point of distraction with the whole gift-giving thing. He’d googled things.
But what he hadn’t done was spiraled. Instead, he’d referred to the internet and his parents, and when he wasn’t satisfied with that, he came to me and asked.
It felt like a big deal and I wanted him to know that I appreciated hiseffort.
I waited for him by my car as he pulled in behind me, and we hurried through the front door together. We took off our coats and boots, the warm house a welcome reprieve from the bitter wind outside.
“There’ll be a good dump of snow by the morning,” Deacon said. Then he looked up at me, alarmed. “Do you have someone to plow your driveway? You could be late to work, or worse, stuck or isolated.”
I smiled at his concern. “I think Ro has that all set up, but I’ll double-check.” I nodded through the entrance. “Come this way.”
It was a gorgeous old farmhouse. In dire need of some love and modernization, but the white wooden paneling and pale cream walls, high ornate ceilings were rarely found outside of old homes such as this.
“In the kitchen,” Ro called out.
I followed my nose, leading the way. “Dinner smells amazing,” I said as we walked in, Deacon a step behind me.
Ro gave us a warm smile. “Deacon, welcome. I hope lasagna and salad is okay for dinner?”
“Yes, thank you,” he said quietly.
“Where are the boys?” I asked. “I hope they weren’t too much for you today.”
“They’re in their crate. You know, they’d be monsters if they weren’t so adorable. They tired themselves out and fell asleep, but—” She glanced at the clock on the wall. “—it’s getting to be their dinnertime. And they’ll hear your voice, no doubt.”
I smiled at Deacon. “Let’s go check on them.”
The living room was small and cozy. And by that, I mean with one three-seater lounge, a coffee table, a wood burning stove, a Christmas tree, and a crate, not much else would fit.
Small and cozy, yes. Butwe loved it.
Bright was sitting at the front gate, as if he were a time warden and I was half a minute late. Merry came plodding over with the cutest little squeak, demanding freedom immediately.
“They’ve grown,” Deacon noted.
They really had. “Grown into their own little personalities too. Bright is still a terror-gremlin, and Merry is a sweetheart. But I love them both equally.”
I opened the crate door and scooped them both up. Merry’s meows weredaddy, I missed youand Bright’s were more likewhere is my food, peasant-human. “I better feed them or Bright will knife me with his murder-mittens.”
Deacon smiled as I handed them both over. He was so adept at handling them. He was gentle but firm, in a way a veterinarian should be, I guessed. Bright tried to follow me by launching himself into mid-air. Deacon was also good at catching, as it turned out.
It made me laugh.
Once they were fed, it was our turn to eat. Dinner was delicious, as always. Ro had watched us both serve up our own, keeping the lasagna and the salad apart on the plate.
“You like your foods not to touch either,” Ro said.
Deacon nodded, then talked about the complexities of lasagna and a bowl of salad. When food, such as lasagna, was made up of many parts, it was fine forthoseparts to touch. Necessary even. They had to be layered to make the dish. Same as a sandwich.
And a tossed salad was a whole unit. Now, if the individual components had been served separately, they would stay separate on the plate and shouldn’t touch. But served as a complete dish, a tossed salad was a whole entity.
Made total sense to me.
“One hundred percent agree,” I said. “But the salad and the lasagna should never touch.”
Deacon nodded. “Correct.”
“When Win was a boy,” Ro said, smiling, “he used to say the food was the hills and there should be enough space between them, like a road for the fork.”
