He didn’t add that Marston’s legs looked incredibly long, and that, yes, they were wearing the same boots again, because for some reason, Marston didn’t seem to want him there, looking at him askance.
Kell hesitated, not moving forward into the kitchen, and asked, “Do you want me to go?”
The question wasn’t hard, didn’t seem to be, but Marston seemed to freeze, one nostril flaring slightly, and then he relaxed.
“No, that’s fine,” he said. “I’m just making an onion sandwich.”
“A what?” asked Kell.
Marston waved him into the kitchen, stepping back from the wide door, and gestured to the metal table, where sandwich fixings were all laid out. A loaf of white bread. Half an onion. Salt and pepper shakers. A jar of mayonnaise. A knife and a plate.
“What’s an onion sandwich?” asked Kell, coming up to the table, though it was fairly obvious what it was, with all the ingredients laid out like they were.
“When I was a kid,” said Marston, going back to his preparations, putting mayonnaise on both slices of bread. “Sometimes we were so hungry we had sleep for supper. Other times—” He paused to slice off two very thin slices of onion and laid them on one slice of bread, shaking a little salt then a little pepper over the whole thing. “Other times there were franks and beans on toast. Or this. I call it my hunger sandwich, because it fills the corners of my belly.”
Marston’s voice as he spoke was steady and calm, but Kell saw the small shake of his hand as he laid the second slice of bread on top and pressed it down, creating what Kell knew would be a very dense bite to the sandwich. And there was more, the idea that Marston used to go to bed hungry as a kid, more than one time, it seemed.
As a kid, Kell’d had no idea what hunger was, true hunger, but when he’d left home, he’d found out pretty quickly what it felt like to have a belly so empty it started eating itself. A hunger that drove him to go to the dumpster behind McDonalds, to get old Big Macs, or a movie theater, where they seemed to throw out a shit ton of hot dogs and chewy salted pretzels, grown soggy in the rain.
Sometimes, Kell would sidle into a Denny’s and grab packets of sugar and butter and together with a loaf of bread he’d managed to steal from a Seven Eleven, he would make a sugar sandwich, which he guessed was his own version of a hunger sandwich.
He’d eaten hundreds of them it seemed, over the last two years, but had he known about Marston’s onion sandwich, he might have made that, and not had his energy run out so fast.
“Wanna try?” asked Marston, bringing Kell right back into the present, into the shiny clean kitchen, and the simple sandwich that Marston had cut in half, and was now offering one half to Kell, on the plate that he pushed across the metal table toward Kell.
Marston was tall, densely muscled, with the kind of physique that came from hard work, real work, and not the gym. Food was plentiful in the valley, as well, so nobody went hungry, not even a little bit.
But from his experiences walking along a highway with his thumb out, hoping for a ride, or swinging up into a slow-moving, open box car, Kell knew quite well that generosity from a hungry person was a rare thing indeed. And yet here Marston was, willing to share.
Kell could hardly refuse him and didn’t want to. To refuse would be rude.
“Sure,” he said, picking up the half sandwich and biting into it. The onion was slightly bitter, but the mayonnaise soothed it, creamy and sweet, with the salt picking up the edges, the bread dense on his tongue. “That’s good,” he said, licking mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth. “Fills you up.”
Nodding, Marston ate his half of the sandwich in three huge bites, wiping his mouth free of crumbs with his thumb.
“I can make us dessert,” said Kell, following suit.
“Dessert?” asked Marston, his eyebrows going up.
“Sugar sandwich,” said Kell. There was a butter dish right next to one of the two stoves, and the butter would be nice and soft, just perfect for a sugar sandwich.
“I know those,” said Marston, quite quietly, as if remembering how many times he’d been desperate enough to simply eat sugar, whose energy would run out and leave a belly needing to be filled all over again.
Wordlessly, Marston cleaned up from the onion sandwich, and Kell made two open-faced sugar sandwiches. Sugar went everywhere, in spite of his care, leaving the metal tabletop sparkling as though stars had been scattered across it.
There they stood, almost toe-to-toe, eating their sugar sandwiches. Marston leaned slightly against the table, his hip pressed into the metal, broad thigh tight beneath the blue jeans he wore.
A bit of boot peeked out from the hem of his jeans, a shimmy of movement, as he adjusted his weight to stand up straight, finishing his sandwich with a lick to his thumb. A last crumb of sugar glistened on his lower lip, one on his cheek. There was a quiet glitter in his eyes as he looked at Kell.
“What book were you going to get?”
“I don’t know what they have,” said Kell, a wild hope springing in his chest that Marston was actually interested.
“Let’s go look.”
Together they cleaned up after their nighttime feast, then, flicking on the light in the tent, Marston led the way to the bookshelves. He crouched down, hunkered on his boot heels, one finger pulling each book down, one at a time.
“Road,” he said. “Young Mac of Fort Vancouver.The Firm.Oliver Twist.”
