“Then your food honors her, yeah?” His voice was kind. “The best cooking is from the heart.”
My throat closed. I nodded, speechless.
“How is your mother?” Chef asked. As if he really wanted to know.
I swallowed hard. I wasnotgoing to weep all over him again. “They wheeled her to the dining room for dinner yesterday. And she walked down the hallway and back.” A good day, according to Meg.
He nodded. His silence pulled at me like the end of the dock back home.Jump on in. The water’s fine.
“The thing is...” I hesitated, then took the plunge. “My mother’s always been so active. She runs that farm. Meg says she can hire someone to help when Mom gets out of rehab, but she’s never had to depend on anyone before.”
“I am sorry.” His voice was kind, his eyes soft hazel.
I shrugged. “Whaddaya gonna do?” I asked, mimicking the New Yorker I’d tried so hard to become.
The real question was, What was I going to do?
But he took me literally. “I thought today I would run with you.”
Wait. What? I looked at his feet. Yep, those were running shoes. Wide toe box, thick sole, well-cushioned and salt-grimed. Like mine.
He cocked an eyebrow. “Unless you prefer to run alone.”
He made it sound like a choice. My choice. No pressure.
I smiled, suddenly light. Free. “Let’s see if you can keep up.”
I took off.
I heard the air escape his lungs—a gust of surprise or laughter—and then his shoes striking the path. For a big man, he was quick. The frantic pace of the kitchen, the constant cries ofHot!andBehind!, must have honed his reflexes. He caught up to me easily.
For a while we ran in tandem. Maybe I slowed down a little. Or maybe he adjusted his stride, matching his steps to mine. I snuck a look at his profile. He wasn’t even breathing hard. I wasn’t at race pace, but...
“How’s your family? Your mother?” I heard myself ask.
His eyes did that crinkle thing, as if he found me amusing, but he answered politely. “She is fine, thank you. She and my father are spending the holidays with my sister in Frankfurt.”
Ooh, a personal detail.
“You think when I was training that I went home to my mother every night?”he had asked me.“That I asked for weekends and holidays off?”
“I guess you won’t be joining them,” I said.
“Not this year. I will miss seeing them, of course. But Germany is not home for me. We were military.” A quick glance. “You understand.”
“Kind of. I mean, I get the whole military-culture thing. You must have felt it even more in a foreign country. But our family never had to move, except to the farm. We always had ties to the community.”
To the land.
“Roots,” Chef said, as if he could read my mind.
“Yeah.”
Our feet pounded, side by side. Our breath puffed, intermingling in the cold air. I hadn’t had a running partner since my cross-country days. I’d always liked running alone, with no one to measure against but myself. But running created an instant intimacy. Shared sweat or something.
“My mother says the farm is our heritage,” I said. “But I couldn’t wait to leave Bunyan. I always felt...”Too bookish, too stubborn, too ambitious, too competitive. “Like I didn’t belong.”
“Ah. In Germany, I was amischlingskinder. Mixed race,” he explained. “It is a term from the Second World War, when American GIs had brown babies with German women. The prejudice is not so bad as it was a generation ago, but...” He shrugged his big shoulders.
