Gemma points, discreetly, toward a corner table where Rosa Delgado sits with two other women from the garden club, all three of them watching us with the undisguised interest of women who have seen this kind of thing before.
Mrs. Delgado raises her water glass.
I put the notecard face-down on the table.
Then Hazel Park materializes beside us with a phone raised at a documentary angle, wearing the expression of someone who has been hoping for this moment and has been carrying the phone charged and ready just in case. "Hi! Oh, this is so cute. Can I just?—"
"No," I say. In Seattle, a person could have a meal without their entire social circle materializing with opinions and documentation. I am noting this for the record.
"Just one?—"
"Hazel."
She lowers the phone two inches. Not all the way. Just enough to maintain plausible deniability. "I'll text you the photos," she says, and retreats.
Gemma puts her head down on the table.
Her shoulders are shaking. Not the controlled, polite shaking from the sidewalk outside Valentino's, but the full-body, helpless, tears-are-involved kind that she's muffling against her forearms. When she comes back up, her eyes are wet, her cheeksare flushed the same pink as her ears, and she looks more alive than anyone has a right to look under a bar light with fish on the walls.
"Say it," I tell her.
"I'm not saying anything," she gets out between breaths.
"You're saying all of it without using words."
"Beck." She presses her knuckles to her mouth, but her eyes are still laughing at me over the top of her hand. "I'm having a really great time."
"You're crying."
"Happy tears," she says, and her breath hitches on a fresh wave.
I pick up a dinner roll. Eat it in two bites. Look at the mounted largemouth bass on the wall above her head and give it a long, considering look, as if it might have useful input. It has none. Neither do I, about any of this, and somehow that's fine.
The next evening I decide to cook.
This is not, as decisions go, poorly reasoned. I cook for Ivy regularly. I make a solid chicken piccata, a respectable pasta, and a chili that Big Jim has asked me for the recipe for twice. Feeding one more person isn't complicated.
Except that the additional person is Gemma, and knowing she's on the other side of the shared wall while I'm at the stove does something to my concentration that garlic and olive oil don't deserve to pay for. I oversalt the sauce. Correct with more lemon. Overcorrect. Start over with a new pan, and the kitchen already smells like the first attempt.
The second attempt is going better when the smoke starts.
Not a lot of smoke. A reasonable amount of smoke from a sauté pan where the oil got hotter than intended and the garlic went from golden to black in the window of time it took me tofind the tongs I'd set down somewhere. I get the pan off the burner, push the window up, and wave a hand in the general direction of the smoke alarm.
The smoke alarm, which has the sensitivity of a Victorian lady encountering scandal, goes off.
It is very, very loud.
I grab a dish towel and start fanning the sensor with the focused urgency of a man who has already provided too much material for Gemma to laugh at. The alarm keeps screaming. The towel does nothing useful. I drag a chair over, stand on it, fan harder. The smoke alarm continues to scream.
Her door opens, and then she's standing in my kitchen doorway in bare feet and an oversized shirt, holding a mug with both hands, blinking at the scene with an expression of someone who heard an emergency and has assessed that the emergency is me.
She doesn't say anything.
"It's under control," I tell her, from the chair, with the dish towel.
The alarm screams.
She crosses the kitchen without hurrying, stands on her toes — she has to go all the way up to reach it — and presses the reset button on the smoke detector with her thumb. The silence is immediate and total, broken only by the tick of the cooling pan and the cold draft from the open window.
