“I used to cook,” she said. “I’ve been letting my skills slide lately, though. Living with Mom, I’m getting spoiled.” She patted her belly. “And fat.”
“I would too, with food like that,” he said, smiling. Then he looked suddenly wide-eyed. “Not that I think you’re fat.”
“I don’t care if you do,” she reminded him. Only, she did, which was a problem. “So speaking if your Grandma Sage…?” she asked, raising her brows.
“I’ve been wondering about her, too, but I don’t know. I s’pose it’s in the journals,” he said. “I have a photo.” He took out his phone and scrolled and handed it to her.
The photo was of a little Native American boy, standing between his redheaded Irish mother and an old Black woman with white hair cut close to her head, in front of what looked like a petting zoo.
“That’s Grandma Sage?”
“The one and only. The three of us could’ve been the start of a joke if we’d ever walked into a bar, I guess.”
She handed him the phone.
They were quiet a moment, then she said, “Let’s have coffee and dessert in Mom’s parlor.” She got up as she said it, went to the coffee maker, and turned it on. Her mother always left it ready to go.
Wolf got up too and started to clear the dishes while she sliced pie. She put it onto plates and stuck them in the microwave for 45 seconds. Then she got the vanilla bean ice cream from the freezer and a scooper from the drawer.
“You don’t mean it.” Wolf’s deep voice sent a shiver right up her spine. The good kind. Well, the bad kind, considering her singlehood. She looked over her shoulder at him. He stood at the sink, rinsing plates. Beside him, the dishwasher was open and partly loaded.
“Oh, I mean it sincerely,” she said, and the microwave beeped like an exclamation point. She took out the plates, dolloped a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top of each perfectly heated slice of apple pie, set a fork across each plate, and handed him one.
“That’s…heaven.”
“Close as we’ll get on this side,” she said. “Here’s to Cilla.” And she tapped the rim of her plate against his.
“To you, Ma.” He smiled when he said it.
It startled Camellia and she realized she hadn’t seen his smile before. She set down her plate and turned to put the ice cream away, and maybe hide her reaction to that smile.
After a beat, she took her plate, led him to the room her mother had always called the parlor, and tried to see it through his eyes.
There were filled bookshelves on three walls and five chairs that didn’t match, each a different style and pattern. Equally diverse end tables stood beside each of the chairs. The furniture was all arranged to face a set of large French doors that led out onto the currently barren stone patio.
“There are usually lawn chairs out there,” she explained, pointing. “But we put them in the shed when it’s cold and wet like this. And the flowers are all gone till spring.”
“It’s a nice room.” He nodded at the fireplace. “You want a fire?”
“Sure,” she said, and then picked up a remote control from one of the end tables and aimed it at the fireplace. It lit up with fake flames that were nowhere near convincing. “It blows heat if you need it. There’s a crackling sound effect, but it sounds tinny.”
“Cheap speaker,” he said, moving closer to the thing, bending low. “I could wire in a better one for you.”
“No,” she said. “Tell me you’re not one of those.”
“One of what?” He’d chosen a chair, the deep blue velour wingback with the peacock design. He put his plate on the oval cherry wood table-slash-magazine stand beside it, then took his first bite, closed his eyes and said, “Sorry. Couldn’t wait.”
She lowered herself into a Louis XV chair with ivory upholstery and pink roses on the other side of a ’70s end table, and set her plate there. “I’m waiting for the coffee.”
“Ice cream’ll melt,” he said.
“Only a little.”
He took another bite, closed his eyes again. He was really into that pie. Watching him was too much, though. She bounced out of her chair and hurried back to the kitchen. Grabbing two cups, she filled them from the coffee maker’s flow, swapping a cup for the carafe, and then for the other cup, then back to the carafe again without spilling a drop. It was better than waiting and watching him make love to that pie.
When she set their cups on their respective end tables, he said, “What did you mean by ‘one of those’?”
“One of those guys who can fix things. A maker. A…MacGyver.”
