She directs. I execute. Not because she requires it. Because the tomatoes are from her vendor, the eggs are from her market, the cheese is from her young admirer. This is her meal in my space. The merger of the two worlds she talked about this morning.
She scrambles the eggs. I handle the tomatoes. She wants them cooked down until they've lost most of their water, which takes patience and produces something worth eating.
She works beside me at the stove. Our hips touch. When she reaches across me for the salt, her hand grazes my stomach under my shirt. When I lean past her for the olive oil, I press my mouth to the spot behind her ear. She doesn't break stride. Adjusts the flame. Takes the salt.
"You're distracting the cook," she says.
"You're the cook. I'm the assistant."
"The assistant is overstepping."
"The assistant knows what he's doing."
She turns. Looks at me. Holds a wooden spoon with tomato sauce on it, the spoon my mother used for thirty years.
"Taste," she says.
I lean forward. She pulls the spoon back an inch. I lean further. She feeds me the sauce. It's extraordinary. But it’s missing something.
"More salt," I say.
"It doesn't need more salt."
"My mother would say more salt."
"Your mother isn't here. I am."
She turns back to the stove. I put my arms around her from behind. The same position from the ragù yesterday. My chin on her shoulder. She leans back.
"It doesn't need more salt," she says again.
"It's perfect," I say. Not talking about the tomatoes.
We eat at the kitchen counter. The tomatoes are as good as Concetta predicted. The eggs are better. We eat side by side, shoulders touching. She steals bread from my plate. I steal cheese from hers. The small negotiations of two people learning the domestic choreography of shared meals.
"What did you want to be when you were young?" I ask.
She decides whether to answer directly. "Something quiet. A librarian, maybe. The kind of work where you help people find things and then they go away."
"Why didn't you."
"My uncle needed me at the church. And then it became the church." She turns her bread over, examines it. "What did you want."
"I told you. Art restoration."
"I know what you told me. I'm asking if there was something before that. Before art history. Before Florence."
"A painter," I say. "I was sixteen. Terrible. But for about eight months I thought that was the answer."
She looks at me over her cup. "What kind of painting."
"Chiaroscuro. Obsessed with Caravaggio that year. I wanted to understand how light decides where to fall." I look at the counter. "I couldn't get the shadow right. The light I could manage. Not the shadow."
"That's the harder part."
"Yes."
"Do you still paint?"
