At the checkout counter, things got worse. I tried to count out my lire, but it was taking so long that I finally just handed it all to the clerk. He counted it quickly, then shook his head, and I understood he was telling me I didn’t have enough money to pay for everything, so I pointed at a block of butter, which I guessed had been expensive, and made like I was slitting my own throat. He subtracted it from the bill. We had another standoff when he realized I had brought no grocery bags with me. I wanted to explain that I’d never heard of such a thing, but by then I just needed to get out of the store, so I packed everything up in the cooler and gave him a strangled “Grazie.”
“Alla prossima,” he said with a small wave, and had I known that he was sayingUntil next time, I might have been tempted to tell him there wasn’t going to be one.
24.
WHEN PAUL RETURNEDto the hotel that evening, I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the bathroom, chopping garlic on a cutting board that I’d propped in my lap. A colander of cooked fettuccini sat in the sink.
“Wow,” said Paul as he bent to kiss me on the top of the head. “This is quite the setup you’ve got going.”
“You like it?” I asked, knowing full well how ridiculous the whole thing looked.
He perched on the side of the tub, and I told him about the lending closet and the grocery store, then how I’d had to raid the cash he’d stashed in the back of the wardrobe so I could buy a bag of ice for the cooler. “Oh, and I needed a grater.”
He looked at me funny. “What are we having?”
“That dish from last night,” I said, with a lot more confidence than I felt. “The one with the artichoke.”
He whistled. “Move over, Julia Child.”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” I said, a little wistfully. It had taken forever for the pasta water to come to a boil, and I had no idea how I was going to deal with the artichoke. Was I meant to boil it and somehow peel the leaves apart, or would it make more sense to cut it into pieces and throw them in the pan with the chunks of lamb?
While Paul changed, I turned my attention to the frying pan, which I’d placed on the hot plate. I had poured some olive oil in the pan, but when I dumped the garlic in, it didn’t really sizzle, at least not the way I expected it to. “Do you think this thing’s broken?” I asked Paul, but he had a shirt over his head and probably wouldn’t have been much use anyway. “The light’s on, so that means it’s working, right?”
I pushed the garlic around the pan for a little while and added the lamb. While I fussed over the meat, I recounted the ins and outs of my day and immediately noticed that I was editing the story as I went, choosingthe most entertaining details to tell Paul and skipping over the times when I had felt anxious or lonely. Already, I had these ideas about what a navy wife was supposed to be: adventurous, inventive, unflappable. I was none of those things, but I didn’t want Paul thinking he’d married a girl who wasn’t up for the job.
The meat was definitely not browning. “Can we eat rare lamb? Will it kill us?”
Paul lowered a long string of fettuccini into his mouth. “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think we can eat it?”
“I don’t think it’ll kill us.”
While I cut the artichokes, I asked him about his day, which felt extremely wifey, for lack of a better word.
“Tom gave me the tour,” said Paul. “Introduced me to everyone. I met the CO and even the commodore.”
“The CO’s who you report to?”
“No, I report to Joe Stearns, who heads up the Repair Department. Then he reports to the XO, who reports to the CO, who reports to the commodore.”
“What does XO stand for again?”
“Executive officer.”
“And he’s the one in charge of the whole boat, right?”
“That’s the CO.” Paul seemed the tiniest bit perturbed that I hadn’t done a better job hanging on to all this information. “CO stands for commanding officer.”
“Got it,” I said, but there wasn’t much about the navy’s reporting structure that I got.
“The XO manages day-to-day operations. He’s like the CO’s right-hand man.”
I added the artichoke to the pan.
“Anyway, the CO’s great,” said Paul. “Really unassuming guy. Not at all what I expected.”
I tried to remember the CO’s name, which had been in theWelcome Aboardpacket. “Johnson?”
