Page 80 of Knife For Hire

A distant past.

“My mom was a cook. She died when I was twelve, but my best memories are of the gumbo she would make. It would take days of preparation, but the end result was always worth the wait. My mom didn’t speak English fluently, but she knew how to convey her love to those she cared about. She did it through her food.” Reuben still isn’t looking in my direction.

There’s pain in his voice. I want to reach forward, to offer support. But he handles it alone. A stoic man. “You use her recipes?”

He whips his attention to me. “How did you know?”

“Most restaurants are…typical? High-end with the same type of flare, but lacking a key ingredient—love. But every time I came here, it felt like I was landing in a memory that wasn’t mine. A warmth I couldn’t capture,” I reply wistfully.

There’s a genuine smile that lights up his face. “I—” He shakes his head.

Spinning on the barstool and looking at the booth I used to sit at with him.

“You used to come here, but you stopped?” Reuben asks.

“I did. No fault of the restaurant. I just unfortunately made a mistake that leached into my memories here.”

Getting up, I wander to the booth. An invisible thread tying me to my past.

“I always sat here alone. I begged my wife to join me but she never would.”

I jolt at his confession, twisting back to find Reuben has made it around the bar. There are a thousand emotions that flicker across his face.

“Who did you sit there with?” His question is innocent enough.

But it pulls at a scab that never fully healed. One that instilled my bad luck. That left me desperate to escape the reality that is my life.

Why I refuse to date Orzo alone.

It was only after that I stuck my head in the clouds and forced myself to live in naivety.

Accept that the car wrecks, the accidents, the bad luck, was just whimsy.