Page 48

The suite is nothing like the room downstairs. That room was built for one thing. This is where he lives.

The ceilings are high and crossed with the same old timber beams as the bar below, and the walls are bare brick. Tall arched windows run down one side, and heavy curtains are drawn most of the way across them against the evening sun, leaving gaps where I can see the river and the bridges. The rugs are old and faded in the middle where people have walked on them for a very long time. There’s a carved wooden chest under the window that looks old. There are books everywhere, in stacks and on shelves and open face down on the arm of a chair, and half of them aren’t in English.

On a shelf by the door, between a bronze clock and a leather book with no title, there’s a wooden spoon. Just a kitchen spoon, small and plain, the bowl of it worn smooth and dark.

“There’s a spoon on your shelf,” I say.

“My father carved it,” Lenart says. “I was nine. I used it every day until I was twenty.”

I look at it again. It’s somebody’s spoon. It was somebody’s spoon four hundred years ago, and he’s kept it all this time.

I don’t touch it.

There’s a table by the windows set for one.

One plate, one set of silverware, one wine glass. A second glass at his place, full of red wine, that I already know he isn’t going to drink. And on the table between them, under silver covers, enough food for three of me. Roast chicken with crisped skin. Potatoes cooked in duck fat. Green beans with almonds. Bread that’s still warm in a cloth. A small chocolate tart on a stand off to the side, waiting.

“From a place on Twenty-Third,” he says, pulling out my chair. “They don’t deliver.”

“They delivered.”

“They don’t deliver to anyone else.”

I sit. I spent three hours this morning in a delivery truck and the afternoon at Dez’s desk with the ledgers, and I haven’t eaten since a granola bar at two, and I’m not going to be cool about this.

“You invited me to dinner,” I say, picking up my fork, “and you’re not going to eat.”

“No.”

“That’s a weird date.”

“Is it a date?”

“You said I’d know by dessert. I’m reserving judgment.”

The corner of his mouth moves. He sits across from me with his untouched wine and watches me eat, and for the first few bites I’m aware of it, and then I’m not, because the chicken is the best thing I’ve eaten in a year. Maybe ever. I stop talking. I eat potatoes with my fingers. He doesn’t say a word.

“Why do you do this?” I ask eventually, with my mouth full. “Feed people.”

“I like the table,” he says. “The candles, the conversation. I like watching someone enjoy a meal completely.” He turns his glass a quarter turn by the stem. “It’s one of the few appetites I can still satisfy in company.”

“You picked the wrong girl to impress with food,” I say. “I’ve been eating gas station burritos since Fresno. You could’ve served me a Lunchable.”

He asks me about Billy Bob. The whole story, how much it cost and how I paid for it, and I tell him, because there’s no point lying to somebody who’s already seen my car. Six thousand dollars. My savings and a credit card I opened in the vet’s waiting room at three in the morning.

He doesn’t look sorry for me. I’m braced for it, and it doesn’t come. He just nods slowly.

“You spent everything you had to keep someone you loved alive,” he says. “Makes perfect sense to me.”

I look down at my plate. My throat’s tight, and I’m not going to cry over roast chicken.

“Don’t offer to pay it off,” I say.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Good. Because I’d say no, and then it’d be weird.”

“I know,” he says. “That’s why I wasn’t going to.”