Chapter 5: Odette's Table

"August fourteenth," I said. "Yesterday I turned eighteen."

The woman in the doorway put one hand flat against the wall.

The workers on the line pretended to look at their gloves.

Luke had gone completely still beside me.

"I'm sorry," the woman said. Her voice cracked and she steadied it. "That's a lovely day to be born. I'm Odette."

"Ginny."

"Ginny." She said it slowly, twice.

She bent and picked up her clipboard with fingers that wouldn't close properly.

"Did you pass the taste?"

"She ate two spoonfuls," the woman my mother's age called. "She asked for more."

Odette laughed, one sharp, wet laugh, and then covered her mouth.

"Come to my house tonight," she said. "Eight o'clock. I'd like to cook for you."

I didn't understand why this woman wanted to feed a stranger from the bottling line.

But nobody had ever said those words to me.

"Okay," I said.

She nodded fast and walked out through the big door without finishing what she had come in to say.

I looked at Luke.

He was watching her go with an odd, tight look.

"Is she always like that?" I asked.

"No," he said. "She's never like that."

At eight, Luke drove me there in the delivery van.

Odette's house was a yellow wooden house on a corner lot, with a wide porch and pepper plants in buckets on every step.

The porch light was on.

Luke walked me to the screen door and then stayed on the bottom step.

"I'll wait out here."

"You don't have to."

"I know."

Inside, the whole house smelled like heat.

Not sugar, not vanilla, not hairspray.

Smoke and garlic, onions and roux, black pepper and butter.

My stomach clenched and I realized I was starving.

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