Christmas Recipe for Romance novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Back Burners

Hattie and Abel strike terms and share a first night of cooking, a near-kiss and a foil label she has seen on her back step all her life.

Abel Cushman's terms came on an index card, in block capitals, taped to the pass at nine o'clock that night.

NO OPEN FLAME NEAR THE FRYER. NO TOUCHING THE FLAT-TOP. NOBODY LEAVES WITHOUT WIPING THE HOOD.

At the bottom he had added, in smaller letters, I SUPERVISE.

"Supervise what?" I said.

"The kitchen." He leaned in the swinging door with his arms crossed, filling it. "Insurance."

"You haven't got insurance on a diner you've sold."

"I have it until the twenty-second."

"You're hovering because you want to watch me fail."

"I'm hovering because you set a pan of butter on the back burner," he said, "and it's been smoking for a minute and a half."

I looked down.

It had been.

I swore and pulled it off the heat, and he did not laugh, which was somehow worse.

I had brought my grandmother's roasting pans, a crate of flour and my own wooden spoon.

I laid them out on the steel counter.

Four dishes.

I could do four dishes in my sleep.

Tonight I did the gravy first, because the gravy always tells me whether my hands are steady.

Pan drippings, flour, cider, a spoon of mustard, a long time over low heat.

Abel watched me stir for six minutes without a word.

"Say it," I said.

"I'm not saying anything."

"You're breathing at me."

"Your roux is going to catch."

"My roux is fine."

"You're a half-minute from fine," he said. "Cut the heat and keep whisking."

I whisked.

The roux deepened from paste to peanut butter to the color of a good penny.

It smelled like toast and not like a burn.

He took the spoon from my hand, tasted it, and gave it back with a very small frown.

"Salt," he said.

"I haven't salted it."

"I know. That's the problem."

"Chicago," I said.

"What about it?"

"That's the voice of a man who has called other people stupid in a very tidy tone for fourteen years."

His mouth twitched, and he reached over my shoulder for the salt and sprinkled it in without asking.

His forearm passed an inch from my face, and I saw the burns.

They climbed from his wrist to his elbow in little pale commas, dozens of them, healed over in different years.

"You have a lot of those," I said.

"Fourteen years on a line."

"Do they hurt?"

"Not since I stopped caring about them." He looked at the pan, not at me. "Taste."

The gravy was better.

I tasted it twice to be sure, annoyed, and he watched me be annoyed with something that looked a lot like contentment.

By midnight I had four turkey legs brining and a tray of gingerbread dough chilling.

A bowl of cranberries sat with orange peel in a cloud of sugar.

Abel had peeled a twenty-pound sack of apples for no reason, and when I asked, he said, "I was bored," and went on peeling.

At one in the morning I put the Co-op's cinnamon roll dough in the proof box, because I still have a day job.

The little box groaned.

The dial showed forty.

I turned it up, and it showed thirty-five.

"It doesn't hold temp," Abel said again, from right behind me.

He reached over my head to the shelf.

I hadn't known how tall he was until the whole length of him closed the space behind my back.

He was warm through the flannel and he smelled of apple and woodsmoke.

His hand flattened on the shelf above my head, and his thumb found the dial.

I could feel his breath on my braid.

"There's a trick," he said, low. "You have to hold it and click."

"Show me."

My own voice came out smaller than I meant.

His fingers closed over mine on the dial, rough and careful, and for three whole seconds neither of us clicked anything.

I turned my head.

His face was very close, and his gray eyes were not deadpan at all.

The kitchen timer went off like a fire alarm.

We both jumped, and he swore, and I laughed so hard I had to hold the counter.

"The test tray," I managed. "The gingerbread test tray is done."

"Right," he said.

He stepped back, cleared his throat and went to stand somewhere safe with his back to the walk-in.

"I'm going to get more apples," he said, and walked into the walk-in and did not come out for a full minute.

I pressed my cold hands to my cheeks.

Then I went to the drawer under the pass for a roll of foil.

The first drawer held only dish towels, so I opened the second.

It held a roll of heavy foil, a stack of masking tape, a fat black marker and a thick pad of paper labels.

The labels were handwritten in block capitals, rows and rows of them, in a hand I knew.

6 PM. OVEN 325. DON'T PEEK.

I stopped breathing.

I had seen those exact capitals every Christmas Eve of my life.

They were in marker on masking tape, stuck to the foil on eight warm pans left on the back step of the Hall.

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