Chapter 6: The Door Is Open

He cooked in a white shirt with the sleeves pushed to his elbows.

I sat on a steel stool at the far end of the counter, with the solid wall behind me and the bay going dark in the glass.

He did not look at me while he worked.

He was exact about it, as he was about everything, and I watched his hands.

They were broad, scarred across the knuckles, and clean.

He cut garlic into thin slices with a small knife, and he put olive oil in a pan and waited for it to move.

"You hold the knife like a man who has used it for something else," I said.

"Crab pots.

"I worked the deck at sixteen."

"Before the warehouses."

"Before the warehouses," he agreed.

"My father put me on the boat so I would know what a man is worth in the cold."

He dropped the garlic in the pan, and the smell filled the room.

I had my own knife in my sleeve and my back to the wall, and I was hungry, and the combination was so strange that I laughed.

It was a short, surprised sound.

He stopped with the spoon in his hand.

"That is the first time," he said.

"Don't make a thing of it."

"I will make nothing of it," he said.

"I will put it in the drawer with the other things."

"What other things?"

"The way you stand with your weight on your left foot," he said.

"The scar in your eyebrow.

"How you take a breath before you say no."

I looked at the scar's place with my fingertips before I knew I was doing it.

I put my hand down.

"Don't collect me," I said.

"I am not collecting," he said.

"I am paying attention.

"They are different, and I will show you the difference in time."

He set a plate in front of me.

Spaghetti with garlic and oil, black pepper, a little parsley.