The Cookbook Dare

I was elbow deep in a box of somebody's dead aunt's paperbacks when Cari pulled the cookbook out of a crate of church donations. She held it up like she'd found a live grenade.

"Teri. Oh my god. St. Luke's, 1987. Look at this thing."

"What about it." I kept sorting. Somebody had donated ninety pounds of Danielle Steel and one lonely hymnal. That's a Tuesday for you.

"It's got a casserole on the cover. A literal photographed casserole on a doily." She flipped it open. "Tuna noodle bake. Deviled eggs. Jell-O with shredded carrots in it, Teri. Carrots."

"People ate that. My grandma made that."

"Your grandma also told my grandma you were too picky to marry, and she was right, because you're forty-six and you live alone with a cat named after a type of hinge."

"Butt hinge is a good name for a cat."

"Teri." Cari set the cookbook down on the sorting table and leaned on it with both elbows. She had that face on. The face she makes right before she ruins my week. "Philip is coming to the barbecue Saturday."

"So."

"So you've been staring at that man over the fence for three years. You mow your lawn when he mows his. You bought a grill because he bought a grill."

"I bought a grill because grilling is a normal hobby."

"You bought a Weber the same week he did. I was there. I watched you order it." She picked the cookbook back up and fanned herself with it. "Forty-six years old and you go stupid over a man in a barn coat."

Philip is forty-eight. He does security audits for the college. He wears a barn coat because it's upstate New York and it gets cold, not as a fashion statement, though it works as one, which I have never said out loud and never will. He says hello over the fence. He brought my trash cans in during the windstorm last March without being asked. That is the complete file. That's all I had, three years of hellos and trash cans, and here came Cari with a church cookbook acting like she'd cracked the case.

"He's nice," I said. "We're friendly."

"Friendly." She said it like it tasted bad. "Teri, you've had one fling in your entire adult life that I know about, and that was what, twenty-some years ago, that professor who was only in town for a semester?"

"Twenty-two years ago, and it was fine."

"It was fine. Wow. Somebody carve that on your headstone. Here lies Teri, it was fine."

I threw a paperback at her. She caught it without looking, which is the most annoying thing about her.

"I'm busy," I said. "I run an auction house. I do the bookstore two days a week because I like old books and quiet. I don't need..."

"You need to get laid."

"CARILYN."

"What! It's a stockroom, nobody's here." She held up the cookbook. "This thing sold for four dollars at the church sale last fall. I bought it. I've been saving it. I don't even know for what, and now I know. It's a prop. It's destiny in casserole form."

"You are unwell."

"Saturday," she said, tucking the cookbook into her purse like a judge tucking away a verdict. "Saturday we'll see."

* * *

Cari's husband Tyrone does the grilling and Jeremiah, Philip's coworker, does the heckling. That's the usual arrangement at these backyard things. Saturday came around hot for September, and I brought a pasta salad I had no business spending forty minutes on for a neighbor barbecue, and I knew exactly who I made it that good for, and I hated myself a little.

Philip was there in a gray shirt, holding a beer he wasn't drinking. Jeremiah was doing the talking, like always.

"Teri! Teri, tell Philip about the estate sale you ran in June. The one with the taxidermied raccoon." Jeremiah loves that raccoon. He brings it up at every gathering like it's a mutual friend.

"It bit a woman," I said. "Not the estate. The raccoon. It was stuffed, so honestly, impressive."

Philip laughed. He's got a good laugh, low, and he doesn't spend it easy. "You ran an auction with a biting raccoon in the lot list?"

"Lot forty-one. It went for sixty bucks. The woman who bought it said she'd get it re-stuffed. Lady, it is stuffed, that is the entire... whatever. It went fine."

See, that's how it is with us. He asks one question, I answer it, and there's this little gap after where neither of us walks away. Three years of that. It's not nothing but it's not anything, and I'd made peace with it.

Then Cari stood up on the porch step and banged her beer bottle on the rail, which is never good.

"Ladies and gentlemen. Announcement." She pulled the church cookbook out of her bag. "Behold. St. Luke's Memorial Cookbook, 1987. Price of destiny: four dollars."

"Where is this going," Tyrone said. He knows his wife.

"This is going somewhere," Jeremiah said, standing up, delighted. He's a big loud guy, forty-three, twice married once, and he has been trying to loosen Philip up since roughly the ice age.

Cari pointed the cookbook at me and Philip. "You two. You have spent three years orbiting each other like a couple of shy planets. So here's the dare. One weekend. Philip's house-sitting for the Hendersons starting Friday, right? Big empty house, hot tub, the works. You two spend an evening together and cook one real dinner out of this cookbook. That's the whole dare. What either of you does after the dishes is nobody's business and nobody's bet."

"And what's the prize?" Jeremiah asked, grinning like a fool.

"There's no prize. Dinner is the dare. Anything else is strictly up to the two of them, and nobody gets punished either way."

"I'll cook," Philip said. First full sentence he'd said in a while. Everybody turned.

"Just cook," Cari said, sweet as pie.

"I think nobody's betting on my weekend," Philip said.

"Scared?" Jeremiah asked. That man has no shame.

Philip looked at his beer. Then he looked at me. Just looked, one of those long stretches where the whole backyard got quiet and Tyrone burned the burgers a little because he was eavesdropping.

"Teri?" he said. "You want to take the dare?"

Here's the honest truth. My heart was doing something undignified. But I looked at that man, three years of hellos and trash cans, and I thought, when in your life, Teri, when, exactly, are you going to do something stupid on purpose.

"Fine," I said. "But I want it understood that I'm in it for the cookbook. I make a mean deviled egg."

"Sure you are," Cari said.

"Friday," Philip said. "The Hendersons' place. I'll cook. And nobody owes anybody anything, that's settled first."

"Settled," Cari said, and slapped the cookbook down on the picnic table like a gavel. "Dinner is served."

Jeremiah was already cheering. Tyrone was flipping burnt burgers. And Philip caught my eye one more time across the yard and did this little nod, like, okay then, and I nodded back, and that constituted the entire conversation, and somehow it was the most anyone had said to me in years.

I went home past the Hendersons' place, which is four doors down from mine and has that big back deck and the hot tub nobody uses. I stood at the end of their drive for a minute like an idiot.

Friday, then. I had four days to figure out what I was doing. I had a forty-six-year-old body, one fine fling twenty-two years back, a cat named Butt Hinge, and a dare.

Four days. I could do this. Probably.

Wednesday I went to the bookstore like always, and Cari was there within twenty minutes, which is how fast she moves when she smells drama.

"Have you thought about what you're wearing," she said.

"Cari, I'm going to a house four doors down from my own house. I own fourteen robes. I could walk there in a robe."

"That's not an answer."

"It's a robe," I said. She gave me the look, the one she's been giving me since we started working auctions together, and I went back to shelving. She bought me a coffee and left, and I will say this for her, she never pushes past the third look. Fourth look and she'd be Cari from hell. Third look, she's just Cari.

Thursday night Philip came over the fence line while I was wrestling my trash cans in. The wind had picked up again. Of course it had. Last March it blew so hard the Hendersons' recycling went to Elm Street and Philip brought my cans in without a word, and here he was doing it again, like it was a service he just provides.

"Friday still on?" he asked over the fence.

"Unless you've got a raccoon emergency."

"No raccoons. I'll pick you up at five. Or you could just walk."

"Walk. It's four doors, Philip."

"Right. Five, then. I'll cook. That part's settled." And he went inside, and I stood there in my driveway holding a trash can lid like a shield, thinking, okay. Okay okay okay.

---

Friday I changed clothes six times. Butt Hinge sat on the bed and judged every one of them. She's a good cat but she has no faith in me.

"You were named for a body part and a hinge," I told her. "You don't get an opinion."

I settled on jeans and a green top, because it's Friday and I'm forty-six and comfortable beats clever every time. I packed a bag I didn't need to pack. Toothbrush, change of shirt, a bottle of wine Cari had left on my porch with a note that said GO GET EM. She spelled it wrong on purpose. She thinks it's funny. It's been funny for eleven years, which is long enough.

The Hendersons' place is nice. Big back deck, that hot tub sitting there like a dare all its own, a kitchen bigger than my whole downstairs. Philip had a bag of groceries on the counter and the cookbook open, spine bent, which honestly felt illegal.

"You're actually cooking from it," I said.

"Part of the dare. And nobody owes anybody anything past the dinner, so I figured I'd better make it good."

"You realize Cari rigged this. There's no outcome where she doesn't get to gloat."

"There really isn't," he said, and almost smiled. He has this way of almost smiling. The actual smile comes out maybe twice a year and I got one once, over the fence, about a squirrel. A whole story involving a squirrel and a bird feeder. Not now. Later maybe.

He was making the chicken thing from page fifty-something. Cream of mushroom soup, the works. Grandma food. My grandma made food exactly like that, in a kitchen with wallpaper that had geese on it, and every bite of that kind of cooking tastes like being nine years old and safe.

"You cook," I said. "You actually cook."

"Since I was twenty-one. Roommate situation in college taught me. He burned water. I figured somebody in the apartment should be able to feed us." He handed me a cutting board and a knife like he'd been waiting to. "You can do the onions. If you're staying."

"If I'm staying."

"You're staying," he said. Not a question. Not a push either. Just a fact, the way he says things, and I took the knife, and that ended it. Not the banned phrase, the actual that was that.

---

Dinner was good. The chicken thing was good, too much butter, perfect. We ate at the Hendersons' table like we owned the place, and the wine went down easy, and somewhere around the second glass the stories started coming out.

"You were married?" I asked. He'd said it like a footnote.

"Twice. First time at twenty-five. Young and stupid, which is a reason but not an excuse. Second time we just wore each other out, no villain in it. She's remarried, good guy, we send Christmas cards. You?"

"Never. One fling, twenty-two years ago. Professor, in town for one semester, gone by Christmas. He wrote me one letter. I still have it somewhere, in a box, with my tax stuff, which tells you something about my filing system."

"Twenty-two years and nothing?"

"Twenty-two years and nothing." I turned my glass on the table. "It's not tragic. I run an auction house, I work the bookstore two days a week, I have a cat. My days are full. But some nights I sit on the porch and think, is this it? Is this the whole show?"

He was quiet a minute. He's good with quiet. Most men fill it up like a hole in a wall.

"I dated a grad student when I was thirty," he said. "It fizzled. She was smart and I was boring and neither of us knew what to do about that."

"You're not boring."

"Jeremiah would testify otherwise."

"Jeremiah heckles you for a living. That's not testimony, that's sport." And there it was. The actual smile. I made that happen. Me. Forty-six years old and I made a man smile with my whole chest involved.

---

After dinner we took our wine out to the deck. It was hot for September, one of those Indian summer