The Good Cook

I was breaking down a case of beets when my date from Tuesday texted me again.

Her name was Denise. She was thirty-eight, worked at the bank, and had told me twice over dinner that she didn't usually do this kind of thing. I still didn't know what kind of thing she meant. The text said "hey stranger" with a winking emoji. I put the phone face down on the cutting board.

You'd think a chef would eat better before dates. That night I'd had half a plate of my own special and a glass of box wine standing over the sink. That's dating at forty-four for you. You eat standing up, you talk about your jobs for ninety minutes, you split the check because she read an article about it, and you drive home wondering if you remembered to lock the back door of the restaurant.

I run the kitchen at the Orange Spoon here in Cactus Flats. Have for eleven years. Farm to table, which out here mostly means I know the guy who grows the squash. His name is Roy. I could tell you Roy's whole life story and not one thing about Denise's.

The lunch rush was over. Old Herbert was wiping down booth four the way he does, slow, like the table might sue him if he hurried. Through the pass window I could see the feed store across the road and the church sign announcing the Harvest Fair, two Saturdays out. Same sign as every year. Same fair. Same squash.

I'll say it plain. I was bored. Good and bored, which is the worst kind, because it comes with a pat on the back. Everybody in town thinks you're doing great. "Clint, you're so steady." Eleven years of steady and my most exciting visitor last month had been a health inspector.

The bell over the door jangled.

I didn't look up right away. I said, "We're closed till five," and then I did look up.

Martine.

She was forty-three now and she looked like Martine, meaning she looked like trouble that had been to four cities and come back with opinions about all of them. Camera bag over one shoulder. Sand on her boots, somehow, though the nearest sand was forty miles.

"You're never closed till five," she said. "You're closed till four thirty and you lie about it so you can drink coffee in peace."

"That's a slander."

"It's a fact with better PR." She dropped onto a stool at the pass and put her chin in her hands. "Hey, old man!"

"Hey yourself. When did you get into town?"

"Last night. Mom's place. Don't ask how the guest room smells. Ask how I am."

"How are you?"

"Between jobs and loving it and also going quietly insane." She flipped a hand. "The point is I need you."

"Everybody needs me. I'm very needed. It's my whole personality."

"The point," she said, "is that I need you to drive me to Bramley County on Friday. Harvest festival up there. Big editorial shoot, orchards, cider, some poor farmer holding a prize pumpkin. Whatever. Two days, there and back, one motel night, and I'll pay for gas."

I stopped chopping. "You'll pay for gas. Wow. Big spender."

"I'll also buy you festival food, which is a punishment, and you'll complain the whole time, which is your love language."

"It is not my love language."

"Clint. You once wrote a guy up for putting cilantro in a posole. Complaining is the closest thing you have to a hug."

Old Herbert snorted from booth four. Traitor.

You should know this about Martine and me, since you'll need it. We met in culinary school twenty years back. We dated for about four months when we were twenty-two. It fizzled. Not badly, not dramatically. It just went out like a burner somebody forgot about, and what was left was better anyway. Twenty years of friendship. She's the person I call when a supplier screws me and the person who talked me out of buying a food truck twice. She lived in Portland, then Heath, then somewhere I still call "the wrong Portland," and now she's back between jobs, sleeping in her mother's guest room, asking me for rides.

And every so often, for about one second, there's this little click in the air between us. Has been since school. We both pretend the click doesn't exist. Twenty years of pretending. You get good at it, like anything.

"Two days," I said. "Friday through Saturday."

"Friday through Saturday. One motel room if you want to save money, two if you're a coward."

"I'm a coward," I said. "Book two."

She grinned. "Booked. I already booked. I'm messing with you. Two rooms, side by side, like a pair of very sad missionaries."

"When do we leave?"

"Friday, eight a.m. sharp. I know that's early for a man who closes a restaurant, but the light up there in the morning is the whole reason they hired me."

"Fine. Eight."

"Fine. Eight." She leaned back on the stool and looked around the kitchen like she owned it. "You've kept this place exactly the same, you know. Same scratch on the prep table. Same dented stockpot."

"I don't believe in change."

"You don't believe in anything riskier than a roux."

The afternoon cook came in the back and started prepping, so I wiped my hands and came around the pass and sat next to her with two coffees, because I know how to be a host even to a person who's roasting me.

"So this shoot," I said. "Editorial. Who's paying?"

"A magazine. Real money, real contract, already signed. You don't have to look at me like that. I'm not asking you to drive me for exposure."

"I wasn't going to say exposure."

"You were going to think it very loudly."

Fair. I drank my coffee. She drank hers and watched the kitchen do its slow afternoon nothing. It was nice, is the thing. It was nice in a way that made me suspicious of how nice it was.

"Okay," she said, turning on the stool to face me. "Dare."

"Excuse me?"

"I dare you. I dare you to admit why you said yes so fast."

"I didn't say yes fast!"

"Clint. I asked you for two days of your life and you said 'when do we leave' before I finished the sentence. A man who shoots down four dates a month, who guards his days off like crown jewels. That man doesn't say yes fast for gas money." She picked up her camera and fiddled with a dial she didn't need to fiddle with. "So. Why so fast?"

"You're paying for gas," I said.

"Lame."

"You have good taste in motels."

"Lame."

"I've never been to the Bramley festival and I want to see how a town with real money runs a fair, professionally, as research."

She just looked at me. She had the same look she had at twenty-two when I lied about why I was really at her apartment, which was that I wanted to be there. Some looks you don't outgrow. Some looks outgrow you.

"Also," I said, "I was bored."

That landed. I saw it land. She put the camera down slow.

"Go on," she said.

"It's nothing dramatic. I've been doing the same thing for eleven years. Which is fine. Which is good. People like my food, I pay my rent, Roy brings me squash. But I looked up at the church sign today and I could tell you every word on it, and I could tell you what it said last year, and I thought, man. I need to go somewhere and see a stranger's pumpkin."

"You need to see a stranger's pumpkin," she repeated.

"That's what I said."

"That is the most romantic thing you've ever said to me and you aimed it at a gourd."

"Romantic," I said. "Who said anything about romantic."

"Nobody," said Martine. "Nobody said anything about romantic. Absolutely nobody." She looked at her coffee. She looked at me. The click happened, that one-second thing, and for once neither of us pretended.

"Friday, eight a.m.," she said, hopping off the stool, bag on her shoulder, cheeks a little pink. "Pack a jacket. Nights get cold up there."

"Roger that."

"And Clint? Bring your appetite and your complaints. You know I love both."

The door jangled shut behind her. Old Herbert looked over from booth four with the smug face of a man who had watched twenty years of television in real time.

"Shut up, Herbert," I said.

He hadn't said a word. That's the worst kind of shut up there is.

Friday, 8 a.m., she pulled up in a rented Corolla that smelled like pine air freshener and someone else's cigarettes.

"Nice ride," I said.

"It's what they had. I asked for something with a little dignity and the guy laughed at me."

I threw my bag in the back. I'd packed a jacket, like she said. I also packed complaints, like she said. I was saving those for hour three.

We got on the highway out of Cactus Flats and the desert did its usual thing, which is nothing, beautifully, for miles. Martine drove with her window cracked and her camera in her lap like a pet.

"Okay, so there's this diner," she said, about an hour in. "I shot a story here once, years ago. The pie was good. The pie chart of my life, this pie sits near the top."

"Pie puns already. Hour one."

"You married the wrong woman, Clint."

"I married no one. That was your whole thing."

"And look how it's going for both of us."

The diner was called the Salt Flat Cafe and it sat alone on a stretch of road like it had lost a bet. We pulled in because she wanted pie and I always want to see how other people run a kitchen, even a kitchen with four stools and a fly strip.

Inside, the pie was actually good. Cherry. I told the woman behind the counter so and she said, "Canned filling, doctor it myself," which I respect. Honesty in canned filling. There's a whole philosophy there.

Then the camera thing happened.

Martine had her camera out on the table, shooting the pie from four angles like it owed her money. A guy at the counter, big, about fifty, in a feed store cap, turned around and stared.

"You taking pictures of me?"

"No, honey. Pie," said Martine.

"Because there was a guy in here last month taking pictures and it turned out he was from the county. Code enforcement. You from the county?"

"Nope. Magazine."

"That's what the other guy said."

"Honey, the other guy was from the county. I'm not. Look at my boots. Does a county man wear boots like these?"

He did not look at her boots. He looked at me, like maybe I was the supervisor.

I held up my hands. "She's with me. We're just passing through, headed to the festival in Bramley County. She shoots food for magazines. I cook."

"Where do you cook?"

"Orange Spoon, Cactus Flats."

"Cactus Flats." He said it like the name of a disease. "My sister lives out that way. Says there's a place there does a decent fried chicken."

"Tell your sister I run the kitchen and I'd be happy to have her."

That did it. That's the trick with guys like him, you can't argue, you have to hand them something. He turned back to his coffee, satisfied, and the woman refilled Martine's cup without being asked.

"That was smooth," Martine said, low.

"Eleven years of small towns. You learn the diffusing."

"You're like a bomb guy."

"I am not a bomb guy."

"Clint, you cut wires for a living."

"And I'll thank you to remember it."

She took my picture then, right there with the cherry pie, no warning. I heard the click and looked up.

"Hey!"

"What? You're photogenic. Grumpy and photogenic. It's a whole genre."

"Delete it."

"Never. It's for my private collection. I'm building a museum of Clint Through the Years and this is the Angry Pie Room."

The woman behind the counter laughed so hard she had to sit down on a crate of oranges.

Back on the road, hour three arrived on schedule and I filed my first complaint, which was about her playlist. It was all these Portland bands, the real Portland, and she defended every one of them.

"This one's good."

"It sounds like a man crying inside a tumbleweed."

"That's the genre, Clint."

"That's a cry for help."

She turned it up. I let it happen. There are battles you pick and battles you lose on purpose, and I've never once been able to tell the difference until afterward.

It was hour five when the tire went.

Not a blowout. Worse. The slow hiss, the pull in the wheel, that soft rrrrp rrrrp of rubber coming apart on hot asphalt. Martine said a word I won't repeat and eased the Corolla onto the shoulder. Dust everywhere. Heat like a hand on the back of your neck.

We got out and looked at the rear left. Shredded. Not flat. Gone. Belt showing, sidewall ripped.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Donut in the trunk."

"There is no donut. It's a rental. Remember? Dignity guy?"

"No donut. Great. Wonderful. This is why people don't leave the house."

I got on the phone with the rental company and spent forty minutes being transferred to a man named Kent who had the warmth of a filing cabinet. Nearest tow and replacement car: two hours out, and the car wouldn't come until tomorrow morning. He said it like good news.

Martine sat on the guardrail in the shade of a sign that said GOD IS NIGH and ate a bag of pretzels from her bag.

"So we're stuck," she said.

"We're stuck."

"No car till morning."

"Till morning."

She looked down the road both ways. There was a motel. Of course there was a motel. There is always a motel in these situations, this is how stories work and I've read enough of them to know. A little place, maybe eight units, a sign with an arrow pointing at a cactus, a wading pool that hadn't held water since the last administration.

We walked over. The office was a room the size of a closet with a fan and a man watching a small TV.

"Help you?"

"Car died," Martine said. "Two units for tonight?"

He winced. "Got one. The big fella over there booked both beds for his party and one of his party didn't show, so I got