The Wrong To-Go Box

Dorian Freemont, 34 years old and gainfully employed as a software developer, stood at his kitchen counter eating cereal at nine in the morning and tasted nothing at all.

Not one thing. The milk was milk-shaped water. The flakes were soggy cardboard. It had been that way since the funeral, three months back, and honestly it had started a little before that, during those last hospital weeks when his mother was mostly sleeping and he was mostly eating vending machine pretzels in a hallway.

Everything was ash. That was the word he kept coming back to. Not sad exactly, though he was sad, god, so sad. But the taste part of his life had just shut off like a breaker someone flipped in the basement.

He'd tried, at first. He'd made her pot roast, following her handwriting on the index card, and it came out fine, probably, and he couldn't tell. He'd ordered the pad thai from the place they both liked. Nothing. He'd eaten a lemon bar at a neighbor's pity visit and it was like chewing sweet drywall.

His friend Benji kept saying, "Dude, you gotta eat," like that was some kind of insight. Dorian was eating. He was eating cereal and toast and whatever showed up in a to-go box, and it all went down the same, which was to say it barely went down at all.

So that was the state of things when somebody started pounding on his door like the police.

"Open up! I know you're home, your lights are on!"

Deidre Slater. Of course. He shuffled over and opened the door, and there she stood, 33 and five foot two of pure bossy, holding two bulging grocery bags and wearing an apron that said EAT MY SHORTS in piping.

"Deidre, what..."

"Nope. Don't even start." She pushed past him into his own apartment like she'd been paying rent on it for years. In a way she had. "You look terrible."

"Thanks, it's a new skincare routine."

"Dorian." She set the bags down on his counter, hard, and turned around. "I'm not going to do the soft voice thing. You've had three months of soft voices. I'm going to tell you what's happening instead. On Saturday I have a wedding. Seventy guests. My assistant quit on me Tuesday to go be a whale whisperer or whatever, and you, my friend, are my new assistant."

"...What?"

"You heard me."

"I can't cook, Zimmer. I can barely operate a toaster. You know this. You've witnessed the toaster."

"Perfect, you're hired anyway. I don't need cooking yet, I need hands. Chopping, stirring, carrying, handing me things when I yell 'hand me the thing.' Can you hand me a thing?"

"I mean... probably?"

"Then we're set." She started unpacking the bags. Shallots, butter, a brick of cream cheese, a bag of flour that thumped like a body. "You're coming to my kitchen tomorrow at nine. Church basement, St. Ambrose, don't be late."

"Zimmer, I have a job."

"Take a day off. When have you ever taken a day off? You have like four hundred hours of PTO saved up, Benji told me, he checks, it's weird."

He wanted to argue. He watched her line up his ingredients on his counter in neat rows, and something in his chest moved about an inch, and he found he couldn't argue at all.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked. "Really."

She didn't look up from the bags. "Because you're my friend and you're wasting away on cereal, and it's pissing me off. Any more questions? No? Good. Nine a.m. Bring your own knife, everything else is provided."

"How do you know I even own a knife?"

"Everyone owns a knife, Dorian. If you don't, steal one from your neighbors, God knows they owe you, you ate their lemon bar and called it sweet drywall."

His mouth actually opened. "I told Benji that in confidence."

"Benji tells me everything in confidence. That's what confidence means. Nine a.m.!" And she was gone, out the door, leaving the apartment smelling like onions and butter and, weirdly, a little like hope.

---

The church basement kitchen at St. Ambrose was nothing like the fancy studio photos on Deidre's website. It was a big concrete room with a scuffed linoleum floor, a huge old industrial oven that ticked and groaned like it held a grudge, and two long steel prep tables that had probably seen forty years of potlucks.

It also smelled incredible. Onion and butter and thyme, warm air rolling out of the oven every time Deidre opened it, and Dorian stood there in the doorway Friday morning just breathing.

"Smell something?" Deidre asked, not looking up from her cutting board.

"No. I mean, yes. I mean, does it always smell like that in here?"

She stopped cutting and looked at him, and for a second her whole face did something complicated. "Yeah," she said. "It pretty much always smells like that. Apron's on the hook. Wash your hands, we've got forty appetizer plates to build before two."

They worked. He learned that handing her "the thing" was a real skill, because the thing changed every forty seconds and yelling was involved. He learned the oven had a hot spot on the left side that could incinerate a tray of gougeres, and Deidre swore at it in a low cheerful voice like it was an old boyfriend.

He learned, around eleven, that he could not cut a shallot.

"Thumb, Dorian, THUMB!"

The knife had gone past the shallot and into the pad of his left thumb before his brain registered it. Not deep, but deep enough, and the blood came fast and red across the white cutting board.

"Oh, God. Oh, that's...!"

"Sit. Sit down right now!" She was already moving, yanking a roll of paper towels off the shelf, dragging a stool over with her foot. "Press. Press hard, there you go. Lean into it, don't be a baby about it."

"I cut off my thumb," he said. "Deidre, I cut off my thumb, I'm going to pass out."

"You did not cut off your thumb. It's still attached. I can see it from here. It's fine, it's shallow, you're being dramatic and it's very rude of you because I need that thumb."

"I'm going to throw up."

"You are not going to throw up on my shallots." She had his hand up over his head, one small strong arm bracing his elbow, and she was talking steady and fast. "Breathe. Look at me, not at the board. Good. Now tell me something dumb. Tell me what Benji said about your PTO."

"He checks how much PTO I have. He said it's four hundred hours."

"See? Dumb. You're fine." She wrapped the paper towel tight around his thumb, and then, because God only knows where her first aid kit had gone, she grabbed a length of clean kitchen twine off the counter and tied it around the whole mess, snug, with a bow. She actually put a bow in it.

"There," she said, holding his bandaged hand up to the light like she was appraising jewelry. "Kitchen twine. It's food safe, it's tight, and it looks festive. You're welcome."

"It's a bow."

"Of course it's a bow. You think I tie knots for just anybody?" She let go of his hand and went back to the shallots, but he caught her watching him sideways for a minute after that.

"Zimmer, why do you have twine tied in bows just lying around your kitchen?"

"Garnish," she said. "Shut up. Eat this." And she put a spoonful of the shallot butter sauce she was making right against his mouth, and he opened it without thinking, and the taste hit him like a wave.

It tasted like butter. It tasted like onions cooked slow in butter. It tasted like salt and thyme and something warm underneath, and Dorian Freemont stood in a church basement with kitchen twine on his thumb and felt his eyes sting for the first time since the funeral.

"Well?" she asked, quiet now.

"It tastes..." His voice cracked. He tried again. "It tastes like something."

"Yeah," Deidre said, turning back to her board, and her voice was a little cracked too. "It does."

The afternoon went better after that, if you don't count the oven. The oven ticked. It groaned. At one point it made a sound like a man clearing his throat before telling you bad news. "She does that," Deidre said, patting the oven door like it was a horse. "Ignore her."

"It's a she?"

"Everything in this kitchen is a she. The oven, the mixer, the walk-in. You're the only him in here, so behave." Around three the door banged open and Benji came down the stairs carrying a box of paper cups and a grin. "The caterer's assistant!" he announced. "How's the thumb?"

"It's a bow," Dorian said, holding it up.

"It's what?"

"Never mind," Deidre said quickly. "Benji, did you bring the cups or did you bring yourself?"

"Both! I'm multi-tasking." He set the box down, grabbed a cup, and helped himself to the extra shallot sauce like he owned the place. Deidre swatted him away, then got a call from the bride's mother about the tent guy, and went up the stairs waving her phone and cursing in two languages. And then it was just Dorian and Benji and the ticking oven, which was, Dorian would realize later, exactly what Benji had planned. Benji wandered over to the big double fridge, opened it, and stared into it like it was television. "Come hold this door, I can't decide."

"You can't decide what? It's a fridge."

"Come here." Dorian came over, and Benji pulled the door shut with both of them half in front of it, which Dorian also should have noticed was a move. "Okay," Benji said, quiet, no grin. "I'm going to say a thing and you're going to listen."

"That's ominous."

"Deidre's been in love with you since junior year of college."

The fridge hummed. Somewhere upstairs a phone rang.

"What?"

"You heard me. Since college, Dorian. Since the thing with the karaoke machine, which she has never once explained to me and which I have never once stopped thinking about. Fifteen years. She watched you date other people. She helped you move three times. She drove you to the hospital when you ate that bad scallop, and she sat in the parking lot for six hours."

"How do you know she sat in the parking lot?"

"Because I called her and she lied! Badly! Nobody lies that badly unless they're sitting in a parking lot!"

Dorian looked at the steel prep table, at the shallot board, at the little pile of papery skins. "She never said anything."

"Oh, well, case closed then," Benji said, throwing his hands up. "Dude. Have you said anything? To anyone? About anything? Since your mom died, you've said maybe forty words to me, and thirty of them were about PTO."

"That's not fair."

"No, it's not fair! None of it's fair! Your mom dying isn't fair and her waiting fifteen years isn't fair!" Benji dragged a hand down his face and gentled a little. "Look. She's not going to say it. She'd rather die in this basement than say it, because if you don't feel the same, she loses the friendship, and the friendship is the whole thing for her, it's always been the whole thing. So you're going to have to be the one."

"Benji, I'm... I'm not even a person right now. I'm a guy who eats cereal and cuts himself on a shallot."

"Yeah, and she spoon-fed you sauce an hour ago and you cried, and she turned around so you wouldn't see. I saw, though. I see everything. It's my whole deal."

The oven chose that moment to go off with a huge metal BANG, like it had been waiting for a dramatic pause. They both jumped a foot.

"SHE'S FINE," Deidre's voice yelled down the stairs. "DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING."

Benji pointed at Dorian. "That's her whole heart yelling down a stairwell about an oven. Don't make me do another intervention. I don't have another intervention in me." He picked up his empty cup, saluted, and went up the stairs, and Dorian stood there in the hum of the fridge feeling as though he'd been handed a live wire and told to hold it.

Deidre came down ten minutes later, all business. "Okay! We have seventy mouths Saturday and a sauce that isn't made, so tonight you learn mole."

"Tonight?"

"Tonight. Grandmom's recipe. It takes four hours, so we start at six, and you're going to stir." She set out the ingredients in a line like a general reviewing troops. Chiles, dark and wrinkled. Chocolate that looked like a brick. Tomatoes, sesame seeds, stale tortillas, a jar of something that made him nervous.

"This is a church basement," Dorian said.

"This is a church basement with a permit. Peel."

So he peeled and she talked. Not about the recipe at first, just talked, the way people do when their hands are busy. About Grandmom Slater, who made mole for every wedding and every funeral and once for a christening that got rained out and turned into a wake. "She taught me in her kitchen in Morningside, on that same terrible stove. Burned herself three times and never once let me touch the pot bare-handed, which, you know, grandmother logic."

"What's grandmother logic?"

"'Do as I say, not as I did, and don't tell your mother I showed you the chocolate part.'"

Dorian laughed. Out loud. An actual laugh, and Deidre stopped stirring for half a second like she'd heard something rare, which she had.

"Okay, so you toast the chiles till they smell like they're about to be trouble, but not burnt, burnt ruins the whole thing and Grandmom would rise from the grave."

"Does the recipe say that?"

"The recipe says 'toast until Grandmom says.' That's it. That's the whole instruction."

They fried the chiles and soaked them, and blended everything in the big