Page 108 of Knottingley Ever After
Including, Pinky. Including this one.
She makes a small sound at the back of her throat. The kind of sound that is half-amused, half-helpless. I keep going.
“It did not get bad for Connor, in any visible way, until the pressure of the Elite track came at us. The window when scouts started circling and the whole roster was working on the edge. I did not know he had moved to the heavier stuff. I want to be honest about that with you. I did not know. I would have known, if I had been looking, but I was not looking. I was looking at the playoff bracket and the GPA requirement and my four sisters at home, and somewhere in there my best friend had started taking the things that put him to sleep instead of waking him up.”
I breathe out.
“And then, on a Tuesday in November, four winters ago, I got the phone call.”
Her eyes have started to do the thing.
“One minute he was here, O’Shea. Studying for an econ midterm with Rémi and Matteo in the kitchen on a Sunday night and complaining about his hangover. The next, the call. He had not woken up. The autopsy report used the wordsrespiratory depression.His mother called me before she called his sister, because Connor had, on his fridge, my name as the in-case-of. He was twenty-one years old. His entire future poofed, just like that, off the front of a calendar.”
Iris closes her eyes.
She does not sayI am so sorrythe way most people do, with the small reflexive verbal hand on the shoulder. She lets the silence be the silence. She lets me have the room with him for the small respectful beat the room would have allowed Connor himself, had Connor been in it.
Then she opens her eyes. They are bright. They are not pitying. They are doing the very specific small difference between sympathy and empathy that I have been able to clock on a face since I was nine years old and that I have, in two weeks, never seen her do badly.
“Damn,” she whispers. “Jude. I am genuinely sorry.”
“Thank you, O’Shea.”
She wrinkles her nose. The small inhale of a woman recalibrating to the air of the room.
“Jude.”
“Mm.”
“Is something burning.”
Fuck.
I am off her in a beat, around the island, and at the stove in three strides. The bottom of the cast-iron has, in the four minutes I have spent with my finger against the pulse at her throat, gone past good caramelization into the precise dark scorched register of a base ruined by inattention. I lift the lid. The smell hits me. I curse.
“Okay,” I tell her, clipped, “I have to transfer this to a clean pot. Hold on. Bottom is gone.”
“I will help. What do you need.”
She is already off the stool and crossing to the cabinets. Pads, with that careful favoring of her left hip, to the lower set, opens the right one on the first try, and pulls out the second-deepest enamelled pot in the house. She plants the empty pot on the burner beside mine. Lid off.
“Transfer,” she says, gesturing.
I transfer. Carefully. Stew goes ladle by ladle into the new pot, leaving the scorched layer at the bottom of the old one. Iris turns the heat down a click without asking. The right smell slowly reclaims the room. Onions and rosemary and the slow umami of the beef and the dark malt of the Guinness coming back up from underneath the burnt that had, briefly, replaced it.
“Okay,” she breathes. “We are okay.”
“We are okay,” I agree.
“Teach me what you put in it.”
“Right now.”
“Walk me through. I want to know how you do this.”
So I do. I walk her through the seasonings in the order I added them. The bay leaves first, into the hot oil. The thyme and rosemary stripped from the stems and crushed between my palms before they go in. The pinch of mustard powder my grandfather always insisted on. The slug of Guinness halfway through, to deglaze. The splash of red wine at the end of hour two. The three peppercorns I throw in whole, against every cooking-school recommendation, because grandpa did and because the recipe is, in the end, the recipe.
She listens. Properly. The careful attentive listen you only give to information you intend to actually use, and somewhere around peppercorn three she has reached for the wooden spoon on her own and started a slow methodical stir.
