Page 54 of Blind Spot
“Don’t.”
“I’m just saying it. Cheektowaga. It’s a beautiful word. The kids of Cheektowaga get a snow day tomorrow, and we get a charter at noon.”
“Tragic,” he said, eyes closed, and his chest jumped once under my ear as he laughed.
We lay there. “Hey.” Rook’s voice was low. “You sure there’s nothing?”
“I’m sure,” I said.
It wasn’t true, but I couldn’t interrupt the moment.
The sentence was there, in the back of my throat.
I want more than this.
Then the control followed it.Don’t make a scene. Don’t ask the sun to come closer.I swallowed.
The words didn’t go all the way down, and they came back in the one way I could say them out loud.
“Többet akarok ennél.” The words in Hungarian.
“Mm. What’s that?” Rook asked.
“It means go to sleep,” I said.
One o’clock arrived. He slid out from under me a centimeter at a time, and I let him go finger by finger. He bent over the bed and kissed me, and his hand came to rest at the back of my neck, staying a beat past the kiss.
After he closed the door, I counted thirty seconds.
Rook:I’m back.
I lay there with the phone lighting the ceiling. UnderI’mback, I typed the words.
I want more than this.
My thumb hovered.
I deleted it because I couldn’t send it in a text. It was a kitchen sentence. It belonged in the house, in daylight, without a chain on the door.
We’d be home on Sunday.
I got up, pulled the curtain past its gap, and stood at the window in the dark. The snow was coming down heavy through the streetlight, burying the parking lot and the entire city.
I made an appointment with myself. Sunday, at the table, I’d say the words out loud.
And if the sun didn’t like being asked to come closer, the sun could take it up with me. I was done orbiting.
Chapter fourteen
Rook
The salt pork went in first, cut small and rendered low until the bottom of the pot was glassy with fat. I’d driven to two stores that afternoon for the clams, settling on the little ones from Cedar Key that were as close to Maine as Illinois was ever going to get.
My mother made chowder in a pot twice as old as me. She’d give it to me if I asked.
I diced the onions while the pork rendered. When they began to cook, the kitchen smelled like Sunday afternoons when I was a kid. Diced potatoes waited on the cutting board beside clam juice in a measuring cup and cream coming to room temperature.
The first time I made the chowder for Varga, I carried it across the city in a container that was still warm. He opened the door on crutches and looked at it, and then at me, like he was trying to work out the angle. There wasn’t one. It was only me who didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say in words, so I brought soup.
