Page 35 of Her Rival

I spent the rest of that session looking at my own glass of water and not at her.

Thursday she came back.

Second week of her being at my place for the interview. Fourth session overall. The rhythm had become almost something. We didn't talk before the recorder was on. We didn't talk after it was off, beyond the small careful polite things people say when one of them is about to leave the other one's house. In the middle we did the interview. Forty-five minutes, an hour, ninety on the day she was deep into the line-change material and lost track of time. She pulled apart the championship season for me one game at a time and I gave her back what I could, which was the hockey of it, and we both held the line, and the line was, on Thursday, three feet of polished concrete countertop between her elbows and mine.

I made dinner that night without quite planning to.

I hadn't invited her to dinner. I had no business inviting her to dinner. What happened was the session ran long, and at some point past six I said, I'm going to eat something. You want anything, and she said, I should get going, and I said, Hartley. It's seven-thirty. You drove forty minutes to be here. Let me make you a goddamn sandwich, and she sat very still on her stool and looked at me with an expression I was learning meant she was overruling something she'd decided in the car on the way over, and she said, Okay.

I made her a sandwich. Then, because the sandwich wasn't actually enough food for the size of the day I'd been having, I started making spaghetti. On the principle that boiling water in the same room as another person wasn't the same as inviting them to dinner, if both people had already agreed it was just a sandwich.

She watched me boil the water from her stool at the island.

I had a stove with six burners I'd used maybe twelve times since I moved in, because cooking for one in a kitchen built for ten was the kind of indignity I tended to skip in favor of takeout. I knew how to make spaghetti because my sister taught me when I was thirteen, so I wouldn't burn my own dinner the nights our mother wasn't speaking to either of us. I made it the way Mary Beth taught me. Salt the water like a sin. Oil at the end. Garlic browned in butter for the sauce. No fancy bullshit. I cooked in silence. Dani sat at the island in silence. The recorder had been off for an hour.

At some point I tossed a noodle at the wall to check if it stuck, the way Mary Beth had also taught me, and it stuck, and Dani made the smallest sound from the stool.

I looked over.

"That was a sound," I said.

"It wasn't."

"It was. I made spaghetti. You made a sound. I'd like a report."

She was looking at the wall, where the noodle hung on, slightly limp, defying physics in the specific way a properly cooked piece of pasta is supposed to.

"My grandmother did that," she said. Quiet. "She threw noodles at the wall. I have not seen a person do that since I was nine years old."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Who taught you to cook."

"Nobody. I don't cook. I edit other people's recipes and think hard about how I'd have written them and then I order Thai."

It came out of her almost involuntarily, the dry quick wit she had, and I almost laughed before I caught myself.

She watched me almost laugh and not laugh.

"You can laugh, Sturgill," she said. "I'm not going to put it in the article."

"I know what's not going in the article."

"That's a different sentence than the one I just said."

"I know."

She held my eyes a second too long. Then she looked down at her wine, which I hadn't yet given her but which had appeared on her side of the island at some point, which I now didn't remember pouring. The cabernet I'd been letting breathe since five. I hadn't invited her to drink wine at my house on a Thursday night. The wine had just sort of arrived, the way the spaghetti had just sort of arrived, the way she had just sort of stayed.

I served her a plate.

She ate.

We didn't talk about the interview. We didn't talk about the article. We didn't talk about her work or my work or what either of us was supposed to be doing in this house at this hour. She told me about the noodle her grandmother had thrown at a kitchen wall in Knoxville thirty years ago. The kind of kitchen it had been. The linoleum. The rooster clock above the stove that clucked every hour on the hour, that her grandmother refused to take down the entire eight years Dani spent staying there in the summers. She told me her grandmother's name, which was Iris, which was also the name of the street the house had been on, and which was the title of the only piece of writing she'd let anyone see in four years.

She told me she'd been a writer once.