Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  Connor’s gut roils as he approaches the table. His sister has pulled any number of stunts on him, and this could be yet another one. He has always gotten the impression that her stunts fill some need in her that he can’t understand. Her best—or worst—stunt to date was to fire Mom’s part-time healthcare assistant once Connor had agreed to move back and take care of Mom part-time. It would have looked bad to the relatives back in Taiwan, his sister insisted, for someone outside of the family to take care of Mom. He couldn’t afford to hire an assistant by himself and his father—Connor knows people his age with grandparents who are older than his father—could barely take care of himself. So, Connor ended up taking care of Mom full-time instead. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t relieved when she finally did die, even if being relieved makes him a monster.

  The urn with Mom’s ashes has been sitting on the mantel of his sister’s fireplace for months now. That it’s taken his sister this long to show up is downright sporting. She might really just be here for dinner. That flicker of hope is completely unwarranted, but he can’t help himself.

  “Prue.” Connor stands in front the table. For her, he’s careful to iron all inflection out of his voice.

  “I need you to renounce your citizenship.” She says this as casually as someone who liked him might say hello.

  And hope dies again. Connor, though, does not miss a beat. He is a food-crafting machine.

  The request for her order falls smoothly from his mouth. She orders the most outrageous thing on the menu, the scale-accurate model of the Chrysler Building. It’s only there to make everything else look reasonable and affordable. He is aghast, but he merely nods and smiles. His heels click, his body pivots, and he’s gone to the kitchen to gather the ingredients before he realizes he’s even moved.

  The raw materials that will become the Chrysler Building fill both tiers of his cart. Inertia gives it a mind of its own as he steers it around the tables in the dining room. The maître d’ stops him.

  “Sure you want to do this by yourself? I hear the staff here is top notch.” The maître d’s gaze flicks over to the handsome band singer. “Besides, you already have his attention. Showboating isn’t going to make him notice you more.”

  The Chrysler Building normally takes five servers and three table bussers to pull off. Conner isn’t building it by himself to prove anything to the handsome band singer, not that he’s against showing off to him. In the moment of reflection before he responds, he realizes he’s not even doing this to prove anything to himself. If the customer were anyone but his sister, he might have put a crew together and put up with their help.

  “No, I can do it.” He wants to push on, but the maître d’ reaches for his arm.

  “Obviously, but that’s not the question.” Her smile is warm and still something Connor’s not used to. “Do you want to do this by yourself? There’s a crew of trustworthy servers and table bussers who’ll help you in any way you ask.”

  “I don’t think that’s the question, either.” Connor pushes on and, this time, the maître d’ lets go.

  Prue smirks when she sees the cart. Something tightens inside Connor, but he forces her expression to pass right through him.

  The Chrysler Building is a deconstructed paella composed of discrete floors that become ever lighter and more delicate as they approach the building’s crystalline spire. Garlic and saffron perfume the air as he prepares all the layers from the grouper at the bottom to the clear tomato distillate at the top at once. Various proteins transform from raw to poached as a deft gesture of his hand lifts them off their plates. At a glance, a pot of water begins to simmer and the water is infused with flavors from fish bones and shrimp shells. Within minutes, the water is transformed into savory stock. Grains of rice swirl about an invisible center. They swell and congeal as they absorb the stock that he makes rain down on them. Meanwhile, with another deft gesture, tomatoes dissolve then evaporate. Their clear condensate drips into a gelatin that Connor has crafted in the meantime.

  Sweat trickles in tiny beads down Connor’s face and back. The building’s foundation, impeccably poached grouper glued into a slab, quivers on a gold-edged plate. As he lowers the next layer, Prue slides documents onto the table.

  “Durable power of attorney.” Prue offers Connor a pen. “Sign it.”

  For a moment, Connor’s torso stiffens, his back ramrod straight. His rib cage shrinks but doesn’t expand again. Whatever’s inside twists. Asking him to renounce his citizenship was just a bit of anchoring, then. It’s the same trick the restaurant pulls when they put the Chrysler Building on the menu. Prue might want Connor to renounce his citizenship, but signing a durable power of attorney sounds so much more reasonable in comparison. Not that letting Prue act on his behalf in legal matters is a good idea. She still hasn’t told him what this is about. Then again, he also hasn’t asked.

  He just keeps on multitasking. Everything has to happen at just the right moment or else some emulsion will fail to set properly or some foam will collapse. This is why it takes a team to build the Chrysler Building, or would if he weren’t so intent on proving himself to the uncaring audience. Prue sets her pen on the document. As he continues to craft, she just sits there, her arms folded across her chest, waiting.

  He falls behind, of course. Not even when he was at his best could he maintain a stock at its bliss point, stabilize a foam, and place a slab of emulsion on an increasingly precarious stack of them at the same time. The foams are stiffer than they ought to be. The transparent flakes of flavored rice emulsion are rough and coarse rather than straight-edged and delicate. He sets them in rows to create the spire with as much precision as he has time for. The rows, one overlapped on top of another, are almost the narrowing concentric arcs they should be. The triangular flakes don’t always point at the tangent of the curve like they should. The effect is not that Art Deco sense of utter craftsmanship. When one is just trying to prevent the building from sagging or, worse, toppling over, one makes trade-offs.

  The spire floats just above the top layer of gel. With deft hand gestures, he guides it onto the clear tomato-saffron distillate. As he does, Prue grasps at the durable power of attorney. The papers skid across the table before she catches them. The Chrysler Building wobbles.

  “Look, this is just so I can tell the probate court that you want your third of the estate to go to Dad. I know you don’t want it to go to me.” She rolls her eyes. “If you don’t trust me, get a lawyer to draft something that says the same thing.”

  It takes effort to steady his breath. He is a rubber band being wound tighter and tighter. Prue hasn’t so much as messaged him since the funeral, much less mentioned Mom or probate. Connor saw Mom’s will once, but it must have been lost if probate matters. If they had the will, they’d just execute it. Also, some of Mom’s “estate”—their parents aren’t not exactly rich—must be in Taiwan. Grudgingly, Connor has to admit that having a Taiwanese citizen—to the extent that that’s even a thing—take care of Taiwan probate might be easier. That doesn’t mean having Connor renounce his US citizenship and repatriate to Taiwan makes any sense. Giving his own share to Dad does, though. If anyone had bothered to ask Connor what he wanted, that’s what he would have told them. As best as he can remember, it’s also what Mom wanted in her will.

  Connor sets the spire in place. The building hardly sags at all.

  “Sure.” His voice is as smooth and level as any layer of emulsion in the building he’s just constructed. “I’ll mail it to you.”

  “Excellent. Let’s settle up.” She pushes back in her chair. “Check, please.”

  The rubber band snaps in two. It whirs as it unwinds. Its ragged ends flail where no one can see them. They slice the air, whistling with each strike. Their energy is spent in an instant and they lie limp in an unruly tangle.

  “Very good.” He nods, all inflection ironed out of his voice.

  With a click of his heels, he pivots to retrieve her check. His sister does no
t leave a tip.

  * * *

  Connor sits slumped on a bench in the restaurant’s locker room. He’s half-dressed. His pants are unbelted and unzipped. His shirt hangs unbuttoned off his torso. Elbows braced against his knees prop up his body as he stares at nothing. Any number of servers and table bussers have asked him whether he’s okay as they changed out of their uniforms and back into street clothes. Connor merely croaks that he’s fine, his gaze still aimed at some point beyond the row of lockers he faces. They all look at him, their eyebrows rise, and they sigh before carrying on with their own lives.

  He’s still sitting there like that when the handsome band singer shows up. Nick is half out of his shirt when he notices Connor. The shirt hangs off his body by one sleeve.

  “Don’t tell me you’re fine, Connor.” Nick crouches in front of him.

  “Oh. Hi, Nick.” Connor looks up for a moment, then breaks eye contact. “Congratulations. Now that you’ve passed the audition, are you leaving us?”

  “Oh, that. It’s just the district audition. I still have the regional and, if I’m lucky, the national after that.” Nick shrugs. “I’m sorry some customer didn’t even touch your work.”

  “Not some customer. My sister.” Connor is too tired to resist any longer, so he lets the handsome band singer fill his gaze.

  For all the width across his thick back and the way his chest and arms pop, Nick isn’t built like some statue of Hercules. He’s soft enough to read as human rather than demigod. His mouth opens and closes a few times before he finally speaks again.

  “So, that’s your sister.” His gaze narrows, his lips purse, and distaste spreads across his face. “Am I supposed to slap you now?”

  “What?”

  “You told me once that if you ever let your sister railroad you into anything again, I should slap you.”

  “Oh, right.” He actually had said that. They chat in the locker room surprisingly often. “No, I really do want my share of my mom’s assets to go to my dad. It’s what she would have wanted. I just need to get a document from a lawyer to that effect that will hold up in court.”

  Connor rolls his eyes at Nick’s skeptical gaze. The handsome band singer has heard too many stories about Prue. Granted, Connor was the one who told him all of them.

  “Can you afford the consulting fee?” Nick stands and finally pulls off his shirt. “I can spot you the money. Pay it back when you can.”

  “No. I got it.” Connor yawns. “They’re letting me pull extra shifts here.”

  Nick’s gaze does not get any less skeptical. He goes back to his locker and pulls on a T-shirt. It manages to be both baggy and revealing on his body. Only now does it occur to Connor that he should change out of his uniform, too.

  “Want a ride home?” Nick pulls on a pair of jeans. “You look like you’re going to fall asleep on the bus again.”

  Back in civilian clothes, Connor shuts his locker. Now that Nick is fully dressed, looking at him doesn’t feel nearly as illicit. Nick, for his part, has chatted with Connor in every possible state of undress including naked. Illicit may not be how looking at Nick is supposed to feel.

  “No, I’ll be fine.”

  It’s cold out, and that’ll keep Connor alert enough to get on the bus. Sometimes, he gets lucky and he wakes up in time for his stop. Other times, well, he’s never not made it home.

  Nick frowns again. He pulls on a thick coat. It ought to obscure the taper from his shoulders to his waist. It doesn’t.

  “Look, if you ever want a ride—”

  “I’ll ask.” And, after an awkward pause, he adds, “Thanks.”

  “Well, safe travels, Connor.”

  Nick slams his locker shut and leaves. His walk is jaunty, stepping in time to a sea shanty only he can hear. Connor collapses back onto the bench, but then forces himself back up and puts on his coat. It’s freezing out, and the bus waits for no man.

  * * *

  The lawyer that the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office recommended to Connor is three bus transfers away. It takes Connor several hours to get to her office. He shivers off the snow then hands the receptionist a check. The consulting fee has to be paid in advance.

  The lawyer’s office is cozy and warm. A large desk sits between them. The lawyer is way more ambitious than he is. She leans forward, asking him to come back with documentation about his family and Mom’s assets. When it becomes clear that he can’t afford any more than this visit, she scribbles out something that her office will make presentable for him to give to his sister. Her reluctant expression and audible sigh screams “against my better judgement.” Maybe it’s just pity, but he’s not proud.

  Shifts at the restaurant come and go. If Connor wants to chop vegetables and adjust the texture and flavor of meat for hours at a stretch, his fellow servers are happy to give up those shifts. There are a couple rough weeks where Nick is gone, preparing for and, ultimately, winning his regional auditions. More than once, Connor’s not sure how he’s gotten home.

  The time Connor doesn’t spend at the restaurant, he spends in his own kitchen, a thin strip of linoleum flooring at one edge of his tiny apartment. Mom’s pot stickers won’t recreate themselves. The extra shifts at work now pay for flour, pork, vegetables, and spices. He figured out the hot-water dough a while ago. As winter thaws into spring, he is still puzzling out the filling.

  The dough rests in a bowl covered by a damp cloth. In another bowl, he mixes pork, scallions, ginger, soy sauce, and sesame oil by hand. A savory, salty meatiness with a slight jab of heat fills his mouth as the mixture squishes between his fingers. He frowns. The flavor is still not what he remembers. He tamps down the fire from the scallions as he works the ingredients together. In retrospect, he should have stuck with jiucai.

  He rolls out the dough into a long snake. One by one, he rounds the small clumps he breaks off between his palms. Forming the tiny balls of dough used to be his job when he was too young to pay attention to how his mom made the filling. Just like he’s doing now, his mom would roll out each ball into a circle, put in a dollop of filling, then crimp the circle into a dumpling. When he’s done, several dozen of them form a neat grid on the floured table.

  He crafts rather than steams then fries the dumplings. No one wanted Connor to spend the years training to be a food crafter. Well, except for Connor, but no one cared what he thought. Since he is a food crafter, though, there’s no point to not taking advantage of that. Whatever made Mom’s pot stickers Mom’s has nothing to do with a bamboo steamer or frying pan.

  The dumplings bobble into the air. They plump with steam and are seared so that they all have crunchy, slightly oily, and savory crusts. Unlike anyone using a steamer and a frying pan, he can hit the bliss point exactly every time.

  He slides a plate beneath them, then lets them fall. Juices dribble down his chin when he tries one. It’s fine, perfectly cooked even, but it’s no more than that. It doesn’t taste like Mom’s. They never do. He can diddle with the flavors. Hell, if he put his mind to it, he could make the dumplings taste like a crisp, tart apple tinged with cinnamon and cardamom. What he can’t do, at least not yet, is make them taste like the ones he remembers, the ones his mom made when he was fourteen when she wouldn’t show him what to do no matter how much he begged.

  He pulls a journal out a drawer. The cover is tattered, and variegated pages paint swirls along the edges formed when the pages stack as the journal is shut. A bookmark sticks out the top. Each page has the flavor of a batch of dumplings he has made. This way, he never tries the same dumplings twice. He opens it by the bookmark to a blank white page. He scrawls today’s date on it, then infuses it with the flavor of this batch. Streaks of green flow down the yellowing page.

  The journal goes back into the drawer. The dumplings go into a resealable plastic container. They’ve become surprisingly popular at the restaurant’s staff meals. Connor, however, can’t make himself eat them.

  * * *

  The maître d’ hands Co
nnor a notebook that has “Mom’s recipes” written in his sister’s precise handwriting on the cover. Connor’s hands shake so much, the notebook vibrates. His heart pounds. The notebook is probably not what it looks like but, as always, he can’t help hoping. He pushes past her and several startled servers, and nearly crashes into a table busser as he sprints out of the dining room.

  Customers in their elegant dinner jackets and evening dresses wait in the restaurant’s lobby. They sit on overstuffed sofas and chat as they wait for their tables. Connor manages to halt his run just as he reaches them. He catches sight of Prue just as she pulls on the door to leave.

  “What is this?” Connor is standing next to the maître d’s stand, holding the notebook out at her.

  Prue turns around. She rolls her eyes and purses her lips.

  “What does it look like?” Her head shakes in disbelief. “I thought you’d thank me.”

  Her tone is sharper than any knife. Connor is convinced Prue doesn’t have any other way to speak. That said, the sharpest knives make the cleanest cuts. You barely feel them. They slide rather than tear through the flesh.

  “So everything went okay with probate?” He clutches the notebook to his side. “My share of stuff went to Dad?”

  “Oh, that.” She turns around and pulls open the door. “I got Dad to give his share to me. I’m in a better position to deal with it.”

  She is out the door before Connor can collect himself. He just stands there watching the door close. The customers do an admirable job of chatting with each other and waiting as though Connor and Prue were not talking at each other from across the lobby.

  “Are you all right?” The maître d’s voice takes Connor by surprise. “Take the night off. It’s not like you haven’t earned one, or ten.”