by Kelly Harms
“Aren’t you hungry?” he asks, giving me the opening to get out of this, an opening I do not want at all, and yet am seriously considering taking.
“I’m starving,” I say after a little tussle with myself, though my stomach is telling me eating is not a good idea. “Where to?” God, I sound casual. Go, me.
“Let’s go to a little place I know of down the way,” he says. “Take a right out of the lot, and go straight at the four-way stop.”
I start the car, feeling drunk but reminding myself that Driving While Infatuated isn’t technically illegal, and follow his directions. After the stop sign, we drive about a mile, me going a little too slowly to be normal and him saying nothing about it. “Okay,” he chimes when we get to a little diner-ish-looking place called Bambi’s. “Turn in here and park anywhere you can find.” Sure enough, the parking lot is packed, and I say so. “You’ll see why it’s so crowded in a few minutes…” he says with great promise, while I circle to a spot in a neighboring business’s lot, and successfully park between two enormous pickup trucks.
Bambi’s itself is little more than a shack with about twelve counter seats, which are not only completely full but also have a standing-room-only crowd behind them, people holding their car keys and watching the waitress behind the counter hungrily as she packs up to-go orders. Outside the building are countless picnic tables, bustling with happy eaters all working on stacks of something in waxed paper wrappers. “You’re not a vegetarian, are you?” Noah asks me with some trepidation, and I shake my head no, thinking that even if I were I’m not sure I’d be able to disappoint him by admitting it now. “Phew. You go find us a nice table outside, one with a good view, and I’ll take care of lunch.”
I go outside and start noodling around the tables, unclear about exactly what he meant by a good view. The tables in front of the building look out on the road and the parking lot, and the ones on the right are surrounded by fields. I pick the field side, and wait anxiously.
When Noah reemerges, he’s carrying a red cafeteria tray full of whatever it is that’s in those waxed paper bundles, and two tall cups with straws.
“Get ready,” he says, as he plops down the tray. With great flourish he hands me one of the cups, which is covered in a frosty condensation. “I wasn’t sure if you were a chocolate or vanilla sort of woman, so I got you a black and white.”
“Yum,” I say, and my tummy seems to relax at the idea of a milkshake, much to my gratitude. I take a big slurp and get the most delicious mouthful of chocolate malt and vanilla ice cream. “Wow.” It tastes so good my whole body seems to come untied. “It’s like liquid Xanax.”
Noah nods. “But just you wait.” Then he unwraps one of the waxed paper bundles and reveals a tiny little hot dog, covered in mustard and bright green relish. He presents it to me like it’s diamonds. “Bon appetit!”
“It’s a little hot dog,” I say like an idiot.
“It’s an awesome little hot dog,” Noah says, a dog already lifted to his mouth. “Bambi’s serves two things: hot dogs with mustard and hot dogs with mayo. I got you three of each.”
“Six hot dogs?” I exclaim.
“If that’s not enough I can always go back for more.”
I laugh and consider the little wiener in my hands. It’s about three inches long, nestled into a pale tan-colored bun, and it looks like you eat it in just a few bites. I take a tiny nibble and then a bigger bite when Noah scrunches up his face at me teasingly. It tastes terrific, with skin as snappy and crisp as a Chicago red hot and a big beefy juicy flavor inside. But the real stunner is the mustard and relish, combining to form a tangy wash of deliciousness over the whole thing.
Noah is watching me all this time, watching my reaction. “Whoa,” I say when I’ve finished chewing. “That is one amazing hot dog.”
“Now try the mayo,” he says. “That’s my favorite.”
I unwrap another dog—this one in a reddish waxed paper wrapping—and taste. I can see why the condiment choice is such a big deal—this one tastes totally different, creamy and kind of lush, and the relish doesn’t seem hot anymore so much as bright and smooth. Thrilled by the contrast, I taste the mustard again, and then the mayo.
“Mustard,” I announce, after I’ve killed four hot dogs. “Mustard is the best.”
“Wrong-o,” Noah says, and then to punctuate that, he shoves an entire mayo dog into his mouth in one bite. It’s both disgusting and silly, and I crack up. “What are you doing?” I ask mid-laugh, though it’s too late for him to turn back now.
His eyes bulge out and I watch him chew intently, trying to get his mouth around the whole hot dog. He’s definitely struggling and there’s a long moment where I wonder if he’s going to have to spit the whole thing out, mortifying us both in the process. But he soldiers on. “Mmmm,” he manages to get out. I see him swallow once, and then, with his mouth still indecently full of hot dog, he mutters “Tastes better this way,” and then chokes a little. After a fit of coughs, he swallows again. “Concentrates the flavor.” He’s bright red and I realize he’s a little embarrassed about what he just did, and it makes me feel so much better to know I’m not the only one here who knows how to blush.
“Oh yeah?” I ask, and then take an enormous bite, not the whole dog but as much as I can get in my mouth. “Mmmpfh!”
“There you go,” he says, swallowing again and then taking a huge slurp of milkshake.
“It does taste better,” I say when I can speak again.
“Right? And if you think that’s good, you just wait. I bet I can do two at once.”
“Don’t show me! Seriously.”
“Are you kidding? I’m saving that for later. It’s the lynchpin of my seduction technique.”
Seduction technique? It is unquestionably hot out, but at that I get a whole epidermis full of goose bumps and feel a chill down my spine. Noah is talking about seducing me. Would I like to be seduced by Noah? I can think of worse things.… But am I even capable of starting a new relationship anymore?
And then it hits me: maybe I could be. After all, I’ve made a new friend in Nean. I’ve talked to all sorts of new people since we moved here. Maybe, with the right motivation, I could try to put myself back out there. And if Noah isn’t motivation, I don’t know what would be.
Now if I can only think of something to say to fill the growing awkward silence. I channel Nean, searching for something appropriately light and flirtatious to say back. “What time is it?” I say at last. In my mind’s eye, Nean is crossing her arms and shaking her head at me in disappointment.
“Noonish. Do you have to get back?” Noah asks.
“Not yet, but eventually. I have to drive my aunt home after her shift,” I say. “I’m taking Nean’s place today.”
“Oh really? How come?”
To see you, I think. “Because, um…” I say.
“Just to see me?” Noah asks around the straw of his milkshake. I gulp.
“I mean,” I start to stutter. “Kind of, well…” I think back to my speech preparation. “I wanted to give you some pies,” I say. “And thank you for all the food you’ve been sharing with us.”
Noah grins, that smile that breaks his whole face wide open and actually makes his green eyes twinkle. Twinkle, I tell you. It’s unreal. “It’s my pleasure. You don’t have to keep sending things back, you know. I love everything you’ve sent, but—”
“Do you really like it?” I blurt out.
“Like what?”
“The food. My cooking, I mean.”
Noah groans and then inhales so deeply I’m a little afraid he’s mad at me for asking. “Are you kidding? It’s the best food I’ve ever tasted.”
I die—actually expire right then and there—and ascend to heaven. “Thank you.”
“You couldn’t be more welcome. Where’d you learn to cook like that?” he asks.
“From books,” I say. “I have a lot of cookbooks.”
“No training? No learning the art at
your mother’s knee?”
“My mom wasn’t a cook, really. She kept me fed, but that’s about it. I ate a lot of Kraft macaroni and cheese and SPAM on toast growing up. But when I—”
I stop myself because I realize I’ve somehow gotten the harebrained idea that I should tell this near stranger very personal things about my life. About how I came to own so many cookbooks and how the first time I used them was when I cooked for the hundreds of mourners who came to bury my fiancé. How the very first big meal I ever fixed was a spiral-cut ham and six quarts of potato salad, eaten on paper plates by people dressed all in black, milling around Ned’s parents’ house, saying nice things about Ned and forgetting my name.
Thankfully the feeling passes and I chastise myself for such a silly idea. He doesn’t need to hear about some old drama lurking in my past. “When I got my own kitchen, I just learned on my own,” I say with finality.
“Impressive,” he says. “What’s your favorite thing to cook?”
“I honestly have no idea,” I say, frowning a bit at the question. “I’ve never thought about it before.”
“Okay,” he replies. “I’ll wait over here while you think it over.”
Yikes. I think through my mental recipe file frantically, knowing I have to say something but blanking entirely. I like cooking everything. I can’t think of what I like cooking the best. Trying to choose seems childish somehow, like picking a favorite color.
But then it comes to me. “Sauerbraten,” I announce proudly, and with great relief. “My favorite thing to cook is sauerbraten. It has a million ingredients and takes three days at least. It has more aromas than any other food on earth, one of them being juniper, which makes your whole kitchen smell like the Black Forest. And you serve it with spaetzle, which you can make a billion different ways. Horseradish spaetzle, and mustard spaetzle, and herbed spaetzle, and spaetzle with cheese.… When you are done, you have this enormous pile of tender, melt-in-your-mouth beef and potato dumplings drowning in gravy, and you are full in two bites.”
“You’re making me hungry, and I just ate seven hot dogs.”
“The power of sauerbraten,” I say. “I also like making tamales, but I’m not as good at it.”
“I’d like to taste this sauerbraten of yours,” Noah says. “If you’d like to cook it for me sometime.”
Up until this moment, I’ve been feeling more and more relaxed over lunch, so much so that it’s been almost like eating with Aunt Midge—if Aunt Midge were very handsome. But when he says this I recoil a little. I can’t help it; I’m not ready. I don’t want him coming to my house and eating at my table. I hardly know the guy. Why is he pushing me?
He must see the resistance in my face because he adds, “I mean, after we get to know each other better.” This is a little reassuring, but I still feel overwhelmed.
“Maybe,” I say, and try to think of a way to change the subject. I summon up the golden rule of men, at least according to the wedding magazines we had at the bridal salon: Ask them about themselves. “How long have you been gardening for the shelter?”
Noah tilts his head at this, and I know he can tell I’m sidestepping the dinner idea deliberately. “Not long,” he says. “I moved here early in the spring, right when most things need to go in the ground.”
“Did you move here just for this job?” I ask.
He pauses and scrunches up his face. “Not exactly. It just kind of fell into place.”
He doesn’t elaborate and I don’t pry. “Do you like it?”
“I do. It’s not my own farm, but it has a ready-made demand from the shelter, and the people who eat my food seem to genuinely appreciate it. As long as the grants keep coming in for the whole operation, I’ll have good work to do,” he says, and when he finishes talking I realize I recognize that matter-of-factness about hard work from back home, from the farmers I’d shop from at the green markets every week. I suddenly feel ashamed that I haven’t found a full-time job yet. If he knew, surely he’d think I was lazy.
“So you want to have your own farm some day?” I ask, desperate to keep the vocational conversation focused on him, and also curious about his ambitions.
He smiles a little. “I actually did have my own farm once, in upstate New York. I grew arugula. Organic arugula.” He shakes his head, looking a little sad. “I don’t even really like arugula. Rocket. That’s what we called it before the marketers got to us.”
“What happened to the farm?”
“I sold it,” he says. “To a gentleman farmer from the city who wanted to get away on the weekends. It’s a long story, but basically I wasn’t making any money at all, for a long time, so I had to let it go and try something else. It was a hard thing. I’m not sure I want to go back to that kind of pressure ever again.”
I think of that pressure, and remember something I haven’t thought of for a long time. “I was going to be a teacher,” I blurt out. “I was going to teach middle school.”
“Oh really?”
“Yeah. But then I realized there was no way I could do it.”
“How come?”
“I’m shy,” I say, as if this isn’t abundantly clear by now.
“There are no shy teachers?”
“Not shy like me. There’s no way I could get in front of a class and teach anything. I don’t know what I was thinking, getting my teaching certificate in the first place.”
“Maybe you were thinking that you had something important to share.”
I shake my head. “I don’t.”
“So you say,” he says, thoughtful. “So what do you do instead of teaching?”
Whoops. Now I’m stuck. “Seamstress at a bridal store. Or I was, when I lived in Iowa.”
Noah raises his eyebrows at me. “No kidding? You can cook and you can sew and you’re certified to teach. Huh…”
“What?” I ask. “Are you going to ask me if I can mix a good martini too?”
“Not exactly,” he replies, a little too quickly, leaving me curious about what’s on his mind. “Hey, did you know there’s a bridal shop in Damariscotta? I bet they could use an extra pair of hands, now that so many city girls are coming up here to get hitched. The caterers have been knocking down my door for fancy salad greens and berries all summer. There’s got to be some kind of crazy demand going on. Where that demand was when I was trying to unload organic arugula, I’ll never know.”
“Actually, I’ve been doing sewing work for them, contracting out of the house. Stuff I can do by hand or on my machine at home. Nothing full-time though.”
“So you’re stuck just sitting around that big house all day?”
“Not sitting around,” I say. “Sewing. And cooking.”
“I can’t have that. You’ll get all moldy. There are only maybe twenty other houses out there on the cove, and The Farm. You need more society than a handful of summer people and some chickens.”
I smile wryly, and say, “Then it’s a good thing I’m having lunch with you.” I give myself a mental high five for that one.
He grins and nods his head at me. “Definitely. Definitely. You’ll have to keep coming to see me if you want to avoid turning into a mole-person.”
For a moment my inner schoolgirl dances in a circle and sings, “He likes me, he likes me.” I hush her up. “I can be persuaded.”
“Good!” He puts both hands down flat on the table and looks right at me. “Next Monday. That will give you four days to get excited about seeing me again,” he wiggles his eyebrows. “Is it a date?”
A date. With someone who is alive, and a guy. Maybe, with someone who will say nice things to me, and listen to my hopes and fears, and take my hand across the table, and kiss me at the end of the night. Someone who will make demands on my time, and fight with me, and keep secrets, and complain about how much I spend on groceries.
And, let’s face it, someone who could leave at any time and never come back.
My stomach turns over again, but I can’t say no. “It’s a da
te.”
NEAN
“[Lobsters] also have the discomforting distinction of being just about the only food we cook live.”
—PAM ANDERSON, The Perfect Recipe
Janey is in love. It’s the most obnoxious thing you’ve ever seen. For the last two weeks she’s been going into town with Aunt Midge more and more frequently, leaving me stuck here miles from everything and going wild from boredom. Every second that J.J. is off gardening somewhere and unavailable to entertain me feels like a lifetime. But Janey is oblivious to my anguish. When she comes back from Little Pond she hums to herself like Snow White. I keep expecting squirrels to come into the house and fix her hair.
And she’s been falling down on her cooking duties, which is the most upsetting part of all. The other day she came home holding a bucket of fried chicken from some roadside shack north of here. She actually served it to us like real food. It was the craziest thing you’ve ever seen—Janey Brown putting down a cardboard bucket in the middle of the table and saying, “Dinner is served.” Of course, she made coleslaw from scratch to go with, so it’s not like she’s had a lobotomy. But it’s the principle of the thing.
The worst part is she won’t talk about it at all, to anyone. You can tell she’s way into this guy, it’s as plain as the egg on my face. But she won’t tell me anything, no matter how much I pester her, which is a lot. Aunt Midge says she doesn’t know anything either. She seems annoyed that I’m in the dark about all this, and I know I’m falling down on the job as Janey’s confidante. What if Aunt Midge gets sick of my ineptitude and tells me to take a hike? You heard the woman: I’m here to be a friend to Janey, and that’s it. If she stops needing my company, I’m obsolete.
I’ve got to find a way to make her talk. Maybe if I hide her chef’s knife.
I’m plotting this when I see J.J. coming toward the house. He’s wearing the holey jeans and baseball cap that are his uniform for garden work, so I know he’s not here just to see me. But nevertheless, my heart does that little leap thing when I see him. I try to ignore it. It’s irritating how cute he can be.
