The Lady in Residence

by Allison Pittman

  Q: REALIZING HOW STALKER I SOUND, SO I WILL SEE YOU AT 9.

  Dini read the one-sided conversation over again, hearing every word of it in his voice, picturing his thumbs racing around the keyboard. She replied with the big-eyes emoji.

  D: SEE YOU AT 9!!!

  Having showered the night before, she immediately got dressed—if pulling on last night’s flannel pants and T-shirt counted as getting dressed. Slipping her feet into her soft, worn pair of fleece-lined Crocs, she went into the bathroom, washed her face—noting the sheet creases still embedded in her cheeks. She squeezed a dollop of gel into her palm and worked it through her hair, defining the curls in their natural state. There was plenty of time to get back to the idea of makeup.

  The coffee table in the living room had been transformed into an evidence area, of sorts, with all of Quin’s offerings displayed. It reminded her of those investigation boards on crime movies, with the red yarn pinned between elements to show connections. There was something here. Something that would put to rest Hedda’s haunting. Detective Carmichael had figured it out—Dini had her own revelation to share with Quin. Unfortunately, as far as she could tell, he didn’t leave a final report.

  In the kitchen, she measured double the amount of her home-ground coffee and put on a pot, loving the moment when the little house filled with the sound and smell of brewing. But there was one thing missing.

  “Alexa,” she spoke into the dawn-filled room, “play soft seventies.” Within seconds, Neil Sedaka’s “Laughter in the Rain” set the tone for the morning. She pulled flour and baking soda from her sparse but neat cupboards. Quin’s face had been near rapturous with the flour tortillas at Mi Tierra, and he’d sent three texts describing the tortillas at Alamo Café. She almost told him how, really, they were super easy to make, but then the conversation had turned…. Measuring deftly, she combined the simple ingredients and set to singing as she kneaded the dough. Three songs—“Bluer Than Blue,” “Summer Breeze,” and “Midnight Train to Georgia.”

  While the dough balls rested beneath a wet paper towel, she made her bed and got dressed—for real this time. Her house was comfortably, but not overly, warm, and the forecast called for sunshine and cool temps, her favorite weather. Denim shorts, a black thin-strap cami, and a forest-green sweater. Little River Band’s “Lady” came on, seeming to affirm her choice. She pulled on a pair of no-show footies and slipped her feet into the Ugg boots she’d bought with her first four-digit gig check. Even she, who never cared much about fashion outside of dressing for her audiences, knew they had out-lasted their popularity, but she loved them anyway. She looked at herself in the long mirror, twisting to see the strip of tattooed card suits stretching out of the boots. They weren’t nearly as alluring with this ensemble as they were with the skirt and heels, but then this morning she dressed for an audience of one. Quin. If he was only going to see her for one more day, she wanted him to see the real her. All her favorites, carefully—if artfully—chosen and arranged, revealing her scar, jagged along the outer side of her right thigh. In the bathroom, she put on a minimum of makeup—CC cream, mascara, a touch of blush for color on her cheeks. Nobody needed to look that real.

  “Just be…normal,” she said to her reflection. “You’re a girl who kissed a boy, and now you’re going to make chorizo tacos and solve a century-old crime together before he ditches you and goes back to high school.”

  She repeated affirmations while working her fingers through the now-dry curls, softening them into something cloud-like. After two shampoos the night before, the color was fading (as it was designed to do), and if she had any regrets about anything this week, it was the fact that Quin never got to see her real hair. Eschewing any other accessories, she slid her spoon-handle silver ring on her finger and went back into the kitchen, stopping to open the front door to this glorious morning and let the sunshine pour through the glass one behind it.

  The coffee was ready, and she fixed a cup, pouring it over the generous amount of powdered creamer Arya berated her for using. The cast iron comal was ready too, having been warmed in the oven. She took it out, placed it over a low flame, and rolled out the first tortilla. Try as she might, she could never achieve uniformity, and the first was always more amoebic than round, but it puffed nicely and made a perfect little pouff when she flipped it over to cook on the other side. She was singing with the Monkees—” ‘Cheer up, sleepy Jean’”—when she heard his knock. A glance at the stove clock showed it to be not quite eight thirty. If it was Quin, he was early.

  Her phone buzzed.

  Q: I’M HERE. EARLY. SORRY.

  Her house was small enough that a single step brought him into sight, and it hit her all at once that she’d been waiting for precisely this moment since he handed her into a Lyft the previous evening.

  “Come in,” she said, motioning with her hand in case he couldn’t hear her. She waited long enough to see him step over the threshold then returned to the kitchen, pulling the tortilla off of the comal before it scorched.

  “You don’t lock your front door?”

  She wanted to say that of course she locked her door except for those times when she was expecting company, but that made it seem like she had company often, which she didn’t. So she ignored the comment and summoned him into the kitchen.

  “What is happening in here?” He prefaced the question with an appreciative sound that she took at first to be a comment on her, but then he rubbed his hands together as if someone tied a napkin around his neck and presented him with a plate of ribs. “Coffee?”

  “Right there.” Though the kitchen was so small he couldn’t miss it.

  “I am so glad to see that you are a good old-fashioned Mr. Coffee girl. Keurigs are ruining the world.”

  “Right? It’s my own blend, so I hope you like it. And I have other creamers in the fridge, I think.”

  “I’m good, thanks. Take it straight.”

  He filled the SeaWorld souvenir mug she handed him and took a sip, his eyes popping with appreciation before taking another.

  “That is really, really good.” He was talking at a rate that made him sound like he was already three cups in, but then Dini realized he might be nervous too, given…everything that happened the night before. As a kindness, and a chance to keep them both distracted, she instructed him to wash his hands and take up the task of rolling out the tortillas while she manned the stove.

  “You’ve used a rolling pin before?”

  “It’s my job when we have biscuits for Saturday morning big family breakfast. So, yeah.”

  “Same principle. Pressure, but gentle. You want to spread them out but not flatten them.” She watched, approving, before jumping in. “So, what’s the big conclusion you hit upon last night?”

  “Nope,” he said, not looking up from his task. “No important talk before we eat, right?”

  “You remember that?”

  He paused in his rolling. “I remember everything.” A beat or two fell between them, and if he was remembering the same moments, they might have chosen to stay embedded in that silence. “I never knew,” he said, finally breaking the spell. “I mean, didn’t really know anyone made their own tortillas.”

  Nudged into motion, she put the newly cooked tortilla on the stack of finished ones and dropped a fresh one on the pan. “I had a stretch of time between gigs last winter, so I took a two-week Mexican cooking class. It’s perfect for someone like me who loves the food but hates to drive.” She approved his work, and he set out to roll the next.

  “So, tell me about this house. This kitchen? It looks like you should be wearing a little apron and pearls. Is everything original?”

  “All but the fridge. Either original or replicas. It’s been in the family for generations—like Carmichael’s, I guess. I was only sixteen when my parents died, and I inherited it. It was still in good shape, but we didn’t live here much of the time, you know? It was a stopover place. So, until I could take full possession—I was in the hosp
ital for, like, six weeks, then Arya fostered me—we found a guy who was a professional handyman-slash-restorer who did all the work in exchange for living here rent-free. Labor of love—for the house, I mean. And it got Arya interested in real estate. Every year for my birthday she presents me with the tax assessment and offers to get me a million dollars so I can buy a condo downtown and hang out with the cool kids.”

  “This isn’t a cool kid neighborhood?”

  “Not really. More older people, like my parents would have been. But I don’t want to sell anytime soon. I own this. The title was transferred to Arya while I was a minor, and we’ve kept it that way, but it’s truly mine.”

  “It’s a great investment.”

  “It’s a home. When I was little, I never wanted to leave. I felt like I was on some old TV show when we were here.”

  He twisted his neck, looking around. “I can see that.”

  “I’ll give you the grand tour after breakfast. Plot twist, you can do the whole tour from the living room.”

  They worked together for a while after that in a silence that was far more comfortable than the initial coffee conversation. Dini stole the occasional look at his forearms, thinking she’d never known that to be a sexy part of a man’s body, but nearly jumped away when he caught her eye as if she’d been peeping at him through a window. For her part too she felt his eyes on her and was thankful for the heat of the stove to explain away the flush she felt. In no time, the comfortable silence squeezed them into an unspoken tension, intensified when the first strains of the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love” flowed through the Bluetooth speaker perched on the antique phone table by the kitchen door. Quin rolled, Dini flipped, while the smooth harmony sang of eyes in the morning sun, touching in the pouring rain, and coming to each other on a summer breeze. Under normal circumstances, this song would have stopped Dini short so she could devote the next four minutes to sinking into it, but now she stiffened, imagining the lyrics floating from her mind and wrapping around the two of them engaged in such kitchen synchronicity. Then Quin grasped the rolling pin like a mic and, in a pitch-perfect match to Barry Gibbs’s falsetto, sang, “ ‘You may not think that I care for you when you know deep inside that I really do,’” then held the pin between them to invite her to sing the next few lines, which she did, with passable harmony.

  The cheesy romance of the lyrics gave Dini an escape route for all of the feelings that built up to this moment. Did she want to be in those arms? Yes, but there was no way of knowing if he wanted the same thing. How could they, when they weren’t the same people? Quin, divorced and dating; she, not even twenty-four hours past her first kiss. And yet maybe in some construct of time they were the same, both having missed out on the normalcy of being young and single. Both of them dropped in the path of a first, true love—at least first and true for her. But for him?

  She watched him during the lyric-free verse, the two of them la-da-da-ing, the full commitment of his body to the song, and thought simultaneously that he was the biggest nerd she’d ever imagined and that she wanted to have this moment every day for the rest of her life. Was he the only light in the darkest night? No. But he was a source that illuminated the space around her. She’d never shared herself with another person. She loved her parents, but she spent much of her time alternating between being part of the act and being alone. She loved Arya but had come into her life as a legal responsibility—something that still underscored all they were to each other. She and Quin had fallen into each other’s lives the same way they’d fallen into this duet. She didn’t know if she loved him deeply, but she knew that she loved him in the way she’d always imagined love would feel—immediate and consuming.

  Eventually the song faded into another soft gem from the seventies, and Quin resumed his rolling. “So, you have an old music soul too?”

  “It’s what I listened to with my mother,” she said, remembering nights in a darkened dressing room, listening to the radio while her father finished his act. “I never bothered to develop my own taste, I guess.”

  “Yeah, I was born in 1990 and always felt like I brought a curse to the music world.”

  “Well, now I know who to blame.”

  “I mean, I haven’t heard that song in years, and all the lyrics were still right here”—he tapped his temple—“and here.” He tapped his heart.

  There was an edge here, daring Dini to take him seriously, but she wasn’t about to let an old disco song be the vehicle of her profession of love. “I’ve always thought the lyrics in disco music are inconsequential. Lots of repetition and cliché.”

  “Right,” he agreed. “If you listen, the vocal is really more of a lead instrument, rather than a purveyor of great truth. Just a bunch of let’s dance, then go to bed, then dance again.”

  Dini assumed an authoritative air. “You know, Quin, we’re living in a world of fools.”

  “Breaking us down.”

  “When they all should let us be.”

  “We belong to you and me.”

  What she initiated with mock sincerity, though, took a turn. It was a rare moment in the breakfast chore when both the skillet and the rolling board were empty and they stood idle with the unfortunate background sound of “Baby, I’m-a want you” standing between them, until there was nothing between them, because he had pulled her close, and she could taste her special coffee blend on his breath, then on her lips. The rim of his glasses touched the top of her cheek, and she wanted to take them off, but that seemed presumptuous. She touched his face, and he changed his angle, which made room to draw her deeper in. Not trusting her strength, Dini gripped his bicep, her fingers dipped beneath the sleeve of his T-shirt, lest she fall back into the glowing blue flame. This other flame, the one burning red hot within her, deserved no caution. She would throw herself in—gladly—and alternate between burning and melting as she did in this moment.

  Until Quin stepped away. She still touched him, held him, and he kept her in an identical grip.

  “Dini, I—”

  “Nope.” Her voice, like his, thick with everything she was too afraid to hear right now. “No important talk before food.”

  “Right.”

  “And, to help”—she lifted her head and spoke over his shoulder—“Alexa, playlist House Music,” bringing to life a big band orchestra in the Bluetooth.

  “I don’t think this is what the kids call house music.”

  “I’m not a kid, and this is my house.”

  With only three tortillas left to cook, Dini transferred Quin’s responsibilities to both the rolling and the cooking while she busied herself crumbling and cooking chorizo into a pan on the second burner and cracking eggs as it sizzled.

  “I hope you like this,” she said, whisking. “I wanted you to have one last taste of San Antonio before you go.”

  “I totally trust you.” He took a tortilla from the freshly cooked stack, tore it, and offered half to Dini.

  They ate and cooked, each humming along as a different instrument until they were finally seated at the little table, a plate of chorizo con huevos and a stack of tortillas between them. Individual plates were incidental as they served themselves from the center dish, making tacos, and silenced for a bit with the satisfaction of heat and flavor. Their conversation remained inconsequential: he talked about his rambling, whip-smart family—a mass of sisters and husbands and nieces and nephews, with Quin the bachelor uncle who could be depended on to give the noisiest, most questionably age-appropriate gift on any occasion. She countered with stories of her unusual childhood, realizing that many of these were memories she’d been carrying around for years but was voicing for the first time. How she’d learned to fold herself up so her father could cut her in half, how it was her job to make sure her mother wore the right shoes and stockings to match the spring-loaded feet when it was her turn in the box.

  “I think that’s why I never thought anything really bad could ever happen to my mother—to either of my parents. When I
was told they’d been killed, I thought it was another trick.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Quin said. “Confession? I googled your parents’ accident. It’s so hard to understand why God allows things like that to happen.”

  “I had a hard time with that myself. We never went to church or anything even remotely close to that when I was growing up, but then when Arya took me in—I wouldn’t know God at all if it weren’t for her. And it’s been harder since I’ve been on my own to really keep up. Church always seems more geared to families, you know?”

  “I know. I think that’s why I let myself get pressured into getting married before I was ready, to someone I didn’t totally love. It was just…expected. The next thing to do in life so I could keep fitting in. So I have to work hard to keep my faith intentional.”

  “Like finding a church when you’re out of town?”

  “Exactly. And finding the right scriptures to back up why we can’t believe in ghosts.”

  “Right.” Dini took the empty dish to the sink and came back with the carafe of coffee, refilling their cups.

  “So, I guess that means it’s time to talk about Hedda now?”

  “The big stuff.” She brought a small tray with her butter dish and sugar bowl to the table. “But one last snack to top it off.”

  “I am going to have to spend the next three days in the gym to work this off,” Quin said, following her example of dipping the back of the spoon into the softened butter, spreading it in the middle of the still-warm tortilla, and sprinkling the top with a sugar and cinnamon mixture.

  “You have an eight-year-old’s birthday party tomorrow. Same amount of calories burned in a bouncy house.”

  He lifted the rolled tortilla in a toast. “To glitter ponies.”

  “To glitter ponies.”

  “Now,” she said as she watched him thoroughly enjoy his breakfast dessert, “I know we both think we have something, but I’m going to start. I don’t think Detective Carmichael ever solved this case.”

  “What makes you say that?” Only, he was eating, so it sounded like Whamakshoosayzat?