Until Love Do Us Part

by Anna Premoli

  “To be honest, I hope they’re not going to be. In fact, I’m counting on it,” he said, dismissing her.

  *

  Amalia had almost managed to get through the disastrous weekend unscathed After all, a slight cold was a fair price to pay for having spent all of Saturday morning covered in freezing mud. She was well prepared: she actually had three packets of tissues that – between one sneeze and the next – she hoped would help her to cope with it until the end of the day.

  Michelle knocked before entering, carrying a nice cup of hot coffee.

  “Here, this is what you need,” she said, putting it down on the desk.

  The alluring steam rising from the cup gave off a pleasant aroma that she could smell despite her cold… Amalia smiled at the kind gesture.

  “Thanks so much. Let’s hope it works. I really can’t afford to get sick right now, there’s just way too much work outstanding,” she said, just before sneezing loudly again.

  “Not to mention that you’ve just received the invite for another hot date,” Michelle informed her with a laugh as she held out the email she had just printed off “On behalf of Judge Wyatt.”

  This time Amalia was prepared – she had been expecting it all right.

  “What do we have to do this time? Let me have a look… Oh, the soup kitchen!” she said, almost surprised that he had not sent her off to the South Pole to save some penguins. “Well, at least we’ll be warm,” she muttered with a resigned expression.

  “Amalia, can you cook?” asked her concerned secretary.

  She chuckled. “Who, me? Of course not! All I can do is turn on the microwave, toast pop tarts and switch on the coffee maker – cooking is not one of my skills.”

  “And how do you think you’re going to manage to learn to cook in five days?”

  Amalia shrugged her shoulders.

  “I don’t know. Hey, isn’t that why we have the internet?” she asked. “Come on, don’t look so worried. And anyway, if the worst comes to the worst there’s always Ryan. Maybe he can cook,” she suggested with a laugh.

  Oh yes, she could already imagine his hyper-critical expression – he would have something to say about everything. He was definitely the kind of man who would find fault in anything at all, especially in the kitchen. But this time she would have her revenge. Big time.

  *

  Ryan had decided that this week was the week he would move on: no more thinking about Amalia Berger and especially no more seeing Amalia Berger. But to succeed with his plan, he needed to convince Judge Wyatt to free him up from having to meet her for the next thousand weekends. Whatever it cost.

  “So, what’s new?” he asked Alex hopefully. But as soon as Alex saw him, his face darkened and he shrugged his shoulders. Not exactly a good sign.

  “There’s nothing we can do. His damn rottweiler of a secretary told me that unless we stop with the phone calls Judge Wyatt will condemn you to a lifetime of cleaning toilets around the city. With Amalia Berger,” he added, keeping the hardest to digest part until the very end.

  “What the hell?” Ryan sighed.

  Alex didn’t really know how to cheer him up. “I’m afraid so. I can’t really see a way out of this and frankly, I don’t think it would be wise to antagonize such a powerful judge as Wyatt. He could cause you a lot of trouble in the future. You’ve only just arrived here, you can’t afford to have the courts against you.”

  The Assistant D.A. rubbed his jaw anxiously. “Sure, of course not. You’re right.”

  “Is Amalia Berger really such a big problem?” asked Alex.

  Problem? That woman is a disaster personified – she is worse than the ten plagues of Egypt. She is like the Big One, the earthquake destined to raze Los Angeles to the ground.

  “No, of course not,” he lied promptly. Because, after all, how could he explain to others what he didn’t fully understand himself?

  There was something dangerous about that woman, something that set off a thousand alarm bells inside him. Not to mention that he apparently risked being electrocuted if he accidentally touched her.

  Since he had failed to convince Judge Wyatt to give up on this absurd community service thing, there was nothing left for him to do but change his strategy: ignore Amalia even if he was standing next to her. Or at least, that was his plan.

  *

  The soup kitchen was not the kind of place where a Berger would normally go. Of course, over the years, with its generous donations, her family had financed canteens of every kind and organized so many fundraisers for the homeless that it put some charities to shame, but this was certainly the first time in their long history that a Berger had been put in the kitchen to do something totally unthinkable – to cook. The last one to pick up a ladle for a reason other than that of banging her husband’s head with it had been her great grandmother Edna. The daughter of a restauranteur, she had stubbornly insisted on cooking for guests even after she married. At the beginning of the last century it was considered bizarre by high society to want to dirty your hands at all, and so even poor Edna had to adapt eventually, and agree to be served. It must have been agony for her!

  Ultimately, Amalia hadn’t had any experience of cooking during her childhood, and the recipes that were handed down from generation to generation in other people’s families remained a complete mystery to her.

  She arrived at the entrance of the canteen equipped with at least her own good intentions, because without those she wouldn’t be going anywhere. To begin with, her clothing was much more suitable than last time: her jeans were what, for most mere mortals, might be considered the equivalent of ripped jeans, a sweater from years gone by that was completely out of fashion, and her hair tied up in a braid so that she could cook without it getting in the food. All decked out like that, Amalia felt almost ready to go to work as a waitress in a diner, an experience she had never had the pleasure of trying.

  She walked through the main door and down a long hallway that was painted brown. An ugly brown, she thought reluctantly, even though she realized that in places like this, what mattered was not the appearance, but the substance. Yet she could not help but think that a different kind of decor might maybe have boosted the morale of the people who sought refuge there. In front of her was a large hall where old wooden tables and benches were stacked. With a little sadness she deduced that it was the ‘glorious’ dining room.

  “Ms Berger?” a middle-aged woman approached.

  “Yes, that’s me,” said Amalia, shaking the kindly offered hand.

  “Pleased to meet you. I’m Mrs Everett. You’re early,” she said, almost in amazement.

  “Only a quarter of an hour. This time I wanted to have an advantage.”

  The other woman smiled politely, without really understanding what she was talking about. “Would you like to see the kitchen?” she asked showing her the way.

  And there it was, the long-awaited kitchen. Not exactly five-star, but it certainly had everything you needed: large worktops, immense stoves and imposing ovens. Not to mention pans big enough to sleep inside.

  “How many people come to this canteen?” asked Amalia, feeling anxious and suddenly doubting that she’d be up to the job.

  “Lots. But we manage to feed about two thousand a day, between lunch and dinner. The rest we are forced to leave outside,” said Mrs Everett sadly.

  “Two thousand people?”

  Amalia couldn’t believe it. Were there really that many desperate people around? Never mind all these projects to prevent the extinction of strange animals – from that moment on she would force her mother to start organizing fundraisers for people in need. Starting in New York. Clearly you didn’t have to go far to meet people who didn’t have enough to eat.

  “We would like to expand, but we just don’t have the funds and what with the recession and all, I am afraid that it will just have to remain a dream for a while longer.”

  Amalia was already preparing the speech she would give to her mother about t
he charity dinner for lawyers when she saw Ryan walk into the kitchen. He seemed less tense than the previous Saturday, although he wasn’t exactly smiling. Apparently his smiles were a really rare commodity and in any case, not meant for her.

  “Are you the Assistant D.A.?” the affable Mrs Everett asked. She was good at putting people at ease, that was clear.

  “In person,” he confirmed, without acknowledging Amalia. She wasn’t surprised. It was obvious he was annoyed with her for having arrived before him. Next time he would certainly make a big effort to get there before her.

  “The rest of the volunteers will be here soon, but they already know what they’re doing in our kitchens. I’ll just quickly run you through how we work and what I thought I would get you to do. Over there in the pantry is all the food that’s going to be served for lunch today, so I’d like to ask you to begin by peeling the potatoes, chopping them up along with the meat and then preparing some sort of stew. Are you ok for doing that?” she asked them.

  Ryan nodded before Amalia could ask for a more detailed explanation.

  A stew? And when the hell had she ever even seen a stew up close?

  “Well then, I’ll leave you to it. If you need me you’ll find me in the office. I have to try to contact some suppliers to arrange the next few days deliveries.”

  And so saying, Mrs Everett disappeared and left them alone in the immense kitchen. Amalia noticed that it was full of knives. Very tempting for two people like them.

  “It’s always such a pleasure to see you,” Amalia greeted him sarcastically, looking at his slightly terrorized expression. Good god, what was it that scared him so much? Just her being there?

  Ryan grunted something incomprehensible and Amalia felt justified in turning her back on him and taking refuge in the pantry. Competitive as he was, he followed her immediately, and they ended up in a smaller and darker room. But still alone. The air immediately became charged with electricity and Amalia felt herself come out in goose bumps. She rubbed her arms to get rid of them.

  “I hope that you are dressed properly… You only avoided catching pneumonia by a whisker last Saturday, don’t tell me you’re planning on going through with it this time?” asked Ryan as he watched her rubbing her arms. Then he reached out towards her, but stopped halfway. His face was a strange mixture of doubt, suffering and anger. Amalia looked surprised. Was he really going to touch her? Ryan suddenly seemed to snap out of it and walked as far away as possible from her, muttering some nonsense about women and their clothes. Amalia paid no attention to his attempts to be annoying and chose instead to focus her attention on the sacks of potatoes in front of her.

  “When you are done with your nonsense, how about giving me a hand with these?” she asked quietly. She had just realized that the more she came across as impassive, the more it seemed to unnerve him, and if she had to pretend to be calm to drive him out of his mind, well, for Christ’s sake, so be it.

  They went backwards and forwards carrying the potatoes from the pantry until they had covered the countertop with them. Meanwhile the place was filling up with volunteers. No one paid much attention to the two of them, immersed as they were going about their own business.

  “Hey, do you know how to peel a potato?” Asked Amalia, taking one in her hand and turning it over.

  Ryan sighed and cursed under his breath. “You just take the peel off. Like this,” he instructed, holding a potato in one hand and a potato peeler in the other, muttering irritably, “It’s not rocket science. I bet that you’ve never peeled a damn potato in your life…”

  “I’ll refrain from commenting on your pronouncements, Mr Assistant D.A. Whatever I say might be used against me,” she replied in a professional voice and began to imitate his gestures.

  It wasn’t exactly an easy job, she thought a few minutes later, a disheartened look on her face: her peels were much thicker than Ryan’s, who, it turned out, was peeling at a tremendous speed. It almost seemed that he’d never done anything else.

  “World Champion potato peeler?” asked Amalia, trying to make him laugh. The reality was that they had been bent over that table for a while and the atmosphere was still pretty tense. It wasn’t her fault, of course, but in any case, without some sort of conversation the hours there would seem interminable.

  Ryan looked up at her reluctantly.

  “Do we really have to talk?” he asked, annoyed by the interruption.

  “Do we have to keep quiet then?” she replied, throwing back the challenge.

  He snorted in disbelief.

  “Listen, you haven’t stopped talking since we got here! How do you do this, and how do you do that… what the hell am I, your teacher?”

  There was something reassuring in his consistently bad mood – something that made her laugh. “Luckily for me I’ve always had teachers who were a bit more conscientious about their work.”

  “I’m sure you have, with what the private schools you went to cost. The teachers there earn much as a physicist at NASA. Even I would have been happy to have you as a student if I was getting paid as much as them.”

  “Do we always have to end up arguing about money?” frowned Amalia, picking up a large potato with a particularly irregular shape. He looked at her dubiously, without saying anything, or at least anything that had to do with cooking.

  “That’s typical of the kind of thing that someone who has never had to worry about money in her life would say,” he scolded, looking back at the pile of tubers in front of him. It seemed that there was not much chance of them getting around that topic of conversation any time soon…

  “I had my own problems. We all have our own problems,” said Amalia, who in all honesty was beginning to tire of always having to justify herself to him, seeing as how she’d been born into her family’s wealth and could hardly feel guilty about that (although irrationally, that’s exactly what she did, all the time).She had worked hard all these years and had been well paid. If money was so important to him, why the hell had he become a district attorney rather than a lawyer? The truth was probably somewhere in the middle: Ryan was more a man of principle than of money, but perhaps he’d rather not have been.

  “Yes, but seeing as it took me years to repay my student loan let me tell you that your serious existential problems certainly come way down the list from mine.”

  That phrase merely confirmed Amalia’s suspicions. She stopped for a moment, put the damned potato down on the counter and looked at him seriously.

  “I’m sorry, didn’t you have a scholarship that covered all your tuition expenses?”

  It was certainly no secret that Ryan had gone to Yale thanks only to a very generous scholarship, but it was evident, from the slightly pained expression on his face, that he didn’t like to be reminded of the fact. Amalia didn’t understand why. From her point of view it was something to be proud of, not the opposite. “I had a good part of it paid for, but I had to sweat for the books, food and a roof over my head. By working.”

  “I admired you for that,” said Amalia. She felt Ryan’s curious gaze on her and blushed against her will. “Yes, well… I thought it was an admirable thing,” she said, in an attempt to justify herself. “My parents wouldn’t let me get a job to pay for small things – they said that I had to concentrate on learning.”

  Suddenly, the atmosphere seemed to thaw a bit.

  “No offence, but I can’t quite see you as a waitress.” He smiled at the thought.

  “And now we’ll never know what kind of a waitress I could have become,” she joked. “Hey, who knows, maybe I would have had a real talent for it.”

  Unexpectedly he let slip the first real smile of the day. “Believe me, you’re better off never having experienced it. I mean, your potato peeling sucks. No offence, of course.”

  “I’m not offended. It’s the simple truth,” she said, taking his comment in jest.

  At that point, Ryan was almost forced to be polite. “In any case it’s admirable that at least you’r
e trying,” he admitted, his voice sounding deeper than usual. Then he looked at her with a strange expression on his face. What was going through his head when he looked at her like that? Amalia noticed his peculiar behavior but didn’t say anything. She was not sure what to think – it was obvious that Ryan wanted to keep her at a safe distance, but at the same time he couldn’t quite resist the temptation to give her the odd furtive glance. Or at least, he hoped they were furtive, she was sure of that. But unfortunately for her, Amalia was instantly able to tell when Ryan was staring at her, because her body reacted, against her will, as soon as she felt his eyes upon it. It remained to be seen whether she wanted to do something about that revelation or not.

  She was so focused upon her musings that she ended up cutting herself with the potato peeler.

  “Damn!” she shouted, leaping up from the table and running toward the sink. Ryan followed her instantly.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked as he approached.

  Amalia let the water run and put her hand under it. “I’ve cut myself, what do you think’s the damn matter…?”

  “But I’m absolutely certain it’s impossible to cut yourself with one of those things,”

  “Well, I have cut myself! I’m not very practical with kitchen tools and my finger slipped under the blade.”

  What did he think, that she had cut herself just to spite him?

  “Let me have a look,” he muttered, taking her hand with great delicacy. Carefully he examined her fingers, found the one that was bleeding and held it back under the jet of water, though without letting go of her hand and gently squeezing her wrist.

  “Ryan, I think you can let go of me now,” Amalia said, a few seconds later. But he seemed to be so immersed in what he was doing that he didn’t hear her. “I said, you can let go of my hand, I’m not bleeding any more!” she repeated, raising her voice.

  He winced. “Oh, sure, yeah,” he answered, but continued to hold her hand under the water.

  They stood for a moment staring at each other in that bustling kitchen full of people and activity, but neither of them seemed able to come up with a reason to break the contact that was becoming less and less accidental. Amalia felt her heart beating furiously in her chest and forced herself to look away. It was just like it was years ago – she hadn’t been able to resist him then so how could she resist him now? But she had already made a fool of herself once, and she hoped that was enough for a lifetime. Basically it was clear that he would never take a step in her direction, at least not voluntarily. Yes, he was attracted to her, she could see it in his face. But Ryan was not one to follow impulses. No, he was the kind of person who would fight against it – even if it killed him. Because the fact that he wasn’t happy to be attracted to her was more than evident from that grim expression and the glare from those beautiful green eyes.