When in Doubt, Add Butter

by Beth Harbison

  I handed Peter the spoon and took a small step from him. “Go ahead and taste it. Tell me if you think it needs anything.”

  He lifted the wooden spoon to his lips, blew gently, then tasted. “Needs onion.”

  I sighed. Almost everything I cooked for them would benefit from onions. “I know.” We both nodded a little sadly. “Other than that?”

  “It’s delicious.” He met my eyes, his pupils dilated in that way my seventh grade science teacher said meant you like what you’re looking at. “Just like everything you make.”

  My face grew warm and I went to the sink to wash my already-clean hands. “Thanks,” I said casually, “but I think it needs something. Apart from the obvious.” I gave a laugh. “I wished I could put something onion-ish in, but Angela is allergic to the entire onion family, so there’s no getting away with that.”

  “Ahh.” He gave a dismissive gesture. “She eats onion all the time and just doesn’t know it. She’s not allergic to anything, she just says that.” He moved back and leaned on the counter. “You should cook the way you want to.”

  I shook my head with a smile. “No way. I cook the way the client wants me to. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be in business long.”

  He gave a half shrug and was about to say something else when an exasperated Angela flounced back in.

  “Honestly, we need two nannies just so they can cover each other’s erratic schedule.” She looked to Peter. “Kim needs to go to the doctor tomorrow while she’s got Stephen, and wants to either bring in a friend of hers to cover for an hour or two, or take him with her. Like Stephen needs to go hang out in a doctor’s office!” She gave a sharp laugh and shook her head.

  “Why doesn’t she go while he’s in school?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Exactly. She said the only time she could get was one thirty, but, come on. She could go to an urgent care place any time in the morning and be back on time to get Stephen.”

  Unless, say, she wanted to see her own doctor. But what could I say? Like Kim, I was just the help. So I said nothing. Just stirred the sauce and sautéed the vegetables.

  “So I was just telling Gemma how we want to go raw from now on,” she said to Peter.

  He looked completely confused. “Raw—?”

  See? It wasn’t that obvious what she was talking about.

  “Food,” she snapped.

  “We do?”

  “Absolutely. It’s the healthiest diet there is. Cooking destroys the enzymes in food.” She glanced disapprovingly at the stove, despite the fact that she had loved this very dish just last month. “It’s almost better not to eat at all.”

  “That’s certainly an option,” Peter said. “Myself, I’d rather have spaghetti and meatballs once in a while.”

  “Gross!” Angela looked at him, scandalized and mouth agape, like he said he’d like live puppies dipped in ox blood. “We just don’t need to consume rotting flesh. It’s disgusting.”

  “Put that way, it is,” he said at the exact same moment that I thought the exact same words.

  “So from now on,” she said to me, her posture suggesting she’d had enough of him, “it’s all raw, all the time, okay?”

  “Same constrictions as before, with regards to onions, garlic, and so on?” I asked.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “What about Stephen?” I asked. “Do you want me to do something”—anything—“to supplement his diet with a little more protein and calcium?”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re talking about cheese, right?”

  “Not necessarily—”

  “Cheese causes phlegm. Dairy is the most common allergy in the United States, but no one even knows it. Everyone just keeps on eating it, coughing, and eating it some more.” She shook her head, a distinct look of they’ll-all-see-one-day-when-it’s-too-late. “People are so stupid.”

  Myself, I couldn’t think of anything in the world better than stirring sharp white cheddar, smoked Gouda, creamy Havarti, Monterey Jack, and a touch of piquant Maytag blue cheese into a bubbling hot white sauce, stirring it to a thick honey consistency, and pouring it over al dente macaroni to toast to a crispy deep golden on top.

  “Okay.” I tried to sound patient, but it was hard. Because I wasn’t. “But there are other options. Tofu. Textured vegetable protein. Nuts. Lean meats would be ideal.”

  She looked dubious. “I’ll have to think about that. Except the tofu, of course. No tofu. Or meat.” She turned away from me and started talking to Peter, clearly indicating her time with me was done.

  I knew exactly what it meant because I’d experienced this same thing time and again with her. It was almost funny. It certainly didn’t hurt my feelings, as it was nearly impossible to take someone like this personally.

  “I don’t like that we have to eat so late because you take so long to get home,” she said to him, walking away but not so far that I couldn’t hear every single word she said. “Why the hell don’t you leave work earlier?”

  “You’re welcome to eat without me,” he returned, completely calm in the face of her snappishness.

  I silently cheered him on.

  “That’s how much you care for your son?” Her voice was demanding, immediately accusatory. “You don’t even care if you eat with him? Wow, that is really … just wow.”

  He shook his head, but it looked like it was more to himself than at her. “Half the time, Kimberly has fed him dinner by the time I get home, anyway.”

  “That’s because you take so long!” She said it through gritted teeth, each word carefully formed.

  He looked weary. “I can’t help the traffic, Angela.”

  “You can help what time you get into it! You’re always staying well beyond the end of the show.”

  I cringed. The entire atmosphere had gotten thick and tense. The strongest mood in the house always wins, it’s just a universal law, and Angela always seemed to have the strongest mood.

  And she always seemed to win.

  I stole a glance at Peter. His face was like something etched by a Renaissance artist, taking every cliché of masculinity and softening it just enough to keep him from looking like a caricature of Hercules. The gentle waves of brown hair also softened what was otherwise a fiercely masculine visage. But when he looked like he did now—angry but in control—he looked distinctly different. Maybe even more handsome.

  His voice was quiet, but not weak. I’d never seen him back down, never heard him give in. Not that I knew everything that happened in this house. Far from it. I was here for two or three hours a week, but given the fact that Angela’s bitching was consistently the same, it was hard to imagine she was sweet the rest of the time.

  I used to ask myself how on earth Peter had gotten into this marriage in the first place, but that wasn’t really the point. He had, and that was that. She’d probably been different once. Whether she’d changed or just been trying to land him, who knows?

  All I know is that it was impossible to imagine him, or anyone, purposely signing up for the floggings I saw her issue almost constantly.

  How did he live like that?

  Why did he live like that?

  I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that: Stephen. Peter was absolutely devoted to that little boy, and the child clearly loved his father, too. I’d seen them playing around, joking, laughing, a million times. If Peter was five minutes later getting home than Angela would have preferred, I don’t know that it was having a huge impact on Stephen, but I knew she would make it sound as if it were.

  And I was also pretty sure that Angela would be the type to use Stephen as a pawn, threatening to keep him away from Peter. I’ve known more than one guy who was so scared by the possibility that he wouldn’t dare take a chance.

  It was sad.

  On the other hand, maybe I was just giving Peter excuses that didn’t fit. Maybe he stayed because he liked his daily beatings. Maybe it was some sort of Stockholm syndrome and he was afraid to leave the known for th
e unknown.

  Maybe he was just a total pussy.

  All I knew for sure was that I could never live with the kind of acrimony I witnessed in this house virtually every minute I spent within its walls. I couldn’t abide it as a bystander, and I absolutely couldn’t imagine being a participant day after day.

  The vegetables were cooked, and I turned the heat off and lifted the pan, almost hitting little Stephen—who had sneaked up on me—right in the face with it.

  “Whoa, buddy!” I reared back, and a few pieces of zucchini flew out of the pan and hit the floor with a splat. I set down the pan, picked the zucchini slices up off the floor and tossed them into the sink. “You okay? I didn’t get you, did I?”

  Stephen shook his head.

  “Are you hungry?”

  He nodded.

  “You want veggies with tomato sauce?”

  He looked hesitant. “I don’t know.”

  I bet he didn’t. It was hard for anyone to know what was all right around here. “I’m going to make a topping for it right now. Want to help?”

  “Yes!”

  “We’ll need to use the blender.” I figured he’d be attracted to the noise and potential mess.

  Apparently, I was right. “Okay!”

  “Okay!” I got out the nutritional yeast and sesame seeds, and a scooper. “We need one of these scoops full of each of these things—can you measure it out?”

  “Yeah.” He looked uncertain.

  “It’s easy.” I got the blender and set it on the counter in front of him. “Pull up one of those stools and you can reach better.”

  More noise. He dragged the stool across the wood floor and climbed onto it, smiling.

  I could feel Angela’s irritation at the noise—which I knew she was picturing creating deep rivets in the floor—radiating from the other room.

  “So, here’s the scoop.” I handed it to him. “First get the flakes.” I pushed the canister over to him and watched as he carefully lowered his hand into it and pulled up the measuring scoop.

  “Is that too much?” he asked, fretful.

  Jeez, this woman had everyone in the house totally cowed!

  “Well, you’re not finished yet. Now you make it even by taking a knife and scraping it evenly along the top.” I demonstrated, running the blunt side of a butter knife along the cup. “See? Now you dump it into the blender.”

  He did, and looked delighted with himself.

  Bless his heart.

  “Now take another scoop and do what I just did.”

  Eagerly, he reached in, scooped out some yeast flakes, and pulled up the measuring cup. I handed him the butter knife, and he was just starting to scrape the measurement even when Angela shrilled loudly from the doorway.

  “Exactly what is going on here?”

  Stephen, startled, let the knife fly, and it clattered onto the countertop, making an edgy rough scraping sound.

  “My God, that could have been his eye!” Angela hurried over to Stephen, but instead of taking him into her arms and coddling him like you might expect a normal mother to when freaked out about her child’s safety, she pulled him roughly off the stool and said, “Go to your room. You know you’re not allowed to play with knives.”

  Instantly, I felt horrible. “Please don’t be mad at him—it’s not his fault! I told him he could help me, so he probably thought it was okay to do what I said since I’m an adult.”

  She sniffed at me. Sniffed! As if it were debatable whether or not I was, in fact, an adult. “You’re the cook. You are not authorized to tell him to do anything.”

  “No, of course not, I wasn’t giving him orders. I just thought it might be nice for him to have a little bit of distraction while you and Peter … talked.”

  “Mr. Van Houghten and I—”

  Mr. Van Houghten. She’d said it pointedly. Big Me, Little You. It was one of her favorite passive-aggressive tricks.

  “—don’t need you running interference for us. We’re perfectly capable of having a discussion and taking care of our child, thank you very much.”

  There was so much I wanted to say to her. But even if I had the freedom to let fly with everything, without regard to losing my job, I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

  Besides which, I couldn’t let fly without regard to my job. She was not only in charge of my Monday-night paycheck, but she held the purse strings for my country club job as well. I had already lost Fridays, so I really couldn’t afford to lose another night.

  “Of course, I was just trying to help. I thought he’d have fun helping out.”

  “It wouldn’t have been very fun if he’d poked his eye out with that knife, would it?”

  “It was a butter knife, and I was right here,” I pointed out. I had to. “He really couldn’t have gotten hurt.”

  She tilted her head at me like the old RCA Victor dog and narrowed her eyes. “Is that right?”

  I tried to give a little laugh, but it was hard to do in the face of her steely resolve. “Well, I’ve had my share of knife injuries, believe me, but none of them ever came from a butter knife.”

  She assessed me, judging. Then just shook her head and left the kitchen, passing Peter on his way back in.

  “You deal with her,” she snapped. “I have a splitting headache.”

  If she had a headache, it was bound to be from malnutrition more than from me, her exhausting cook.

  Peter ignored her and fastened his gaze on me, concerned. “What happened?”

  “I let Stephen measure an ingredient out and gave him a butter knife to level the measure.” I grimaced with the retelling, hoping it wouldn’t seem so heinous a crime to him as it did to her. “I’m really sorry.”

  “A butter knife?” He laughed and reached for the knife on the counter. “This one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it actually say Fisher-Price on it?” He turned the knife over, pretending to look for the toy branding, then set it down. “That couldn’t have hurt him.”

  “Honestly, that’s what I thought,” I said. It was a relief that he wasn’t mad. “But Angela came in, and I guess she was scared when she saw it in his hand, so she spoke”—shrieked—“and it made him jump and drop the knife. Which, admittedly, isn’t something you ever want happening around a child.”

  Peter waved the notion away. “Don’t worry about it. I think it’s nice that you were letting him do something in here. She won’t even let him come through here without hovering over him to make sure he doesn’t eat something unhealthy. Not that you could find anything unhealthy in here. Or edible.”

  I smiled. “Well, she does have a lot of food allergies and whatnot.” Onions, dairy, honey, cinnamon, peanuts, carrots, mushrooms, and any kind of root vegetable, to name a few. “That kind of limits what you can keep in the kitchen.”

  He gave a half shrug. “I don’t know that she has allergies so much as there are things she doesn’t like the idea of.”

  “They’re really not allergies?” He’d said it earlier, but I thought he’d been kidding. I’d been driving myself crazy, scanning the tiny ingredient list on every box, can, bottle, or bag I bought for them for a year, absolutely vigilant about not even purchasing a bag of something that had been next to a bag of something else that was processed in a plant that may or may not have processed peanuts. What a waste of time!

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Huh.” Well, it wasn’t like I could stop being vigilant about it, anyway. If she said she had allergies, I had to proceed as if that were true, even if it wasn’t.

  But why would she say it if it wasn’t true?

  There was no reason in the world she needed to lie and tell me she was allergic to stuff if she just didn’t like it. She was the boss—if she hated cheese or onions, or if she preferred that I sauté everything in no more than a quarter teaspoon of oil and drew big yellow smiley faces on the napkins, she wouldn’t get cheese or onions and I’d sauté everything in no more than a quarter teaspoon of
oil and I’d draw big yellow smiley faces on the napkins.

  There was no reason to make it seem like a bigger deal than it was for her to want her specifications met.

  God, she was tiresome.

  “Anyway, thanks for trying to take care of Stephen,” Peter went on. “It was a lot better than letting him hear his parents argue. That’s for damn sure.”

  I agreed, but of course couldn’t do so out loud. “I was happy to have him here. He’s adorable.”

  Silence stretched between us.

  “I guess I’d better finish up here,” I said.

  “Here.” He handed me the knife, and I held it in my left hand as I measured out sesame seeds with my right.

  “Thanks.”

  “Is this the fake Parmesan?” Peter asked.

  I nodded. “It’s pretty rich, nutritionally.”

  “It ain’t Parmesan.”

  I laughed. “No, but it also ain’t dairy.”

  “Right.” He looked at me, and I saw a distinct weariness in his eyes. This was a guy who’d made a bad deal, and he knew it and paid for it every day of his life. “But it’s what she wants. And she gets what she wants.”

  “A lot of people would call that lucky.”

  “Yes, they might.” A muscle tensed in his jaw. “You’re not like her, though.”

  “Well.” What could I say to that? If we were friends chatting in a bar, I could be honest. We weren’t, and I couldn’t. “We’re all different, aren’t we?”

  His eyes flicked to mine, but he didn’t answer.

  So I followed my usual compulsion to fill a tense silence with empty chatter. “I have to say, I feel just awful about what happened earlier. It was my fault, not Stephen’s. I hate to see him getting in trouble when I asked him for help.” Not only asked, but in reflection, I had basically lured him right into a trap.

  God, the poor kid was already skittish enough. He’d trusted me for a moment there, and it had led him to get into trouble.

  I felt just terrible about that.

  “The poor kid.” A darkness I’d never seen before on him crossed his features. The bad deal wasn’t just his. His son was paying the price, too. “Thanks again for trying to help. I’ll go talk with her about it.”