Page 32 of The Quiet Tenant

He chuckles. It feels like the first bite of a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie, like a warm bath after a rainy day, like the first sip of a dry martini—knowing I made it happen.

We return to the kitchen and put the milk containers down. I pick up the stainless steel dispenser we store in a corner. Aidan leans to help me but I tell him it’s okay—the dispenser isn’t heavy when it’s empty. “When it’s full of four gallons of hot cocoa, don’t worry—I’ll have a job for you.” He laughs again. It’s almost too easy to be around him, too comfortable, an indictment on how trickily the world behaves the rest of the time.

We work side by side, his gestures mirroring mine. Together, we bring the milk to a simmer in a large pot. We add cocoa powder, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon. I jog back to the pantry. “Smell this,” I tell him when I return. He leans in to take a whiff. “Ancho chile powder,” I say, and he asks, “Really?” and I tell him yes, my dad insisted on it—it’s his recipe, and once you try it, you can never go back.

“I trust you,” he says. It moves me more than it should.

He watches as I add a dash of the chile powder to the mix and stir. Just as I’m about to reach for more vanilla, something—a flicker from him to me, a movement in my peripheral vision—stops me.

“What’s this?”

His arm extends toward the base of my throat, the small dip where my vocal cords begin. There, his fingers land on the locket I slipped around my neck this morning. An electric current bristles from my neck to my stomach.

“Oh. It was my mom’s,” I tell him. I hold it up so he can see the design. Three women—three graces is what the jeweler had told her—in flowing dresses, holding hands, one of them pointing to something in the distance. Maybe the sky. In the designer’s mind, I think the women were just going on a stroll, but to me, they’ve always looked like they were performing some kind of ritual. Casting a spell.

“I don’t wear it to work because it’s a bit…much,” I tell Aidan. “My mom liked it because it was so different from everything she owned. And I like it because it reminds me she could be fun.”

He touches the locket again, picks it up with two fingers as if to feel its weight.

“I think it’s a wonderful tribute,” he says.

He lets go of the pendant. Our respective ghosts float in the kitchen. I let them haunt us a bit before breaking the silence again: “Do you spend a lot of time in the kitchen? At home? Or are you a takeout guy?”

He tells me he cooks. Nothing fancy, he says. Then, gesturing around the kitchen: “Nothing like what happens here.” He’s a home cook, a functional one. He wants his daughter to eat well. Not that he minds being in the kitchen. Preparing food relaxes him. “It’s always been on my list of chores,” he says, “even before—” He stops. Themilk bubbles. I stare at the pot’s contents, focus on the ladle dipping in and out of the liquid. “Well, you know,” he adds.

I look up at him. It costs me a little, shedding a layer of me, allowing him to see whatever’s underneath, but it’s worth it. A current of knowledge streams between us. The world has given me this gift, this man in this kitchen, all mine for a few minutes. I hope he can hear the things I can’t tell him out loud.

Something stings the back of my hand. A droplet of hot cocoa, boiling hot, sputtering out of the pot. “Oops.” I bring the heat down, wipe my hand on the towel we used earlier. “I think this is ready.”

I turn to him. “Want a taste?”

“Only a fool would say no.”

An image flashes in my brain—holding the ladle up to his lips, one hand underneath to catch any drips, tilting the ladle back, watching him drink. Too much. Too on the nose, too risky. I abandon the ladle, retrieve a white coffee cup from the cabinet above the counter. The cocoa is thick, with the perfect color I recognize from my father’s batches. We made this. We made this together.

“Here.”

His fingers brush against mine as he grabs the cup. My stomach twitches. He takes a sip. I watch in expectation as his eyes close. When he opens them again, there’s a sparkle.

“Holy shit,” he says. “Sorry. I just didn’t know cocoa could taste this way.”

He goes back for another sip. I smile. There’s nothing to say, nothing to add. This is a perfect moment, and even I know that the only sound thing to do is to stand back and savor it.

—

HE INSISTS ONwashing his empty cup. I tell him I can do it, that I have to clean our utensils anyway. “Don’t worry about those,” he says, and he scrubs them, too. I put away our dry ingredients, discard the empty containers of milk. Together, we transfer the hot cocoa to the steel dispenser and lift it up. He lets out a grunt.

“See?” I say. “I told you it’d be heavy.”

We take careful steps out of the kitchen and into the dining room, our bodies moving with each other. When we reach the door, he leansagainst it to push it open. A gust of wind tousles his hair and the light hits his face just so.

“There you are!”

Judge Byrne watches as we set the barrel on top of the folding table. I run back to the kitchen for paper cups and napkins. Aidan follows me.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I say.

“I know. But I’m a part of this cocoa mission now. I’m not going to drop out at the last minute.”

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