Page 18 of The Whisper Place
Blake was scooping cookie dough and I’d started the first coffeepot of the day when a pounding at the back door made me splash water all over the coffeemaker and down my apron. My heart rate skyrocketed.
“Can you get that?” Blake shouted over the music.
I nodded, but it was hard to make my feet move. No one had ever come to the kitchen door. It led out to a small fenced backyard with only a few lounge chairs and a grill on the cement patio. Deliveries always came through the front and always during business hours.
Drying my hands, I went to the door and opened it. A man stood on the other side, fist raised. We both jumped when we saw each other.
“Sorry.” He stuffed his fist into the pocket of his flannel. “Sometimes Blake doesn’t hear the door over the music.”
“Take on Me” by a-ha wailed behind me, spilling onto the patio where the tree branch shadows rustled in the wind. The guy looked like a bear, tall and thick with a full beard and brown hair curling over his ears. I didn’t move, didn’t say anything until Blake shouted, “Well, look who it is.”
I retreated to the abandoned coffeepot in the sink.
“That’s far enough. This is a clean kitchen, dickwad.” Blake kept scooping while side-eyeing the guy, who followed her instructions and leaned against the door. “You haven’t responded to a single text I’ve sent you in the last two weeks.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Bullshit.”
“Blake has control issues,” the guy said to me. “If you’ve worked here for over an hour, you probably already knew that.”
“Chooch has communication issues. He thinks texts are just for reading.”
“TheHome Alonetweets were funny.” He grinned and dropped a backpack next to the greenhouse, leaning down to untangle a cluster of cilantro stalks from the basil. The gentle movement from such a giant, burly guy made me pause, full coffeepot in hand.
“ButHome Alonewas from the nineties.” I spoke up, as if Macaulay Culkin was the source of all my confusion in this moment.
He laughed, plucking a yellow leaf from one of the plants. “You do know Blake, huh?”
Blake slid pans full of cookie dough into one of the ovens. “This is my new roommate and coworker, Darcy. Darcy, meet Chooch.”
“Charlie,” the guy corrected, but quieter, as though he was less sure of his own name than ofHome Alonetweets. He smiled at me, flashing white teeth in his mass of beard before quickly looking away.
“If you stick around, you’ll see Chooch every few months. He’s got a hobby farm south of town.”
Blake was close enough that I could ask under my breath without Charlie overhearing. “Are you two together?”
The laughter that shot out of her was so loud it caused ear damage. Her pink braid swung toward the floor as she doubled over against the butcher block.
“What?” Charlie asked.
She didn’t answer and I felt myself blushing, even though I didn’t know why. Washing her hands, Blake picked up the backpack Charlie had dropped on the floor and took it to the stairs that led up to the apartment. He didn’t follow her.
“He’s my idiot brother,” she managed between giggles.
“Oh.” I could feel even more blood rushing to my face. “Hi.”
He nodded at me, returning the greeting. As soon as Blake disappeared upstairs with the backpack it felt suddenly quiet in the kitchen, despite the music.
“How’s it going so far?” He asked in the same quiet way he’d said his name.
I left without answering.
Charlie came back a week later with another backpack and he and Blake went through the same ritual—insulting each other with old familiar affection before Blake took the bag and disappeared with it. I stocked the bakery case, filled the coffeepots, and dusted the counter, staying in the front room until he was gone.
I didn’t know what was in the backpacks and I didn’t ask. Blake was entitled to her secrets as much as I was entitled to mine. She’d never asked about my life before Iowa City, never made me come up with stories that I’d have to keep track of later. Blake knew there was an uncrossable line in our friendship, a dark space that, if she tried to breach it, could swallow Darcy as though she’d never existed.
Once, when she served us both the unsellable ends of a loaf of banana bread, I took a bite and said without thinking, “It tastes just like my mom’s.”
