Page 15 of Puck Daddies
I pull on sweats and go to the kitchen before I talk myself into doing something stupid like crawling back in and pretending morning hasn’t happened.
The kitchen is the same as it was yesterday and a little different because I’m in it now with a body that has new information in it. I wash my hands even though they’re clean. I set the pan on the stove. I open the fridge and take out eggs, then put them back like they bit me. Not again. Not after yesterday.
I love her. I’ll eat whatever she makes without blinking. But how did she mess up toast? How was it soggy and sharp at the same time? It was like somebody told bread it was being demoted, and it tried to cry and failed.
I open the freezer and stare at the bag of sausages, and I grab the pancake mix I keep around for mornings when the world needs rescuing with butter and syrup. I can make pancakes from scratch. I do, most Sundays. This is not a Sunday. This is a triage situation. I move like I’m trying to make my brain quiet with my hands.
I am maybe overcompensating. I don’t care.
The whole apartment starts to smell like breakfast and childhood cartoons. It’s safer than thinking. I pour the firstpancake and watch for bubbles. I flip it when it tells me to. Golden. Not a brag. A fact. I flip the sausages and feel better than I have any right to feel about meat browning in a pan.
This is what I can do—make a meal that tells a person they are cared for. I don’t know how to solve history. I do know butter, and heat, and when to flip.
The first plate goes in the oven. I pour three more pancakes. I try not to imagine her waking up to nothing and thinking we ran. We didn’t. We won’t. Oliver doesn’t run from anything except a bad cut of lumber. Rocco doesn’t run when somebody cries, even if it’s his own face doing it. I sure as hell don’t run from what I want. I run from what I might do to what I want if I don’t sit on my hands.
The way Rocco walks is different from the way Oliver walks. That’s how I know who’s behind me. Rocco pads. Oliver strides and then remembers to soften it so he doesn’t wake anybody. Rocco yawns without covering his mouth like a cat and leans on the doorframe like he grew there.
“Smells good,” he says. His voice is sanded from sleep.
“Pancakes. Sausage.”
“Thank God,” he says. Then, because he is not stupid, “No eggs.”
“No eggs,” I confirm. “Toast is officially suspended until further notice.”
He huffs a laugh. He goes to the sink and drinks water like he’s just discovered water. “She sleeping?”
“Yeah.”
“How are you?”
I think about lying. I think about telling the truth in a way that will make him roll his eyes. I split the difference. “I’m fine.”
He waits.
“I’m not fine,” I admit. “But I’m not bad.”
He looks at the stovetop like it’s a campfire and something in there can be read. “We need to talk before she wakes up,” he says, quiet.
“I figured.” I flip a pancake. I kill the heat under the sausages because they’re perfect and I refuse to let them go past that.
Oliver appears a minute later, hair damp from a shower, hoodie unzipped. He looks like a brochure for some kind of benevolent lumberjack company and I will never tell him that. He’s smiling the way he does when he’s bracing for a hard thing and wants to soften it with light anyway.
“God bless you,” he says, peering into the pans. “I would eat a stack of those dry with no syrup.”
“You won’t have to,” I say. I point my spatula at the oven. “Plates are warming. Syrup’s warm. Strawberries are not warm, because I’m not a monster.”
Oliver grins at me like I’m making sense. Then he sobers and leans his hip on the counter. “We have to be smart.”
“I know,” I say. The words taste like medicine.
Rocco rubs his hands over his face. “We have a season.”
I plate up the first round—two pancakes and a coil of sausage on each, butter melting down the sides like an apology. I slide plates toward them and take one for myself even though my stomachfeels like it’s more air than organ. I eat anyway. I function better when I’m not shaking.
Oliver picks up his fork and then sets it down. “Last night was—” He stops. Too many words would be embellishment and we don’t do that. “Good,” he says instead. “Right. For her. For us.”
“It was,” I say. That’s the problem. It was good and right and I want it again and that’s not a blueprint for not wrecking our lives.
