Page 24 of Crossroads Magic
The range against the wall was a ten-burner with a steel backsplash and exhaust fan hood over the top. It was an older model, but it wasn’t a 19thcentury throwback like the old stove in my mother’s apartment. A professional griddle with five burners sat on the counter next to it. It wasn’t as big as the griddle I had been using at the diner, but it would handle a lot of food, nevertheless.
I wrinkled my nose as I passed a bulging plastic bin. The top had popped off from the building gas inside. That one was definitely for the Dumpster. If theyhada Dumpster, here.
In the back corner was a commercial cold room. A small one. It surprised me to see it there. I had half expected a kitchen this old to have two or three old Frigidaire domestic refrigerators sitting in a row, and an icebox for a freezer. Or a battered steel commercial refrigerator.
On the wall which contained the door out into the dining room were heavy shelves – also wood—serving as a pantry. They had canned goods, jars of preserves, and non-perishables. It looked decently stocked, too.
“Yo, Ms. Crackstone.”
I whirled toward the back door.
Hirom stood in the doorway, looking very short, and very solid. “Came to make up some dinner for myself,” he said, the cheeks above his thick, short beard flushing red. “Seeing as Thamina…well, she won’t be cooking here again, will she?”
“My mother cooked everything?” I was astonished. “My mother was aterriblecook.”
“Yeah, she was,” Hirom said without a hint of apology in his voice. “But I scald water, and Frida, the one time she tried to make coffee, well, she set fire to the kitchen. So Thamina did all the cooking.”
“For thepublic? In the dining room?”
“Most folk didn’t seem to mind,” Hirom said. He took a step further into the room. “D’you mind if I grab something? I’ll be here ‘til eleven….”
“Of course,” I said instantly, and automatically. “Who is Frida?”
“Housekeeper,” Hirom said. “You’ll meet her tomorrow, I guess.” He moved purposefully toward the shelves. “She starts early and spends the rest of the day in her room, and likes it that way.” He pulled down a hessian bag, pushed aside some of the containers on the counter behind him, and dropped the bag onto the cleared space.
I was beginning to understand why the kitchen was in the state it was. “So everyone who lives in the inn has been just…helping themselves, like this, since my mother died?”
“More or less. Although that’s just me and Frida. The last of the guests left before yesterday.” He looked around, spotted a knife among the containers and grunted his satisfaction. He wiped the knife on his trousers, and sawed at the bread, hacking off an uneven, thick slice that made me wince. “There’s not a lot of guests in the winter. Around the solstice, yeah, but not either side of it.”
“It was the solstice recently?” I asked.
“Twenty-first,” Hirom said, shooting me a glance. He turned, and hooked a jar of mayonnaise off the shelf by jumping for it. Then he used the end of the bread knife to spread mayonnaise on the two thick slices of bread. He glanced at me again. “Night your mother died,” he added.
“Do you think that has something to do with why she died?”
“Don’t know,” Hirom said, sounding unconcerned. He raised up on his toes and scanned everything on the counter, then reached and dragged over a square glass container. Inside was what I thought was some sort of potted meat. He opened the lid, sniffed, and wrinkled his nose, then shrugged and hacked off pieces of what I thought might be beef, and laid the slivers on the bread. “But the solstice was a biggie on the old calendar, they say, so who knows?”
Biggie? Old calendar? I stared at him blindly, trying to wrap my head around what he was saying. It just didn’t make sense.
Hirom slapped the bread together and took a huge bite out of his sandwich. The taste seemed to please him, for he chewed vigorously. Then he raised the sandwich up. I realized he was waving. Or saluting. “Gotta get back to the bar,” he mumbled around his mouthful, and left, sandwich in hand.
I cleared up the remains of his meal-making, and put the knife in the big, deep sink on the back wall. Then I went into the cold room and quickly scanned the contents. I found a casserole dish with a shepherd’s pie with only one scoop out of it. Mom had made shepherd’s pie for me a lot when I was a kid. I suspected this was hers, too.
I took it back out to the kitchen and scanned hopefully for a microwave among the steel appliances. There was a small one on the counter near the sink, nearly hidden behind the containers and leftovers littering the counter. I cleared them out of the way, found two bowls on the shelves, rinsed them out, and added a serving of the pie to each bowl and heated them.
Cutlery was also on the shelf, not neatly pre-wrapped in serviettes, prepared to be laid upon the tables in the dining room, but tossed into old gallon soup cans.
I found chopping boards on the lower shelf of the counter, and used one as a carrying tray. I took that up to the attic apartment and called out to Ghaliya to come and eat.
We settled on the wingchairs, the bowls on pillows on our knees.
“Smells good,” Ghaliya said, sniffing.
“I think it’s real lamb, too,” I told her. “Not beef. Which makes this genuine shepherd’s pie.” I scooped up a forkful of potato, meat and gravy and ate.
The flavor was so familiar, so evocative, that I could almost hear and see the kitchen where I had grown up, the old Formica table I’d sat at, while eating shepherd’s pie just like this. My mother’s voice, as she washed dishes and spoke about…something.
My eyes filled with tears before I realized what was happening. The tears dripped down my cheeks.
