Page 35 of Home Ice

“I had lunch, but it was—huh—it was at eleven.”

It was now a quarter past seven.

I walked toward the stairs to the second floor. “Leave the apron on the peg,” I said. “Bring the shavings if you’re attached to them.”

***

Rafe stopped two steps inside my apartment. He looked at the bookshelf I built at twenty-three, the coffee table I built at twenty-six, and the bench by the door. Then he pointed to a chair by the window.

“That one leans,” he said.

“Yes.”

“On purpose?”

“It was incompetence. I built it eight years ago. The back legs are out of square, and I didn’t catch it until the glue was dry.” I pulled a skillet down from the hook over the island and set it on the stove. “I keep the chair there as a reminder.”

I poured enough olive oil into the skillet to cover the bottom, then pulled Monday’s bread off the counter and cut four slices thick as my thumb.

“You don’t have to feed me,” Rafe said.

“I know.”

“I can get something on the way—“

I set an empty plate down in front of him, and he stopped talking. Ma taught me. You don’t ask a person if they’re hungry because asking gives them room to be polite and reject it.

I heated the soup I’d made on Tuesday. It was simple: lentils, cumin, and a bay leaf I forgot to fish out. The bread sizzled when I set it in the skillet. After it turned golden on the bottom, I flipped it over and laid hard cheese over the top to soften.

“That smells like my grandma’s house,” he said.

“It’s the bay leaf.”

“No, it’s the other part.”

“Cumin.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think she uses that. Maybe it doesn’t smell like her house at all.”

“Warm food cooked from scratch. The specifics don’t matter.” I ladled the soup and set the bowl next to the bread. He ate with both hands involved. Rafe had eaten a third of the bowl before he came up for air.

“What’s in this?”

“Lentils, onion, carrots, and garlic. Cumin, bay leaf, and lemon are the seasoning.”

“My mom makes something close. She uses barley.” He tore a corner off the bread. “We have it all winter long, but it’s never exactly the same soup twice.”

“What does she put in it?”

“Whatever she has.” He shrugged. He pointed to the stove. “The skillet. It’s cast-iron, right? It looks old.”

“It was my grandmother’s,” I said. “It came over from Greece with her.”

“Does it work better than a new one?”

“It works older than a new one.” I paused. “Fifty years of cooking polishes the iron. She fed people out of it for decades, so when I feed people out of it, that keeps going. It’s the same reason I kept the chair. I like things that have a history.”

He carried his bowl to the sink, and then he took the skillet off the stove. Before I could say anything, he’d already gotten the salt out of the cupboard.