54°F The first words I ever heard Isabel say were: “Can I ask why the hell we’re making quiche instead of talking about my brother?” She had just climbed out of a massive white SUV that basically took over the Brisbanes’ entire driveway. My first impression of her was tall—probably because of the five-inch heels on the ass-kicking boots she wore—followed by ringlets—because her head had more of them than a porcelain doll.
“No,” Grace said, and I loved her because of the way she said it, no negotiation allowed.
Isabel made a noise that, if converted into a missile, had enough vitriol to obliterate a small country. “So can I ask who he is?”
I glanced at her in time to see her checking out my butt. She looked away quickly as I echoed, “No.”
Grace led us into the house. Turning to Isabel in the front hallway, she said, “Don’t ask any questions about Jack. My mom’s home.”
“Is that you, Grace?” Grace’s mom called from upstairs.
“Yes! We’re making quiche!” Grace hung up her coat and motioned for us to do the same.
“I brought some stuff back from the studio, just shove it out of your way!” her mom shouted back.
Isabel wrinkled her nose and kept her fur-lined jacket on, stuffing her hands in the pockets and standing back while Grace shoved boxes toward the walls of the room to clear a path through the clutter. Isabel looked profoundly out of place in the comfortably crowded kitchen. I couldn’t decide whether her perfect artificial ringlets made the not-quite-white linoleum floor look more pathetic or whether the old cracked floor made her hair look more perfect and fake. Until now, I hadn’t ever seen the kitchen as shabby.
Isabel shuffled back even farther as Grace shoved up her sleeves and washed her hands at the sink.
“Sam, turn on that radio and find something good, will you?”
I found a little boom box on the counter amongst some tins of salt and sugar and turned it on.
“God, we really are going to make quiche,” Isabel moaned. “I thought it was code for something else.” I grinned at her and she caught my eye and made an anguished face. But her expression was too much—I didn’t believe her angst entirely. Something in her eyes made me think she was at least curious about the situation. And the situation was this: I wasn’t going to confide in Isabel until I was damn certain what kind of person she was.
Grace’s mom came in then, smelling of orange-scented turps. “Hi, Sam. You’re making quiche, too?”
“Trying,” I said earnestly.
She laughed. “How fun. Who’s this?”
“Isabel,” Grace said. “Mom, do you know where that green cookbook is? I had it right here forever. It’s got the quiche recipe in it.”
Her mom shrugged helplessly and knelt by one of the boxes on the floor. “It must’ve walked off. What in the world is on the radio? Sam, you can make it do something better than that.”
While Grace fumbled through some cookbooks tucked away on a corner of the counter, I clicked through the radio stations until Grace’s mom said, “Stop right there!” when I got to some rather funky-sounding pop station. She stood, holding a box. “I think my work here is done. Have fun, kids. I’ll be back…sometime.”
Grace barely seemed to notice her leaving. She gestured at me. “Isabel, eggs and cheese and milk are in the fridge. Sam, we need to make plain old piecrusts. Would you preheat the oven to four-fifty and get us some pans?”
Isabel was staring inside the fridge. “There’s, like, eight thousand kinds of cheese in here.
It all looks the same to me.”
“You do the oven, let Sam get the cheese and stuff. He knows food,” Grace said. She was standing on her tiptoes to get flour out of an overhead cupboard; it stretched her body gorgeously and made me want in the worst way to touch the bare skin exposed on her lower back. But then she heaved the flour down and I’d missed my chance, so I traded places with Isabel, grabbed some sharp cheddar and eggs and milk, and threw it all on the counter.
Grace was already involved with cutting shortening and flour in a bowl by the time I’d finished cracking eggs and whisking in some mayonnaise. The kitchen was suddenly full of activity, as if we were legion.
“What the hell is this?” Isabel demanded, staring at a package Grace had handed her.
Grace snorted with laughter. “It’s a mushroom.”
“It looks like it came out of a cow’s rear end.”
“I’d like that cow,” Grace said, leaning past Isabel to slap some butter into a saucepan.
“Its butt would be worth a million. Sauté those in there for a few minutes till they’re nice and yummy.”
“How long?”
“Till they’re yummy,” I repeated.
“You heard the boy,” Grace said. She reached out a hand. “Pan!”
“Help her,” I told Isabel. “I’ll take care of yummy, since you can’t.”
“I’m already yummy,” muttered Isabel. She handed two pans to Grace, and Grace deftly unfolded the pie pastry—magic—into the bottom of each. She began to show Isabel how to crimp the edges. The entire process seemed very wellworn; I got the idea that Grace could’ve done this whole thing a lot faster without me and Isabel in her way.
Isabel caught me smiling at the sight of the two of them crimping piecrusts. “What are you smiling at? Look at your mushrooms!”
I rescued the mushrooms in time and added the spinach that Grace pushed into my hands.
“My mascara.” Isabel’s voice rose above the increasing clamor, and I looked to see her and Grace laughing and crying while cutting onions. Then the little onions’ powerful odor hit my nose and burned my eyes, too.
I offered my sauté pan to them. “Throw them in here. It’ll kill it a bit.”
Isabel scraped them off a cutting board into the pan and Grace slapped my butt with a flour-covered hand. I craned my neck, trying to see if she’d left a print, while Grace rubbed her hand in leftover flour to get better coverage and tried again.
“This is my song!” Grace suddenly announced. “Turn it up! Turn it up!”
It was Mariah Carey in the worst possible way, but it was so right at the moment. I turned it up until the little speakers buzzed against the tins next to them. I grabbed Grace’s hand and tugged her over to me and we started to dance like we were cool, terribly clumsy and unbearably sexy, her grinding up against me, hands in the air, my arms around her waist, too low to be chaste.
I thought to myself, A life is measured by moments like these. Grace leaned her head back, neck long and pale against my shoulder, to reach my mouth for a kiss, and just before I gave her one, I saw Isabel’s wistful eyes watch my mouth touch Grace’s.
“Tell me how long to set the timer for,” Isabel said, catching my eye and looking away.
“And then maybe we can talk…?”
Grace was still leaning back against me, secure in my arms, covered in flour and so entirely edible that I ached with wanting to be alone with her, here, now. She gestured lazily toward the open cookbook on the counter, drunk with my presence. Isabel consulted the recipe and set the timer.
There was a moment’s silence when we realized we were done, and then I took a breath and faced Isabel. “Okay, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with Jack.”
Isabel and Grace both looked startled.
“Let’s go sit down,” Grace suggested, removing herself from my arms. “Living room’s that way. I’ll get coffee.”
So Isabel and I made our way into the living room. Like the kitchen, it was cluttered in a way I hadn’t noticed until Isabel was in it. She had to move a pile of unfolded laundry to sit on the sofa. I didn’t want to sit next to her, so I sat on the rocker across from her.