Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [157]
While they’re gone, I taste Fiona’s sauce and right away diagnose the problem—or one of them anyway. She has used poor quality vinegar, a distilled white vinegar by the taste of it. Checking my mother’s recipe I note she didn’t specify what kind of vinegar to use, so I pull down a bottle of aged apple cider vinegar from France from my pantry shelf. I pop the cork and give it a smell—fruity and intense with a hint of caramel. By the time Fiona comes out of the bathroom I’ve assembled most of the ingredients necessary for a new, and hopefully improved, batch of sauce.
“We can try making it when I get home,” I tell her.
She stops and clasps her hands together. “Thank you, thank you, Mira.” She looks like she is about to cry, and I have a sudden urge to put my arms around her.
“Nonsense,” I tell her. “It will help me out, too. The column is due tomorrow, and I have to make it anyway. Besides, you’re the one doing me the favor. Thanks for watching Chloe tonight.”
“Don’t be silly,” Fiona says. “I’m glad of the company. Your father is interviewing a candidate for visiting professor tonight, so it will be just us girls,” she says, stooping to pick Chloe up from the floor where she is playing. “What do you say, Chloe, how about we have a tea party?”
I watch as Fiona dances Chloe around the kitchen, completely unself-consciously, her bracelets tinkling, and her high-heeled sandals clicking merrily on the wood floor.
My mother, who never once danced with me, who was seldom silly, and whom I can’t remember ever wearing bracelets, had been so different from Fiona. Watching Chloe giggling delightedly in her arms, I’m suddenly so thankful that Chloe has someone like Fiona, someone fun and silly and playful in her life. Fiona dances around the table toward me, and when she swoops Chloe in to kiss me, I envelop them both in a hug. “Thanks, Fiona. Thanks for everything,” I whisper in her ear.
“Why, Mira dear, you’re welcome,” Fiona says. She looks at me, her eyes soft. “In case you haven’t noticed, I love this little girl!”
At the last minute, Richard insists on walking to the car. I hand him his ebony-topped, curly maple walking stick, which he instantly rejects as being “too flashy,” choosing instead the four-pronged, stainless steel cane his physical therapist brought and keeps urging him to use. He’s dressed in a pair of khakis, a blue plaid button-down shirt and a dark windbreaker. He looks like a high school gym teacher. I know he’s taken pains to appear unobtrusive, something that normally doesn’t come easily to him. There’s a code of conduct at AA, one even I remember from my brief stint at Al-Anon twenty-odd years ago: no last names, no flashy possessions, and no snap judgments.
In fact, no judgments at all.
On the way over, Richard is quiet. I suspect I know what he’s thinking—probably the same thing I’m thinking. Twenty-three years ago, when we first met, he was at AA at the urging of his then lover. Although he stopped drinking, the relationship hadn’t lasted. That history appears to have repeated itself is an obvious fact that neither of us mentions.
I pull into a handicapped parking space across the street from Wightman School and turn off the engine. We’re ten minutes early. Richard is staring straight ahead, his lips parted in a half smile. He reaches over and takes my hand in both of his. “Do you remember the first time I saw you? You were standing under that street lamp over there,” Richard says, pointing. “You were smoking a cigarette, and I could tell by the way you were holding it you hadn’t been smoking long. Each puff looked like it hurt, but still you kept at it, sucking on that stupid cigarette, taking one long drag after another. I thought you were the angriest kid I’d ever seen.”
Richard is staring at the streetlight as if he can see me there, his nostrils slightly flared, as if he is expecting to smell the smoke from my purloined Marlboro Light. “You were what, all of fifteen?”
“Barely,” I tell him.
Richard is quiet