McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [161]
She sighed now, with some elegance in her shoulders, and stirred the growing lemonade with a wooden spoon.
“But a good chef must let go of the salt/pepper ratios,” she said. “It’s uncontrollable. It is a chef’s nightmare to see the salt shaker dump itself all over a perfectly salted piece of meat or to see the pepper dirty up what is an ideal wave of béchamel. It is a chef’s sleeplessness, right there,” she said.
“So let it go,” she said. “I cannot worry about it excessively. I simply Can Not.” She poured herself half a glass of lemonade and took a sip. “Too sweet,” she said, cutting four more lemons precisely in half. “And if lemonade is too sweet,” she said, “then we are somehow lost to the crush of anonymity.”
Her face struck against itself, and her eyebrows folded in.
“Sir,” she said. “I was here for twenty-six years. Had they both trusted my expertise, perhaps none of this would have happened.”
I found I wanted to comfort her but her eyes had shut down, and after I finished spiking the last crumb, I tried to thank her sincerely, but she had lost herself in thought, at the kitchen table, stirring four grains of sugar at a time into the pitcher, and tasting, repeatedly, with the large wooden spoon.
“Thank you for your time,” I said, then, to no one.
It was not the chef; I believed her fully. It was not the neighbor. It was no outside job. The evidence was in. So then if the mystery was solved, both big and small, why was I still on it? That was what my boss kept asking. He had a new case for me involving a homicide over on the west end of town, of a very old rich codger who had seven children, and it seemed likely that one of the seven had killed him. But I was bored by that one. It would solve itself, like a hose releasing its pinch and letting the water flow. I bought some orchid food instead, and went to see the coroner again, because my mind would not stop thinking of that end, when the husband and wife realized they were dying together, each by the hand of the other. In a way, they actually had swapped personalities, by killing the other in the manner of his or her favorite spice. The wife chose knifing, which is certainly “pepper-like” in its spicy attack on the body, and the coroner thanked me for the orchid food and confirmed my suspicions about the poison, by explaining how the one the husband had chosen killed by increasing the saline level of the bloodstream to such a degree that the person essentially dehydrated.
I myself have a girlfriend, as I have mentioned, which is perhaps why the salt and pepper pair do not leave my mind. The case is closed and the file cabinet locked but I still think of them all the time. The ranch-style house sold for cheap to a small family who moved here from Michigan and didn’t hear the history. I believe the cook retired from family work, and now is doing private catering on her own, and if I ever get married, I will surely hire her, although my superstitious girlfriend might not approve. I do love my girlfriend, for her differences and her similarities, but I do not know if one day the item that defines me in her eyes will no longer work. If my body will fail. If I will face her in bed and not know what to do, when now her body still seems infinite. If she will stop having that bright look in her eye at the parrot store, and instead lose herself circling letters in word searches. There are couples who commit suicide together and they are in line with Shakespeare’s greatest lovers, but those who murder each other precisely at the same minute are written up in all the papers as crazy. Even their family members coughed and got off the phone as fast as they could. They would like to erase the whole rigamarole. I picked up more than one tone of disgust and superiority in my many interviews. But it seems to me beautiful. How right at the end, when everything was over, they realized they had reached the ultimate gesture of compromise, that their