The Lost Recipe for Happiness Part 6

She nodded, smiling. "Thank you."

"I brought wine, but I didn't know what you'd need for tonight, so don't feel that you have to open this one."

Waving him into the kitchen, Elena said, "I hope you don't mind if we eat at the kitchen table. It's the most comfortable spot."

"That's fine. Smells good."

She inhaled the chile and pork aroma, the hint of chocolate hanging like a whisper in the air. The round table was nestled under the window, covered with a red woven cloth from Ecuador. She'd set it with simple things, shallow white bowls and white napkins and fat white candles on a red and orange saucer she'd found years ago at a thrift store. "Do you want a beer?"

"Please."

Settling the flowers on the counter for a moment, she opened the fridge to fish out two bottles of Dos Equis. "I like wine, too," she said, "but beer is better with a meal like this." Opening both bottles, she handed him one, and toasted, "To our venture, Mr. Liswood."

"To our venture," he echoed, and drank a modest sip. "But you've got to stop calling me Mr. Liswood. It's Julian."

"I'll try." Gesturing for him to sit on a stool, Elena settled on the other side of the granite countertop. It was cold on her elbows. "Thanks for arranging for the condo. It's perfect."

"You might change your mind when the whole complex fills with skiers every weekend. But I thought you'd like the kitchen."

"Absolutely." In the background played Matt Skellenger, jazz ba.s.sist, invigorating but not too intrusive. On the stove, the soup simmered, a sound Elena sometimes dreamed about. "Did your daughter arrive safely?"

"She's here under duress," he said. "But she's here." He sipped the beer. "Let's talk about you, Elena. Tell me what you thought of the building."

"I made some notes." She grabbed her notebook and ran through her initial impressions, touched on some of the ideas she had for remodeling, and listed the most urgent expenditures. "Also, I met Ivan."

His body loosened. "Ah."

"He'd crashed in the staff room and smelled of three weeks' hard drinking, but he did a.s.sure me that he was the best chef that ever lived."

Julian grinned. "And?"

"I said that would be impossible because I am the best."

His laughter was as bright as poppies. "That's why I hired you. Chutzpah." He sipped the beer, and rubbed his belly. "Let's eat, shall we? That smells so good my stomach is growling."

Elena jumped up, suddenly embarra.s.sed. "Sorry. Of course. We can talk and eat. I don't know what I was thinking."

His hand closed around her wrist. "Don't," he said.

"Don't what?"

"Flutter. Worry, start the servant-master thing. I hate it."

Trouble bloomed right there, the two of them standing too close with the smell of Elena's posole heating the air. She saw the faded scars of childhood acne on his lean cheeks, faint now, but once not so. She saw the weary thinness of the skin beneath his eyes and the creases along his mouth. He was older than she by more than a decade. He'd been through three wives, one of them twice. She caught a sharp taste of sour cream and potatoes-latkes, was that what they were?-Jewish food. Of course.

In his turn, his eyes showed nothing, only that liquid blackness, focused on her face.

"Where did you grow up?" Elena asked him, moving away.

"New Jersey."

"Really? You don't have that accent."

"We moved to Pasadena when I was twelve."

She flashed a smile over her shoulder. "And you fell in love with movies."

"I bet you read that in a magazine."

"Maybe." She ladled the stew into the bowls, and garnished them very simply with tiny rings of fresh scallion and bright red minced tomatoes and just one strip of chile, roasted and spun into a ring. She carried them to the table.

Julian bent into the bowl. "Beautiful," he said, inhaling.

"One more thing." She fetched a tortilla warmer and carried it with an oven mitt to the table, then settled across from him.

He rested his wrists against the edge of the table. "Tell me about this soup, Chef."

She sipped her beer without hurry. "Pork posole, a New Mexico stew, served with fresh corn tortillas."

"And this is your favorite meal?"

"Well, comfort food, yes. Made from my grandmother's recipe."

"Very pretty." He bent over his bowl and inhaled the steam, evaluating it. Then he picked up his spoon and dipped it into the stew and took a bite, his eyes on the bowl. Elena noticed the high bridge of his nose, the way the hair at his crown shone against the light. "Oh yeah," he said, and bent into it again, taking a more generous bite this time, looking at the ingredients in his spoon for a moment. Nodding, he p.r.o.nounced it "Very "Very good." good."

She nudged the dish of corn tortillas toward him. "Try one. Homemade."

"Also Grandmother's recipe?"

"Well, not exactly." She pointed to the masa on the counter. "Add water and cook. The hard part is getting the shape. Took me years to master it." She took one out and examined it, smooth and supple, then tore out a hunk to make a cup, and dipped it into the stew. It was her first real bite, not counting the samples tasted while cooking.

-tender explosion of salty broth, subtle sharpness of sweet chiles, pungency of onions and plenty of garlic, and the smooth texture of hominy and the grainy pleasure of fresh corn tortilla- She closed her eyes. "Perfect."

It was a recipe that never failed. Julian tucked it away with gusto, proving the rule, and Elena relaxed a little. She ate without speaking, enjoying the moment-the fat candles burning, the light fading over the mountains outside the windows, music playing quietly.

His hands were long and graceful as he imitated Elena's method of tearing strips of tortilla, then dropping them into the soup, as if they were crackers. "This," he said distinctly at the bottom of the bowl, "is delicious, Elena."

"Would you like some more?"

He held up a hand. "In a moment, perhaps."

Perhaps. Who said "perhaps"? She smiled. "Take your time. There's plenty."

He took a long, healthy swallow of beer. "Did your grandmother teach you to cook?"

"She did." It was complicated, her story of cooking, so she said, "But we have to talk about you until I finish eating."

"I don't know how to cook," he said, settling comfortably. "No one bothered to teach me. It was a.s.sumed a wife would do it for me."

"Shocking."

He inclined his head. "Traditional. After my mother died, my father and I subsisted on Hamburger Helper and Swanson's."

"You could teach yourself to cook."

He gave Elena the smallest, most appealing little twist of his lips. "I buy restaurants instead."

She laughed. "Interesting choice."

"Money allows a lot of interesting choices."

"It does," she agreed, thinking of her own salary, which, even before she'd taken this position, had been quite good for a woman on her own. One of her early bosses had been a financial consultant in his real life, and had shown Elena how to draw up a budget and stick to it, how to invest in retirement accounts, how to build a credit rating-all things no one in her working-cla.s.s world had thought to tell a child, especially a girl. The security was no small thing for a woman whose body might give out at any time. "Not that I'm in your league, of course."

"Well, not to be arrogant, but not many are. I got lucky."

"Talent might have had something to do with it."

A shrug, not diffident, just sure. "A lot of talented people don't make money. I was in the right place at the right time."

Elena inclined her head. "It's more than luck."

His black eyes, so hard to read without the marker of a pupil, were direct as he said, "My dad drove a truck."

"Mine worked at the post office. My adopted father, anyway." She paused to drink some beer, let the food settle. She could sometimes be a pig, eating more than she needed, but over time, she'd learned to take breaks. The soup spread its good cheer through her body. "This really is my comfort food," she said, and sighed. "It's grounding, after a big change."

"Maybe it should be one of the menu options."

"You read my mind. But let's not talk about that yet. Tell me more about yourself, Julian. What was your comfort food when you were a child? If I'd asked you the same question-and given an ability to cook-what would you have made for me?"

"Potato latkes," he said without a moment's hesitation. "With sour cream and applesauce, hot off the stove."

Elena was careful not to smile in satisfaction. "Is your mother Jewish?"

"My father was. My mother was Italian. She's been gone a long time."

"I'm sorry."

"Her death was the reason we moved to LA. My father couldn't bear it. And you know, he never did marry again."

"That's sad."

"Or touching. She was his soul mate, and despite everything, they had to be with each other. It wasn't easy, the Italian and the Jew, in our old Jersey neighborhood."

A hollowness moved in her chest. "Do you believe in that? Soul mates?"

"I don't know. It's hard, in the modern world." His mouth turned wry. "And, well, I've been divorced four times."

"Ah. Serial Serial soul mates." soul mates."

He laughed. "Is that the voice of experience?"

"Oh, I've had lots of soul mates. Souls mating for an hour or two." The words sounded bitter, and she gave him a glance under her lashes to soften it. From nowhere rose a memory of Dmitri, curling around her, his lips pressing into her spine, his s.e.x nudging her flesh. She turned the beer bottle in a precise little circle. "Once or twice," she said more quietly, "I believed in it."

"And your parents?" He picked up a tortilla, rolled it into a tube between long fingers. "Was their marriage happy?"

"No. My father died in Vietnam before I was born, and my mother was a party girl. My father's family adopted me when I was eight, but they were Catholic, and married for life." She lifted a shoulder, thinking of Maria Elena and Porfino, of his sullen silences, the red sharpness of the ignoring, the bristling heat of their union. "Not quite the same thing as a soul mate."

"Cynical."

"Maybe." Elena wanted to sigh. Roll her eyes. She wanted to say, I'm thirty-eight years old and have had six major relationships, and at some point, I believed each time that I'm thirty-eight years old and have had six major relationships, and at some point, I believed each time that this this time we would bond forever. time we would bond forever. Instead she gave him a practiced, easy smile to lighten the mood. "Restaurants are not the place to be if you want to focus on relationships, you know? Sometimes, you make a trade for work you love." Instead she gave him a practiced, easy smile to lighten the mood. "Restaurants are not the place to be if you want to focus on relationships, you know? Sometimes, you make a trade for work you love."

"I'm in a business like that myself." His face was sober. For a quiet moment, there were ghosts crowding the room, his and hers, possibilities that had once shimmered and had then tarnished. Elena felt the p.r.i.c.kling of his hunger, as deep as her own, and tried to brush it from her knowledge.

"I'd like this to be the house soup," Elena said to chase the ghosts away.

"One of them. Yes. What else have you come up with? Any ideas?"

"Yes," she said. "Let me serve the chocolate and I'll show you my notes."

Julian bent over his cup of chocolate and inhaled. It smelled of cinnamon and chile. As he sipped it-slowly, as if it were a powerful alcohol that would make him lose his head-he felt as if he unzipped the outside layers of artifice and masks and walked out of them, unenc.u.mbered in his own skin. Elena's face captured him, plain and exotic at once, her long eyes and a mouth like some creature from a fairy tale, a mouth to seduce, red and soft and lush; her skin which could be sallow, he guessed, and the shadows below her eyes that would show exhaustion too easily.

They talked about the menu, about parameters and ingredients and philosophy. "Food should be beautiful, fresh, and wholesome." She held out a hand, palm cupping something luscious and invisible. "Sensual."

He nodded, listening.

"I want to go with my roots, with southwestern cuisine. Authentic, but high-end." She leaned on the table earnestly. "I think we can go bright and smart and s.e.xy and authentic."

"I think so."

She inclined her head. "I also want to go with as much organic food as possible. It makes it more expensive, and it's not always possible, but making the attempt is worth it."

"I have no problem with that."

"Good."

"Have you come up with ideas for menu items?"

"A few, but I'd like to bring Ivan into the process, so he feels included. Patrick and Mia will be here this weekend, and we can all brainstorm a menu together."

He felt he could sit here for a year, never moving, letting her spiced hot chocolate, cinnamon and chile laced through it like a love spell, fill his belly. Finally he gave a nod. "Good." He roused himself, thought of his daughter who should not be left unsupervised for long stretches. "I've got to get back to my daughter, but I'll be at the meeting tomorrow. Is it two p.m.?"

"Right," she said, standing up. "I'm meeting the kitchen staff then, but I'd like you to come a little later if you don't mind. Give me an hour alone with them first."

"Absolutely." He shook down his sleeves, pleased. "How about three-thirty?"

"Perfect."