Mom?”
“Billy? Oh, my God. What’s wrong? Is Luke okay?”
“Luke is fine,” Billy said, tucking the cordless phone between her shoulder and her ear and fanning herself with an oven mitt. “This isn’t about him. It’s about a roast.”
“A roast?”
“Yes, Mom, a roast,” Billy grumbled. It was July first, the hottest day of the summer so far, and her kitchen felt like a steam room. “You don’t have to sound so surprised, either. I made a pork roast,” she added, staring accusingly at it in its roasting pan on her stove top.
“Oh, Billy. Why would you do that?” her mother asked, her sympathy tinged with reproach. “You know you should not, under any circumstances, cook. It’s an invitation to disaster.”
Billy didn’t argue this point. Even she had no idea what had inspired her to try to cook dinner for Cal. “Look, Mom, it’s done. It’s too late to rethink it now. My guest is arriving in”—she checked the oven clock—“in five minutes.”
“Your guest?” her mother said, warming to the topic. “Who is he?”
“Why would you assume it’s a he?”
“Because I doubt you’d risk life and limb to cook for a she.”
That’s true, Billy thought, fanning harder. But the fact was that she’d started this thing and she was going to finish it. “Look, Mom, you’re right, it’s a he, and, even though he’s just a friend, I need your help. Please.”
“Of course, honey. What’s the problem?” her mom asked, shifting into crisis mode.
“The problem is, I don’t know if it’s cooked all the way through or not.”
“Use a meat thermometer. Pork should reach an internal temperature of 145 degrees.”
Billy blinked. How did she know this? Billy knew it now, but only because she’d looked it up on the Internet. “I don’t . . . I don’t own a meat thermometer,” she admitted.
There was a barely audible sigh on the other end of the line, and Billy knew her mother was asking herself how it was possible for anyone not to own a meat thermometer. Her mother, though, tended not to dwell on unanswerable questions. Not for nothing had she been a vice principal at a girls’ school for twenty-five years. “All right. Why don’t you start by telling me exactly how you cooked it?”
“In a roasting pan at 350 degrees for an hour.”
“Then it should be done. Just to be sure, though, why don’t you cut into it? The inside should be pinkish, but not pink.”
“Hold on,” Billy said, putting down the phone. She got a fork and knife and, pushing past Murphy, who was literally drooling on the floor from the smell of cooking meat, sawed into the roast and examined it critically. It was definitely pink.
She picked up the phone again. “What’s the difference between pink and pinkish?” she asked.
“Well, pinkish is just slightly pink.”
“But still pink?”
“Well, of course still pink. Just not very pink.”
“I can’t tell which it is.” Billy sighed. “It’s one or the other.”
“Then it’s fine. I’m sure it’ll be delicious.”
Billy glared at the roast again. She was actually starting to hate it. “I don’t know,” she said, chewing on her lower lip. “It just doesn’t look done. It’s supposed to have this glaze on it, this maple and mustard glaze. But it doesn’t look like the picture in the recipe. That roast”—she consulted the picture she’d printed from the Internet—“that roast has a nice browned look to it. You don’t . . . you don’t think I should put it back in the oven?”
“No. Now, what else did you make for dinner?”
“A tomato and red onion salad and a summer herb potato salad.” Those, at least, had been a success. She’d made them ahead of time and had put them, proudly, on the already set kitchen table.
“Perfect,” her mom said. “And don’t worry about the roast.”
“Easy for you to say. You’ve never served a piece of meat in your life that wasn’t perfectly cooked. I’ve got to go, though, Mom. My guest will be here any minute.”
“All right, honey. I love you. And Billy, enjoy yourself tonight. I know that sometimes, between Luke and the library, you can forget to . . . focus on yourself. So have fun. Promise?”
“Promise,” Billy echoed. “I love you, too. I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said, hanging up. She inspected the roast once more and made a snap decision. She turned the oven up from 350 degrees to 450 and popped the pan back inside it. There. The roast would cook a little more, to the right degree of pinkness, and with any luck, it would brown nicely in the process. She’d leave it in for only five minutes. She was about to set the oven timer when the doorbell rang.
Murphy, barking enthusiastically, bounded for the door, and Billy hurried after him, plagued by an unfamiliar nervousness. For God’s sake, relax, she told herself. This is not a date. This is a casual dinner. This didn’t stop her, though, from glancing into the hall mirror as she passed. She wasn’t thrilled by what she saw. In the humidity, her cotton dress looked wilted, her hair was curling at the ends, and despite the pressed powder she’d applied so carefully to cover her freckles, her face looked a little shiny.
Great, she thought, opening the door with a grim determination. But she smiled as soon as she saw Cal standing there. “Hey,” she said.
“Hi, there,” he said, smiling back. While Billy might have felt hot and frazzled, Cal looked so cool and fresh in jeans and a button-down shirt that it was as if he were stepping into her house from another climate. “This is for you,” he said, handing her a bottle of white wine. “Chardonnay, right?”
“Right,” Billy said, trying to prevent a still barking Murphy from jumping up on him. Cal didn’t seem to mind, though. He kneeled to pet him. “And who might this be?” he asked.
“This is Murphy,” she said, closing the front door. “He’s our wildly ineffective watchdog. If someone broke into our house in the middle of the night, he’d probably bring them a tennis ball to toss for him.”
Cal laughed. “Is that true?” he asked Murphy seriously, scratching him behind his ears. “Are you a failure as a guard dog? Because I can see you have many other winning qualities. I miss having a dog,” he said, straightening up. “We always had one when I was growing up, but the building I lived in in Seattle had a ‘no pets’ policy. Your son, Luke, must love him. Is he . . . around?”
She shook her head. “His friend Toby invited him to go out for pizza and minigolf with his family.” Billy had taken this as a good sign. Had Luke reached out to Toby or had Toby reached out to Luke? she’d wondered. Either way, she’d been pleased. “He’s one of Luke’s old friends,” she explained to Cal. “He’s not . . . one of the friends he was with when he got picked up by the police.”
“That’s good, right?”
“That’s very good. Toby and Luke were in Boy Scouts together. Toby’s still in it. He’s working toward his Eagle Scout badge.”
“Ah, I see what you mean, then. Most parents would probably prefer their son be friends with a Boy Scout over a tagger.”
Billy smiled. She watched as Cal looked around the small front hall, from which you could see the equally diminutive living room and dining room. “I like your house,” he said. “Do you mind if . . . ?” He gestured toward the living room.
“Not at all,” Billy said, though in truth, when she compared it to the photographs of his living room—his former living room—in the Seattle Met Magazine spread, she felt self-conscious about it. Still, Cal was clearly interested in it, and not only that, he also looked at it differently than most people would have. Not critically, exactly, but carefully. He stopped to admire the teak boomerang coffee table and the midcentury starburst clock on the wall, both items that Billy was inordinately proud of. When he finally came to rest in front of one of the built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on either side of the fireplace, he stood there for a long time. Then he selected a book from it, a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright. Billy smiled to herself. It was one of the few books she owned about architects or architecture, but there was no need to tell him that. He flipped through it, put it back, and looked around again. “Do you know what I like about this room?” he asked Billy finally.
“No,” she said, though she expected him to say that it looked lived-in, or comfortable, or quirky.
“It looks like you,” he said simply. “I mean . . . your personality comes through. You know, who you are, what’s important to you, what makes you happy. That doesn’t always happen in someone’s home. In fact, most of the time, it doesn’t.”
“Thank you,” she said, and as she smiled she felt suddenly shy. She was still holding the wine bottle, she realized, its chilly rivulets of condensation running over her hands. It felt nice. It was so hot in here, even with the windows open and the ceiling fan on. She started to apologize for this, but something in the dining room, which was connected to the living room, caught Cal’s eyes.
“What’s this?” he asked, heading over to the dining room table.
“Oh, that’s a model town that Luke built. Well, Luke and my dad,” she amended, following him. Shortly after they’d moved into this house, Billy had given Luke permission to use the dining room table for his myriad building projects. She’d known they wouldn’t be using the table to dine on—the kitchen table worked just fine for that. So she’d covered this table with felt to protect it and let Luke take it over. What he’d done with it was build a miniature town, complete with its own courthouse, post office, bank, school and, much to Billy’s delight, library.
“This is so cool,” Cal said. “Your dad must have had so much fun working on it with him.” He bent over to get a better look. “How did Luke get started on it?”
Billy considered this. “When he was in preschool, he used to play with train sets. But my dad noticed he was more interested in the miniature towns the trains passed through than in the trains themselves. So we encouraged him to concentrate on the towns. He’d build and rebuild them over and over again. This was the first one that really stuck, though. Literally stuck. It’s glued down.”
“It’s really good,” Cal murmured. “A lot of it is built to scale, isn’t it?”
“That was my dad. He was a structural engineer. He died a year ago,” she added.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said simply.
Billy had turned her attention back to the miniature town. “It’s not Butternut, obviously,” she pointed out.
“I noticed that. There’s no comic book store in Butternut,” he said of a corner grocery that Luke had repurposed as a comic book store.
“I think this town is what Luke thought Butternut should be.”
“That explains the three playgrounds,” Cal said. “And is this a skateboard park?”
“Yes.” Billy smiled. “Most of the buildings are salvaged from old train sets or Christmas villages, but that skateboard park was built by hand. That’s balsa wood.”
Cal nodded, running a finger lightly over a ramp. “How long did it take to build this whole thing?”
“A year,” she said. “Maybe more. He went through stages. Sometimes he’d work on it all the time, and sometimes he’d forget about it for a while. He always came back to it, though. And when he was really into it, you couldn’t help but feel his excitement and share it. I know because I ended up doing some of the painting. That was all Luke trusted me with, apparently,” she said with amusement, pointing to the white picket fences in front of the houses on Main Street that she had painted with a tiny paintbrush. “He’s not quite finished with it, as you can see,” she added, pointing to an undeveloped area of green felt. “He was thinking about putting a go-cart track over here, or maybe an outdoor ice-skating rink. That’s the nice thing about model towns, I guess. No permits, no zoning, no planning commissions. But he stopped working on it”—she leaned over and straightened a traffic light—“a couple of years ago. Right around the time my dad first got sick. If I asked him about it now, he’d probably say, ‘It’s lame’ or something like that. Everything is lame now, apparently.” And that includes me.
“He can always come back to it,” Cal said, using a finger to push a miniature working tire swing in the backyard of a house that looked a little like Billy and Luke’s. Billy smiled. Luke and Annabelle had spent hours and hours and hours on the real tire swing when they were younger. Annabelle, come to think of it, had helped with this model town, too. Luke had let her glue individual leaves onto an oak tree on Main Street. It had been a thankless task, as Billy recalled, but Annabelle hadn’t complained.
“Are you . . . cooking something?” Cal asked her then, straightening up. “I think it might be . . . burning,” he added, almost apologetically.
“Oh no,” she said softly. She closed her eyes as if this might somehow postpone the inevitable. The inevitable, of course, was what happened next: Billy ran to the kitchen, Murphy hard on her heels, and Cal right behind them. She put down the wine bottle, found the oven mitts, and opened the oven door. As a cloud of smoke billowed out, she removed the roasting pan and slammed it onto the stove top. Then she turned off the oven and, making a flapping motion with the oven mitts, tried to disperse the smoke before it set off the smoke detector. Then, and only then, did she inspect the roast. It was completely charred, clearly neither pink nor pinkish inside anymore. Far from having a glaze on the outside, it now had a completely carbonized shell over it. What struck Billy, standing with Cal in the still smoky kitchen, was not simply that she’d forgotten about the roast but that she’d forgotten about it so completely. After the doorbell had rung, she hadn’t given it another thought. And the reason for that, of course, was Cal, who so far had the decency not to say or do anything that would in any way increase her mortification. If she’d been trying to impress him, she thought, waving at the smoke that still hung over the shriveled meat, she’d failed. But since when, she wondered, did she try to impress anyone? Or, more accurately, try to pretend to be someone she wasn’t?—which, in this case, was a cook. She picked up the pan and headed for the garbage can.
“What are you doing?” Cal asked.
“I’m throwing it away,” Billy said, pausing. “Or would you like to take it back to your cabin to use as a doorstop?” Even Murphy, she noticed, had lost interest in what was left of the roast.
“Hold on a second,” Cal said, taking an oven mitt from her and putting the pan back on the stove. He searched around, found a fork and knife, and tried to cut into its grizzled remains.
“What are you doing?” Billy asked.
“I’m tasting it,” he said. Before she could stop him, he’d hacked a piece of it off and popped it into his mouth. She watched while he chewed it patiently. He looked like a man eating something with the consistency of a car tire, but he didn’t give up. Eventually he swallowed. “I think . . . I think it’s a little well done,” he said.
Billy laughed. “Why did you do that?” she asked, still smiling.
“I thought it might make you laugh.”
“You were right. But, Cal?”
“Yes?”
“I can’t cook. I mean, at all. Even my scrambled eggs aren’t great. And I’ve never understood why it’s so difficult for me. How is it possible that someone who can read Anna Karenina for pleasure cannot follow a recipe?”
He smiled but didn’t answer her. He leaned down and kissed her. She tasted, at first, the cindery traces of the roast he had so gallantly sampled. But the kiss—which was not a polite kiss, a “don’t worry about burning our dinner” kiss, an “oh, cheer up, everything will be all right” kiss, but a full-blown seduction—soon made her forget about the roast. The only other time anyone had kissed her this way, she’d been a teenager, eighteen years old, and the next thing she’d known . . .
“Cal,” she said, pulling away from him. “What are we doing?”
“Kissing?” he answered, a slightly quizzical expression on his face.
“No, I mean . . .” And for some reason, she remembered one of the posters that lined the hallways at Luke’s school. “Actions have consequences,” it warned. Yeah, no kidding. Billy had a thirteen-year-old son to prove it. But it wasn’t getting pregnant she was worried about. She and Cal weren’t there yet, and even if they had been, she’d swallowed a birth control pill faithfully, as if it were a multivitamin, one a day, every day, since Luke was a year old. No, what she was concerned about was a different kind of consequence, a different kind of complication. She and Wesley had at least been unencumbered by other people when they met. She and Cal, on the other hand, not so much.
“Is everything okay?” he asked her now. “I mean, other than that roast?”
At that moment, though, there was a ping from her cell phone on the counter. “I’d better get that.” She reached for it. “It’s Luke,” she said, scanning his text. “Toby’s Dad is giving him a ride home now.”
She frowned and texted him back.
Billy: What about minigolf?
Luke: I changed my mind.
Billy: You told them you’d go with them.
Luke: That was before I remembered how lame it is.
Billy put her cell phone back down on the counter. “He’s coming home early,” she said to Cal.
And something about the way she said it made him ask, “Do you want me to go?”
“No,” she said. And then, almost immediately, “Yes. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. I told him you were coming tonight. I just—I just assumed you’d be gone by the time he got home.”
“No, I get it,” Cal said. “Really. I do. It’s fine.”
It wasn’t fine with Billy, who felt a sting of disappointment. She couldn’t tell how much of it was from the knowledge that Luke’s night with Toby had not been a success, and how much of it was from the knowledge that her night with Cal had been cut short. Either way, as she walked Cal to the front door, her sense of letdown was palpable.
“Thank you,” Cal said.
“For what?” she joked.
“For the company.”
She smiled, but then she turned serious. “Cal, things are complicated right now,” she said. “With my son, but with . . . me, too.”
He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead this time. “If things get less complicated, let me know. I can always burn you a dinner at my cabin.” He gave her one last smile. Billy watched him walk to his car, his ridiculously beautiful car, and then she went back inside and closed the door.
She had meant to make a start of cleaning the kitchen, but as she was throwing the roast away, she was reminded of Cal tasting it. It was rare that people surprised her; Cal had surprised her. Why had she said that, about things being complicated? It was true, of course, but did that preclude her from having fun occasionally? She didn’t want anything serious, but then, Cal probably didn’t, either. He didn’t even know how long he’d be here. So what was stopping her from having a little summer romance? Something discreet. Something light. Something fun. There was that word again. And she knew what Rae would say, and what her mom would say, too: she didn’t have enough of it.