Page 39 of The Plus-One Deal
“A cooking class. Right.” The words came out ragged, and I swallowed dryly. “Can you even cook?”
“Sort of. Can you?”
“Just read the box, right?”
We shared a weird laugh at that, tense on both sides. I knew whyIwas stressed, but I wondered why she was. Why she’d gone pink, and was twirling her hair. Then she turned away from me.
“I’m going to get dressed.”
We met up with Verity right around lunchtime. Ken pulled me aside as Verity went off with Claire.
“I told her, don’t do this. Give them their space. But she was dead set on it, no talking her down.” He shook his head, rueful, and pulled a sour face. “I’d burn water. How about you?”
“I made spaghetti once. It came out soggy.”
“So, okay, strategy — let’s just get through this. Do whatever we’ve got to do, then you say you’ve got work. I’ll take Verity dancing, and you and Claire, well, that’s your business. But I’d say you deserve one night without us old folks.”
I shook Ken’s hand, relieved, and told him he had a deal. Then we marched into the bright, steamy kitchen. Claire was already tying on her apron. A cook bustled up and handed me mine. I put it on, feeling silly, and squeezed in next to Claire.
“What are we making?”
“I don’t know yet.” She peered at the ingredients and bit her lip. “Whatever it is, it looks complicated.”
“It’s not,” said the chef, taking his place at the front. “We’re making pan-seared swordfish and ratatouille. A nice balanced meal. We’ll start with our ratatouille, working in pairs, one on sauce and seasoning, the other on veggies.”
I leaned to whisper to Claire, “He’s lost me already.”
“I’ll do the sauce,” she said.
“Wait, why do you?—”
One of the cooks had materialized at my elbow, and was stacking veggies in a tub to my left. “It’s easy,” she said. “Just cut these in slices, about one-sixteenth inch thick.”
“One sixteenth… what?”
She’d already vanished, moving on down the line. I took a zucchini and chopped off the end. It rolled off the counter and bounced off my shoe. When I went to retrieve it, one of the cooks beat me to it and shooed me back to my chopping board. Back to my slicing. I nudged Claire’s elbow.
“I can’t get them that thin.”
She looked up from her olive oil. “Try holding them steady?”
I tried, but I couldn’t find that sweet spot. My slices came out either chunky and thick or wafer-thin half-moons, see-through at the edges.
“Don’t worry too much about how it looks.” The chef gathered my zucchini bits and passed me a squash. “Here, try with this one. It— ooh, check this out!” He flitted over to Verity, who was some kind of genius, slicing eggplant and zucchini at the same time. Her slices peeled off thin, crisp, and perfect, and she used her knife-edge to push them off to one side. Ken, in the meantime, had screwed up their sauce, charring the onions to the side of the pan. The chef scraped it out and scrubbed off the mess.
Claire elbowed me. “See? You could be worse.”
“Look at these slices. Rata-pooey.”
“Don’t say it like that. It sounds like there’s rat poo.”
We elbowed each other a little bit more, till the chef made us stop it. “Those are sharp knives.”
“Sorry, chef,” we chanted, and got back to work. Verity drifted over to check on our progress. She had nothing to do while Kenredid the sauce, and she took my knife from me and cut a few slices.
“Don’t lift the whole knife up, just the back end. And keep the flat against your knuckles, and you won’t cut yourself.”
I managed to thank her, though my patience was waning. It might’ve been selfish — it definitely was — but I wanted every minute of my last day with Claire. If someone had to show me how to chop veggies, I wanted Claire to do it, even if she did it wrong. Even if we cooked up the worst ratatouille, crispy and soggy at the same time.