Page 30 of Codename: Dustoff
CHAPTERSIXTEEN
With the holiday party about to start, I didn’t want to push the subject. She needed to go to that wedding though. I was no Henry “Coping is Moping” Jennings, I could see that Amelia’s pattern of resisting extended even into her military life. While she may have been hesitant to see all those guys out of fear they’d somehow blame her for their friends being gone, I think a few years down the road she might regret not attending.
“Amelia said she’ll be ready in ten minutes.” Gemini breezed by me in the kitchen, where I had begun plating our first course.
“Say, Gem.” I looked up to see her frying pork belly in a cast iron skillet for our main course. “On a scale of one to ten how much do you like dress shopping?”
“I’d say a mini would probably look best on you… a ballgown would be a fire hazard around all of this open flame.” She threw her head back and cackled at her own joke, shaking the pan before starting a roux in a second pan.
“You should really take your comedy tour on the road. Seriously, though. Amelia got invited to her commander’s wedding. I think one of the reasons she doesn’t want to go is because she’s embarrassed about her leg. I thought maybe if you took her to whatever place has fancy dresses, and maybe helped her try some on—you know grab them for her while she stands in the dressing room—maybe she’d change her mind.”
Gemini had been a flurry of activity organizing all of her pans for the main course. She stopped everything she was doing to turn and look at me. With her hands on her hips, she cocked her head, a full, toothy smile on her face.
“Aww Emmett’s sweet on Amelia.” She made a few obnoxious kissing noises before turning back to her sizzling pans.
“You’re such a child, Gem.” I tossed a dishtowel at the back of her head. “I’m being serious though. Do you think you could invite her out shopping? Maybe have some fake event you need to go to and ask her help deciding on a dress. Or, you know however you think you could get her to agree to go.”
“Did she say she was going to go to the wedding?”
“No, not yet.” I shrugged. “I’m hoping I can convince her to go. I just … I know she’ll regret it if she doesn’t go.”
* * *
“Most of the crowd’s been fed,” Finn handed me a plate, “Why not take this to your woman. Go enjoy dinner with her.”
Amelia sat in the same booth I’d put her in earlier. She’d styled her hair down, her curlicue hair had been flattened into soft round curls. I wanted to reach out and twist them around my finger, to feel their silkiness and test their bounce.
“That smells divine!”
She clapped softly as I set the plate down in front of her. Finn came in right behind me to drop off a plate for me and left a bottle of wine.
“You are such an inspiration, Emmett.” She beamed at me with a toothpaste ad smile. “A self-taught chef. It’s not something you see every day.”
“Well, I’m not a chef, I just like to cook. Gemini is the chef. For the most part I do what she tells me to do.” I took a sip of the wine Finn brought to the table, reflecting on the past year. “I will say I’ve learned so much from Gemini.”
“Oh! That’s right. She told me once that I should ask you how you learned to cook.”
She said it with such entertained glee that it was obvious she didn’t know the pain attached to those memories.
“How did that conversation come up between you and Gemini?” I asked. “Out of curiosity. Because I can’t imagine that Gemini would bring that up in a casual conversation.”
The smile slid off her face faster than the last lap at NASCAR race. I watched her fidget with her napkin, folding it over and again across her lap. When she looked up at me again her face had tightened as if she was nervous to mention it.
“That first night I’d been at your house, and you made me go to Wal-Mart that next morning? Gem and I were in the car talking about her and Finn and what a good guy you were. And I made a joke along the lines of how you must really love bulk shopping stores because everything in your house was in oversized containers.”
She licked her lips, grabbing her water goblet and taking a long drink. I didn’t want to interrupt her, but also didn’t know if that was the extent of her explanation.
“Anyhow she said that Henry giving you ‘adapt’ as a verb was perfect for you because it’s what you always did. And she mentioned that when you first lost your arm and were trying to find your way, the smaller jars and such at the grocery store were all twist jars, and being up here in hill country, there wasn’t much access to accessible tools that would have helped you in the kitchen. Finn’s dad owned the restaurant and gave you an industrial sized can opener—one of those electric ones, and so you just learned to adapt.”
Wasn’t Gemini the little songbird. While she’d given her some good history, she’d forgotten all of the important pieces. This wasn’t the type of getting to know you chatter I wanted to have with Amelia. However, she had unloaded a whole lot of her trauma connected to her tour in Afghanistan, I guessed it was the least I could do.
“Gemini may have glossed over the key points,” I started, twisting my fork over and again, playing with the few remaining bites of gratin in the ramekin. “The biggest being that hill people grow up poor. You know—you were mining poor; we were railyard poor. So we too depended on foodbanks and the like to fill in where the paycheck couldn’t stretch. Food bank boxes tended to have a lot of random ingredients. Which meant from an early age I learned to at least make do with what we got. After I lost my arm, Pa wasn’t ever much of a help and tended to ignore things that made me different. I just figured out ways around doing things. Like Gem said Finn’s dad was more of a help than my own pa. I used the tools that were available to me. If I bought an industrial size can of whole potatoes, I would find different ways to cook all of those potatoes until they were gone, so that I didn’t waste anything.”
While I told Amelia my sad little tale, I made a study of her face. She had the most expressive eyes. I could guess which emotion she felt as I escorted her through my backstory, just based on the twitch of an eyelid, the widening of her eyes, or the rounding of her eyelids.
“Have you ever thought about getting a prosthetic?”
“Not sure how a fake arm can help me any. Other than make me look better balanced.”