Kenneth had regrets about the day. He had not wanted to leave his lady friend, Edie, behind at the party with her family; in particular, her estranged husband, Richard, about whom he had heard not one good thing. But Kenneth had a restaurant to run, and there was no one to take his place in the kitchen. Saturday nights were his best nights, second only to Sundays, when many people were lazy and without ambition and wanted someone else to cook their food for them. He had bills to pay. He had been behind on them for months. He had no choice but to go to work.
But first he had driven Edie from the synagogue to the Hilton in his twenty-year-old Lincoln Continental, walked her into the ballroom decorated with pictures of her grandchildren, the twins, Emily and Josh, who were celebrating their bar mitzvahs that day, and deposited her at her table, which was decorated with ballet shoes, a nod to a popular reality show about a dancing competition, which he had never seen because he had not owned a television set since 1989. He felt, briefly, as if he were checking her into a mental institution. When he kissed her good-bye, once on her cheek, and once on her lips, her son, Benny, who was seated next to her, threw himself into a noisy coughing fit. Kenneth squeezed Edie’s hand tight and kissed the top of it. She was wearing a beautiful plum-colored dress that glittered. She smelled fantastic. She was overweight, and her breasts were tremendous. The night before, he had buried his hands and face and tongue in them, and was reborn in pleasure. Cough away, son. I can kiss her all day.
But that was a regret, too. He wanted her son to like him. He knew that Edie would still care for him even if her son didn’t, but if Kenneth’s own family was so important to him, how could it not be the same for this dear woman?
A final regret: that he hadn’t walked up to Richard Middlestein and looked him straight in the eye and let him know what was what. A finger jab to the neck, he remembered that move from a long time ago. But it was not his battle to fight, it was Edie’s, and he wouldn’t think of getting in her way.
The minute he released her hand, he resolved to make it up to her.
Six hours later, after twenty tables had come and gone, Kenneth stood in the kitchen pulling noodles quietly, holding the dough high in the air and then twisting it, folding the dough in half, then stretching it again. The action was mindless, yet infused with love. He rolled the dough in flour. Long, thick noodles emerged, and as he twisted and halved and stretched, they quickly became shorter and thinner. Nearby sat cumin seeds, lamb, garlic, and chilies. These foods would warm her up. He had never met anyone with so much fire in her mind and heart as Edie, but with such a cold stomach.
She had allowed him to examine her tongue the night before, and it was pale and swollen. Her pulse was slow. He had put his hand underneath her shirt, and on her belly.
“Too cold,??? he had said.
“Come here, then,” she had replied, her arms outstretched, her tongue lighting up the edges of her lips. “Warm me up.”
His daughter, Anna, pushed her way through the double doors with the last of the dirty dishes. She blew back her purple-streaked bangs from her face and, as she bustled past, glanced at her father and at the food spread before him on the counter.
“Dinner for two?” she said.
He blushed. He was still thinking of all the ways he could heat Edie up. He had not felt this filled with desire since he was a young man and had first met Marie, his wife, now gone, hovering up in the sky somewhere. It had been eight years since she’d died, eight years since he’d had sex, and that time alone had felt cursed. Now here was Edie, reversing the curse.
“I could make some for you, too,” he offered to Anna. He worried briefly that he had not been paying enough attention to his daughter while he’d been so busy becoming invested in this relationship with Edie. He saw her every day at the restaurant, though. They spoke all day long, even when they did not exchange a word.