“How?”
She looked at him silently, studying the sweet, caramel brown of his eyes,
while she contemplated mysteries going back farther than she did, back under
the magnificent chandelier in the days when every prism flamed with light.
“Stillwater lies even with his cooking; my father refuses to tell the truth.
Where? Where does that story begin?” She turned her head, held Zed’s eyes.
“I will fry fish for Ella,” she told him fiercely. “I will eat Stillwater’
s not-cooking, I will learn wolf and howl back at my father if that’s the
only way I can talk to him. I want to understand this story if that’s the
last thing I do. If nobody’s talking, I’ll find a new way of listening. If
nobody’s talking, then nobody can say no.”
She went to work for Todd Stillwater during her hours off at the Kingfisher:
lunches on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and dinner on Wednesdays. She did not so
much as whisper to a soup pot or tell a fork in Ella’s kitchen that she was
cooking for Stillwater. She kept the word “water” out of her head when she
took Hal’s daily note up to Lilith. She avoided even looking out the window
at the bay. Chowder, she thought. Butter, cream, clams. Onion cheddar
biscuits. Endless sizzling fries. The sudden flick of storm-green glances
Lilith sent her way hinted that she suspected something. But for once in her
life, Carrie was doing the not-talking, as though her life depended on it. She
babbled randomly instead, about Zed, about the aging pickup truck, about the
old fruit trees and vines the early farmers had left behind still alive and
blossoming again. When Lilith pressed her about Merle, she drew upon old
memories: he had left her a seashell, laundry, a wild lily in a beer bottle;
she had heard him singing deep in the woods at midnight.
Except when she glimpsed him brooding at her in the Kingfisher bar, she had no
idea what he was doing, or thinking, or where, or in what shape, he slept. He
knew what she had done. She knew he knew. Neither one of them was talking.
The first of the questing knights came at the beginning of a Friday Nite Fish
Fry. Carrie walked out of the kitchen holding the huge cauldron full of
steaming oyster stew with tiny crackers buttered and broiled to a crisp
floating like gold coins on top of it. She heard their voices break the
traditional silence, the worship of smells, before she saw them. She glanced
across the room toward the sound, found a cluster of noisy, muscular, handsome
men, all of them dressed in black. They were laughing, she realized
incredulously; they were joking about the peculiar backwater ceremony going on
in the dilapidated old inn.
Hal did not waste a glance at them. He simply stopped, leaning on his staff,
gazing ahead. The line behind him, Father Kirk with the bloodstained gaff,
Merle carrying the salmon on the gold platter, Carrie, all stopped. The diners
gathered for supper stood silently in their places, waiting. Through the
swinging doors that Curt Sloan and his son Gabe held open, Carrie heard not a
whisper, a step, a clatter from inside the kitchen.
The laughter thinned, died away. Carrie recognized the uniforms then, the
little heraldic shields embroidered on their jackets. One of the young men
looked at Tye, behind the bar.
Tye said before the knight could speak, “Bar’s closed.”
“Private party,” another man murmured, and asked Tye, “Could you tell us—
”
“Try Stillwater’s,” Tye said without compunction, and stood unblinking,
hands flat on the bar, until the young men finally drifted toward the door and
out.
Hal spoke then, smiling, welcoming the gathering to supper.
My father knows what all this means, Carrie thought coldly, as she carried the
cauldron back into the kitchen to ladle out its contents. He won’t tell me.
Maybe, she thought later, bringing the cleaned and polished cauldron back to
the bar to be locked away, Stillwater knows. Maybe he’ll tell me.
“It’s nothing,” Stillwater said, when she asked him about the ritual a few
days later. “A family thing. You know how families are. Always looking back,
doing things the way they were always done, acquiring habits, ceremonies over
the years. Actually, if I were making that choice, I wouldn’t put that in
there.”
Actually, Carrie didn’t say, I have no idea how families are, and neither do
you. “That” was a lemon, and “there” was one of Stillwater’s many odd
kitchen tools, machines of various sizes with no obvious ways of behaving.
“Sorry,” she said. “I thought it was the slicer.”
He opened a drawer, took out a paring knife. “This works.”