When he reached the house, she stood and followed him inside.
“Get out the good china,” he said, placing the groceries on the kitchen counter.
“We have good china?”
“We do indeed. It came with the sofa.” The broadness of his smile shocked her.
“Why?”
“Because I just bought the largest cannery in town.”
As they prepared dinner, he was unusually animated, as lively as the night was still.
“And the biggest question of all is how anyone fails to see it!” He stopped midchop and looked up at her with big, sharp eyes, the diameters of which were increased nearly twofold as a result of his eyeglasses. “Time was, you could sell one otter pelt—just one—to a member of the Chinese aristocracy and earn enough to buy a house. So they all swooped in: Spaniards, Russians, Bostonians, all of them convinced the supply would never dwindle, which of course it did. But did they turn their sights in a new direction? Seek out an alternative to self-inflicted feast and famine? No! No, indeed! When the otters were gone, they went for the whales: a man named Davenport blazing the trail, only to be throttled at his own game by the Portuguese, who ran the show until—in a surprise to end all surprises—the whales disappeared, too. And we could talk about the abalones, but I’d hate to sound tiresome.”
Here, he fell silent, but not peacefully so. There was effort involved in this version of muteness, and he was taking it out on the squid: the beheading, the disembowelment, the slicing into rings. He enjoyed kitchen work, butchery in particular, viscerally and without any shame regarding the perceived gender reversal, and tonight it seemed especially significant. The resumption of a ritual. A possible sign that their mutual antipathy was at an end.
She scooped up the squid rings, dumped them into the hot skillet, and waited for the white flesh to start popping.
“The abalones,” she prompted after the proper interval had passed. “What about them?”
His knife was working again, ripping through a foreign cluster of herbs, rocking and flashing against the wooden board. “It was the local Chinese who reaped the rewards first, who created the overseas market. Then, before they knew it, their big-city cousins had come to town: thousands of San Franciscans with better fishing methods and bigger boats and more secure connections to the homeland. When the abalones were gone, the visitors from the north ended up rich. The locals, needless to say, did not. They had to start fishing for squid instead.”
He smiled at the squid in the skillet as if they had done him a personal favor, then smothered them with a handful of minced greenery. She hadn’t expected it to feel this good—this return to business as usual—but it did. Her father’s sudden enthusiasm was sweeping away any former notions of patience, payback, or restraint. Just like the burned sketchbooks, she thought with a shiver: the catharses that were always so final until, at a certain point, they weren’t.
“And what about the squid? Did they disappear, too?”
“No. The bay is still full of them, but that’s not the point. The point is that, for centuries now, people have been doing the same damn thing. Breaking the bay, waiting for it to fix itself, and then breaking it again. And I’m certain there’s a better way.”
He reached across her to give the skillet a little shake.
“And what way is that?”
Instead of answering, he took a tiny jar from his vest pocket, opened it, and dosed its contents into his palm.
“Smell,” he said.
She paused. This was the most conciliatory gesture he had made in months, and something about it worried her. But then she bent over his hand and inhaled. Hot, musky, semisweet. As specific and strange as the unknown herbs.
“What is it?”
“Chinese five-spice powder. Try to guess all five.”
Guess, she remembered telling the biologist. Guess how old. She closed her eyes and took another sniff.
“One: cinnamon. Two: cloves . . .”
“Star anise, fennel seed, and Szechuan pepper.”
“I was just about to say that.”
“No,” he teased. “You weren’t.”
The powder hit the pan, its smells unifying and then exploding.
“Quick,” he said. “The plates.”
She opened the nearest cabinet and withdrew two pieces of the good china, which had been placed there without her knowledge, as if in deliberate secret.
“Cook it for too long,” he said, easing the squid out of the skillet, “and it turns to rubber.”