From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(13)

When I went downstairs to let him in, the first thing he did was wet me with kisses. As I helped him take off his jacket, the first thing he said was “I’m glad you woke up.”



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Before coming to Italy, my father and I had gone jogging one day in his Houston neighborhood and he had given me a piece of sage advice. I might have shared my suspicion that my mother’s marriage was moving toward a swift and decisive end. I had just spent the summer working in his law office, where I often fell asleep during lunch. I was bored in the way that a college student is who returns home and hasn’t a clue as to what she should do next.

He sensed I needed to know something about relationships that had, until that moment, been unclear to me. “Tembi, there are many people in this world that you can love,” he said between breaths.

“Okay, Dad, c’mon.” I was uncomfortable with the sudden intimacy.

“Now, let me finish.”

I didn’t want to show it, but he had my attention.

“There are many people, maybe even thousands, that you can love. But there are few people,” he continued, his words measured, “maybe only one or two on the planet, that you can love and live with in peace. The peace part is the key.”

He stopped short in his 1987 Bar Association T-shirt and looked me square in the eye. I hoped like hell he wasn’t going to ask me specifics about my love life. My dad was telling me something—the kind of stuff I usually overheard him say only when he shot the breeze with his friends over a glass of bourbon and local barbecue. It felt true. In relationships, real partnerships, the love is only as good as the friendship.

What I didn’t know was that loving someone long term, in that “peace” that I so desperately longed for, would also mean loving parts of them that remained unseen. As much as Saro’s heart was an open book, there was a mystery in him. My familial love was given, steady, open, even when out of sight. When he spoke of his origins, his family (which was rarely), there was a trace of pain, something unsettled, an air of disappointment I couldn’t quite identify. It was a part of his life that hadn’t yet been fully revealed to me. It would be soon enough.





AFTERTASTES




Sicilian sea salt boils faster than Morton’s. Add fresh basil near the finish, not the beginning, when simmering tomato sauce. Laurel will bring out bitterness. Soak garbanzo beans overnight, a pinch of salt in the water. That was the extent of what I knew. Years spent with a chef, and how salt boils and when to add basil were the centerpieces of my culinary education. I had never planned for this day, the day I would stand at the stove and cook my first meal alone.

Early-April light filtered through the windows of our Silver Lake home and into the kitchen Saro had designed—galley style with a four-burner stove, deep industrial sink, and granite countertops the color aptly called “coastal green.” Those features lined up along a wall with a picture window onto our back-yard garden. The window was framed with an Italian marble backsplash of hexagonal tiles that reached the ceiling. I thought about all the cooks in whose kitchens I had stood before meeting Saro. None of those cooks had left much of an impression. With the exception of my father, Gene, and my grandmother in rural East Texas, I essentially hailed from a long line of pot watchers, people content to have someone else cook and feed them food. I had enjoyed the complacency of knowing hunger satiated by a ready-made plate.

Sure, I knew some things, perhaps more than many home cooks. I had been lazy, but I hadn’t been blind. I could approximate. But that is not the same as intuiting. Could I cook with his essence? Would I ever taste his alchemy at the end of a spoon again? Or was my empty palate evidence of a grief that would never leave?

I looked out the window at the hundred-year-old fig tree that stood just outside the kitchen door. Then I reached for his knife.

The first thing that took my breath away was its weight. Instinctively, I had selected the largest knife in his collection. It was on top of the other knives resting in the block and the one knife in the kitchen he handled most. It was seamlessly crafted steel, and each nick in the handle told the story of a meal, an emotion. It had divided, sliced, and julienned a thousand raw ingredients. The weight of it in my palm forced me to sit down; a wave of dizziness and nausea bore down on me. My husband is dead. He is gone. Saro is gone. It was something I had had to process over and over again in the seven days since he had taken his last breath.

Hours before, I had taken Zoela, our daughter, to school for the first time since her dad died. Returning to her first-grade classroom after a week at home was a first big step into a new but strangely familiar world. She needed to climb trees, hang upside down over a sandbox with her friends. She needed time away from a home life that had lost its tether.

I wasn’t ready to return to my career as an actor. I couldn’t imagine breaking down a script, trying to push my grief aside to burrow inside the life of someone else. I couldn’t see myself walking across a studio lot, I couldn’t imagine standing before a camera and showing up for an audition in any cogent capacity. Acting had always been my creative salvation. I was proud of the career I had built as a working actress with worthy film and television credits and a well-earned pension, but now I feared that maybe my career had died with Saro. He had been my soft-landing spot, my constant in the steady stream of rejections the industry doles out. My agents and managers knew I was in the undertow of grief, barely able to leave the house. “Tell us when you’re ready, and we’ll send you material,” they’d said. That had about a snowball’s chance in hell of happening at that moment.