Dream Lake (Friday Harbor #3)(49)

“I’ll get you some coffee.”

The vicious throb at the front of his skull made him want to gouge his eyes out. Carefully he lowered his forehead to his arms and tried to think past the jitters. “Why don’t you bring me a six-pack of Old Milwaukee tall boys to go with it,” he said in a muffled voice.

Zoë set a cup on the table. “Try this first.”

Alex fumbled for the coffee.

“Let me—” Zoë began, reaching out to steady his hands.

“I don’t need help,” he growled.

“Okay,” she said calmly, backing off.

Her patience annoyed him. The cherry-printed wallpaper hurt his eyes. His head was pounding like a thrash band concert.

Once he got the cup to his mouth, he drank as if his life depended on it. He asked for another.

“Have some of this first,” she said, placing a shallow bowl in front of him.

The bowl contained a golden cakelike square spangled with candied fruit cut into strips no thicker than a cat’s whisker. Cinnamon-scented steam rose to his nostrils. Zoë poured a splash of whole milk into the bowl and gave Alex a spoon.

The baked oatmeal was chewy and tender, crisp at the edges, the crumbly sweetness infused with a sunny citrus tang. As the milk soaked into the oatmeal, the texture loosened and each spoonful became more moist and delicious than the last. It was the farthest thing possible from the gray-slurry oatmeal of his youth.

As he ate, the toxic feeling left him, and he relaxed and began to breathe deeply. Something like euphoria settled over him, a mellow warmth. Zoë moved around the kitchen, stirring contents of pots, pouring milk into pitchers, and chatting lightly without requiring a response. He had no idea what she was talking about—something that had to do with the difference between a cobbler and a brown Betty, none of which made any sense to him. But he wanted to wrap the sound of her voice around him like a clean cotton blanket.

His days fell into a pattern: every morning before work he went to the kitchen at Artist’s Point and ate whatever Zoë put in front of him. The half hour he spent with her was the time around which everything else was structured. After he left, the sense of well-being faded hour by hour until he reached the raw and ragged evenings.

His sleep was riddled with nightmares. Often he dreamed he was drinking again, and he awoke smothered in shame. Even the knowledge that it had only been a dream, that he hadn’t fallen off the wagon, failed to ease the panic. What got him through the nights was knowing that he would see Zoë soon.

She always said “good morning” as if it actually were one. She set plates of beautiful food in front of him, every bite blooming with color and fragrance, flavors nudging each other forward in clever ways. Soufflés so light they seemed to have been inflated by a wish, eggs Benedict blanketed with hollandaise the color of sunflowers. She created symphonies of eggs and meat, poems of bread, melodies of fruit.

The kitchen was more personal to Zoë than her bedroom. It was her artistic space, arranged exactly as she wanted it. The open pantry, lined floor to ceiling with shelving, held rows of deeply colored spices in glass cylinders, and huge old-fashioned penny candy jars filled with flour, sugar, oats, vivid yellow cornmeal, plump beige pecan halves. There were bottles of pale green olive oil from Spain, inky balsamic vinegar, Vermont maple syrup, wildflower honey, jars of homemade jam and preserves, bright as jewels. Zoë was as particular about the quality of her ingredients as Alex was about making angles plumb and square while framing a house, or using the right carpentry nail for a given task.

Alex loved to watch Zoë work. She moved around the kitchen with a kind of clunky-ballerina quality, graceful movements often coming to the abrupt finish of a heavy pot being lifted with both hands, or an oven door closing decisively. She wielded a sauté pan as if it were a musical instrument, gripping the handle and jerking it back with a sharp elbow motion so that the contents appeared to jump and toss themselves.

On the seventh morning that Alex ate breakfast at the inn, Zoë served him a plate of buttermilk grits sprinkled with cheese and spicy red crumbs of fried chorizo sausage. She had stirred some of the sausage renderings into the grits, charging them with salty, earthy richness.

As he ate, Zoë came to the table and sat beside him, sipping her own coffee. Her nearness made him slightly uneasy. She usually worked while he had breakfast. He stole a glance at the finespun skin of her inner arm, noticing the healed-over burn mark. He wanted to press his lips to it.

“The cabinets have come in,” he told her. “We’ll start installing them later this week, and I’ll build the kitchen island.”

“Build it? I assumed you would order a premade one.”

“No, it’ll be a little cheaper—and look more custom—if we make one by trimming down some stock cabinets, finish the outside with beadboard, and add the countertop.” He smiled as he saw her expression. “It’ll look great. I promise.”

“I wasn’t doubting you at all,” she said. “I’m just impressed.”

Alex drowned his smile in the cup of coffee. “I’m not doing anything special,” he said. “Just basic carpentry.”

“It’s special when it’s my house.”

“In another week, I’ll need to know what paint colors you want.”

“I’ve almost got them all picked out,” she said. “Soft white for the beadboard and trim, and butter yellow for the walls, and pink for the bathrooms.”