Yolk(46)

“Beg your pardon?”

He laughs. “Pasta.”

The kitchen’s tiny, with high white cabinets and insultingly abbreviated counter space, but it’s the kind of room that’s perfect for entertaining, the way it opens into this little nook where he’s set up a café table. It’s the sort of cubby that never puts on airs, where if the host is gracious and organized, cooking becomes a collaborative activity. Everyone chopping on whatever available surface, drinking and eating without a sense of imposition or resentment or slavish, burdensome labor.

Basically, the opposite of the way my mom cooks.

I try not to move into his apartment in my mind. It’s while attempting not to picture us in matching aprons making pancakes that my eye lands on an old egg timer shaped like an avocado sitting on top of his counter.

I pick it up. It hums lightly in my hand. I didn’t know I had a hole in my heart in the shape of an avocado egg timer.

I glance at him again, utterly charmed. Between this and the handkerchief, why is he so adorable? Why the fuck can’t he use his phone timer like everyone else in the world?

“Guess an egg was too on the nose?”

“It would be depraved to have an egg complicit in another egg’s demise,” he says distractedly, checking his pan.

“God forbid a chicken,” I observe.

Finally, he turns to me and appraises my outfit. I smile goofily.

I feel ridiculous. He holds his hand up for a high five. I reach over and slap it. “We look like Japanese game-show contestants.”

“We look like a million bucks,” he says. Suddenly everything is easy. Comfortable. It’s as if we shucked off some film of self-consciousness when we both put on house clothes.

When the timer goes off, I watch closely. He spoons a little pasta water into his pan of garlic, adds olive oil and bits of red pepper. In deft, economical movements, with a tea towel in hand, he drains the spaghetti, gives it a good shake in the colander, and dumps the pasta into the pan, making it sizzle. It smells dementedly good. When he looks back at me, his glasses are fogged. If I were braver, if this were a movie, I would step forward and polish his glasses with my sleeve. He removes them and smiles.

He piles two blue-rimmed bowls with nests of noodle. “Whatever you don’t want, I’ll eat,” he says, and hands one to me. He wipes his glasses, puts them back on, and opens the drawer by the stove.

“Fork or chopsticks. I could do either.”

I marvel at his lack of self-consciousness or formality. Nothing he does is showy. It’s a quiet kind of confidence that’s unfamiliar to me. I grab forks for both of us.

“There’s Parmesan in the fridge,” he says. “And parsley in the blue thing.” I’m standing between him and the door.

I find that I’m holding my breath when I open the fridge. There are cans of LaCroix and beer. Oat milk in the door. A rotisserie chicken from the supermarket. There’s also a squat jar of kimchi, a tub of red pepper paste, and a stack of plastic containers with various prepared banchan.

I’m torn between the relief and this stirring, sparkly almost triumphant other feeling. It’s a revelation to open the fridge door of a Korean person who isn’t related to me.

See, I don’t fucking worship white-people things, I want to tell June.

“Right there,” says Patrick, pointing at a dedicated drawer in which there’s a Saran-wrapped wedge of cheese. And, as promised, in a blue-topped container, there are green sprigs. I open it. There’s parsley with a white paper towel lining the bottom. I can imagine him so vividly, carefully blotting the fronds after washing them and it makes my insides evanesce. I want to give his parents a plaque.

“Grab a drink?” he asks.

“Sure. What are you having?”

“Seltzer?”

I grab the cans. Suddenly I’m starving.

We sit on the couch to dine at the coffee table, but when I scooch down onto the floor, he joins me. “That’s how I usually do it, but I didn’t want you to think I was an animal.”

I love this feeling. Like we’re kids having a midnight snack.

The pasta is delicious. Perfectly cooked. Expertly salted. He offers the cheese grater and then stops me.

“Um,” he says, eyeing my hands intently. “Is it okay if I grate it for you?”

“Excuse me?” My hands pause above my bowl.

“That fucker is weirdly slippery and a total health hazard. It’s a design flaw that I always forget about until someone else uses it.”

“Sure,” I tell him. “Grate my cheese… Oppa.”

He rolls his eyes. “Just say when.”

“That’s good,” I tell him, watching the flecks fall.

He winds noodles into his spoon and shoves them into his mouth. “Where’d you learn how to cook?” I notice that his wedge of Parmesan is the real deal. That his olive oil is bright green. That even his salt and pepper seem considered, special, extracted from a small wooden bowl and crushed out from a large, well-worn peppermill.

He keeps chewing. “My pops cooks,” he says finally. “This isn’t a recipe though. Good pasta’s only ever four things.”

“Your pops?”

“Yeah.”

“Pops? That’s what you call your dad?” I take a sip of soda.