Lost Art of Mixing (9781101609187) Read Online Free PDF

make out the sound of children staying up long past their bedtimes, the prolonged hiss and sharp pop of the illegal fireworks the relatives bought at the Suquamish reservation on the way into town.
    Her own New Year’s Eve had been quiet thus far, just she and Isabelle sitting in front of the fire, which Isabelle’s age-spotted hands tended with an assurance Chloe could not yet master, mostly because Isabelle refused to give up the task, sitting by the fireplace as if reading the smoke that rose up into the chimney. Almost a year now Chloe had been living in this house—housemate, not guest, she would remind Isabelle. Housemate, not protector, Isabelle would say, looking pointedly at Chloe. True, and not true, on both counts.
    Chloe had first met Isabelle in Lillian’s cooking class. At that point, Chloe was a nineteen-year-old busser at Lillian’s restaurant, the cooking class a first, instinctive step toward a dream of becoming a chef. It was Isabelle who had taken Chloe in when she had left her boyfriend and the thought of returning to her parents’ house had quite literally given her hives. Chloe had arrived on Isabelle’s doorstep at ten at night, and the older woman had given her homemade chamomile tea, insistent that it would cure the red blotches covering Chloe’s arms. Two hours later, the litany of Jake’s transgressions diffused into the air, Chloe had looked down at spotless skin. Isabelle set Chloe up in the guest room where she had stayed until they both realized that the arrangement was better than temporary, better, in many ways, than family.
    Isabelle loved the dark, Chloe thought as she looked out the front door. When Chloe had first moved in, she would come home from Lillian’s restaurant late at night and check on Isabelle, only to discover the house empty. She would finally find Isabelle in the backyard in her yellow men’s pajamas and a kitchen apron, gardening by the light of a headlamp, a fairy circle of spades and cutting shears and weeding forks surrounding her. Isabelle said gardening at night was more fun, and better for the plants. You could feel them, she would say: you could tell with your fingers which ones should go, which ones needed to stay. Besides, it made for a better surprise in the morning. Chloe had to admit she was often astonished, looking out the kitchen window as she held her morning cup of coffee, to see a patch of daisies meticulously free of weeds, a row of beans gracefully winding their way up long, white strings.
    But recently, Chloe had sometimes found Isabelle gardening out in the dark with no headlamp, no apron, and the surprises in the morning were more often exactly that. Last week, Chloe had come home from work and heard rustling in the yard next door. There had been raccoons recently, and Chloe looked over the three-foot-high fence to check, and spotted Isabelle digging with her spade in the middle of the neighbors’ hydrangeas.
    It was funny, and not in a humorous way, Chloe thought now, how the qualities you admired most in someone could become your biggest obstacle when things started going off-kilter. When Chloe had first met Isabelle, it was her independence that drew Chloe to her—the way Isabelle kept moving forward even when her memory sometimes slipped her sideways. But nowadays, Isabelle’s independence was transmuting into waywardness and Chloe sometimes wondered how long it would be before family would have to be family again.
    Still, even on her good days—and probably especially on her bad—Isabelle wouldn’t have thought twice about walking out the door at night with a suitcase in her hand. Wouldn’t have worried about what might be in the dark, wouldn’t have cared what the Morgans might think, or been embarrassed by the fact that the red suitcase was empty, the journey simply metaphorical. A leap in the dark, Isabelle would have said. You don’t have to know where you’ll