Lost Art of Mixing (9781101609187) Read Online Free PDF Page B

land.
    The house was quiet, Isabelle safely asleep. Chloe stepped outside and closed the door, locking it firmly behind her.
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    IT WAS AL WHO had started the whole thing with the suitcase. That day Chloe had gone to his office, bearing the soup Lillian asked her to bring, she had encountered a man some fifteen years older than her father, with short-cropped dark hair and an awkward pair of glasses that would have told Chloe he was an accountant even if the sign over the door hadn’t already declared it. But he had a friendly face and he seemed as befuddled at seeing her as she was at being there—so when he pulled an extra spoon out of his desk drawer, running into the little bathroom to wash it and then handing it to her with a flourish, saying really, she had to share the soup, it was so wonderful—she sat down, without thinking, across the desk from him. It was while they were eating that she spotted the book of rituals.
    Al had tried to hide the book at first, but that only made Chloe more curious and he finally tried to explain.
    â€œRituals are like making time into family,” he said. He checked to see if she was following. She wasn’t.
    â€œI mean,” he continued, and then shook his head, frustrated. “You know, never mind. I’m not very good at this. I’m better with numbers.” He reached for the folder next to him.
    Chloe watched him, fascinated. Her father always knew what he thought; it was reassuring in a way to see someone, a real grown-up, looking confused.
    â€œNo,” she said. “Keep going.”
    â€œWell . . .” he began, and then he leaned forward, his voice gathering in intensity. “Normally, time just flows along, and you might not pay any more attention to it than you would strangers on the street. A ritual makes you stop and notice. It says, look, you’re growing up, or older, or into something. It turns that moment into something you carry with you forever, when otherwise it could have just drifted away.”
    â€œOkay,” Chloe said.
    â€œAnd rituals can change you, too,” he added. “Make things happen.”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œI don’t know; what do you want to have happen?”
    Chloe pondered. She hadn’t thought about things like that much recently. For the first time in her life, it felt like she was rounding the corner on happy. She was cooking in Lillian’s restaurant, no longer bussing tables. She was living with Isabelle, which many would have said was a strange situation for a twenty-year-old girl, and yet the intricacies of life with Isabelle were satisfying in a way she didn’t know how to explain. She knew only that Isabelle, with her startling directness, her own lonely places, and even her occasional waywardness, answered a need in her.
    And yet. Back when she was bussing tables, Chloe would sometimes see a customer sitting alone in the restaurant, across from an empty place setting. And then the front door would open and someone would enter, and the customer’s face would simply illuminate in recognition.
    I want someone to look at me like that, Chloe thought.
    And then almost immediately, faster even than surprise, she could hear what her father would say about a statement like that, coming from her.
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    CHLOE’S MOTHER AND FATHER had been teenagers when she was born, no more ready for parenthood than they had been prepared for sex. Chloe’s formative years were built upon a framework of cautionary tales in which her own existence was held up as a prime example of the consequences of reckless actions. Chloe’s mother, in an act of penance, or perhaps merely in a search for domestic normalcy, had attempted to emulate the June-and-Ward social conventions she had seen on reruns as a young girl, but the ideal had a tendency to wander in disconcerting directions without the