The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister

in a gesture so automatic that he was surprised when the smell of the garlic slipped into his nose.
     
    Charlie had loved garlic; she had told Tom that if he loved her, he’d better love the way her fingers smelled after a day in the kitchen, the scent soaked deep into her skin like wine into a tablecloth. She refused the aid of all kitchen gadgets, crushing the fat, firm cloves under her strong thumb, pulling off the papery outer sheets and digging her nail into the base of the clove to remove the hardened end. She would have chopped with her fingers, too, if she could have, burrowing into the smell of it. When she was done, she would trace lines with her fingertips between her breasts, along the base of her skull and up behind her ears.
    “Trails for you to follow,” she would say to Tom with a wink.
    One evening at a restaurant, the wife of one of Tom’s law firm clients had commented despairingly on the amount of garlic on her bruschetta.
    “Andy will never sleep with me tonight,” she had remarked with an embarrassed laugh. “Darling, did you bring mints with you?”
    While the couple was engaged in checking pockets and purses, Charlie had met Tom’s eyes across the table. Slowly, she ran her index finger over the thick, aromatic oil that had seeped into the toasted circles of bread on her plate. Then her hand disappeared under the table.
     
    The garlic LAY on the chopping board, cut into small, precise pieces. Lillian took the knife from Tom and pushed the pile into a small mound on the side of the board. Tom was surprised to see a pile of freshly cut onions next to it, their smell sharper, lightning instead of thunder.
    “I thought I’d keep you company,” Lillian commented. Grasping a half-gallon bottle of olive oil from under the counter, she hefted it up and poured a spiraling circle of thick, green-gold liquid into the large skillet on the stove. She turned the burner on with a small whoosh of air.
    “Sometimes,” she remarked, “the best meal requires you to forget that time exists. But then there’s olive oil—olives start to change flavor within hours of when they are picked. After all those months of growing. That’s why the best oil comes from the first press, and the very best is made close to its own trees.”
     
    Tom had met Charlie eight years before, when they were both working the summer shift at a restaurant on Cape Cod. Not that it was really a restaurant, or that he was really a cook, or that Charlie should have ever been a waitress, given her general attitude toward submissiveness. Considering Charlie’s skills in the kitchen, it should have all been the other way around. But that was the way things worked at Lonny’s.
    Tom’s first day he had been on the breakfast shift, turning over bacon with a long-handled spatula and trying to work up the courage to flip the frying egg that would soon no longer be over-easy. A woman with golden skin and sun-blond hair, an appearance rendered only slightly less stunning by the irony of her red-and-white-striped waitress outfit, walked up to him and grasped the handle of the frying pan. With one quick jerk forward and back she sent the egg up and over.
    “Wish I could do that to table number seven,” she remarked dryly, and headed back out of the kitchen.
    She had found him again on his break. She handed him a frying pan, complete with a half-cooked egg.
    “I’m Charlie,” she said. “Flip this ten times for me.” After his third failed attempt, she had grinned, taken the pan and shown him again, and he had fallen in love with the faint line of muscle that ran down her arm.
    Tom quickly learned that Charlie couldn’t keep her hands off food. She could mince an entire onion, left unprotected on the counter, before the prep cook could come back out of the walk-in refrigerator. The cooks were always yelling at her for sticking her fingers in the sauces. She would placate them flirtatiously, giving a seductive pause before hip-checking