You're Not You by Michelle Wildgen Page B

me. She didn’t elaborate, so I got my hands beneath her arms and said: “Ready?” She nodded. As soon as I lifted her I knew by the pain across my back that I was in the wrong posture. Her head tapped the door frame.
    “Shit,” I said.
    “It was nothing,” she told me.
    Back in the kitchen we looked at everything piled on the counter. I’d been an idiot not to go to the market every week. We had little buttons of white cheese floating in herb-speckled oil, sheaves of spinach, trout that was faintly rosy at the edges from the smoke. I thought of the bags of wet, pre-peeled carrots I ate most of the time.
    “Would you believe this is the first time I got something besides pastry?” I asked her.
    Kate was looking fondly at some radishes, their roots ice-white. “Are you a convert?” she asked.
    I started to put the smoked trout and cheese away. “I think I am,” I called from inside the refrigerator. “What’s Evan going to do with all this?”
    She didn’t answer, and so I stashed the food on a shelf in the fridge and turned to look at her. She was giving me a big smile. “We,” she said.
    “ ‘We’?”
    She nodded.
    “I can’t cook,” I reminded her.
    “Don’t worry. This is mainly assembling.”
    I looked at all the food and back at her. I decided that as far as a day’s work went, making a meal might not be so bad. It all seemed terribly healthy, too. It occurred to me that my headache had been gone for a long time, possibly since the croissant. I’d have to remember that.
    Before we cooked I followed her to the stereo and looked over her CDs. She was into folk, it seemed, the kind of thing that relied on a good voice and an acoustic guitar. There was a shelf full of jazz and classical. As we contemplated it, me crouched next to her chair, I said, “Do you two have similar taste in music? Or are some of these Evan’s and some yours?” I thought of Liam and his wife meeting at a concert. I couldn’t tell what he would have thought of her music, but I thought he might have liked it, if only because I knew none of the names, which was frequently a positive sign.
    I turned to watch Kate answer. She was looking thoughtfully at the CD cases. “It’s hard to remember,” she said slowly. “I think our taste has merged.”
    “That’s kind of nice,” I said. I put in the CDs she nodded at. “It’s romantic.”
    She smiled faintly. “Yeah, I guess.”
    She looked at me sideways, said something I missed. She repeated it for me: She was asking what I liked.
    “Oh, I don’t know,” I told her. We headed back to the kitchen. “I tend to really love a song I hear once on the radio, then I play it intothe ground and hate it in three weeks. I don’t think I actually have taste. I have flings.” Liam often brought me CDs, scratchy old recordings or bright Latin guitars. I’d fallen in love with one of them as soon as he played the first track. The band was a trio of saxophone, bass, and drum, with a singer whose voice was low and dark. His women were the sort who had daddies and drank whiskey and met in pool halls in the afternoon. “I like Morphine,” I told her. “Did you ever hear them?”
    She shook her head. “Bring it next time,” she said. “I could use some new music.”
    I sat down with Kate and we made a list of what to do. She was right; it wasn’t much actual cooking. Most likely she’d planned it that way on purpose.
    I taped the list to a copper pot that hung over the island so I could glance at it as I worked. Kate sat with her book apparatus on, a magazine in front of her, but after a while she didn’t read at all, but watched me and told me what to do for each thing—to tear the stems from the big pieces of spinach, to scrub the radishes but leave the tops on. First I washed almost everything and spread it on towels to dry. Then I trimmed and peeled and chopped. Some vegetables I cooked in a big pot of salted water, and other things I just sliced. Kate listened to the