Cold Service

9

SUSAN HAD SPENT the better part of two days making a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. Obviously she was exhausted, so I agreed to cook the rest of the meal, which I began at nine Thanksgiving morning. Susan sat at the kitchen table and drank a cup of coffee.

"If you hadn't forced yourself upon me," Susan said, "you could have begun preparations much earlier."

"I know," I said. "But after dinner I'd have been too full to force myself upon you."

"Oh good," Susan said. "I can rest easy."

I had the small turkey all rinsed and patted dry.

"Will you make that stuffing with the apples and onions and little cut-up sausages?"

"Yes."

I had coffee, too, and drank some.

"Would you like to look at my pie again?" Susan said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The pumpkin pie."

She got up and walked to the refrigerator and opened the door. The pumpkin pie was on the top shelf.

"Ta-da," Susan said.

"Did you really take two days on that thing?"

"Don't call her that thing, " she said. "What if she hears you."

"She looks worth every moment spent on her."

Susan went back to her seat at the table. I sliced up eight small breakfast sausage links into my stuffing mix.

"What is Hawk doing for Thanksgiving?" Susan said.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't think he's got much appetite yet."

Pearl got her front feet onto the kitchen counter next to me and pushed her nose into the stuffing mix. I put her back on the floor.

"How'd she know the recipe called for dog slobber," I said.

"What recipe wouldn't," Susan said.

Pearl walked over and rested her head on the table beside Susan and gave a gimlet eye to the plate of buttermilk biscuits I had made for us to nibble. Susan broke one in half, and handed one half to Pearl.

"Whole-grain," she said to Pearl. "Healthful."

Pearl sniffed it, accepted it carefully in her mouth, and took it into the living room and onto the couch. Susan put a minute dollop of honey on the other half and popped it into her mouth.

When she had chewed and swallowed and drunk some coffee, she said, "Is he seeing Cecile?"

"I don't know."

"Did you ask?"

"No."

Susan smiled and shook her head.

"Amazing," she said.

"What?"

I peeled two Granny Smith apples and cored them and sliced the remains into my stuffing.

"He has risked his life for you and you for him."

I turned on the water faucet and began to peel onions in the stream of descending water so they wouldn't make me cry. I didn't want Susan thinking I was a sissy.

"And," Susan said, "you are planning to risk it again."

"Prudently," I said.

"And you don't even ask him what his plans are for Thanksgiving, or if he's spending it with anyone."

I had the first onion peeled. Pearl padded back in from the living room and sat near Susan and looked hopeful. I put the onion on the cutting board and turned and leaned against the kitchen counter and looked at Susan.

"I was walking along the river with Hawk, couple of weeks ago," I said. "And he remarked that life in prison had no connection with how people live anywhere else."

"He's probably right," Susan said.

"He's nearly always right," I said. "Not because he knows everything. But because he never talks about things he doesn't know."

"Not a bad idea," Susan said.

"No," I said. "Quite a good one."

"But what's that got to do with not knowing what he was doing for Thanksgiving?"

"I digressed," I said. "And it misled you. Go back to the thing he said about prison."

Susan poured herself half a cup of coffee and emptied in a packet of fake sugar.

"Analogy," Susan said. "Hawk's world is not like anyone else's."

I nodded.

"So asking Hawk about Thanksgiving is like asking a fish about a bicycle," Susan said.

"Or asking him about Cecile."

"Does Cecile matter to him?"

"Yes," I said.

"But?"

"But not the way you and I do."

"Who does?" Susan said.

"Good point," I said.

"Do you understand him?"

"Up to a point," I said.

"And then?"

"Hawk's black. He's been outnumbered all his life. I don't know, and probably can't know, quite what that's like."

"Or what it took for him to become Hawk," Susan said.

"And to keep being Hawk," I said. "He didn't choose a Hawk that's easy to maintain."

"But if he doesn't maintain," Susan said, "he'll disappear."

"He'd laugh at you for saying that."

"Yes," Susan said. "But it doesn't mean it's not true."

"Besides," I said. "You have a doctorate from Harvard and you live in Cambridge."

"So I'm used to being laughed at," Susan said.