“No, we’re fine there, thank you.”
We smiled at each other. Another point of contention: Eleanor had asked me to plan an event for the following Tuesday, essentially a press briefing around an exciting announcement, but she hadn’t told me what the damn announcement would be.
“Anyway, thanks for letting me grab you.” She swept a lock of hair off her cheek. “I love your dress, by the way.”
“Thanks!” I chirped, and I waited until I was almost at the elevators to let my smile drop into a scowl.
* * *
—
I gripped the knife tighter and squinted at the flesh before me, sitting in a puddle of pink-red juice. The recipe for stuffed chicken breasts hadn’t sounded too complicated, but now, in my small kitchen, I realized just how much detail was missing.
“How’s it going with the spinach?” I called.
“I think good?” Her voice curved into a question mark. “Hopefully this is small enough. The recipe just says ‘chopped fresh spinach.’ ”
I turned to inspect the recipe card on my kitchen island, keeping my hands up like a surgeon. “I think it needs to be finer.”
“You need to be finer,” she murmured. She squinted at the card. “You don’t think this looks like that?”
“I’m sure it’s fine. Want to start on the onions?”
I made a terrible head chef, but Katie kept on doggedly relying on me for kitchen management. For years, we’d both assumed we disliked cooking, likely because our mother hated it. When she’d come across a cooking show, she’d shake the remote at the screen and holler, “You’re watching somebody do a chore!”
But Katie had, unexpectedly, returned from Michigan with a new goal on her lips: She wanted to learn to cook. And I could see the obvious downsides of my nightly take-out habit. So here we were, in my fully equipped kitchen, hunching over a meal kit.
When the dish came out of the oven, though, we both stared in quiet horror.
“We’ve made a terrible mistake,” Katie whispered. Cheese and spinach had spilled out everywhere, burning in peaks and ridges, and the “stuffed” chicken breasts had curled closed like irritated clamshells.
I couldn’t help it—I let out a laugh, then stifled it into the dishtowel still clutched in my hand. Katie snickered, too, and then we were both laughing uncontrollably, doubling over in my kitchen. Cosmo wandered in, sat down just long enough to fling up a leg and groom himself, then padded out, prompting another wave of hysterics.
I swiped the instructions off the island, wiping my eyes to read it. “We were supposed to keep it shut with toothpicks!” I gasped between giggles.
“You skipped the chicken sutures?” she choked back, then composed herself. She let out one of those high, happy sighs people make to seal their laughter, as if already reminiscing about it. “I guess we won’t be getting board-certified in fowl surgery.”
I erupted into laughter again and she joined me, face red. I felt something in my ribs and froze the moment long enough to identify it, before it could slip away: It was the first time since she’d moved back that I’d seen Katie being Katie.
* * *
—
After we’d eaten the mess, Katie suggested we take a walk. She’d done this a few times, and I hadn’t quite figured out why: whether this was something she did in Michigan, carving up the loneliness with long, patient strolls, or whether she perhaps was trying to reorient herself to New York, a city that had changed so much in even the eleven months she’d been away. I liked our walks—they reminded me of afternoons in Kalamazoo spent exercising our doofy yellow lab. When I was in junior high and Katie in elementary school, we’d circled the neighborhood, Kobe bounding ahead as I confidently imparted to Katie everything she needed to know about popularity and makeup and boys and fashion, topics I barely understood myself.
We ventured out into the cold, our breath forming little clouds in the streetlamps’ glow. I directed us off of my street, lined with boutiques and cafés closing up for the night, and onto a residential one, where townhouses with tasteful holiday decorations unspooled down either side.
“Mom says hi,” Katie said, stashing her phone in her pocket. “I texted her a photo of tonight’s fowl play.”
I snorted. “It looked like something Mom would’ve made.”
“Only it tasted better.” We walked quietly on and I waited to see if she’d say more about Mom, blunder further into the tension. When she didn’t, I changed the topic: “So how was Mocktails?” We’d spent most of dinner discussing her interview. From what I could tell, Katie had no idea that Eleanor wasn’t sure Katie was Herd material.
“All anyone could talk about was the vandalism,” she said. “If they were trying to keep it a secret, they failed. Why didn’t they just have someone come in and cover it up right away?”
“I said the same thing. But Eleanor always insists on using her friend for repair jobs. And he can’t come until after hours.”
Katie tugged her cap down. “I’m just offended that I couldn’t re-contour my cheekbones at three in the afternoon. What kind of hellhole tears women from their Gleam Cream like Sophie’s Choice?” I gave her a shove and she stumbled to the side, grinning. “Seriously, though, I think she should leave it up. Call it art. Cunts are awesome—they birth tiny humans. You say tagging, I say tagline.”
“Eleanor hates that word. It’s not the first time some misogynist dude has come after her, but—I could tell it bugged her. She usually has a pretty thick skin.”
We exchanged an identical that sucks look: nose scrunched, lips downturned. We don’t share an iota of genetic material—myself a mélange of Middle Eastern, Eastern European, and South Asian, per an expensive DNA testing kit I’d ordered in college, and Katie an Aryan dream—but everyone comments on how alike our mannerisms are.
“ ‘Come after her’? What happened?”
I sighed. “There are idiots who crop up if you’re a public figure, especially a woman, especially a woman trying to fight the patriarchy by creating an empowering space for other women.” We turned right, past a jumble of trash bags and old office chairs, piled like a sculpture. “She doesn’t talk about it, the same way movie stars don’t talk about their stalkers. The worst thing you can do is give an attention-seeker attention. But she’s a huge deal. People are kind of obsessed with her. And she gets, you know. Death threats and stuff.”
“Really?” Katie turned to me, her eyes like two moons.