“So, what’s my surprise? Spill!” In the voice message, Tai sounded flirty, but Tai always sounded flirty.
“Coq,” Andi recorded and hit send, waiting for the laughter she knew was coming.
Tai’s next message was just that: a long, deep cartoon-villain cackle. In the next message Tai was still laughing, but managed to get out: “Liar. If you had a cock, I could stop dating.” Another signature cackle and, “See you at seven, girl.”
“I can get one.” Andi deleted the recording immediately and wondered if spending her entire Saturday dismembering a four pound, “free-range,” plucked and disemboweled “coq,” had somehow broken her brain. It was possible. When she’d been separating the bird one body hinge at a time she’d swung between frantic giggling and dry heaving into the garbage – the small click that meant the bone had snapped from its joint a too-literal reminder that attachments aren’t permanent. But when she had browned the pieces of the chicken, turning them with care, one at a time, to make sure they crisped up evenly, that had been nothing but peaceful, nothing if not an act of love.
Making the Coq au Vin for Tai was a first. Well, sort of a first. Andi has always brought Tai food, but she has never made her dinner, not like this. When they were fifteen and Tai’s first boyfriend dumped her, Andi stayed up all night making apple cinnamon cookies, which was not a real thing, but something Tai had said one time that she wished was a real thing. After school they’d sat in Tai’s basement on her tie-dye bean bag chairs eating cookies and talking about how much boys sucked.
Junior year they’d gone camping down by the river and Tai had brought a tent that was much too small, and Andi had pretended not to be tired to avoid the close space. She discovered that Tai didn’t know how to roast a marshmallow without burning it and so she spent the night making Tai a seven course meal of perfect s’mores, lightly browned marshmallows bursting onto melting chocolate all pressed between graham crackers that she warmed on one of the rocks surrounding the fire. When the fire was only a glow Tai had silently leaned over her shoulder, cheek to cheek and shoved the final, sticky bite into Andi’s mouth. Andi’s stomach had dropped so hard she’d choked and Tai had laid back in her camp chair giggling until she cried.
All night, Andi’d curled into the corner of the tent trying not to think of Tai’s fingers in her mouth or to wonder if her tongue would taste like chocolate and marshmallow.
For Tai’s graduation, Andi had made a crepe cake, which she hadn’t known was a thing, but Tai had seen it on TV and freaked out and so Andi figured out how to make one. Tai had come over on Saturday and led with the news that the night before she’d finally fucked Danny as a birthday present to herself even though “he’s a total player, but ohmygod he was really good in bed and whatever I never have to see him again.” And Andi had gone hot, like a lit twist of newspaper was pushing up from her gut into her chest and maybe if she opened her mouth she’d breath fire or something worse, She ran to the kitchen pretending she’d forgotten something.
She’d gripped the edge of the counter until her fingers hurt and thought about grabbing Tai and fucking her right on the living room floor, of showing her that Danny wasn’t even close to “good in bed.” Even thinking about it started the pins and needles sensation that began at her extremities and worked inward anytime she let her head go there, but by the time Tai had come looking for her, she was taking the cake out of the fridge and Tai had screamed and kissed her on the cheek. Something snapped in her, disengaged her body and mind like a dislocated shoulder joint. The rest of the day she felt hollowed out like a cheap plastic mannequin — unbothered by Tai’s body for the first time in years. It was a relief, and she thought, “this is it, I’m finally over her.” And she wondered if maybe she could finally have her friend back.
But six months ago, three weeks after graduation, Tai had taken a turn too sharply and her car had careened into the gully, which at that particular part of the road was fifteen feet deep and filled with kudzu. And now it was Tai’s birthday, the one the doctors never thought she’d see, and she was up and walking and as close to back to normal as she was going to get, and Andi made Coq au Vin because it was the fanciest thing she could find in her cookbook, the only way she could think to fill Tai with the unsayable things that had welled up in her during the weeks waiting for her to wake up. The meat turned a bruised purple in the dark wine and Andi had to swallow again and not think of Tai in her hospital bed the first time they’d let her in to see her. She fished out the bundled the herbs, she’d used white thread because they didn’t keep cooking twine around and that had turned purple too.
In the Saturday-sleepover thrillers of their childhood, the world was threatened by asteroid strikes and tsunamis and volcanoes, but Andi realized her world was far more fragile –
could have been blasted, sunk, and burned if Tai had not opened her eyes.Tai showed up to dinner on crutches, laughed at the candle-lit table and the music and the bottle of wine Andi had smuggled in. She hugged Andi hard, sat, and let herself be waited on.
Andi poured wine, spilled a little – watched Tai wipe it up on her finger and lick it, making a worse mess. She almost knocked over the whole glass trying not to look at Tai’s mouth, at the pink tip of tongue darting out around the pad of her finger. She served: scooping out first, pieces of chicken, then onions and mushrooms and salt pork, then the rich purple red juice on top, finally balancing a slice of baguette on the edge of the bowl, a shaky precipice above a dark sea of carnage. Andi listened to the scraping sound of Tai’s fork on the chicken bones pulling away the soft stringy wine-purple meat, let her eyes lay on Tai’s jawline as she chewed.
Tai held a pearl onion in her pursed lips and waggled her eyebrows at Andi, who was reminded of the slow, gentle roll of the pan while she’d caramelized the onions and she’d thought how she wanted to kiss Tai like that, unhurried and careful. She faked a laugh and pretended that she wasn’t imagining what it would feel like to take piece of mushroom and press it into Tai’s mouth, let her suck the juice off of her fingers. Tai reached across the table and squeezed Andi’s hand. Andi wanted to wrap her arms around the sloping shoulders and jutting shoulder blades and say, “I love you more than anything.” She knew she could have, that that was allowed, but also knew intimately the pain of saying one thing and having someone hear another. She squeezed back, let go, scooped out another piece of the bruised chicken, placing it in Tai’s bowl.
Kate Tooley is a writer living in Brooklyn with her wife, cat, and a collection of dying houseplants. Originally from the Atlanta area, she is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at The New School. Her writing can be found online at Longleaf Review, Apocrypha and Abstractions, erikafranz.com, and newschoolwriting.org, and is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine.
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