LEGEND Read online

  Chapter 26

  THE KITCHEN OF THE OLD HOUSE LOOKED VERY MUCH LIKE the one in Cole’s fantasy house, with a huge cast-iron stove and a big oak worktable sitting in the middle of the room. Next to the kitchen was a pantry that was stocked to the ceiling with every conceivable canned good and great bags of flour and rice. Outside the window was a patch of herbs that were struggling to stay alive in spite of years of neglect.

  Grabbing canned tomatoes and a bag of apples from the pantry floor, Kady carried them back to the kitchen. “Tarik, darling,” she mocked aloud as she grabbed an apple and a dull paring knife. “Aren’t I just too, too divine for words.”

  Tarik chuckled from the doorway. “Don’t let Wendell get to you. She’s been that way since she was a kid.”

  “And what way is that? Tall, beautiful, and a bitch?”

  “Let’s just say that she doesn’t have many women friends. What are you doing?”

  She looked up at him as though he were terminally stupid. She was so angry with him, what with not believing her about the opening in the rock, then that horrid woman, then frightening her with his mock battle with Luke, that she could hardly speak. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “If you’re planning to cook dinner, and I hope you are, I think I had better warn you that Uncle Hannibal isn’t a gourmet. He won’t like squid ink pasta or anything dribbled with balsamic vinegar; besides, all you’ve got to cook on is that,” he said as he nodded toward the cast-iron stove. “Ever seen one of those before?”

  Kady gave him a look that should have warned him but didn’t. “I’ve seen a few in history books.”

  Tarik took one of the apples she’d just peeled. “Maybe you should get Uncle Hannibal to show you how to work that stove.”

  “Or maybe Luke would show me,” she said sweetly.

  “Trying to make me jealous?”

  “Trying to improve my sex life,” she said without thinking.

  “Oh?” he said with interest as he took a step toward her. “I could—”

  “You take one step closer and you’ll be missing some body parts.”

  Smiling, he stepped away. “I’ll leave you to it then, and I shall look forward to dinner. But, remember, nothing outlandish. Just something simple, like, like . . .”

  “How about spaghetti and apple pie? Or is spaghetti too foreign for your very conventional family?” she asked innocently. Hannibal and his two “children” were anything but conventional.

  “No, no, that’s fine,” he said, smiling, seeming to enjoy that he was making her angry. “If you need me, I’ll be outside. I want to see that Harley Wendell was on. Good-looking machine, isn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve never been butch enough to learn much about motorcycles. Tell me, does she also chew tobacco and play football with the men?”

  As he bit into his apple, he gave her a look that nearly singed her hair. “Wendell does whatever she wants whenever she wants with whomever she wants.”

  “Yes, and I can see that it has made her into a very nice person.”

  As Tarik left, chuckling, closing the door behind him, Kady threw a handful of apple peels at him.

  After Tarik left, she was thinking about that dreadful red-haired—

  “May I help?” Luke said meekly from the doorway. “And can you really cook?”

  There was a sweetness about him that reminded her of Cole. She smiled and gestured for him to join her. “Come in and talk to me while I cook. Tell me everything about your family.”

  Luke helped himself to a slice of apple. “About the Jordans or about my cousin Tarik in particular?”

  “I have no interest in him whatever. None. He is free to do whatever he wants. He can—” She stopped because Luke was grinning at her.

  “Right. And the way the two of you look at each other could set the barn on fire. So where do you want me to start? With his mother, his father, or his girlfriends?”

  Kady kept her eyes down on the apples she was peeling and didn’t look up at him.

  Luke lowered his voice. “Or would you rather that I tell you about his dreams?”

  “What dreams?” she said sharply.

  “Of a little girl on a pony. A little girl with lots of dark hair in a fat braid down her back. Actually, she had a braid very much like yours. Interested?”

  “Maybe,” she said as though she didn’t want to hear every word.

  “Oh, well, then, I guess I better go outside and help my sister tune her carburetor.”

  “Sit!” Kady ordered, pointing with the knife.

  “And what do I get if I rat on my own flesh and blood?”

  “A meal better than any you’ve ever eaten in your life,” she said seriously.

  With eyes wide, Luke stared at her. “Alexandria, Virginia! Onions! Kady with a d. That’s who you are.”

  Kady couldn’t help giving a smile of pleasure. “Exactly. So sit down here and talk to me while I prepare dinner.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Luke said as he took a seat across the table, where she put him to work peeling the rest of the apples.

  Luke talked while Kady worked quickly and efficiently. He repeated what Kady had already heard about the neglect of Tarik’s parents, but she had to keep her eyes lowered when Luke said he’d never seen his cousin so relaxed and smiling. “You’ve done something to him,” Luke said. “It didn’t take me two minutes to see that he’s not his usual quiet, mysterious self. When I was a kid, he used to visit Legend, but he’d disappear for days at a time. No one knew where he went. Both Wendell and I used to try to follow him, but he easily lost us. But today . . . With you . . .”

  Kady refused to give any weight to Luke’s words. “I’m sure that if he brought a girlfriend up here, he would have—”

  “He did once. When Wendell wasn’t here, of course. His girlfriend was so frightened of the coyotes’ howling that Tarik took her back to town the next day.”

  “Tarik,” Kady said softly. “Did you know that in New York people don’t know his name?”

  Luke gave a one-sided grin so like Tarik’s that Kady had to look away. “Private man. Very private. So tell me about you, Kady. Why did you marry my taciturn cousin?”

  Kady didn’t want to talk about herself, she wanted to listen. “Come outside to gather herbs with me and tell me about his dream.”

  Smiling, Luke followed her outside as Kady gathered herbs, explaining that, all his life, Tarik had had a dream of a little girl on a pony. When he was a child, he used to say that she was his best friend and that she was going to come live with him. His fantasies about the little girl were a family joke.

  After they returned to the house, Kady listened intently as she wielded a rolling pin. She was making fazzolétto, handkerchief pasta: whole leaves of herbs were rolled between transparently fine layers of pasta, then cut into sheets to show the beauty of the pattern. There was no time to make her usual three-hour tomato sauce, so she used canned tomatoes, onions, and herbs.

  For dessert, she made a tarte tatin, one of the most divine dishes ever created: caramelized butter and sugar covered with a dozen apples sliced paper thin, cooked on top of the stove, then a round of flaky pastry put on top, baked until golden brown, and at last the whole thing was turned upside down onto a plate. It was almost as beautiful as it was delicious.

  At about seven o’clock in the evening, everyone began showing up, enticed by the smells coming from the open windows of the house. Hannibal looked as though he’d been working in the mines, as his clothes were flecked with rock dust. Wendell still wore her black leather, but she’d put on even more makeup, making Kady wonder how she could lift her eyelids when they were so weighted down with mascara.

  As for Tarik, he came in last and from the rolled-eyed looks of reproof that Wendell gave him, Kady didn’t think they had spent the afternoon together after all. Not that it mattered to her, of course, but as she turned away, she smiled. Then she began to wonder where he had been, for Tarik was very dirty, wi