He opens the refrigerator, tunnels through. "Aha." He unearths a plastic container. "Ricotta."

"Cheese," Jenna tells me.

He pops off the top, sniffs, and sighs. Jenna checks to see if I'm digging him. He opens the crisper, dives in, and surfaces with a bunch of weeds that he waves under my nose. "Parsley, dill."  Out comes a lemon."  He closes the crisper with his knee, extracts a box of eggs from the top shelf, and asks Jenna to "grab that half and half, and take two eggs out of this." He shoves the egg box into her arms.

"What are you making?" she inquires.

"Ricotta tart."

Jenna looks my way, chin tucks down, eyebrows rise. Translation: I hope you heard that, I hope you're impressed.

"Cut this in half."  He hands her a lemon.  "You relax, Frannie."  He cracks the eggs and empties them one-handed, selects a whisk from a host of kitchen doodads, and starts beating.  "You should always eat when you unburden your heart."

Jenna's eyebrows nearly fly off her forehead. I pull a long face dittoing "impressive" in our silent conversation, but frankly I think James read that line somewhere and is quoting. What normal guy says that?

"James's parents are never home," says Jenna.

"Never home," James echoes.

His little brother's at day camp. His mom and dad own a hardware store in Cold Spring, and they work all day."  Jenna does a split.  The kitchen's a galley and when she sinks down and raises her arms, each hand proffering a half lemon, she pretty much takes up the space.

James accepts the lemon fiom his balletic assistant and, with one twist of each half, squeezes the juice into the eggs.

He's in constant motion. He may be awkward and gangly to the point that no limb appears to be aware of another when he lopes around in regular life, he may drive a car in fits and starts as cautious as a canary in fear of a cat, but here in the kitchen he's as graceful as Jenna: reaching for this and that, sometimes simultaneouly, spinning fiom one spot to another, deftly slicing/dicing/whipping.  The fish has found water, or maybe the octopus has: He beats the cheese into the eggs with one hand while he reaches for a glass with another and knocks a lower cabinet closed with his foot. Signor Waldo the Italian chef has another moniker now: Octopus Man.

from "Frannie in Pieces".
Delia Ephron's latest novel.  Copyright © 2007 HarperCollins Publishers, All rights reserved.  Text copyright © 2007 South of Pico Productions, Inc.  Illustrations copyright © 2007 by Chad W. Beckerman.
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