Page 42 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“Romantic.”

“It will be if the chicken cooperates.”

“Search ‘piccata no capers.’”

He typed with one finger. The kitchen already smelled like the garlic he’d started too early, soft and gold in the butter. He scrolled. “This one says I can substitute green olives.”

“Do we have green olives?”

“We have black olives.”

“That feels like a different dinner.”

He opened the refrigerator and took inventory out loud. “Chicken thighs. The recipe says breasts.”

“Chicken is chicken.”

“That’s what I said.” He set the thighs on the cutting board. “One lemon. Half a bag of the shredded mozzarella from the taco night.”

“Mozzarella wasn’t from taco night. Nothing about taco night was from taco night.”

“Butter. Flour.” He shut the door with his hip. “We’re in business.”

Stella’s phone buzzed on the couch cushion. She reached back without looking. “Bea’s doing her hair tonight. There’s a diagram.”

“Of course there is,” Tyler said, and kept scrolling.

The recipe had a story at the top, a long one. He scrolled. “This woman’s telling me about her grandmother’s village. I just need the pan temperature.”

“You have to earn the pan temperature. That’s how those sites work. They hide the actual food at the bottom.”

He scrolled to the bottom. Read. Looked at the refrigerator for a while.

“What?” Stella asked.

“Capers are pickled.”

“Okay.”

“We have pickles.”

Stella lowered her phone. “You’re going to make piccata with pickles.”

“I’m going to try it on us first. That’s the whole point of tonight. You don’t serve Lindsey the first attempt.” He got the cutting board down and minced three pickle chips into pieces the size of capers, more or less, and Stella came off the couch to watch.

The dredging station was a dinner plate of flour, and the recipe said one wet hand, one dry hand, and Tyler used both hands for both jobs, and within a minute the flour was on the counter, the faucet, the front of his shirt, and one cabinet knob nobody could explain.

“You look like you lost a fight with a bakery,” Stella said.

“System’s working.” He pressed a thigh into the flour with both wrong hands and laid it in the pan, and the butter took it with a sound like applause.

The first side of the chicken went fine. The smell got serious—butter, garlic, lemon zest where he’d grated it straight over the pan—and Tyler stood over it with the spatula and did not touch it, because the recipe said don’t touch it, and the woman with the grandmother had been firm about that.

The second side was where it went wrong. He turned to answer Stella’s question about whether Lindsey actually liked capers or just tolerated them, and the butter went past brown while his back was turned, and the smoke came up off the pan quiet and fast, and the smoke alarm went off.

The smoke alarm had waited all week for this.

Tyler got the pan off the burner and the window up, and Stella stood on a kitchen chair and fanned the alarm with a cutting board, and for about forty seconds the bungalow was all noise and lemon smoke and the neighbor’s dog answering the alarm personally. Then it stopped, and the pan sat in the sink hissing, and the chicken had gone somewhere the recipe never mentioned.