Page 6 of The New Place

“You love me,” Ned says.

“I have no shot with her.”

“Why not?”

“She looks like a real adult. Not that you know what that is, living with your parents.”

“I’d be hurt by that if I didn’t hear the cha-ching of my bank account every month from not paying rent somewhere. Did Abbot say when he’s coming?”

“After his meeting, like you just read with your own eyes. Apparently it came up last minute, and he’ll be here right afterward.”

An unscheduled meeting right at the beginning of the semester, at an hour when most of the faculty would be leaving campus? “Oh. I have to rescue him.”

“You have to not leave me here with a bachelorette party.”

“This has Chris all over it.” Ned drains his beer. “I’m going to stick Baxter upstairs, okay? I’ll come right back for him, but it could take a minute to pry Abbot free.”

“Ned,” Pat hisses. “What do I even say to her?”

“Tell her about my second paper,” Ned whispers back. “Claire? Pat’ll take care of you. Hey, Pat, she got a salad. I think I got her a salad. Get her a salad, would you? And nachos and another beer.”

“You are the most terrible thing that’s ever happened to me,” Pat says. “A bachelorette party? This is torture.”

“It absolutely is,” Claire agrees.

Ned hugs him, like he should have when he first got here. “I’ll be back in a few.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Pat mutters, but he’s already leaning across the bar to talk to Claire, his face quickly turning a bright red.

It’s still so cold out. Ned hurries against the bite of winter to grab Baxter from the car and hustle him into Pat’s apartment. “Don’t eat any shoes,” he tells the dog. “I’m bringing back our guy. You ready to finally see Abbot? Yeah, me too, bud.”

Ned checks the mirror before he jogs back down the stairs. Abbot will look like a million bucks, even at the end of a long workday, and Ned will have just run across campus.

But the other option is to delay even longer, and Ned gives that thought a hearty fuck no. Abbot’s so close, just a couple blocks away, and once more, Ned hurries out into the night, eager for him.

3

ABBOT

As Chris talks, Abbot opens another tab, scrolling through recipes he could make with Peggy. A chocolate griessköpfli? Peggy will like that more than a traditional one, and licking the bowl will give her something to indulge in while waiting for the recipe to set in the refrigerator.

Can children eat raw batter? he searches like he always does ahead of baking with her. He finds yet again that the advice swings between Better enjoy a trip to the ER if you let a kid eat raw eggs and uncooked flour and What is with the world these days? Why do we worry about everything? Let kids live a little.

Ned can settle this. Abbot’s in the lucky position of simply providing Peggy with the sugar and accompanying fun, and he can leave any actual oversight to Ned. Like when they made both a lopsided apple strudel and an apricot cake in one weekend, and Ned had negotiated exactly how much of it Peggy could consume before dinner.

Quite a bit, it turned out, to the detriment of her plate of untouched food.

What else had she wanted to bake from the recipe book Abbot got for her birthday? I can read the German, she still insists, drawing her finger down the list of ingredients as she sounds out the English version provided. She’s vetoed Aargauer rüeblitorte, arguing it’s just a carrot cake and baking is no time for vegetables. The vermicelles, perhaps? They could try those this weekend with the chestnut paste he brought from Geneva, though he’s not sure she’d like the flavor. Better to make something else at the same time if they go that route. Cremeschnitte or perhaps spitzbuebe. She likes those little sugar-covered jam cookies, and he’d looked forward to making them with her over the holidays, back when he’d thought she and Ned would make the trip to Geneva.

They will this summer. It’ll be a better time for a visit, what with the brevity of her holiday break and her scheduled days with Jen. She and Ned will have long enough to really explore Switzerland, and they can work through a long list of bakeries while they’re there. Liesl will hopefully be past the mood she’d clung to this past month, alternatively bubbly and joyful, then morose and sour. Thirteen, he had thought more than once, wondering at the change.

An email alert flashes at the top right of Abbot’s screen and he clicks it. I want some, Lee has written in the subject line.

“The cookies,” she whispers when he glances at her.

“We’ll meet monthly between now and May,” Chris says at the front of the room. “And I’ll be checking in with each of you, of course. Book club accountability, for all of us. Gotta get those pages read!”

Lee holds out her hand beneath the table, wiggling her fingers.