Frost's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Frost woke before dawn and opened his pantry. He was cooking that night for the retired cook, and he had promised her something he feared. That meant moving toward his grandmother's soup without stealing it. He needed her bones, her roots, her sour green weed from the ditch behind her house. He needed the fat pork she cured in a shed. He had none of it. His shelves held saffron, aged vinegar, dried porcini, three kinds of salt. Nothing on them tasted like the countryside she cooked from. Every pot he built here would come out clever. He had one day to fix that. He wrote a list from memory. Marrow bones. Yellow onions with the skins on. A bitter marsh green his grandmother pulled from standing water. Smoked pork jowl, not belly. A hard, dry cheese rind. He drove out of Fogged City before the light broke. The farms east of the city were half-shut for the season. At the first stall he found bones and onions and a wedge of rind from a woman who remembered his face from years ago. She wrapped the bones in butcher paper without asking why he wanted them. The jowl took longer. He drove another hour to a smokehouse and paid too much for a piece cured the old way, with black pepper and no sugar. He put it in the cooler beside the bones and kept going. The marsh green was the problem. His grandmother pulled it from a wet ditch, and no grocer sold it. He stopped at the edge of a swampy park where the ground stayed soft all year. He walked in past a hollow oak with a wide split down its trunk. Something pale sat inside the cavity, a feather laid on a small painted disc. He did not touch it. He kept his eyes on the ground. He found the plant at the base of a tangled bush, broad glossy leaves dripping from last night's rain. He knew the shape. He knew the smell when he crushed a leaf between his fingers. Bitter, iron, faintly sweet. A frog with a mottled green back watched him from a root and did not move. He cut a full bundle at the stems and wrapped it in a wet cloth. On the way back he stopped at a lounge with dark wood and brass rails, the kind of place his grandmother would have laughed at. He bought a bottle of dry sherry from the bar. She had used cheap cooking wine, but he wanted one honest ingredient of his own in the pot. He drove home with the windows down. By noon his counter held everything the list demanded. Bones, jowl, onions, rind, the wet green bundle, the sherry. The pantry was no longer the reason he would fail. Whatever happened tonight when the retired cook tasted his food, it would happen because of him, not because of what he lacked.