Brodetto

by Kelly Zanotti

It’s a love test, always the first ritual step: the making of brodetto.

*

The first time she made it was the first time she had ever cooked mussels, or red snapper. Though she had said “I love you” before, returning language that was always handed to her too soon. She called the man over to her apartment and he waxed on about liking the stew, just as she had waxed on in making it. 

*

The third time she ever made it she put a fresh lobster tail on top. She was simmering the stew in the man’s kitchen, his mother humming as she set bowls on the table, when he cornered her, back to his mother, and in a low whisper hissed, “I can’t believe you bought lobster.” The lobster was a nice bite but divided between the three of them there was hardly enough, and the snapper had been over-simmered to a toughness. They ate it with a half-frown.

*

This time: canned plum tomatoes, good olive oil. Embarrassed by how much fish costs. 

The man bakes the bread to go in the bottom of the bowls, leaving it to turn golden in the oven while she cooks down the tomatoes. Then she leaves the mussels to gasp themselves open in the broth while he cuts steaming white slices and arranges them in two bowls.

They eat in separate corners of his living room, cross-legged, bowls resting on the hardwood floor. The bread is sweet, and the fish richly salted. They have two bowls each, after which he rises from his seat, carrying the bowl of empty mussel shells, and declares, “Well, Sugar, that was a fine brodetto,” trying on the new word—the Italian unfamiliar on his lips—and kisses her while she still sits.

*

She doesn’t remember the second time she made brodetto.

*

The next morning she wakes to a plate of the leftover bread toasted and topped with peanut butter. A mug of coffee sits steaming for her on the desk.

Love has not been said, might not be said, but her tongue quickly sticks in the peanut butter.

*

She has a fault: she has never been able to see forward toward the end. Her head always tilted down at the plate on the table, the slab of toast before her. The coffee, warm on a September morning.

At home she typically listens to the pot speak to her while the coffee brews, a dialogue of groans and smacking verbs while she nods politely out of her sleep. But today the coffee is already made, dark and silent in the mug. He sits at the other desk, book spread open, and asks how she slept.

*

There is something she repeats to herself when he turns his face from her, something she whispers when her car door closes and she is about to drive home after the eighth night of sleeping in his apartment.

*

The man for whom she made her fourth brodetto once screamed at her for spilling ground coffee in the sink. I trace it back to the farmers’ hands, and the ground where it grew. You would have been more careful if you did, too.

*

Dear and Darling are stuck in the peanut butter.

*

It was the day the homemade bread began to smell faintly rancid on his counter. The butter in it going sour, and the coffee, too, striking the back of her tongue too acidic. 

It was the first day that she rose from bed before him. Him, stretching his limbs into the center of the mattress in her absence, and her, at the kitchen window, succumbing to the metaphor. 

*

She also understands subjunctive mood.

That this may end, pressing her forehead to the window glass, a bright mist pressing back from the other side. 

She takes it as a study in plot. The narrative arc traced over her heart, thumb arriving at the inevitable red X where she will bleed. 

*

When he appears in the doorframe behind her, she smiles and it settles on her face as a wince. Asks him if he’ll bake more bread. There’s still brodetto in the fridge, in a pot with a heavy red lid. 

He doesn’t eat breakfast, as a rule.

*

I think I’m gonna call a psychiatrist today, love (heart, darling, dear), she doesn’t say.

*

But there’s still brodetto in the fridge, in a pot with a heavy red lid.