Coda Books 04 - Strawberries for Dessert (MM)

laughing.
    “Don’t tell me.”
    We sat in silence for a minute. Maybe two. Finally he sighed dramatically, and I turned to find him watching me warily. “My full name is Cole Nicholas Fenton Davenport the Third.”
    I burst out laughing before I could help myself, but cut it short when I saw the obvious embarrassment on his face. “Umm…. Wow.”
    “It’s terribly ostentatious, isn’t it?”
    “It really is.”
    “You can see why I don’t choose to introduce myself as such. It makes me feel pretentious.”
    “It makes you sound pretentious.”
    He rolled his eyes at me. “You’re not helping, love.”
    They called for first class boarding, and I ignored it out of habit, but Cole stood up. I looked up at him in surprise. “Are you coming?” he asked.
    “Are we flying first class?”
    “Good lord, of course we are,” he said, and I had to hurry to gather my things and catch up with up him.
    “I’ve never flown first class,” I admitted as we found our seats.
    “I’ve never flown coach.”
    He got a blanket down before he even sat down. He wrapped it around himself and curled into the window seat with his head against the wall, looking out at the tarmac. I suspected it was driving him crazy that he couldn’t take his shoes off. “Is everything okay?” I asked him.
    “Fine,” he said quietly. “I warned you that I would be temperamental on this trip.”
    “I don’t mind,” I told him. “I’m just not sure if I should try to cheer you up or leave you alone.”
    “I’m not sure either, love. But I’m glad you’re here.”
    The simple confession touched me. It was so unlike him to say anything genuine. I wished that we weren’t on an airplane with a line of people filing past us. I wished I could wrap my arms around him and make him smile. I settled for reaching over and putting my hand on his leg. He put his hand on top of it, allowing his fingers to tangle with mine. “I’m glad too,” I said.
    The flight from Phoenix to New York took nearly six hours. He hardly spoke for the first half. I read a magazine and left him alone. We were three hours in when he asked suddenly, “What was your mother’s name?”
    I turned to him in surprise, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was still looking out the window, and his bangs hid his expression from me.
    “Why do you ask?”
    He was silent for a bit, and I was starting to think he wasn’t going to answer. But finally he sighed and turned to look at me with wary eyes. “I’ve been reading the cards.” For half a second, I thought he was talking about some kind of fortune telling thing. But then I remembered the recipe box. I hadn’t thought about it since the day I gave it to him.
    “Yes?” I prodded gently.
    He looked so unsure of himself. It was unusual for him. He looked down at his lap, letting his hair hide his eyes from me again. “I feel like I know her,” he said softy. “I know it sounds silly, but I do. I know what she looked like, from the picture at your house. And I learned a great deal about her from the cards.”
    “Like what?”
    “I know that she loved garlic. I know that her favorite dessert was pumpkin bars, and she liked key lime pie, but she hated anything with coconut. I know that she took the green peppers out of every recipe—”
    “Because I didn’t like them,” I said in surprise, but he kept talking as if I hadn’t spoken. “—and that she put sour cream and onion flavored potato chips on top of her tuna casserole. I know that she mixed cottage cheese into her goulash, and used half hamburger and half spicy Italian sausage for her meatballs, and that she never made pie crust from scratch. I know that she made beef stroganoff more than any other recipe—”
    “It was good, too.”
    “—and that she was allergic to shellfish. I know she didn’t like chicken enchiladas or green chili, but she loved cilantro, and I know that her favorite soup in the world was ham and beans.”
    “You got all of that from a box of index cards?”
    He turned away from me to hide his blush. “I could tell which ones she used by how worn the cards were. The ones that are clean were never used. The ones she used often are almost illegible. And she made notes.” It amazed me to learn that not only had he kept the recipe box, he had looked at it. And more than that, he had studied it. He had used it to piece together a picture of my mother that even I had never quite seen before. His voice, when he continued,