Page 43 of Summer Reading

“Oh, I’m pretty broken,” I said. He didn’t argue, just tipped his head to the side in that way he did when he was listening. “I didn’t find out that I had dyslexia until I was in high school, and by then, I’d developed so many coping mechanisms to deal with it that I actually thought I was doing fine.”

“Strong survival instinct,” he said.

I smiled. “I suppose. What’s weird is, looking back, I knew something was wrong, but by the time I knew enough to tell my parents I was struggling, their marriage was unraveling and I didn’t want to cause them any more stress, so I just figured out how to decode the world enough to survive.”

“I bet you’re wicked smart,” he said. “Like genius-level intelligent.”

I glanced at him in surprise and drew in a shaky breath. It was the first time someone had discovered I had dyslexia and assumed I was smart instead of dumb. It shocked me. It made my eyes fill with tears, and a hard knot formed in my throat. Yes, it meant that much to me. After years of being dismissed as stupid because of my learning differences, Ben had spun it around onme. I didn’t know what to say, and it was taking everything I had not to cry.

I took a beat to pull it together. He was being kind. I appreciated it more than I could ever say, but as much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t pretend that what he said was true.

“The critical voices in my head don’t see it that way, but thank you.” I was trying to keep it light. He wasn’t having it.

“Tell those voices to shut the fuck up,” he said. He pushed his sunglasses up onto the top of his head and leaned toward me, clearly wanting to emphasize his point. “I mean you have to be off-the-charts brilliant. There’s no way a child could keep up academically like you did unless you were thinking three moves ahead of everyone else. That’s freakishly intelligent.”

I stared at him. His gaze held mine, and his eyes didn’t have a shadow of a doubt in them. He genuinely believed I was brilliant. I had no idea what to do with this information. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to cry. I wanted to hug the stuffing out of him. I did none of those things.

“I’ve never thought of it that way,” I said. “Huh.”

“How did you get outed?” he asked.

I thought about Mrs. Ward and the play. I didn’t want to risk a break in the dam of tears I was pushing back, so I kept it short. “At the last minute, a teacher reassigned parts for a play we were reading in class. Iwas assigned a new part and couldn’t memorize my lines ahead of time.” I glanced at him with a rueful look. “It was bad, as in ‘crash and burn with no survivors’ bad.”

“I’m sorry.” His eyes were kind and full of empathy.

I felt the tears well up again, but I blinked them away and asked, “So if you don’t think I’m broken and you’re not trying to fix me, why the story?”

“Cooking is your thing, right?” he asked.

“Hundred percent.”

“True confession time,” he said. “I hate cooking. No, ‘hate’ is too weak a word. I loathe, despise, and abhor it.”

“Don’t hold back,” I said, repeating his words to me on the ferry when we first met. “Say what you feel.”

“Oh, believe me, I am,” he said. “If I had it my way, I would eat out for every meal, I’d never ever cook. In fact, my house wouldn’t even have a kitchen.”

I put my hand to my throat. “Blasphemy!”

“I know,” he said. He raised his hands in the air. “I’m a knuckle-dragging boor, a philistine to the culinary arts. But the truth is I loathe everything about cooking. It bores me to tears. So here’s my question to you, why do you love it?”

Stunned by his revelation—I mean, who hates cooking when you have to eat to live?—I turned from him and stared out at the water. The waves were rolling up higher and higher on the beach as the tide made itsway in. How could I answer his question in a way that would make sense to him? Cooking beside my vovó had been a part of my life as soon as I could stand on a stepstool beside her. It calmed me. It allowed me to be creative. Under her gentle guidance, it was the one place where I felt exceptional.

“It just makes sense to me,” I said. “Taking ingredients and making something new out of them, something that didn’t exist before, that tastes amazing and sustains the body, it feels like a special sort of magic.”

“Magic. That’s how I feel when I read a book,” he said. “It’s like opening a portal into another world, allowing me to escape the one I’m trapped in.”

“I can see that,” I said. “While I was listening to you, I felt as if I were in a pub in Ireland, looking for an ex-boyfriend and wondering what I would say if I found him.”

“Exactly. Just like when I tasted the food you created at that delicious happy hour, I was in awe of what you were able to conjure. Since you shared your love of cooking with me, it seemed reasonable, when I learned why you’re not a reader, to share what I love with you, which is stories.”

“You really aren’t trying to ‘fix’ me?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “As long as you don’t ask me to cook, I won’t ask you to read.”

I laughed. Now his scheme was coming into focus.“But you’ll eat what I cook and I’ll listen to your stories, so we’re really just sharing what we love with each other.”

“Yeah,” he said. His gaze was tender, and I felt my throat get tight when he asked, “Do you think that’s possible?”

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