Page 116 of Why Cheese?
I know.
You didn’t lock up right.
I know.
You forgot to knock on the trash can lid. Five times.
I know.
It’s all your fault. You killed the only men who could ever love you.
Love?
The gremlin falls silent. I fight to blink away the tears, the numbers a glowing haze. Slowly, the fog lifts.
Five minutes past sundown.
An inhuman squeak tears up my throat. My phone rings and it tumbles from my hands. When it strikes the ground the ringing stops. I stand on shaky fawn legs and take a step closer to the counter. “Cam?” I call out. “Roq? Brie?” A sob wracks my body and I fight to stop it just as I scream, “Cheddy!”
They aren’t here. Naked and laughing, or yelling, or arguing. No goofy blond man hefts an entire palette of cheese one-handed. He isn’t chastised by Roq, or encouraged by Cam. Brie doesn’t quietly present me with one of his new paintings while he picks at a salad.
They’re gone.
Instead of four outrageous, impossible men, the cheese stands alone.
“No!” Screaming, I slam my hand into one of the shelves. Pain sunders up my arm, but I feel dead watching the flimsy wood break and wheels of cheese go tumbling to the floor. As they roll and bounce around, almost like they’re alive, it hits me. Roq said something about them being put away. What if they can’t come back when they’re under something? What if they need to be freed?
In a laughing, blind panic, I race around the room. Cheese flies everywhere. I switch from hurling them off of the stacks one by one to pushing the whole thing over. Garbage-soaked wheels of cheddar roll across the floor. Bries and camemberts tumble out of their cases and land with a splat. None of them are my guys.Where are they?
I fling my arm across the shelves, clearing them. As more cheese hits the ground, I look back waiting for the impossible.
Humans can’t come from cheese. Everyone knows that. It’s science. It’s impossible.
“Gah!” I shriek at the cheese refusing to become a foot or a hand—anything to prove I’m not insane. Tearing through the place, I upend every wheel, every slice, every cube until the floor is covered in nothing but cheese.
The clock strikes midnight and I’m alone.
Numb, I wrap my arms around the charcuterie board and sink to my knees. Salt burns down my cheeks and pain bites at my knuckles. I hold the board against my sternum like it’s a blade about to pierce my ribs and tear through my dying heart.
You did this. You killed them.
“I know.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Mourning Mascarpone
EVERY NIGHT I waited. Hands clenched, breath held, heart breaking—I watched as the sun slipped below the skyline and nothing happened. I’d try to stay up until the sun rose, certain that if I was there, I’d figure this out. I’d find them. But I rarely made it past two A.M., my head heavy and eyes on fire.
Once, cops showed up for a wellness check my mother called in. They wouldn’t say who, but I knew it was her. I gave them the last few bottles of wine while I loaded the garbage cheese in a trash bag. There was no saving any of it. No saving the store.
She won.
As badly as I want to stay, I can’t. Without them, I can’t make cheese. Without cheese, there’s no store to run. And without the store…
Numb, I gave up and let that realtor, Mr. Walker, do whatever he wanted to my hopes and dreams. Each day, I had torn out what little remained of the shelves and tossed away the molding cheese—except for the little charcuterie board. That I reverently placed in the emptying refrigerator counter. Every day, I’d push Brie and Cam back together into a little mold, then place them on the counter at dusk in the hope that they only needed more time to come back.
It never happened. One afternoon, I woke after my vigil to find the only refrigerated counter gone and the charcuterie board on the floor. They started to grow mold and melt in the boiling August heat. If they could have survived a minor case of digestion before, they wouldn’t now. There was nothing to come back to.
