Chapter 8 - The Tourtière Legacy
Graham came home at four in the afternoon.
The light was fading from the sky, leaving behind that pale, bruised violet that settles over the city before the winter streetlights flicker on. Theo was sitting on the living room rug, methodically wrapping his plastic dinosaurs in green construction paper with miles of scotch tape, whispering secrets to them about Santa Claus.
I was in the kitchen, rolling out a sheet of pie dough for a chicken pot pie. The counter was dusted with white flour; my sleeves were pushed up to my elbows, and a smudge of butter was drying on my wrist.
Graham walked in through the side door. He didn't take off his coat immediately. He stood on the linoleum mat, his face pale, his breath catching in his throat, looking at the flour on my hands, the rolling pin, the wooden cutting board.
"Graham?" I asked, setting the pin down onto the granite.
He walked over to the island, pulled a small, worn piece of paper from his coat pocket, and laid it flat between us.
It was an index card, yellowed with age, the edges frayed and stained with brown rings of ancient vanilla extract. At the top, written in a spidery, elegant script that belonged to a generation long buried, were the words: Maman’s Tourtière — 1954.
"Where did you get this?" I whispered.
"My dad gave it to me," Graham said. His voice was thick, clogged with unshed tears. "Before Brenda came home. He pulled it out of his wallet. He’s carried it around for forty years, Margo. He never gave it to Brenda because he knew she would throw it away."
I looked down at the index card. Beneath the list of ground pork, savory, onion, and lard was a small note in the margin: Two pinches of clove only. Any more will kill the pork.
"Walter was right," I said softly, looking up into Graham’s eyes. "I put half a teaspoon in. It was too much clove."
Graham let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. He reached out with both hands, ignoring the flour on my arms, and pulled me across the granite island until his forehead was resting against the hollow of my neck.
His coat was freezing, smelling of the highway, salt, and old spruce needles, but his skin was burning hot against my throat. He was weeping—not the polite, quiet tears of a man trying to manage a scene, but the ragged, deep, chest-heaving sobs of a boy who had finally crawled out from the wreckage of a collapsed cathedral.
"I'm sorry," he wept into my collar. "Margo, I am so sorry. I let them treat you like dirt. I let them do it because I was terrified that if I stood up, they would look at me the way they looked at everyone else. I made you carry everything."
I brought my floured hands up and rested them against the back of his neck, feeling the heavy, frantic pulse hammering beneath his collar.
"I know," I murmured into his hair. "I know, Graham."
"I told them," he choked out, his shoulders shaking against my chest. "I told Mom she wasn't coming here. I told Renee to shut up. I told them we were staying home for Christmas."
I pulled back an inch, looking into his face. His eyes were red-rimmed, swollen, his nose running, his hair wild from the drive. He didn't look like an architect presenting a clean set of plans. He looked human. He looked broken, and for the first time in seven years, he looked entirely mine.
"You told Renee to shut up?" I asked, a tiny, involuntary smile twitching at the corner of my mouth.
"I did," he sniffled, wiping his nose with the sleeve of his coat like an eight-year-old child. "And Walter told her to listen to me."
We stood there in the quiet kitchen while the streetlights outside flickered from amber to cool white, casting the shadows of the bare maple trees across our ceiling. From the living room, Theo shouted, "Mommy! The T-Rex is wrapped! He's a present now!"
"Come here, T-Rex," Graham called out, his voice cracked and raw, but steadying itself with every breath.
Theo came galloping around the corner, holding his taped-up green monstrosity aloft like an Olympic torch. He skidded to a halt on the linoleum, looked at Graham’s wet face, then looked at the flour on my hands.
"Daddy's crying," Theo said, matter-of-factly, tilting his head.
"Daddy was just cold from the car, buddy," Graham said, kneeling down onto the floor, completely unbothered by the flour dust coating his trousers, and opening his arms wide.
May you like
Theo threw himself into the embrace, the green construction paper crinkling loudly against Graham’s wool coat. Graham held him with both arms locked tight around his back, burying his face into the four-year-old’s hair, breathing him in like a man who had just surfaced from twenty fathoms of black water.
I turned back to the counter, picked up the rolling pin, and began smoothing out the dough for our dinner. The flour rose in a soft, white cloud in the yellow light of the stove, settling gently over the granite, over the recipe card from 1954, over the kitchen that belonged to no one but us.
