Chapter 8 - The Solitary Steak
The butcher shop on Market Street in Manassas had been run by the same family of German immigrants since nineteen-fifty-four.
It had sawdust on the floor—real pine sawdust that smelled of resin and clean cold—and a display case made of thick curved glass that showed beef that had been hung in a dry-aging locker for twenty-eight days until the fat was the color of old ivory and the meat was dark as an autumn leaf.
I walked in at four o'clock on the afternoon of December thirty-first.
The bell above the door gave a cheerful, brassy jingle that cut through the gray slush of the street.
Old Otto was behind the counter, wearing his white coat with the blue-and-white striped apron over his belly, his hands wiping an eight-inch boning knife on a clean linen towel.
"Mrs. Powell," he said, his face breaking into a wide, red-cheeked smile that showed his gold fillings. "I haven't seen you since the first frost. Liam’s wife was in here three weeks ago for that heritage turkey. She told me you were letting her do the shopping now."
"Liam’s wife likes to talk, Otto," I said, setting my purse on the counter.
"She does," Otto chuckled, leaning his elbows on the glass. "She wanted me to cut the bone out of a prime rib and tie it with lavender string. I told her lavender belongs in the wash-house, not on a piece of Black Angus. What can I get for you today, Mrs. Powell? A nice roasting chicken for the holiday?"
"No, Otto," I said. "I want one ribeye. Cut it two inches thick. Cut it from the small end of the loin where the marbling is tightest."
Otto blinked. His knife paused above the steel.
"Just the one?"
"Just the one," I told him. "Cut it thick enough to hold the heat of the cast iron, Otto. I’m having dinner with myself tonight."
He looked at me for three seconds. He had known David since they were boys catching catfish in the creek behind the quarry; he knew the look a woman gets when she has stopped asking the neighbors for permission to live in her own skin.
"Two inches," Otto said, nodding his head twice. "I have a loin from a steer down in Fauquier County that finished on clover and corn. It’s got a fat cap that’ll crisp up like bacon."
He walked into the locker.
When he returned, the meat was wrapped in two layers of white butcher paper, tied with rough brown twine, the weight heavy and cold in his palms.
"Twenty-two dollars, Mrs. Powell," he said, handing it across the counter.
I pulled two crisp ten-dollar bills and two singles from my purse—money I had drawn from my own pension draft at the credit union that morning.
"Happy New Year, Otto," I said.
"Happy New Year, Pauline," he replied, touching the brim of his paper cap. "Tell Liam that if he wants that lavender string on his roast, he’ll have to go to the supermarket in the city."
I drove home through the dusk.
The clouds had settled down onto the hills, turning the sky into that deep, slate-purple that promises eight inches of dry snow before dawn. The lights were not on in the house when I turned into the gravel drive.
Liam and Harper had left at ten that morning in her crossover, Harper announcing that they were meeting her parents at a spa in Leesburg for "pre-holiday wellness treatments" and that they would return with the fourteen guests at seven-thirty sharp.
"Have the potatoes peeled by four, Pauline," she had called through the car window as Liam backed down the lane. "We want the starch to settle so they whip up light."
I had not peeled a single potato.
I walked into the kitchen, set the two certified envelopes on the marble shelf inside the drawer beside my chair, and took off my coat.
The house was sixty-four degrees.
I didn't turn on the central heat. I went down to the cellar, brought up two armloads of seasoned hickory, and built an eight-log fire in the woodstove until the cast-iron top was hot enough to dance a drop of water across the black plate.
I took David’s twelve-inch skillet from the hook behind the door.
I set it on the gas ring, turned the flame high, and dropped two tablespoons of salted butter and three sprigs of fresh rosemary from the pot on the windowsill into the hot metal.
The smell that filled the kitchen was not the smell of an outsourced holiday.
It was the smell of seventy years of honest grease, iron, and salt.
When the butter was brown and foaming, I laid the two-inch ribeye into the center of the pan. The sizzle was sudden, violent, and deafening—the sound of protein meeting steel at five hundred degrees.
I cooked it four minutes on the first side. Three on the second.
I basted the dark crust with the foaming fat using a bent tablespoon David had found in the creek fifty years ago.
When it was done, I set the steak on my plain white plate, poured a glass of cold well water from the pitcher, and sat down at the head of the kitchen island.
May you like
The grandfather clock in the hall began its preliminary whir for the eight o'clock strike.
And then the headlights swept across the kitchen ceiling—not two beams, but six, as three heavy SUVs turned off the county road and came crunching up the frozen gravel of my driveway.
