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“I don't know how to fold broken cheese like that,” David exclaimed.
The rest of the table burst out laughing, Marcy and Clint’s faces lit up with joy. Patrick, who had heard the story multiple times, chuckled along with them and looked at David fondly.
It was the last day of Marcy and Clint’s visit to Schitt’s Creek to celebrate David and Patrick’s engagement and they were having an early lunch at Cafe Tropical before they hit the road. David had been sneaking glances at Patrick throughout the meal, checking that Patrick was enjoying himself and that the Brewers liked him as much as they had previously. From Patrick’s expression, it had been going well, and David’s amusing anecdotes were keeping Marcy and Clint laughing.
Clint and Patrick had gone up to the counter to settle the bill with Twyla, from across the room David could see them chatting to her and having a mock contest over who should pay the bill.
“You know,” said David hesitantly, “other than the ill-fated enchiladas, I haven’t really cooked much”. As he finished talking he cringed slightly, wishing his desire to fill the gap in the conversation hadn’t lead to this confession.
“Oh, really?” replied Marcy, David looked at her, expecting judgment but couldn’t find a trace of it on her face, instead she looked intrigued and a little amused.
“Yeah, usually Patrick cooks, or we order in,” as he spoke, David grimaced again.
“I never used to be a good cook,” Marcy said, “Before I married Clint I just lived off sandwiches, it was only starting a family that made me want to cook, and even now I leave the roast dinners to Clint”.
“Really? I wouldn’t have guessed, Patrick always said that you’re a great cook” replied David.
“You don’t want to learn to cook then?” said Marcy, changing the subject to deflect from David’s complement.
“I would like to…” admitted David as he trailed off “I’ve just never had anyone to teach me”
At that moment Patrick and Clint arrived back at the table, both putting their wallets away and rolling their eyes at each other, evidently having settled their mock contest by splitting the bill. Clint reached over the booth and grabbed Marcy’s coat to put it on for her. Patrick gave David a quick kiss on the forehead before David slid out of the booth.
When they left the cafe, coats and scarves wrapped around them, they were hit with the autumn chill. The trees by the cafe had started dropping their leaves, which crunched underfoot as Patrick and David and walked Marcy and Clint to where their car was parked beside the store. Once their car had warmed up, Marcy and Clint said their goodbyes and started the long drive back.
***
A few days later, the trees in front of the store had dropped all of their leaves and the sky was grey with potential rain. David was signing for the mail at Rose Apothecary, there were a few boxes that one of the further away suppliers had sent, and a small parcel. When David got to the final parcel, he saw that it was addressed to him. He squinted at it a few times before he recognised the handwriting. It was the same handwriting as boxes Patrick sometimes received, small care packages from his parents, usually containing family news, home-baked cookies and some gifts.
David placed the parcel on the counter and opened it carefully with a pair of scissors. Inside was a handwritten note on yellow paper, a book and some index cards. David opened the note, it was from Marcy, thanking David for entertaining them for the weekend. At the end of the note Marcy had mentioned their conversation in the cafe, and wrote that she had bought David a book of soup recipes and had copied out some old family recipes that she used to make for Patrick.
When David had finished reading, he held the note in his hands for a few seconds, before putting it down and picking up the book. It had a picture of a chef on the front holding a bowl of tomato soup and promised 100 soup recipes. David flicked through it, getting hungrier at the thought of the food. He glanced at the recipes Marcy had copied out in her neat handwriting, there was a soup recipe, two stew recipes, and a lasagna recipe, with a note at the top saying “this one looks difficult but it’s not!”
David placed the book, letter and note cards in his bag and started unpacking the rest of the delivery, an idea forming in his mind.
***
It was three days later, Patrick was covering the store and David had an afternoon off. He usually spent it bothering Stevie at the motel or watching films in his room, but this afternoon he had a different idea. Before David left, when Patrick had been on his lunch break, David got out a folded piece of paper from his pocket and walked to the front of the store. From the produce section, he selected some juicy looking tomatoes, a carrot, an onion and a stick of celery, and from the bakery section he took a loaf of sourdough bread. He rang them up on the till and shoved them in his bag while Patrick was still at the cafe. When Patrick returned, David persuaded him to lend him the keys to his apartment.
David headed home to collect the recipe book Marcy had given him, and take a nap, and then made his way to Patrick’s flat. Once he got there, David took the produce from his bag, along with the recipe book and set them on the counter. David figured he would try a simple tomato soup, as he had an hour or so before Patrick would arrive back from the store. This may have been his first mistake. David spent a long time chopping up the onion, carrot, and celery, his perfectionism showing through as he needed everything to be exactly the same size. When he had read the recipe book, this had been given as a helpful suggestion, and David had taken it to heart.
His next mistake came a bit later after he had added the oil and vegetables into the pan, and then received a text from Stevie. After twenty minutes of texting back and forth with Stevie, David smelled a slight burning and ran to the stove to check on the vegetables. Unfortunately, some of the onions had taken on a slightly charred appearance. David stirred them a little, hoping that would help. He added the tomatoes he had chopped carefully to the pan, prodding them with the spoon until they became a thick mushy stew. He then added some bay leaves and stock and left the soup to cook.
After his timer went off, David looked at the clock and realised how little time he had, unless there was a particularly chatty customer, Patrick would be back from the store in fifteen minutes. In his panic, David grabbed the soup pan and poured the whole thing into the blender, this was his third mistake. David shoved the lid on tight and blended it until it was smooth.
Happy with the soup, David took a spoon out of the drawer and tasted some of the soup… it tasted… incredibly burnt and surprisingly chewy. He spat out his mouthful, and stared down at the blender filled with inedible soup, his first thought was to throw it in the bin, but luckily he stopped himself when he realised that he could pour it down the sink instead. His heart sank even further as he saw the tomato soup circle down the drain and he started washing up everything.
A few moments later, Patrick walked through the door, wrapped in a brown aviator jacket with cream lapels and wearing a brown hat Marcy had knitted him. He rubbed his hands together a few times to get the feeling back in them from his walk in the cold.
“David, that smells amazing,” said Patrick, giving David a quick kiss and a hug.
“Um… so… about that” David muttered to Patrick, looking at the floor. “I may have failed to make soup”
Patrick started to laugh, first at the thought of David making soup, and then at the thought of David failing to make soup. He hugged David again and then kissed him on the cheek, David had stopped staring at the floor by this point and started to smile himself.
“So, please tell me how you failed to make soup,” Patrick said, once he’d stopped laughing.
“Well, firstly I had a nap”
“I think if your soup recipe starts with a nap, it’s probably not a great recipe,” said Patrick, David ignored him and carried on.
“Then, I burnt the onions”
“Oh, so that’s the burning I could smell”
“And then I blended two bay leaves” finished David, starting to feel sorry for himself again.
Patrick, sensing David’s embarrassment, kissed him again, this time running his hands through the back of David’s hair and stroking his shoulder once they pulled apart.
“You know what, David, it’s the thought that counts, I think we should get pizza and forget all about soup,” Patrick said, smiling at David.
“Well… I am hungry after all this hard work” David replied.
***
It was a week later and David had his usual Wednesday afternoon off, this time he had a solid plan and a butternut squash. He grabbed the keys to Patrick’s apartment and headed out, this time avoiding his nap at the motel. When he got to Patrick’s, he unpacked the recipe book, butternut squash, onions and his phone. After the tomato soup disaster, he had been texting back and forth with Marcy, and she had instructed him to facetime her if he had any problems next time. During the text conversation, David hadn’t been sure whether his stubbornness was endearing or just annoying, but he assumed from Marcy’s offer of help that she liked the idea of David cooking for her son.
This time, the cooking went a lot smoother. At one point, David wasn’t sure how to tell whether the butternut squash soup was cooked, so he called Marcy and showed her the pot, she got him to stab a bit with a fork and tell her how soft it felt.
“Hmm, it feels pretty hard,” David said, and then tried to hold in a smirk.
“Ok,” said Marcy, David wasn’t sure whether or not she had seen his smirk “leave it for a few more minutes”
“Thanks,” said David.
“So how’s the store?” asked Marcy. They started chatting about the store, about how Marcy’s new community choir was going, and about the wedding planning. Marcy stopped David occasionally to get him to do the next step of the cooking. Before long, the soup was ready and simmering away on the stove and David had cut up some crusty bread into slices and placed it on the table alongside some bowls.
David and Marcy were still chatting when Patrick walked through the door. He took his heavy coat off and kissed David on the cheek.
“Oh, hey mom!” he exclaimed when he saw David’s phone propped up against a pepper grinder.
“Hey sweetie, I was just talking to David, but I’ll let you two eat!” said Marcy’s voice from the counter.
“Thanks mom, I’ll call you at the weekend,” said Patrick.
“Thank you again for your help Marcy,” David said before they said their goodbyes and he hung up.
“What was that about?” Patrick asked, his eyebrows knitted together in confusion before he noticed the set table and the pan of soup simmering on the stove. “Oh, she was helping you cook?”
“Well, mostly she was chatting, but yes, she did give me a few choice pointers,” David said.
“That smells delicious, David, I hope this time it’s edible?” said Patrick as he sat at the table.
“I assure you, it tastes good” replied David.
He carried the heavy soup pan to the table and set it on the potholder, then he ladled out two large steaming bowls of soup, topped them with soured cream and ground pepper over the top, just as Marcy had told him to do. After he had returned the pot to the counter, he sat down opposite Patrick. Patrick took a spoonful of the soup, blew on it and then placed it in his mouth. David waited a second for his reaction.
“David this is lovely,” said Patrick, the soup warming his insides, still cold from his walk home. David beamed at Patrick, content for a moment just watching him enjoy the soup, seeing him blow on it to cool it, and the look of happiness Patrick had while he was eating. David felt the same emotions when he looked out over the store, with people buying his carefully curated goods, pride and happiness and satisfaction.
***
The next Wednesday, David swore to himself he wouldn’t need any help from Marcy. He spent his rainy walk to Patrick’s apartment walking through slushy leaves and thinking about cooking. By this point, he didn’t need to make up any reasons for borrowing Patrick’s apartment, and Patrick was warming to the idea of coming home to freshly cooked soup.
Today, David was making one of the recipes that Marcy had copied out for him, and had texted her in advance, quizzing her on different parts of the recipe. The recipe was a winter vegetable stew since David wasn’t feeling confident enough to try meat yet and he didn’t think Patrick would be too enthusiastic if David gave him food poisoning. As he lifted the heavy casserole dish out of the cupboard, David felt confident in his abilities.
The recipe was pretty straight forward, cook some onions and garlic, something David had become fairly good at, add the beans and vegetables and cook in the oven until they were done. David even felt he had got quicker at chopping vegetables, this time not caring so much about whether each chunk looked identical, knowing that Marcy had said they just needed to be roughly the same size.
Once the pot was in the oven, David set a timer on his phone and grabbed his book from his satchel. He lay down on Patrick’s couch, dangled his feet over the end and started reading. The next moment he heard his timer going off, in his hurry to turn his alarm off he rolled off the couch and onto the floor. David stood up quickly, panicking about the stew. He was sure he could smell burning from the kitchen area.
He rushed over to the oven, expecting to see black smoke billowing out, but instead, everything looked fine. He opened the oven door and took the pot out with his oven gloves on, he opened the lid and stabbed a bit of parsnip with a fork. It felt pretty soft, so David put the lid back on and turned the oven off, expecting Patrick home any minute.
A few moments later, Patrick walked through the door, stamping the snow from his boots and quickly stripping off his hat, gloves, and coat. He took a long breath in and then smiled softly, mostly to himself.
“What?!” said David, “Do I have bed head?” He reached up and smoothed his hair down, worried his impromptu nap had ruined his hair.
“No,’ said Patrick, reaching for David and pulling him towards him. He wrapped his hands around David’s back and kissed him deeply.
“Mmm, what was that for?” said David once they had pulled apart.
“I’m just pleased to see you,” said Patrick, “also I’m starving”.
David laid the table and ladled out some stew, making sure they had even numbers of each piece of vegetable. He grabbed some bread and dipped it in the stew, savouring the warm earthy taste. Patrick did the same, again smiling to himself.
It wasn’t until later that evening when Patrick and David were curled up under a blanket watching a movie, that Patrick told David what he kept smiling about.
“It’s because you love my domesticity right?” said David, smirking at the idea of himself being domestic.
“As much as I’m enjoying eating much less takeout pizza, I’m not sure I could call you domestic, David” replied Patrick.
“What is it then? I’m assuming it’s not the amount of quality time I’m spending with your mother.”
“It’s just...” said Patrick, “my mum used to cook that stew for me as a kid, when I opened the door it transported me back home, to coming home from hockey practice and mom cooking stew for me.”
David wasn’t sure how to react to that, he pictured young Patrick, hockey stick in hand, walking through the door and seeing Marcy at the stove. A part of David was so pleased that he had made this apartment seem like home to Patrick, but part of him wished he had this kind of memories of his parents from when he was younger.
***
Schitt's Creek lay blanketed in a layer of snow, it was the beginning of December and Clint and Marcy were spending the weekend in Schitt’s Creek. They were there to celebrate an early Christmas with David and Patrick, as Patrick had decided to stay in Schitt’s Creek again this year to help out in the pre-Christmas rush. Marcy and Clint were having a lazy morning in the motel. The previous evening Clint had cooked a roast at Patrick’s apartment, so David had offered to cook soup for lunch the next day.
Patrick was buzzing around the apartment, straightening things up and making sure the remains of the last evening’s dinner party had been sufficiently tidied away. David was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables (similar sizes, but not perfect) and then frying some onion and garlic.
David had been given the recipe a couple of weeks ago. He had been standing in front of the produce section of the store when Ronnie had walked in, she asked David why he was standing there squeezing the tomatoes and he explained the soup experiment. Initially, Ronnie laughed, but after she had collected herself, she told David about her minestrone soup that she cooked to impress Karen many years ago. Then the next day she dropped by the store with a handwritten recipe, which David placed at the front of his soup book, alongside Marcy’s recipes.
When the doorbell rang, Patrick rushed to let Clint and Marcy in. They shook the snow from their boots and hung their coats on the hooks near the door. Marcy smiled as she saw David cooking, and wandered over to see what he was doing.
“How’s it going, David?” Marcy asked, tentatively.
“It’s going well” replied David, in a tone that suggested he himself was slightly surprised.
David busied himself by getting drinks for Marcy and Clint, he opened a bottle of red wine from the store and filled everyone’s glasses. He hovered by the stove as Marcy, Clint and Patrick sat down around the coffee table, chatting amongst themselves about the cold weather and their preparations for the drive back the next day.
David added vegetables, noodles, and broth to the pan and set it on the stove to cook. He then pulled out some food to make the secret ingredient that Ronnie had ensured would make anyone love her minestrone recipe. He blended some ingredients to make fresh pesto, slightly oilier than usual, to drizzle over the top of the minestrone. Satisfied with the pesto, David laid the table and then joined the others, adding his slightly incorrect information to the conversation about cold weather preparations.
Fifteen minutes later and David’s alarm went off, he rushed to the stove to check on the soup. When he got there, the soup was… not so soupy. David looked around and then in his panic he texted Marcy, who was less than ten feet away from him. She looked at her phone and then excused herself from the conversation with Patrick and Clint. David saw Patrick and Clint look over, realise what was happening and then return to their conversation, becoming slightly more animated.
“What’s wrong with the soup? Your text just said “SOS” and then a lot of exclamation points” said Marcy
“Look at it!” whispered David, and showed her the incredibly thick soup.
“Oh,” said Marcy “That’s no problem! I was worried for a moment that we wouldn’t have any lunch”
She boiled some water and then added it to the saucepan, stirring to mix it all in until the minestrone returned to the right consistency. Patrick and Clint were still having a conversation about cold weather preparations, one or the other of them glancing over every now and again to make sure David was ok.
David ladled the soup out, drizzled the pesto over the top and brought the bowls to the table, two at a time. Marcy and Clint sat down at the table, and Patrick walked round to David’s side, kissed him on the temple and then sat down too.
All four of them ate in silence for a moment, savouring the warm soup and slathering chunks of bread in thick layers of butter. David looked up expectantly at the Brewers as he waited for their verdict.
“David, this is wonderful,” said Clint, grinning, pride stretching across his face.
“Yes,” said Marcy, “this is delicious, I don’t believe you couldn’t cook before.”
David beamed and looked expectantly at Patrick.
“This is lovely,” said Patrick, and kissed David on the cheek, “I love the pesto.”
“It’s Ronnie’s recipe,” said David “she used it to woo her wife apparently.”
“Well, I can see why,” said Clint.
They all turned back to their meal, dipping thick bread into hot soup. Silently enjoying the food David had cooked before starting up a conversation about Marcy’s community choir. David looked around the table, Marcy and Clint on one side, and Patrick next to him. He thought about making soup, about the process of chopping and frying vegetables, adding the stock and letting it simmer. How the main components of soup are time and trust, that when he leaves the soup to cook on the stove he trusts in his preparation and that the finished soup will be greater than the sum of the ingredients. He slips his hand onto the small of Patrick’s back and knows that together they have all the trust and time that they could need.