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"Are you ... cooking?"
Peggy looked over her shoulder at Jack, who had just limped into Howard's enormous kitchen. He had been at Howard's mansion for three days now, since being discharged from the hospital, and had spent most of that time sleeping or slouching around the house, looking thin and ghost-like, and blatantly ignoring the nurses' instructions not to mix alcohol with the painkillers he was taking.
Today he looked more alert. He was actually dressed, admittedly in a pullover jumper of Howard's rather than his usual suit and tie, and he'd shaved and made some effort to clean up; his hair was combed, parted, and even gelled into place. All of which pointed to Jack feeling a lot better, even though he was still much too thin with blue shadows under his eyes.
And he was staring in disbelief and some amount of worry at the skillet on the hob under her hand.
"I can cook," Peggy said.
Jack laughed.
It was good to hear him laugh, even at her expense, though she directed a frown at him anyway just so he didn't think he was getting away with anything.
"Very well, I can cook certain things, and -- oh bugger," she muttered. She'd let herself get distracted, and now the eggs in the skillet were well and truly scorched. She scraped them to one side of the pan and ruefully wondered if they were too burnt to eat. She'd eaten worse things during the war, after all ...
Jack had drifted over to the coffeemaker (a Howard special; none of them quite understood how it worked, but it did work, and seemed to contain hot coffee at any hour of the day or night). He glanced over at her. "Want some help?"
"From you?" she said, scraping her burnt eggs onto a plate. She would eat it and enjoy it. "In the kitchen?"
"Omelets are the one thing I know how to make."
"You do."
"I do. When I was a kid," Jack said, turning around from the coffeemaker with both hands curled around a mug of coffee, "I used to spend a couple of weeks every summer at my grandma's place."
"Gam-Gam," Peggy said.
"Are you going to let me finish?"
"Sorry, do go on." She liberally salted and peppered the eggs. They couldn't be as bad as they looked.
"Anyway, she taught me. I made breakfast for us both every day." He looked wistful, gazing back into the past. "It's been ages, but maybe it's like they say about riding a bike, huh?"
Peggy took a bite. No, they really were as bad as they looked. She grimaced and put the fork down.
"The bar is set here," she told him, holding out the plate so he could see its stringy, burnt contents. "If you can cook something better than this, I'll eat it."
"Ah," Jack said, and there was a bright glint to his wan smile that she hadn't seen since he was shot. "A challenge."
*
Amazingly, it turned out that he actually was good at it. The omelets would, perhaps, have failed to pass inspection under Mr. Jarvis's exacting eye, but they were perfectly serviceable, dripping with cheese and even graced with a few fresh herbs from Ana's herb boxes.
"Better than burned eggs," Jack said, grinning at her.
"Much better," she admitted. Scooping up the last bite onto her fork, she added, "I'd like to say that I learned useful skills from my grandmother, but what I remember now is largely in the line of being scolded about grass stains on my skirt, and failing to stitch the samplers she considered a suitable activity for a young girl."
"The more fool her," Jack said.
"I'd thank you not to call my grandmother a fool."
"Sorry," he said, but there was still a glimmer of humor in his eyes.
"Even if it's not entirely inaccurate," Peggy murmured, and the glimmer turned into a full-on grin.
He was definitely feeling a lot better. He'd only eaten about half his omelet, but it was more actual food than she'd seen him eat in days.
"Tell me about her," she said. "Your grandmother. Gam-Gam."
"Yeah, I meant to ask, how do you know that I call her -- wait." The look on his face turned sharp and attentive. "I knew you were hiding in her room somewhere, your actress friend's room. And this proves it. But where? There was nowhere we didn't look."
"Oh, yes there was," Peggy said cheerfully. "I leave it as an exercise for you to determine."
"Under the bed? No ..."
While he mused on it, Peggy rose to get herself a fresh cup of tea. Jack looked up, and there was another flash of humor -- the same mischievous-little-kid glint that he sometimes used to get back at the office, right before he'd stick her with some unwanted task.
"You know what else Gam-Gam taught me, Peggy?"
"No," she said, "but I'd love to hear it."
"The cook never does the dishes."
"This sounds suspiciously like your grandmother ensuring that you'd wash the dishes most of the time."
"Is she wrong, though?" Jack said.
Peggy smiled, and began to gather up their plates. "I'd never argue with your Gam-Gam, Jack."