Chapter Text
It had started off as any normal day in November. It was Wednesday so he’d spent half the day at the muffler shop and the other half of the day taking care of the weekly errands, then coming back home where he’d spend the rest of the evening.
Now, hours later, Red Forman was fixing his dinner while the Point Place’s weather forecast played in the background from his living room. The volume was a little higher than usual but despite what his daughter claimed it wasn’t because his hearing was going, it was so he could hear the set while in another room. It was his set, his house, and no one else was there so who would the loud volume bother?
“As we all know we’ve had an early start to our winter season. This past week we’ve had days at 20 and below and people, it’s only gonna get colder,” Harry Heatwave was standing in front of his weather chart, moving his arms about, but Red was hardly listening.
Most people didn’t like weathermen, they got the blame for the bad weather days and it was even worse when they predicted the wrong kind of weather. Harry the Heatwave’s predictions though were pretty on point, but that didn't make Red like him any better. He couldn’t understand why a guy would go with the name ‘Heatwave’ when working as a weatherman for town that had not seen a heatwave in over thirty years. What a dumbass.
Snap. Snap.
Red poked the two required holes into the plastic cover of his frozen dinner tray and tossed it into the microwave with a thud that sounded more like a rock hitting a plate than a healthy meal. After the numbers were punched into the nuke machine, all Red had to do was wait the three minutes. He decided to pass the time by cracking open his dinner beverage of choice: a cold can of beer.
“We could possibly see ouR first heavy snowfall as early as this Tuesday,” Beer can to his lips, he listened to Harry Heatwave’s report. “And while we’re not talking some big storm just yet, if our radar is correct, in the amount of snow expected, we’ll start our snow shoveling season this week. Now even though this has been an early start to winter, the record for the earliest winter is from 1907…”
A faint wrap coming from the front door was heard. It was so faint, and given the hour of the day, Red had to pull his beer away and listen again. Sure, enough the sound echoed, this time sounding even louder than before.
In a small town like Point Place, by seven in the evening everyone was in their homes or heading towards them. No one knocked on someone’s door unless they were expected company and Red was certainly not expecting any company tonight.
Being a man who enjoyed his privacy and did not enjoy his alone time being interrupted, Red marched over to the door ready to give an earful to the moron who had decided to pay him a visit. Part of him was even certain that the person wasn’t ringing the doorbell because they wanted to see him, when he opened the door there would be a good chance he’d find no one there—there’d been a few cases of ding dong ditch going around the neighborhood since Halloween. This filled Red with even more fury and his footsteps fell heavier and at a much faster pace.
With the doorknob in hand, Red threw open the door, prepared to give the prankster dumbass a piece of his mind only to immediately stop in his tracks and stand there in shock when he saw that on the other side of his front door was not some teenager running away as fast as he could but rather Kitty Halpert.
Kitty Halpert was Red’s neighbor. They lived across the street from each other for almost forty years. Red and Eloise had moved into their home in 1952 and three years later Kitty and her husband had bought the house across from them. The two couples weren’t best friends or anything like that, but they were neighborly to one another. They didn’t get together to play bridge or got on date night together, but they did give each other small waves when they spotted the other out in their front yard.
The Halperts had actually been closer with Red’s next-door neighbors The Pinciottis. They had kids that were in the same grade growing up, Red’s daughter Jackie was a year younger than them but that didn’t stop her from trying to tag along on their adventures, despite their protests and attempts to lose her along the way. If Kitty hadn’t given them a talking to about including Jackie, Red certainly would have taken things into his own hands in making sure his daughter was included the neighborhood group.
As the kids grew up, Jackie found her own group of friends at school in her own class while Kitty’s son and Bob Pinciotti’s daughter started a high school sweetheart relationship that led to their marriage a few years back. Red didn’t even want to imagine what it would be like to live so close to your in laws.
Despite having family close by though, Red had Kitty Halpert standing at his doorstep and he had no idea why.
“Mrs. Halpert,” he greeted, trying not to sound to surprised.
Kitty smiled softly, “It’s Kitty, remember?”
“Right, right,” Red nodded and looked past her smiling face and over her shoulder, scanning the view of her home for any signs of some kind of disaster. “Uh is everything okay?”
“Everything is fine,” she assured, that bright smile of hers showing no signs of going flat. “I was just out for an evening walk and thought I’d stop by and visit with a neighbor. And tonight, you are the lucky one!”
“I am?” he wasn’t quite sure how true this was.
“Mmhmm,” Kitty bobbed her head again and rubbed her arms for warmth. Taking a quick peek inside the house to make sure no one was there, she then looked back up at him. “May I come in?”
It wasn’t difficult to notice Kitty’s chilled state, the cold wind trying to make its way into the house only further proved how cold she must have been. Embarrassed that his shock had made him forget his manners, Red stepped aside and opened the door a little wider.
“Oh yeah, yeah, come on in.”
“Thank you.”
Kitty stepped into the house. It was much warmer than the bitter cold outside but its warmth, like the heat in her own home, was come from the house’s heater. The family warmth that had once filled the house had simmered down into a smoky abyss.
Just as Kitty was starting to take off her jacket a sharp beeping cut through the silent air, startling both parties for a brief moment. Kitty froze with her arms halfway out of her sleeves, he eyes darting towards Red.
“Oh my, I didn’t set off some kind of alarm, did I?” she asked playfully.
It was a well-known fact in the neighborhood—and Point Place—that Red was not exactly a people person. If it were available, it probably wouldn’t be too big of a surprise if he’d set up a type of security system to detect any unwanted visitors that entered his home.
“No, no,” Red dismissed the ribbing by realizing where the beeping had actually come from. “That uh, that was coming from the kitchen. Excuse me.”
Red headed off away from the entry way where he and Kitty stood, down the hallway that led into the kitchen. What Red didn’t notice was that instead of waiting for him to come back, Kitty had followed him the rest of the way into the next room.
Standing under the doorway of the kitchen, Kitty watched Red open the microwave oven and quickly pull out a plastic black plate. There was an aroma of food that filled the room, but the scent didn’t have a freshness to it. It had more of the processed, premade, frozen meal kind of stench to it.
“Oh honey, don’t tell me that’s your dinner,” her voice sounded sad, disappointed.
Not only was Red startled by Kitty’s voice coming from behind him, but having her call him ‘honey’ was something he never would have expected. It had been almost six years since someone had called him ‘honey,’ it wasn’t until this moment when he heard Kitty call him ‘honey’ that Red realized that he’d actually missed the pet name.
Still recovering from the surprise, Red could only admit the truth to her question. “Uh yeah.”
Kitty clicked her tongue at the roof of the mouth, creating a clicking sound as she shook her head. “At our age Red Forman, it is important for us to eat healthier meals. And just because the box might say ‘Lean Cuisine’ it doesn’t mean that it really is the best cuisine to keep you lean or healthy for that matter.”
The lecture reminded Red that Kitty Halpert had been a nurse for several years until she retired when Joel got sick. He didn’t want to say anything, but his frozen meal wasn’t even a ‘Lean Cuisine’ meal it was one from the line of ‘Hungry Man’ meals.
“Why don’t I make something instead?” suggested Kitty, already stepping further into the kitchen.
Even though a homemade meal would be a very welcomed thing, it had become a rarity since losing Eloise, the idea of Kitty standing in Eloise’s kitchen cooking up a meal, left Red feeling unsure. The whole thing was more than a bit uncomfortable, it was darn right unusual. His neighbor of 40 plus years, who he’d only spoken to on a few occasions, was here in his house wanting to make him dinner in his dead wife’s kitchen. Red didn’t know what to make of any of this.
“You don’t have to go to that kind of trouble,” he tried to stop her, but she was already standing in front of the stove.
“Oh, it’s no trouble,” Kitty waved her hand in his direction, flashing him another smile. “After all you need to eat, and I need to eat. Tonight, we’ll just eat together.”
Red still wasn’t swayed by the idea. There we plenty of reasons he could have said this wouldn’t be a good idea but for some reason the first one that came to mind was, “I don’t exactly have a lot of groceries right now.” Seeing her eyebrows raise in surprise, he felt the need to justify his statement by explaining, “I’m supposed to go later…on Saturday.”
None of Red’s attempts to get her out of his kitchen were working. Judging his dinner choice of the frozen meal Kitty could already guessed that the kitchen probably wasn’t properly stocked up. It didn’t seem bother Kitty though, instead she seem to think it was really quite adorable the way he seemed to be so embarrassed that his cupboards didn’t have a big selection. He just didn‘t want her to think that he couldn’t take care of himself.
“You’d be surprised how much you can do with very little,” Kitty assured him before swinging open the cabinet door that was closest to her. It was the pantry but from the few contents inside it looked more like a forgotten closet than a kitchen pantry. At least the small collection would narrow down her search time. “Now let’s see you’ve got tomato sauce, we can do plenty with that…”
With his hands stuffed in his pockets, Red stood pursed his lips together and stared at the ground but occasionally lifting his head to take quick peeks at the woman rifling his kitchen. Wondering why there was a part of him that hoped she would find something useful.
“Oh and pasta,” announced Kitty, twirling around to show him the blue box of long noodles that she had discovered. “How does spaghetti with no meatballs sound?”
His head was now up but his lips stayed pursed and he kept his hands hidden in his pockets as he shrugged, “Sounds a whole lot better than a radioactive dinner.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said with a girlish giggle.
When Red heard the laugh, he nearly had to do a double take. It was like no other laugh he had ever heard before. Sure, living across the street from each other for four decades, he must have heard her laugh sometime before at some kind of neighborhood block party or maybe from the distance of the other side of the street, but hearing it now so close to him was so very different.
Her laugh was such a happy one. One that was as joyful as it was genuine. The mere sound of it had the corner of his mouth stretching up at an angle.
And on top of all that, Red had to admit she had one heck of a smile.
“Now, I’ll get started on the food and you can just sit back, relax, read the paper or go watch the news. I think I can find my way around here,” Kitty had already located the stockpot from the bottom cabinet and was currently filling it up with water in the sink.
Red couldn’t argue with that kind of offer. “Sounds like a good plan to me.”
If given the opportunity any other time, Red would have surely followed through with the suggestion and disappeared into the living room. Hell, even when Eloise was alive most evenings while she was in here making dinner he’d be in the other room watching a game or out back in his workshop and she would call him when super was done. It didn’t feel right to leave Kitty in here alone though, and it wasn’t because he didn’t trust this woman who was practically a stranger to him, he just couldn’t bring himself to leave her by herself while she was busy doing this nice gesture for him.
So instead of going into the living room to watch that dumbass Harry Heatwave’s newscast, he grabbed his newspaper and took a seat at the table. Shaking the paper open, Red caught a glimpse of a smile on Kitty’s face and he smiled to himself, pleased that she okay with his decision.
The kitchen was silent with the exception of the crinkling from Red’s paper and the sounds of Kitty preparing the food. However, unlike the awkward, nervous kind of silence they stood in at the entryway of the house, this silence was much more peaceful and comfortable for each of them.
This was the first time they had ever done this, the first time they had ever been alone in a room together but with Kitty cooking dinner while Red sat at the table reading the paper…it felt like the most natural thing in the world.