As she’d hoped, his miasma of grouchiness had dissipated on the way here. They’d stopped at an amazing patisserie for coffee and pastries. She’d eaten one more chocolate croissant than she reasonably should have. But she loved them, and it wasn’t as though she could get chocolate croissants this good in Manitowoc.
It felt perfect now to stretch her legs, to breathe deeply and move at a brisk pace. As they made their way up the inclined walkway, he seemed lighter. Cheerful, for him.
The bridge was all cables and air, the pedestrian walkway in a separate area from the car traffic but crowded with tourists and punctuated by the occasional surprise of a cyclist bombing downhill from the Brooklyn side.
The morning was crisp, the sky bluer than blue, the river shining with reflected light.
“What is that, the Hudson?”
“East River. The Hudson’s on the other side.”
“Oh.”
“Separating Manhattan from New Jersey?”
May rolled her eyes and tried to project Sure, I knew that.
“Kids today,” Ben said. “Did you learn no geography in school?”
“My teachers back home sadly neglected the unit on mapping Manhattan. And I bet yours did, too.”
He smiled. “Yeah, I can’t really remember, honestly.”
“Did you go to cooking school?”
A slightly risky question, as it might fall into the none-of-your-business category or, worse, plunge Ben back into gloom. But her curiosity demanded to be fed more scraps of Ben’s life story.
“No, I went to UW–Madison. You know Connor, the guy who was slagging off my darts game at Pulvermacher’s?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“That’s where we met. He was my roommate.”
“So how did you get into the restaurant business?”
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. Gray today. The blue T-shirt he wore underneath did interesting things to his eyes.
“It was an accident,” he said. “I was supposed to be a farmer. I grew up on a berry farm. Raspberries, blueberries. And hives, too. Lakeshore Nectar.”
“Did you sell honey all over Wisconsin?” She might have eaten it and not even known.
“Not as far away as Manitowoc. I think they changed the name anyway.”
“They?”
“My dad and his new family. My parents got divorced.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“It’s all right. Happens to everybody.”
“Well, not everybody.”
He had nothing to say to that.
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”