That was the hardest part, honestly. Harder than the transfers. Because cooking was the thing that made me feel like myself. It was Grandma Marta’s yellow kitchen. It was Sunday soup. It was home.
And now I couldn’t reach anything.
“Who designed these cabinets?” I said, the first time they put me in the practice kitchen at rehab. I was staring up at the shelves, which were about a mile above my head.
“Someone tall?” my occupational therapist suggested.
“Someone who hates me.”
When I got home from rehab, my apartment had been modified. A ramp at the front entrance. Grab bars in the bathroom. A lowered counter in the kitchen.
But it still wasn’t easy. Nothing was easy.
One night, about two weeks after I got home, I was trying to make dinner. I reached for a pot on the stove and knocked a whole box of pasta onto the floor. Penne everywhere. Under the stove. Under the table. All over.
I was so angry I grabbed the dish towel off my lap and threw it across the room.
It landed in the corner by the refrigerator.
I sat there breathing hard.
Great, I thought. Now pick it up, genius.
I couldn’t.
I couldn’t reach it from my chair. And I didn’t have my grabber tool. It was in the bedroom.
The towel stayed in that corner for two days.
Grandma Marta used to say: A man who can fry an egg is never lonely.
Sorry, Grandma.
You were wrong.
I could fry an egg. I could fry a perfect egg. I could make potato pancakes that would make you cry.
I was the loneliest man in the world.
Still, I wasn’t giving up.
About six months after I got home from rehab, I started a cooking blog. Under a fake name.
Marta’s Kitchen.
It was simple. Just videos. Short ones. I’d set my phone up on a little tripod above my counter and film my hands cooking. Chopping onions. Rolling dough. Flipping pancakes. Grandma’s recipes, mostly. Some of my own.
I only ever filmed my hands. And the food.
Never my face. Never the chair.
The very first comment I ever got said: Show your face, man. Who are you?
I wrote back: Just enjoy the pancakes.
I wanted people to judge my cooking. Not my wheelchair.
I wanted one thing in my life where nobody looked at me with that look. The sad one. The pity one. The oh, you poor thing one.
On Marta’s Kitchen, I was just a pair of hands that made really good pancakes.
And my pancakes were a hit.
I don’t know why. Maybe because they were really good. Grandma’s recipe, with buttermilk and a little bit of nutmeg and the secret ingredient, which was a spoonful of sour cream. Maybe because the videos were short and calming. Maybe because I always talked to the camera like it was an old friend sitting at my counter.
Within a year, Marta’s Kitchen had forty thousand followers.
I still never showed my face.
Then one day, about a year and a half after I started the blog, I got a direct message.
It was from someone named Hannah.
It was a photograph.
The photograph was of a cake. Or something that had once been a cake. It was nearly black. Charred. Smoking a little. Sitting in a pan on top of a stove that also looked a little scorched.
Under it, she’d written:
Your recipe tried to kill me.
I laughed. Out loud. Alone in my kitchen.
It had been my three-ingredient chocolate mug cake. The easiest recipe I’d ever posted. Flour, cocoa, sugar. You couldn’t mess it up.
I wrote back:
That’s actually impressive. It’s a three-ingredient cake.
She replied almost instantly.
Four, if you count the smoke.
I laughed so hard I almost tipped my chair over.
After that, she kept sending me burnt things.
Burnt cookies. Burnt muffins. A burnt pizza that looked like a manhole cover. Burnt toast, with the caption I don’t even know how this happened. I was standing right there.
One time, she sent me a picture of a saucepan with a black ring scorched around the bottom.
What was that? I asked.
Water, she wrote. I was boiling water. For tea. And I forgot about it. And it burned.
You can’t burn water.
And yet.
I still don’t know how she did it. I’ve thought about it a lot.
She was twenty-nine. A nurse. She worked twelve-hour shifts, mostly nights, at a hospital across town. That was why she was always cooking at strange hours. Two in the morning. Seven in the morning. Whenever she got home.
“I can save people’s lives,” she wrote once. “But I cannot make a cupcake. It’s my great tragedy.”
She loved old comedies. Black and white ones. Some Like It Hot. Bringing Up Baby. Arsenic and Old Lace. She could quote entire scenes.
She hated raisins in baked goods.
“Raisins,” she wrote, “are just sad grapes.”
“That’s the most accurate thing anyone has ever said,” I wrote back.
She laughed at my jokes. Even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones.
She listened when I talked about my day. Even when my day was nothing. Even when my day was I reorganized my spice rack and found a jar of paprika from 2014.
“What did you do with it?” she asked.
“I held a small funeral.”
“Did you say a few words?”
“I said, You were never spicy enough. Rest in peace.”
She sent me back about forty crying-laughing emojis.
I told her about Grandma Marta.
About the yellow kitchen and the plastic covers on the couch. About the chicken soup with the tiny hand-rolled noodles. About a man who can fry an egg is never lonely.
And one night, very late, I told her about my parents. About my dad’s empty closet. About my mom going to the store and never coming back. About sitting on the front steps until it got dark.
She didn’t write anything for almost a full minute. The little dots appeared and disappeared.
Then she wrote:
I’m so sorry, Matt. That’s a lot for a kid to carry.
And then:
I hope you know you’re not still sitting on those steps.
I read that one about thirty times.
A few weeks after that, we moved from texting to phone calls.
The first time I heard her voice, I was so nervous I almost hung up. I’d been talking to her for two months, and I’d never heard her voice.
It was warmer than I expected. Lower. She laughed with her whole chest.
“You sound different than I thought,” she said.
“Different how?”
She was quiet for a moment.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “Familiar, maybe. Like I’ve heard your voice somewhere before.”
“Maybe on the videos,” I said. “I talk in them.”
“Maybe,” she said. But she sounded unsure.
We talked every day after that. Sometimes for hours. She’d call me on her drive home from the hospital at seven in the morning, and I’d make breakfast while she told me about her shift. I’d describe exactly what I was cooking, step by step, and she’d say, “Stop it, you’re torturing me, I’m starving.”
She told me about her patients. Not their names, never their names. Just stories. The old man who flirted with every nurse on the floor. The little girl who wanted a pink cast. The guy who’d swallowed his car keys on a dare.
“How do you get car keys out of someone’s stomach?” I asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
“I really do.”
“You really don’t.”
There was just one problem.
Hannah didn’t know I used a wheelchair.
At first, it just never came up. We were talking about cakes. About raisins. About old movies. It didn’t seem relevant.
Then, as the weeks went on, it started to feel relevant. More and more.
And then I got scared.
Every time I opened my mouth to tell her, I’d think about Rachel sitting in that chair by the hospital window. I can’t do this. And I’d close my mouth again.
I told myself I’d tell her next time. Next call. Next week.
I never did.
Four months after that first burnt cake, she texted me late one night.
Are you ever going to ask me out?
I stared at the screen for a long time.
I thought we were taking it slow, I wrote.
Matt. We’ve been talking for four months.
That’s practically a marriage.
Then you owe me dinner, she wrote.
My heart was pounding.
Okay, I wrote. I’ll pick the restaurant.
I told myself I’d explain everything in person.
Before she saw me. Or right when she saw me. I’d get there early. I’d text her from outside. Hey, before you come in, there’s something I should have told you.
Obviously, a flawless plan.
I picked a café downtown. A little place called Pemberton’s, with big windows and wooden tables and the best lemon tart in the city. I’d been there once before. It had a ramp at the front door and the tables weren’t too high. I’d checked.
On the day of our date, I got there twenty minutes early.
I rolled up the ramp and stopped outside the front window. I checked my reflection in the glass.
Blue button-down shirt. Ironed. My good jeans. My hair combed, then messed up, then combed again. A bunch of yellow tulips from the grocery store in my lap, wrapped in plastic.
I looked terrified.
“Looking good, Romeo.”
I turned around.
An older man was standing by the café entrance. Maybe seventy. Bald as an egg. Little round glasses. A white apron tied around his waist and a tray tucked under his arm. A name tag that said SAL.
“Thanks,” I said.
“First date?”
“Is it that obvious?”
He grinned.
“Flowers. Nervous face. Third time checking your hair in my window. It’s pretty obvious, son.”
I laughed. It came out shaky.
“Actually,” I said, “I might cancel.”
Sal raised his eyebrows.
“Why would you do a stupid thing like that?”
I looked down at my lap. At the tulips. At my legs.
“She doesn’t know I’m in a wheelchair,” I said.
“Ah,” Sal said.
He set his tray down on one of the little outdoor tables. He pulled out a chair and sat down, facing me. Like he had all the time in the world.
“We’ve been talking for four months,” I said. “Every day. And I never told her. And now she’s about to walk in here and see me. And what if she sees me and leaves?”
Sal shrugged.
“Then she’s not worth your time.”
“Easy for you to say.”
He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees.
“Son, I’ve been married forty years,” he said. “Four-oh. You know what my wife said to me on our very first date?”
“What?”
“She said I was too short, too skinny, and I had terrible hair.”
I glanced up at his bald head. Shining in the afternoon sun.
“She wasn’t wrong,” I said.
Sal burst out laughing. A big, booming laugh. People at the next table looked over.
“Exactly!” he said, slapping his knee. “She wasn’t wrong! But she gave me a chance anyway.”
“And?”
“Four kids. Seven grandkids. And she still complains about my hair.” He grinned. “Every single day. Forty years.”
