“Thanks, I appreciated the chance to help out, and I had help.” He put his hands on Matthew’s small shoulders.
Katie smiled down at the little boy. “Did you help fix all this?”
He nodded. “Uncle Natty’s teaching me to cook so I’ll be able to help my girlfriend when I grow up.”
“I like the sound of that; maybe you can tell my son that women like a man who can cook.”
“I will,” Matthew said.
Zerbrowski laughed. “Well, thank you, Matthew and Nathaniel, for helping Katie out.”
“You know, Zerbrowski, you could have helped her cook stuff,” I said.
Katie laughed, and it matched the rest of her, airy and pretty, if a laugh could be pretty. “Oh, no, Anita, the only person less likely to be helpful in the kitchen than you is my husband. I swear, if there was a way to do it, he’d burn water.”
Zerbrowski pushed his glasses more firmly up his nose and grinned at her. “But you love me anyway.”
“If you hadn’t been a terrible cook we might never have dated,” she said.
“I don’t cook and it’s never helped me date—how’d it help you?” I asked.
They looked at each other, faces alight with a shared secret. He made a little gesture at her.
She said, “We met at college. Anita probably already knows that.”
I nodded that I did. He’d actually told me he had to get her drunk for her to agree to a date, but I was pretty sure he was kidding, though sometimes it was hard to tell with him.
Katie continued, “Zerbrowski says he knew who I was, because he used to sit behind me in American History and stare at my hair.”
“It’s really pretty hair,” he said, and went around the island so he could put his arm across her shoulders.
“Thank you, dear, but I didn’t know who he was until the night of the fire.”
“What fire?” I asked.
She snuggled in against him, tucked under his arm, hers around his waist, and said, “He set his dorm room on fire trying to make soup.”
I grinned at them. “How bad a fire?”
“Soup from scratch is hard,” Nathaniel said.
Zerbrowski shook his head. “Nope, I opened a can of Campbell’s tomato soup and the next thing I knew the fire alarm was going off, there was smoke everywhere, and flames. The dorm monitor was yelling for us all to get out. I grabbed the hall fire extinguisher and put out the fire I could see, but we still had to evacuate the dorm.”
All the grownups laughed, even Zerbrowski, but Matthew didn’t get the joke. He looked up at us, clearly puzzled. I didn’t try to explain the humor, I’d learned that humor is a skill set like a lot of socialization, and Matthew just had to learn it as he went. Explained jokes lose their funniness.
Katie said, “I was coming back from a movie with friends, and we went to see what was happening. I saw my future husband for the first time covered in black soot, hair every which way, his dorm monitor screaming at him, and him waving the fire extinguisher back at him.”
“Love at first sight?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No, but he was totally calm in the middle of it all. Everyone else was angry, or scared, or just confused, but he wasn’t.” She looked up at him with that shining look she saved just for him.
“She thought I was brave,” Zerbrowski said.
“You were and are,” she said.
He shrugged, but looked pleased. “She recognized my hair and glasses in class the next day, and started talking to me. I’d spent almost an entire semester trying to get the nerve up to talk to her, and she just comes up and does it for me. It was totally worth destroying the dorm’s kitchen and nearly getting expelled.”
She kissed him again, and then asked, “How did you guys meet?”