Wild Game My Mother, Her Lover, and Me - Adrienne Brodeur Page 0,2

ships full of men onto the rocks, where she would delight in watching them plunge into the abyss. I knew about the Sirens from reading Greek mythology and marveled at my mother’s powers.

Candles were lit, illuminating the room, and the happy creak of corks announced that dinner was ready. Six of us assembled around the table and dug into our first course: steamed, soft-shell clams that my mother and I had plucked from a nearby sandbar at low tide earlier in the day. We pried open the shells, rolled the skin off their elongated necks, dunked the bodies into hot broth and melted butter, and popped them into our mouths. A burst of ocean.

Then came the pièce de résistance: Ben’s squabs, served family-style on an enormous carving board with grooves that caught their abundant juices. Using long tongs, Malabar scooped up a tiny pigeon for each plate. Roasted to medium rare, the meat was silky and tender, fine-grained and richer than I’d expected. The skin was fatty, like a duck’s, and as crisp as bacon. As accompaniment, my mother had made a savory corn pudding, some collision of kernels and eggs and cream, which she dolloped onto each plate. The flavors were complementary, sweet and salty, with a certain succulence that gave a nod to ferment.

At her first bite, my mother moaned with satisfaction. She never shied away from enjoying the fruits of her labor.

“This,” Ben said, closing his eyes, “is perfection.” Seated beside Malabar, he placed an arm around the back of her chair and raised his glass. “To the chef!”

“To Malabar,” Lily seconded.

We all clinked glasses. My stepfather beamed and said, “To my sweet.” Charles adored my mother, who was his second wife and nearly fifteen years his junior. They had both been married to other people when they met through friends and fell in love. Charles appreciated that my mother had stuck with him through his protracted divorce and the series of debilitating strokes he’d suffered just before their wedding that had left him partially paralyzed on his right side. He now walked with a shuffle and had learned to write and eat with his left hand.

Charles and Ben had been boyhood friends, brought together by a shared love of the town of Plymouth where Ben, a direct descendant of the Mayflower Pilgrims, lived and where Charles had spent summers in his youth. They were an unlikely pair—Charles always in his head, Ben so very physical—but the friendship had thrived for decades. They were within six months of each other in age, but intense and magnetic Ben seemed years younger. A hunter, a fisherman, and a conservationist—in addition to being a successful businessman—Ben had an encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world, and he shared it enthusiastically. Over dinner, I hammered him with questions: How do horseshoe crabs mate? What causes the annual spring migration of herring? How do quahogs lay eggs? I tried to stump him but failed. Answering questions about the environment and its inhabitants was his party trick.

As the six of us devoured our meal, Ben schooled us in pigeons, which he had been raising for more than thirty years.

“Did you know that the babies are brooded and fed by both parents,” he said, aiming a petite drumstick my way.

“So these are, like, city pigeons?” I asked, curious if they were the same grimy creatures I knew from New York, where I was born and where my father still lived.

“Yes and no. Pigeons and doves are from the same family, Columbidae,” Ben said, touching my arm as he spoke. “The birds we raise are white doves.”

“Oh, the flock is so gorgeous, Rennie,” Lily said. “You’ll have to visit sometime and see for yourself.”

“I’d love that,” I said and I looked at my mother, who nodded permission.

“So how do you kill them, exactly?” Peter asked.

Ben twisted a tiny, invisible neck.

The evening went on, electric and full of small surprises. Ben was a vigorous man who spoke with his hands and explained things thoroughly but also listened intently to whoever was speaking. I noticed how his gaze kept returning to my mother throughout the meal. My mother seemed to delight in these glances, giving equine tosses of her head and laughing readily. At one point, I watched as she dragged her fork across the dome of her corn pudding. We both looked up to see if Ben was watching. He was. She shot me a furtive smile and poured me a glass of red wine. Then she