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    Food for Thought
    Food for Thought
    Food for Thought
    Ebook144 pages1 hour

    Food for Thought

    By Amy Lane

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    About this ebook

    A Tale of the Curious Cookbook

    Emmett Gant was planning to tell his father something really important one Sunday morning—but his father passed away first. Now, nearly three years later, Emmett can't seem to clear up who he should be with—the girl with the apple cheeks and the awesome family, or his snarky neighbor, Keegan, who never sees his family but who makes Emmett really happy just by coming over to chat.

    Emmett needs clarity.

    Fortunately for Emmett, his best friend’s mom has a cookbook that promises to give Emmett insight and good food, and Emmett is intrigued. After the cookbook follows him home, Emmett and Keegan decide to make the recipe “For Clarity,” and what ensues is both very clear—and a little surprising, especially to Emmett's girlfriend. Emmett is going to have to think hard about his past and the really important thing he forgot to tell his father if he wants to get the recipe for love just right.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamspinner Press
    Release dateApr 8, 2015
    ISBN9781632168597
    Food for Thought
    Author

    Amy Lane

    Award winning author Amy Lane lives in a crumbling crapmansion with a couple of teenagers, a passel of furbabies, and a bemused spouse. She has too damned much yarn, a penchant for action-adventure movies, and a need to know that somewhere in all the pain is a story of Wuv, Twu Wuv, which she continues to believe in to this day! She writes contemporary romance, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, and romantic suspense, teaches the occasional writing class, and likes to pretend her very simple life is as exciting as the lives of the people who live in her head. She’ll also tell you that sacrifices, large and small, are worth the urge to write. Website: www.greenshill.com Blog: www.writerslane.blogspot.com Email: amylane@greenshill.com Facebook: www.facebook.com/amy.lane.167 Twitter: @amymaclane

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      Book preview

      Food for Thought - Amy Lane

      To Mate, Mary, and all assorted Spawn. And to Marie, RJ, and Amber, ’cause lobby-con can do strange things to women,

       and this was one of the best.

      Prologue

      Dust for Dinner

      EMMETT GANT looked at himself in the mirror of his dorm room, and wondered how gay he looked. He had a long bony face and gray eyes, so usually he looked just… solid and placid, a sober, rawboned specimen of American manhood.

      But he knew he was gay. He’d known since his long ago junior high crush on his best friend, Vinnie. His crush on Vinnie had gone away—for one thing, Vinnie was just too awesome a friend to crush on for long. He was the kind of friend who would sneak all the seniors on the football field in the pissing rain, after the last home game, so they could perform their competition band show without instruments, singing their parts at top volume. He was the kind of friend who would show up at your dorm in Sacramento from his dorm in Chico, with a keg in the back of his aging Mini Cooper and a plan to go eat sourdough bread and look at girls on the beach.

      He was the kind of friend who would nurse Emmett through a broken heart and not ask the name of the person who broke it—wouldn’t even ask the gender.

      He was a brother kind of friend—but he wasn’t a crushing on kind of friend, not anymore.

      Emmett had lived through the crushing on kind of friend, and had broken his heart, and he’d managed to pull his grades out of the toilet from that semester, and managed to put on some of the weight he’d lost too.

      And now it was time to tell his father why he’d looked like hell for three months. Because right now, only two other people in the world knew, and they weren’t likely to tell a soul.

      Emmett decided that whether he looked gay or straight, his sandy hair wasn’t going to get thicker or more interesting looking and it was time to go. He pulled out his cell phone and hit his dad’s picture. Ira Gant had a farmer’s face—but he’d been a factory worker, so maybe that was just the kind of face he was supposed to have. Raw-boned, like Emmett, unsmiling, he always seemed to be looking at a grimmer version of the world than Emmett could imagine, and his picture in Emmett’s phone wasn’t any different.

      Hey Dad? You must be outside mowing the lawn. Anyway, just a reminder that I’m on my way today, okay? I’ll cook dinner—I know you get tired of eating out. See you when I get there!

      Emmett’s dad didn’t say… well, anything, but Emmett had figured out that his dad liked it when he cooked. When he’d been about six, he’d once tried to make popcorn in a pressure cooker, because he’d been home alone and hungry, and they’d had an air popper, but he hadn’t been able to reach it. He had, fortunately, not killed himself by blowing up the kitchen, but the lid to the pressure cooker had frozen, and when his dad got home, Emmett was crying over the pressure cooker, because he was starving and all of the popcorn was right there and he couldn’t pry the lid open.

      His dad had taught him how to make noodles then, and mac & cheese, and even open a can of beans and add hot dogs. Emmett had been the one to find the kids’ cookbook at the library, and then Vinnie’s mom, Flora, had helped him through the basic recipes.

      Emmett’s dorm had a hot plate and a minifridge, but once a week and on the holidays, Emmett went to his dad’s place and made things like chicken cacciatore and roast pork with new potatoes, and he enjoyed that. He didn’t want to do it for a living, but being able to give his dad some sort of substantial proof that Emmett was grateful for his upbringing: that was important.

      Emmett didn’t remember his mom—she’d left before he went to kindergarten—but Emmett’s dad had… well, been there. He’d hugged Emmett when he’d cried—although he hadn’t offered any advice on how to stop. And he’d tried to make sure Emmett grew up as a healthy child, although Emmett had needed to go next door to Vinnie’s house to know how to grow up as a happy one. No, a communicator Ira Gant was not, but Emmett was still sort of sure his daddy loved him.

      For one thing, every Sunday when Emmett arrived, his dad was sitting out on the rotting wooden porch of the old stucco house waiting for him, even if it was near the summer and a zillion degrees outside.

      This particular mid-April day, it wasn’t supposed to get above 80, so Emmett was surprised at the end of the two-hour drive to find that his dad wasn’t there on the porch. The house looked like it always did—the stucco was chipped and peeling, the porch needed to be painted, and the roof was probably falling down—but Emmett’s dad was nowhere to be found.

      Dad? Dad? Emmett knocked on the door, but heard nothing. He had to use his key to get in, because it was still locked, and his dad hadn’t turned on the air or opened up any of the windows.

      The house smelled… bad. Funky. Like a science experiment left in the petri dish too long, or one of his current roommate’s socks.

      Like something organic and animal left to rot.

      By the time he got to his father’s room, he knew what he’d find, but that didn’t make it any easier.

      Later, after he’d called an ambulance and they’d come to take his father’s body away, the doctor would tell him that it was a massive cardiac infarction. That didn’t make it any easier to find his father, eyes open and milky, face blue, tongue black, dead in the same bed he’d slept in since Emmett was a kid.

      THE FUNERAL was a quiet affair. Dad’s colleagues from the local clay-making factory showed up, looking sober and uncomfortable. Emmett had the impression that they would probably mourn his dad over beers, in much more color, later when they weren’t standing at the gravesite.

      Vinnie and his mother and father and his entire family turned out.

      They provided color, and they brought all the flowers, and every one of them stepped forward to say something nice about Emmett’s father. They talked about how he always brought soda to the family picnics when he was invited, because it was the one thing that Vinnie’s mom did not let them have. They talked about how many times he’d brought home a ribbon or a doll or a backpack that one of Vinnie’s sisters had dropped, and how he’d spent an entire night looking for the youngest’s—Cecily’s—kitten when it ran away. Cecily came forward, crying, a beautiful dark-haired, dark-eyed teenager by now—and told everybody that he’d found her kitten run over, but had gotten a look-alike from the pound the next day and had tried to pawn it off.

      Mom and dad had already told me, but we had a game of pretend, you know? I pretended I didn’t know, and he pretended it really was Snuffles, and Snuffles the second is still living in my room.

      So everybody had something nice to say about Emmett’s dad.

      Emmett stood up and said, Dad… Dad, I’m gay. Dad, I’m gay and I never told you. I’m gay and my first broken heart almost killed me, and I don’t know if I can be gay and get my heart broken and be a man if you’re not at home on the porch, ready to just be my dad. "Dad, we had so much to say to each other. And all we had was silence. I

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