Chapter 21:

Tamagoyaki requires commitment.

Not the patient commitment of nikujaga — that's the long game, the low heat, the trusting of time. Tamagoyaki is immediate commitment. Present tense commitment. The heat has to be right before you pour and once you pour you're in, you're fully in, there's no stepping away to check your phone or answer a question or receive a pun —

I pour the first layer.

The egg hits the pan with the specific sizzle of correct temperature — not too loud, not too quiet, the particular sound of a surface that has been prepared correctly, that is ready to receive what's being given to it —

Thirty seconds. Maybe less. Then the folding begins.

The spatula under the edge. Gentle. The first fold establishing the foundation that every subsequent layer builds on — if the foundation is wrong the whole roll compensates for it through every layer, carries the error forward, compounds it —

"I'm bored," Chloe says.

She has appeared in the kitchen doorway with the specific energy of a person who has exhausted all other options and has arrived at the kitchen as the last resort.

"Do homework," I say. My eyes don't leave the pan.

"I did homework."

"Do more homework."

"I'm not a homework factory, Michael, I'm a person with finite homework and I've reached the end of it and now I require stimulation and you're the only —"

"I'm cooking," I say.

"I know you're cooking," she says. "I have eyes. I also have ears and my ears are telling me that the sizzle in that pan is tamagoyaki which is a very precise cooking task that requires a brain that is running at a high level, and I have a proposal —"

"No."

"You don't know what the proposal is."

"It doesn't matter what the proposal is," I say. "The answer is no. I need to focus."

She leans against the doorframe.

"You only need a brain and a mouth," she says. "I'll do most of the work. You just have to keep up."

I fold the first layer.

It folds correctly.

"Puns," I say.

"Puns," she confirms.

"I'm making tamagoyaki."

"Which is egg-cellent timing," she says, "because I've been egg-cited about this all evening and I don't want to egg-nore the opportunity any —"

"Those are three puns in one sentence," I say. "You've already violated the structural integrity of —"

"There are no rules," she says cheerfully, pulling herself onto the counter. "There have never been rules. Rules are for people who are afraid of chaos and we are Potter siblings and we —"

"I'm afraid of chaos," I say. "I have a preferred route. I count ceiling tiles. I —"

"You're afraid of external chaos," she says. "Internal chaos you've been swimming in since birth. Different categories. Now —" She gestures at the pan. "You were saying something about structural integrity."

I pour the second layer.

---

"Okay," she says. "Here's the opening."

"I haven't agreed to anything."

"Your continued presence in this kitchen is agreement," she says. "Here's the opening: why did the egg get promoted?"

I fold the second layer over the first.

The foundation holds.

"Because," she continues, without waiting, "it really knew how to get cracking, and in the corporate world you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette, which sounds like a metaphor but is actually just Tuesday in most offices, and the egg in question had been shell-shocked by the previous management but had really come out of its shell recently, which the board noticed, and they said this egg has real yolk — I mean yolk, I mean — this egg has real —"

"You just punned yourself," I say.

"I self-punned," she says. "It happens to the best of us. The point stands. The egg got promoted because it demonstrated the ability to perform under pressure which is a scrambled concept in most workplaces because pressure either cooks you or breaks you and this egg had specifically —"

"The egg was hard-boiled," I say.

She points at me. "There it is. There's the first real one. I'm logging it. Hard-boiled — the egg, the detective, the person who has been through enough that the exterior has set into something that doesn't crack easily. Continue."

"I wasn't continuing," I say. "I was noting."

"Note louder," she says.

I pour the third layer.

The roll is taking shape.

"The egg was hard-boiled," I say, because the pan is at the right temperature and the layer is setting at the right speed and my hands know what they're doing and my mouth apparently has opinions, "because it had been through the same heat repeatedly and each time it came out of the heat it was slightly more set than before, slightly less likely to break under pressure, which the board found admirable and I find —"

"Suspicious," Chloe says.

"I was going to say over-determined."

"Over-easy is the word you want," she says. "The egg found the whole promotion over-easy once it had been hard-boiled long enough. Which creates a problem because now the egg is too set, too hard, too — you can't make an omelette with a hard-boiled egg, Michael, the texture is wrong, you've cooked all the possibility out of it, it no longer has the capacity to —"

"Fold," I say.

"— fold, yes, to fold into something new, to receive new layers, to — oh, that was good actually, fold, the folding of the tamagoyaki and the folding of the self into new configurations, I'm going to pretend I did that deliberately —"

"You didn't."

"The collection of my deliberate puns is extensive and does not require fraudulent additions," she says. "Unlike some people's collections which shall remain nameless but are currently standing at the stove making tamagoyaki —"

"I have a collection," I say.

"You have eighteen — nineteen — items," she says. "That's not a collection that's a starter pack."

I fold the third layer.

"A starter pack," I say, "implies there are expansion packs available."

She opens her mouth.

Closes it.

"That was good," she says.

"I know."

"Don't be smug about it."

"I'm not being smug," I say. "I'm being accurate."

"Accuracy delivered with that face is smug by definition," she says. "Okay — where were we — the hard-boiled egg with the folding problem, the corporate omelette, the —" She shifts on the counter, getting comfortable, settling in for what her expression suggests is going to be a significant escalation. "Okay. Okay. So the hard-boiled egg goes to therapy —"

"The egg goes to therapy."

"The egg goes to therapy because it's been carrying a lot —"

I note the word carrying.

I file it.

I pour the fourth layer.

"— it's been carrying a lot since the promotion, the weight of the new position, the shell that's gotten so thick it's basically a wall at this point, and the therapist — who is a poached egg, very zen, very soft in the center, trained in the Viennese tradition which is a tradition I've invented just now — the therapist says to the hard-boiled egg, you seem very set in your ways —"

"Yolk," I say.

She stops.

"What," she says.

"The therapist says," I say, setting the spatula down, the tamagoyaki rolled and resting and correctly formed, "you seem very set in your ways. And the hard-boiled egg looks at the poached egg therapist who is soft in the center and trained in the Viennese tradition and says —" I look at Chloe, "— I know. Must've been a real yolk."

Silence.

Two seconds.

Three.

Chloe looks at me.

The yolk as burden. The yoke as the thing carried. The egg that has been carrying something and knows it and has one word for both the carrying and the joke about the carrying — one word, two meanings, the whole battle arriving at this single precise point —

"That's —" she starts.

"I know," I say.

"You've been holding that since —"

"Since carrying," I say. "You said carrying approximately six exchanges ago."

She stares at me.

Something on her face that is not in the collection yet.

Something new.

Not the smile-adjacent thing. Not the nineteen logged deviations. Something that is — I'm not going to describe it in detail because I'll be wrong about it and being wrong about the description feels worse than not having one, it feels more inaccurate, it feels like it costs something — but something that is looking at me and seeing something it wasn't expecting to see and finding that the not-expecting is —

"Twenty," she says quietly.

"I wasn't making a face."

"You were making a face," she says. "The face of someone who has been waiting six exchanges to deploy a perfect pun and has just deployed it and is pretending not to feel anything about the deploying." She hops off the counter. Gets two bowls from the cabinet — the right ones, the deep ones. "It's a good face, Michael."

I plate the tamagoyaki.

It has rolled correctly. The layers visible in cross-section where I've cut it — each one distinct, each one adding to the whole, the whole thing holding its shape because the foundation was correct and every subsequent layer was folded at the right moment —

I hand her the bowl.

She takes it.

We sit.

---

The kitchen in its dinner configuration.

The specific warmth of a space that has just been used for two things simultaneously and has absorbed both of them — the cooking and the chaos, the tamagoyaki and the puns, the precise and the playful running in parallel the way they always run in this kitchen, the way they always run between us —

Chloe eats.

I eat.

"The therapist being a poached egg," I say. "That was good."

"I know," she says.

"Very zen," I say. "Soft in the center."

"Trained in the Viennese tradition," she says. "Which I invented."

"I noticed."

"Invention is a form of genius," she says.

"It's a form of something," I say.

She points her chopsticks at me. "That face again."

"I'm not —"

"Twenty-one," she says. "I'm counting that one too."

I eat my tamagoyaki.

It's good.

The layers have held.

The foundation was correct.

Outside the window the evening has gone fully dark. The lamp doing its amber thing. The white wall at the end of the hallway doing its minimum. The apartment holding us the way it holds us — without asking anything, without requiring anything, just the walls being the walls around the people inside them —

"Hey," Chloe says.

"Mm."

"You were smiling," she says. "Earlier. During the battle. When I self-punned."

"I wasn't."

"You were," she says. "It was small. It was approximately 0.4 seconds. But it was there and I saw it and I'm logging it and it's going in the collection and there's nothing you can do about it."

I look at my bowl.

"It was a reflex," I say.

"The best ones are," she says.

We eat.

The tamagoyaki is good.

The layers have held.