St. Mary's Church Community Kitchen — July 2010, Next Morning
The Skill Market opened like a vending machine designed by someone who'd read too many RPG wikis. I was sitting on the closed toilet lid in the church bathroom — fast becoming my operational headquarters, which said something about the glamour of being a temporal repair technician — scrolling through Tier 0 offerings at seven in the morning while the wake's second day assembled itself in the fellowship hall.
The options were aggressively practical. Passable Dancing (200 SP) — partner and solo, wedding-reception grade. Basic Car Repair (250 SP) — oil changes, tire rotation, the kind of thing that makes you useful at a cookout. Functional Guitar (400 SP) — campfire-level proficiency, twelve songs, three keys. Small Talk Mastery (200 SP) — the dark art of making strangers comfortable, which I probably needed but couldn't afford to stack with what I actually wanted. Furniture Assembly Speed-Run (150 SP) — tempting in a primal way I didn't want to examine.
And there it was: Decent Cooking (BBQ) — 300 SP.
Rubs, smoke rings, grill temperatures, wood types, timing. Proficiency equivalent: 2,000 hours of backyard experience. Limitation: Good, not great. Will impress civilians. Will not win competitions.
Three hundred points out of fifteen hundred. Leaving twelve hundred for whatever came next. The church kitchen had a grill out back — I'd spotted it through the window yesterday, a neglected Weber kettle sitting under a tarp near the playground equipment. Community cookout infrastructure, dormant and waiting.
I pressed PURCHASE.
The download hit like someone had fast-forwarded a cooking show directly into my cerebral cortex. Three minutes of compressed hallucination: charcoal pyramids, the hiss of fat on grates, the specific amber color of a perfectly seared patty, the physics of indirect heat, the patience required for a smoke ring, the chemistry of a dry rub involving paprika, brown sugar, garlic, onion, and a pinch of cayenne that I could suddenly taste on the back of my tongue. My hands twitched on the phone — ghost-grilling, muscle memory being installed like software.
When it ended, I was breathing hard and my mouth was watering.
[SKILL ACQUIRED: Decent Cooking (BBQ) — Tier 0]
[Integration period: 24 hours before next skill purchase.]
[Note: Skill is knowledge-based. Physical execution may vary during first deployment. Practice recommended.]
I stood up. My legs were slightly wobbly — the download had drained something, a low-grade mental exhaustion like studying for an exam in a single sitting. I steadied myself against the stall divider and took a breath.
I know how to grill. I know how to grill like a man who's been doing it every weekend for twenty years. I know the difference between mesquite and hickory and why lump charcoal is superior to briquettes in seventeen specific scenarios. This knowledge did not exist in my head four minutes ago.
The face in the bathroom mirror looked the same. Holden Lawson, early thirties, blue eyes, dark hair, tie loosened from yesterday. But behind the eyes, something had shifted. A new competency sat alongside the old ones — not natural, not earned through practice, just there, installed like an app on hardware that wasn't designed for it.
This is the price. Not SP. The price is becoming someone I didn't build. Someone assembled from purchased pieces and borrowed time.
The fellowship hall was half-full by eight. The wake's second day operated at a lower intensity — fewer mourners, quieter conversations, the bone-deep exhaustion of a community that had been grieving for thirty-six hours and was running on casseroles and obligation. The food table looked like a battlefield: half-empty aluminum trays of dried-out pasta salad, a picked-over deli platter with the last sad slices of turkey curling at the edges, and three untouched bowls of coleslaw because nobody at a wake has ever voluntarily chosen coleslaw.
I found Nora Ferdinando-Buzzer in the community kitchen, stacking clean mugs with the efficiency of a woman who hadn't slept but refused to show it. Her hair was pulled back, her sleeves rolled to the elbows, and her clipboard was nowhere in sight — replaced by a dish towel she was using to dry mugs between stacks.
"Hey," I said from the doorway. "Mind if I use the grill out back? I can do burgers for the lunch crowd."
Nora looked up. The polite-blank expression from the handshake line was gone, replaced by the evaluative squint of someone who didn't have time for ambiguity.
"Do I know you?"
"Holden. I was at the service yesterday."
"I know you were at the service. I asked if I know you."
"Coach helped me out when I was a kid. I moved away, lost touch." The cover story, deployed for the second time in two days. It held about as well as a paper umbrella in a thunderstorm, but Nora was too tired to press.
"Grill's under the tarp. Charcoal's in the shed. If you burn down the church playground, I'm billing you."
"Fair."
The Weber kettle was in better shape than it looked. Under the tarp, the grates were rusted at the edges but structurally sound, and the charcoal in the shed was lump — good lump, the kind that burns hot and clean. I built a two-zone fire with the specificity of a man who'd done this ten thousand times, except I'd done it zero times and the knowledge was three hours old.
My hands knew what to do. The charcoal pyramid, the chimney starter improvised from a coffee can with the bottom punched out, the patience of letting the coals ash over before spreading them. The downloaded skill operated like muscle memory with a half-second delay — my brain sent the instruction, my hands received it a beat late, and the first few motions were clumsy. I dropped the tongs twice. Spilled charcoal on my shoes. Burned my thumb on the grate because the download hadn't included the sensory memory of hot metal hurts, just the knowledge that it would.
Practice recommended. No kidding.
By the time the coals were ready, the rust had burned off the grates and the smoke rising from the grill smelled like every good summer afternoon that had ever existed. I'd found ground beef in the kitchen fridge — church potluck supply, probably earmarked for Thursday's youth group — and formed patties with a light touch the skill insisted on: loose pack, thumb indent in the center, salt and pepper only because a good burger doesn't need to try hard.
The first patty hit the grate with a sizzle that traveled through the open kitchen window and directly into the fellowship hall. I could practically hear the heads turn.
Eric Lamonsoff appeared at the back door in under three minutes. The man had radar for food the way sharks had radar for blood — specific, irresistible, and accompanied by a slightly panicked look that suggested he'd been eating wake coleslaw and had reached his limit.
"Is that — are you grilling?"
"Morning. Want a burger?"
"It's eight-thirty in the morning."
"Is that a no?"
Eric looked at the grill. Looked at the patties. Looked at me. Some internal negotiation happened behind his eyes — the kind where the responsible adult and the hungry human debate for approximately one second before hunger wins by knockout.
"Medium, please. Don't tell Sally."
The first burger came off the grill with a crust that crackled when I pressed it and a center that blushed pink. Tier 0 — good, not great. But in the context of a wake where the highest culinary achievement had been reheated lasagna, it was a revelation. Eric took a bite standing up, and his eyes closed mid-chew with the expression of a man who'd just remembered what food was supposed to taste like.
"Where have you been," he said, and it wasn't a question. It was a declaration of emotional devotion delivered through a mouthful of beef.
"Around."
"Don't go back there. Stay here and do this forever."
The grill became a beacon. Kurt arrived next, drawn by the smoke, and stood with his arms crossed watching me flip patties with the skeptical attention of a man who'd been lied to by grills before.
"You season those?"
"Salt, pepper, and restraint."
Kurt's eyebrow went up. He took a burger. Ate it in four bites. Came back for a second without comment, which from Kurt was the equivalent of a Michelin star.
He took a plate to Deanne and Mama Ronzoni. I watched from the grill, tongs in hand, as the two women bit into their burgers at the same time. Deanne nodded. Mama Ronzoni chewed slowly — the deliberate, judicial chewing of a woman who had opinions about seasoning the way other people had opinions about politics.
"He seasons properly," she said.
Kurt looked at me from across the yard with an expression I couldn't read. Then he walked back to the grill, took a third burger, and said: "Mama Ronzoni's never said that about a man who isn't related to her by blood or marriage. You should feel honored. Or scared."
"Both seems appropriate."
"Both is correct."
The lunch crowd built around the grill the way crowds build around campfires — gradually, organically, drawn by warmth and the smell of something good. Folding lawn chairs appeared from the church storage room. Someone brought out a cooler of sodas. Lenny arrived around noon with Roxanne and the kids, and the kids — Greg, Keithie, Becky — went straight for the burgers with the unerring instinct of children who could identify real food in a sea of casseroles.
Marcus drifted out around one, plate already loaded with inside food, took one look at the grill situation, and said: "So we're doing this now? We're doing a cookout at a wake? Coach Buzzer would have loved this. He would've also said we're all going to hell."
"He would have asked for his medium-rare," Rob said, and he was there too, Gloria beside him, his toupee straight for once, his phone mercifully silent for a twenty-minute stretch.
I grilled for four hours. My shoulders ached. The charcoal smoke had embedded itself in the suit I'd been wearing for two days. My thumb throbbed where I'd burned it, and the downloaded skill was wearing grooves into my muscle memory with each patty flipped — the half-second delay shrinking to a quarter-second, then disappearing entirely by the third hour.
The grill crowd didn't disperse. It grew. And by late afternoon, I was standing at the center of a loose circle of lawn chairs where four of the five friends were telling Coach Buzzer stories while their wives compared notes on whose kids were the worst-behaved and the kids themselves ran laps around the playground equipment.
Sally found me during a lull. I was scraping the grates with a wire brush — cleanup, the part of grilling nobody romanticizes — when she appeared at my elbow with a fresh spatula and the gentle, thorough expression of a woman about to ask questions she already knew the answers to.
"So, Holden." She set the spatula on the side table. "How'd you know Coach Buzzer?"
"He helped me out when I was a kid. Before I moved."
"When was that?"
"Early eighties."
"And you're, what, early thirties?"
The math. The math didn't quite work unless I'd been very young, and Sally was doing the calculation behind eyes that were friendly and precise and missed nothing.
"I was young," I said. "Really young. He coached a youth league I was in for a summer."
"Huh." Sally picked up the spatula, turned it over in her hands. "It's just — nobody here can place you. I've been asking. Two days at a wake and not one person remembers a Holden who knew Coach."
The smoke from the grill stung my eyes. Convenient, because it gave me a reason to look away.
"It was a long time ago. People forget."
"Sure." She handed me the spatula, and the handoff was deliberate — a gift, not a challenge. "Well, you cook like someone who had a good teacher."
She walked back to Eric. My hands were tight on the grill brush, knuckles white. The cover story — tissue-paper thin since the moment I'd arrived — had just taken its first real hit. Sally hadn't pushed hard, hadn't confronted, hadn't made a scene. She'd catalogued. Filed. Noted the inconsistency and stored it in whatever organizational system lived behind those calm, watchful eyes.
Sally Lamonsoff is not a character in a comedy. She's an intelligence operative disguised as a mom with homemade earrings.
The charcoal smoke smelled exactly like every backyard in every summer in every life I'd ever lived. For five seconds, leaning over the dying coals, I wasn't a transmigrator or a patcher or a stranger at a wake. I was a guy at a grill, missing a home that didn't exist in this world, and the smoke carried the ghost of a father who wasn't mine into a sky that didn't know my name.
Then the moment passed. The coals shifted. Eric yelled something about potato salad that made Kurt choke on his soda. Becky Feder asked me if I could make a burger shaped like a heart, and I said I'd try.
The lawn chairs had arranged themselves into a circle. Lenny at twelve o'clock, Eric at two, Kurt at four, Rob at eight. Marcus was inside — I could see him through the kitchen window, doing something at the kids' table that involved napkin puppets and dramatic whisper-narration. The children were rapt. The adults were ignoring it. And the system, silent for hours, sent a single notification that pulsed once and vanished:
[Diagnostic scan active: Marcus Higgins — comedy pattern analysis in progress.]
[Preliminary assessment: Comedy-as-defense mechanism. Severity: Significant.]
[Mission generation: Pending.]
The grill was cooling. The sun was dropping. And inside the church, Marcus Higgins was making a napkin puppet tell a joke about a chicken crossing the road, and somewhere behind the laughter, the system was watching his comedy the way a mechanic watches an engine that's running too hot.
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