He burned the pasta.
Not a little – catastrophically. The kind of burned where the water evaporated entirely and the spaghetti fused to the bottom of the pot like modern art and the smoke alarm went off and we both stood in his kitchen waving dish towels at the ceiling while the alarm shrieked and neither of us could stop laughing long enough to open a window.
“You said you could cook,” I said. Coughing. Waving my towel with the coordination of someone who was crying from laughter and smoke simultaneously.
“I said I could make pasta. That’s not cooking. That’s boiling water.”
“You failed at boiling water.”
“The water part went fine. It was the everything-after-water part.”
I made the sauce. Oversalted it so badly that the first bite made both of us wince and reach for our water glass
