“Didn’t know you liked to cook,” Steve said, after perusing her bookshelves at length.
Maria Hill shrugged in response, a little sheepish. “I do in theory,” she said, “and sooner or later I’ll have the time to do it in practice. That’s a classic, anyway, and the author’s a favorite of mine.”
Steve nodded in understanding. He’d missed enough life drawing classes for the sake of various missions, certainly, even since waking up. Cooking hadn’t even made the list of potential hobbies yet.
A thought occurred to Hill. “You might have met her, actually,” she told him. “She was in the OSS.”
Steve considered this. “Name doesn’t ring a bell,” he said. “I knew a Child– Paul, I think it was– who took me and the rest of the squad to dinner in London once with some muckety-mucks. Too fancy for us by half, but it was good food.”
“That’s her husband!” Hill said, face lighting up. “She married him after the war. You’d know if you met her, though, she was six foot two with a voice like a foghorn–”
“Hey, yeah!” Steve said in surprise. “Julia McWilliams, sure, I remember her. Only woman I knew who stood taller than me in heels, after the serum. Good analyst, too. I didn’t know she liked to cook.”
“She didn’t, ‘til after the war,” Hill said.
“Well, whaddaya know,” Steve said.
Later, he looked her up on Youtube, and there she was, large as life, perhaps a little grayer than he remembered, but dismembering lobsters with immense good cheer.
“Huh,” Steve said, to no one in particular. “Julia McWilliams. Who’d have thought.”
So. Much. Win.
Want to see him reacting to the “sometimes, it doesn’t work right. My advice?” Pitches the pan’s contents into trash. “Throw it out and start over: it’s cooking, not the Mona Lisa.” Moment on the PBS show.