Birthday Girls

To
the number of Smiths who have dropped into my life: Cindy, who has shared her energy, support, and love for so many decades; Bob, who has never hesitated to share his wife’s time and has supplied so many airline tickets to make it happen; and E.J., who has taught me so much more than I’d ever planned to learn. Thanks to you all.

Thanks
, too, to Ann Hill, for her many contributions to this book and for helping to make the Michigan adventure such a memorable one; Dr. Keith Wilson, for the great escapes of shoptalk over chicken soup at Borders; Gail Lyders for her candid answers to my many questions; and Dr. Ron Wade for his time and medical expertise.

September 1958

The cake
was big enough to have fed all the “young ladies” of Arbor Brook School, not just the four who stood in the dining room of Abigail’s grandfather’s manor house.
Happy 10th Birthday
was squiggled in birthday-girl pink across the thick white frosting. Then came their names: Abigail, Kris, Maddie, and Betty Ann.

“I have an idea,” Betty Ann squealed. “Let’s make birthday wishes!”

“Not until the candles are on the cake,” Abigail replied.

“Why not?”

“Because that’s how it’s done.”

Kris crossed her arms and tipped up her chin. “You close your eyes and make a wish, then blow out the candles. And if you tell anyone your wish, it won’t come true.” She blinked her long lashes. “Unless someone has a better suggestion.”

“Let’s write down our birthday wishes,” Betty Ann giggled, “then seal them in a bottle to keep them a secret.”

“That’s not how it’s done,” Abigail repeated.

“We can open the bottle next year!” Betty Ann’s words rushed out; her freckled cheeks glowed. “Then we’ll know if our wishes came true!”

“One wish for each year?” Maddie asked, tugging at the hem of her Mousketeer T-shirt.

“We’ll start off by saying, ‘By the time I’m eleven …’
then fill in the rest! We can start a tradition and do it forever.”

“Forever?” Kris frowned.

“Well, maybe not forever, but let’s say … until we are fifty.”

“Fifty?” Maddie moaned. “When will we be fifty?”

“1998,” Abigail answered. “And this is stupid.”

“1998?” Maddie cried. “We’ll be old!”

“With wrinkled-up faces and blue-white hair,” Kris added, then pirouetted. “We’ll have children and grandchildren and spend our days playing bridge.”

“Oh, God,” Maddie groaned. “We’ll have nothing left to wish for by the time we are fifty.”

Abigail stared at the huge birthday cake and wondered if Maddie would be right.

August 1997

Abigail Hardy
bolted past the cameraman and spit into the sink. “The freaking coffee is cold again,” she barked to whomever was listening—which, under the circumstances, should have been everyone.

“Cut,” the director’s voice groaned across the vast room, the Victorian-appointed, copper-and-brass-shining room. “Let’s break for lunch.”

Slamming her mug against the stainless steel, Abigail snapped around the kitchen-turned-studio. “Kaminski!” she screeched. “Where the hell is Kaminski?”

It had not been a good morning. The script called for shooting the bakery segment of
Christmas with Abigail
before the afternoon sun scorched the kitchen and wilted the cranberry phyllo puffs. But wide-eyed Paula Padderson, baker extraordinaire who’d been imported from lower Manhattan to Abigail’s estate on the Hudson, had the unfortunate habit of looking better on camera than her pastries. And her hostess.

Standing beside chef Paula, Abigail appeared hausfrauish, old, and plain. Plain. Martha Stewart plain. Not every
woman’s idol, Abigail Hardy, who dished up elegance with every easy-to-prepare, gourmet recipe and helped transform her middle-America audience into Park Avenue socialites. Anything but plain.

She pushed up the sleeves of her red-sequined silk tunic and envied Martha Stewart that she could wear jeans. There was something to be said for being comfortable.

Darting her eyes from the lace-trimmed velvet bows to the bundles of evergreens that swathed her kitchen, Abigail realized the absurdity of pretending it was Christmas when it was still August and eighty-nine steamy degrees outside, an hour north of the city, and how asinine it was that they’d had to camouflage the windows so that the viewers wouldn’t notice the explosion of color in the summer gardens beyond the French doors—the summer gardens that dotted the 1,500-acre estate and framed the forty-room sandstone Tudor mansion in a veritable rainbow of pollen.

Abigail lit a long, slim cigarette and wished her hand would stop trembling. She detested taping these holiday specials, detested the damn fuss, detested the damn
smiling
. Tightening all those facial muscles couldn’t be doing her plastic surgery any good.

Abigail much preferred her own weekly show … the half-hour syndicated show in which
she
called the shots, from choosing the featured guests (preferably male) to the meat of the content. Well, she decided now, pushing out an angry cloud of smoke, if they wanted her to continue these specials, she’d have to demand creative control from the network.

“Do you need me?” Larry Kaminski appeared beside her, clipboard in hand.