Goddess of Spring (4 page)

Anton finished the sentence for her. “—There's no crying in baking.”

Dolores nodded vigorous agreement.

Lina set the cat carrier next to her desk before taking a seat behind it. Anton and Dolores sank into the two plushly upholstered antique chairs that faced her. No one spoke.

Hesitating, Anton made a vague gesture in the direction of the cat. “Patricia from Street Cats said that she'd stay a little past closing today, so if you want me to, I can drop off that little orange thing on my way home. It's really not out of my way.” He finished with a weak smile.

“Thank you, Anton, even though you called her a little orange thing, I'll take you up on your kind offer.”

“Well, I meant little orange beast, but I was trying to be nice,” Anton said, sounding more like himself and looking less likely to hyper-ventilate.

“What are we going to do?” Dolores asked.

True to form, Dolores was ready for the bottom line. Though only twenty-eight, she had been working for Lina for ten years. The reason Lina had hired her was not just because she had a flair for baking pastries and a way with old people, but Lina appreciated her no-nonsense personality. And she was the perfect balance for Anton, who was—Lina glanced at her other employee who sat with his legs crossed delicately, the sheen of almost-tears still pooled in his eyes—decidedly more dramatic. They fit together well, the three of them, and Lina intended that they stay that way.

“We expand our menu,” Lina said firmly.

Dolores nodded her head thoughtfully. “Okay, we can do that.”

Anton gnawed on the side of his thumb. “Do you mean, like, add sandwiches or something?”

“I'm not exactly sure yet,” Lina said slowly. “I haven't had time to think it through. I just know that we have to make more money, which means we need to bring in more customers. It only makes sense that if we expanded our menu, we would appeal to a larger group of people.”

Anton and Dolores nodded in unison.

“Catering Tess Miller's dinner is a good place to start,” Dolores said.

“Catering,” Anton whined. “It sounds so, I don't know,
banal.
”

“As banal as bankruptcy?” Lina asked.

“No!” The word burst from his mouth.

“My thoughts exactly,” Lina said.

“So what are we going to serve?” Dolores asked.

Lina ran her fingers through her neatly cropped hair. She had absolutely no idea.

“We're going to serve selections from our expanded menu. That way we'll get practice as well as publicity.”

“And that expanded menu would be what exactly?” Dolores prompted.

“I have absolutely no idea,” Lina admitted.

“And to think I didn't bring even one tiny Xanax with me to work today.” Anton was gnawing at his thumb again.

“Quit biting your finger,” Dolores told him. “We'll figure this out.” She shifted her gaze to Lina. “Right?”

Lina's heart squeezed. They looked like baby birds gaping up at her expectantly.

“Right,” she said, painting her voice with confidence. “All I need to do is to . . .” she faltered. Her nestlings blinked big, round eyes, waiting for her next words. “Is to . . . um . . . brainstorm.” She finally finished.

“Brainstorm? As in the step before writing a paper?” Anton, who was perpetually a sporadic night school student at Tulsa Community College, clutched onto a familiar idea.

“Of course,” Dolores added brightly. “Lina probably has about a zillion and a half cookbooks at home. All she needs to do is to go through them and pick out a few great recipes for wonderful meals.”

“Then she'll share them with us, and we'll begin our new creations!” Anton gushed. “How ab fab! I can hardly wait!” Then he reached over and squeezed Dolores's hand. “I feel just awful that I was so negative in the beginning. I almost forgot our Baker's Motto.”

Dolores and Anton grinned at each other, and then as if they were getting ready to say the Pledge of Allegiance, they covered their hearts with their hands and spoke solemnly in unison:

“In baking we must always rise to the occasion.”

Lina thought that she very well might have been in baker's hell, but she kept nodding and smiling. Dolores was partially correct, she did have a wonderful collection of cookbooks at home—all filled with fabulous recipes for breads and pastries. She had very few cookbooks that contained recipes for meals. Actually, she didn't even cook many full meals herself. A little pasta here, a little salad there, and a nice glass of Chianti was her idea of cooking a full meal. Baking was her specialty and her love. Meals were, well, banal.

Out of her element, she admitted to herself. This whole thing was totally out of her element. So, feeling a little like a sparrow struggling to feed the cuckoos in her nest, Lina kept smiling and nodding at her chicks.

“Well, I think we've been absent from the front long enough. Now that we've got a plan, why don't you two handle it for the next hour and close up for me? I'll go home and begin brainstorming.”

“Tess said she'd call you on Monday about the menu for the dinner, didn't she?” Dolores asked.

“That's what she said, all right.” Lina focused on keeping the panic out of her voice.

“Oooh, this really is exciting. You know, I'll bet there will be lots of local celebs at that dinner.” Anton waggled his well-maintained eyebrows. “Not to mention media coverage.”

“I imagine there will be.” Lina walked briskly from her office.

As she called quick good-byes to her customers and hastily retreated out the door, she could hear Anton telling Dolores that he would certainly need several new, exciting outfits to go with their new, exciting menu.

Her grandmother had told her many times that swearing was common, unladylike behavior reserved only for peasants and men who were not gentlemen. On the other hand, she totally endorsed a well-accented, well-chosen Italian curse as simply showing one's creativity. Standing in front of her bakery Lina let loose with a string of Italian that began with telling the IRS they could
va al diavolo,
or go to hell, and ending with saying they were nothing more than a chronic, flaming
rompicoglioni,
or pain in the ass. Just to cover all bases in between she strung together several “shits” and “damns,” in Italian, of course. She felt sure Grandma would have been proud.

When people began staring she shut her mouth and told herself to breathe slowly and deeply. She was an intelligent, successful businesswoman. Hell, she could even curse eloquently in Italian and English, but she tried to keep the English to a minimum—Grandma had been right, it just didn't sound as well-bred (and yes, Grandma would also have appreciated the pun). How difficult could it be for her to come up with a few new menu choices? Even if they were meals and not breads.

She started to twirl a strand of her hair, but caught herself and forced her hand to stay at her side. The problem wasn't that she couldn't come up with some new recipes. The problem, she realized, was that through Pani Del Goddess she had established a solid reputation for preparing breads that were unique and delicious. She couldn't just slap some pesto over pasta and toss a salad on the side of the plate. She wouldn't do it at all if she couldn't do it well. The name Pani Del Goddess meant excellence, and Lina was determined that it would never stand for anything less.

She should call her grandmother; she'd have a stack of ideas that she'd be thrilled to share with her beloved
bambina
. Again.

“But as Anton would say, I'm
sooo
not a baby,” Lina muttered to herself. “Good God, I'm forty-three. It's about time I quit running to Grandma.”

Lina's dialogue with herself was interrupted by the sound of care-free laughter coming from two women who had just emerged from the used bookstore across the street. She scowled and wished that all she had to worry about was shopping with a friend for the perfect book.

The scowl shifted as her expression turned thoughtful. The Book Place was a wonderful used bookstore with a vast selection of fiction and nonfiction. Lina had spent many satisfied hours lost in their maze of shelves. Surely she could find a fabulous old cookbook in the stacks, something that had been hidden in out-of-print obscurity for years, and within its pages there would be a recipe that was the perfect blend of Italy and magic and ingredients.

Yes, she thought as she dodged cars and crossed the street, The Book Place was the perfect place to begin brainstorming.

CHAPTER THREE

THE pile of used books was daunting. She'd found ten of them. Ten old, interesting looking, out-of-print Italian cookbooks. While she was choosing them they hadn't seemed so thick—and ten certainly hadn't seemed to be so many. But now that they were home with her, piled in a neat stack on the glass top of the wrought iron sculpture she used as a coffee table, they appeared to have multiplied.

Couldn't she have narrowed her choices down by a few less books before she'd left the bookstore?

“In baking we must always rise to the occasion,” she reminded the enormous, longhaired black-and-white tomcat that perched in the middle of the black-and-white toile chaise. The perfect match made Lina grin. She enjoyed purchasing furniture that properly accessorized her pets, even if the cat didn't deign to notice. Lina did receive a brief look of boredom from his side of the room and a quick swish of his tail in response to the proclamation of her bakery motto.

“Patchy Poo the Pud Santoro,” she addressed him formally by his full name. “You are a handsome beast, but you know nothing about baking.”

At her feet, the half-sleeping old English bulldog snorted as if in agreement with her.

“Don't be rude, Edith Anne,” Lina scolded the dog halfheartedly. “You know considerably more about eating than you know about baking.”

Edith sighed contentedly as Lina scratched her behind her right ear. With the hand that wasn't busy, Lina picked up the first book. It was a thick tomb entitled
Discovering Historical Italy.
She let it fall open and began reading a long, complex paragraph about the proper preparation of veal. She blanched and snapped the book shut. Veal was a popular dish in Italy, but to her veal meant baby cows. Mush-brained, adorable, wide-eyed baby cows.

“Perhaps it's not possible to rise to a very difficult occasion without the proper preparation.” She said to the now snoring Bulldog. “In baking or otherwise.” She closed the book, setting it gently back on the table a little like it was a bomb that might very well explode if not treated carefully.

“I think this particular preparation calls for a nice glass of Italian red,” she told Patchy Poo the Pud Santoro. He glanced at her through slitted eyes and yawned.

“You two are no help at all.”

Shaking her head, Lina walked away from the table and headed directly to her wine closet. In her opinion, a Monte Antico Rosso Sangiovese was the perfect preparation tool for any difficult situation—baking or otherwise.

“Maybe I can serve enough wonderful Italian wine with my new menu that my customers will get too soused to pay much attention to what they eat.” She spoke over her shoulder to her animals as she poured herself a ruby-colored glass of wine, but she didn't need a non-response from her pets to know that her last statement was ridiculous. Then she'd be running a bar and not a bakery, which would give Anton an apoplectic fit. Lina straightened her spine, snagged a bag of double-dipped chocolate-covered peanuts, the perfect accompaniment for the Sangiovese, and marched back into her living room. Planting herself on the couch, she opened her notebook and chose the next book in the pile,
Cooking With Italy.

The dog and cat lifted their heads and gave her identically quizzical looks.

“Let the games begin,” she told them grimly.

THREE hours later she had finished combing through nine of the ten books, and she had a list of four possible main course recipes: chicken picatta, puttanesca on spaghetti, eggplant parmigiana, and a lovely aioli platter, complete with artichokes, olives, tomatoes, poached salmon and carpaccio.

Lina felt a little thrill of accomplishment as she looked over her list. She was actually enjoying herself. Delving through the musty old books had become an exercise in Italian history and culture—two things that had been a constant part of her upbringing.

Only one more cookbook was left. Lina picked up the slim hard-back. She had purposefully saved this one for last. In the bookstore she had been intrigued by the cover, which was a deep, royal blue etched with a gold embossed design. The title,
The Italian Goddess Cookbook,
rested over the golden illustration of a stern looking goddess who sat on a massive throne. She was dressed in a long robe and her hair was wrapped around the crown of her head in intricate braids. In one hand she held a scepter topped with a ripe ear of corn, in the other she held a flaming torch. Underneath the illustration the words,
Recipes and Spells for the Goddess in Every Woman,
flowed in beautiful gold script. The author's name, Filomena, was branded into the cover underneath the embossed print.

“Just one more recipe. Help me to find just one more, and I'll call it a night,” Lina said as she ran her fingers over the raised embossing.

Her fingertips tingled.

Lina rested the book on her lap and rubbed her hands together. She must be getting tired. She glanced at the clock. It was only a little past nine o'clock, but it had been a long day.

Lina looked back down at the cover. The gold print caught the lamplight, causing the words
Recipes and Spells for the Goddess in Every Woman
to seem to flicker and glow.