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Authors: Kathleen McCleary

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BOOK: Leaving Haven
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“Hello,” Georgia said.

“Mom, this is important,” Liza said.

“I'm on the phone, too,” Georgia said, “but I wanted to acknowledge your existence.” She raised her eyebrows to show Liza she was making a point.

Liza rolled her eyes and said, “
Hi, Mom
.”

Her face still held the faint roundness of childhood, and even though her breasts had started to bloom and her hips to round, her waist was straight, her legs slightly knock-kneed. She had inherited John's heavy-lidded eyes and strong cheekbones, but her wavy brown hair and pert nose were all Georgia. Liza often complained about her looks, about the fact that she wasn't narrow waisted, blond, graceful. Georgia wished her daughter could see her own face in unguarded moments, when all that energy and liveliness shone through her very pores. Or that she could see her body, strong and fearless, as she jumped off the high dive, chittered across the waves on water skis.

“How are you, darling?”

“I'm
fine
. I'll talk to you later.”

“I may need your help, with making roses,” Georgia said. “We've had—”

“Mom. I'll come down in, like, five minutes, okay? I have to finish this conversation.”

Georgia remembered the days—just last year!—when Liza would come home from school, pour herself a glass of milk, get three chocolate chip cookies out of the snack drawer, sit down on a stool at the counter, and talk. She'd prattle on about her crazy world history teacher or the latest “drama” with the fifth-or sixth-grade girls, while Georgia rolled out fondant or whipped up a batch of mocha mousse filling. She and Liza both loved bad puns and Samwise Gamgee and chocolate malts and watching
What Not to Wear.

“I've had a cake disaster,” Georgia said.

“I've got a friend disaster,” Liza said. “Do you understand? This is important!” She walked out, trailing the scent of gardenia perfume.

“Georgia?” Chessy said.

“Yes.” Georgia stared after Liza as she walked down the hallway. Those jeans were much too tight.

“Some of the roses are still in one piece,” Chessy said. “No one eats them anyway, right? So it doesn't matter if they've touched the ground.”

“Of course it matters,” Georgia said, her attention back on the cake. “Who knows what's been on the ground?”

She tried to think. The wedding was at six at Western Presbyterian, which meant the ceremony would be over by six thirty.
Why couldn't Chessy have dropped the cake for a nice long Catholic wedding?
The reception would begin immediately afterward at the museum. The cake had to be there when the guests arrived. Georgia looked at the blue digital numbers on the microwave in the kitchen: 3:00. She had three hours to make a substitute wedding cake garnished with dozens of sugar roses and petals and—

“The bride and groom,” Georgia said into the phone. “Chess, please tell me the bride and groom on top of the cake are okay.” It had taken forever to make the tiny little figures out of fondant, in part because they both had to be dressed exactly like the real couple in a photo the bride had given Georgia.

“I don't see the bride and groom,” Chessy said.

“They're wearing overalls, and they're about four inches high.”

“Overalls?” Chessy said.

“Yes! Didn't you notice when you picked up the cake?”

“Who wears overalls?” Chessy said. “Are they farmers?”


No
. I don't know. They love roses. They garden a lot. They wanted a cake with lots of roses and with themselves in their gardening clothes. And I promised I'd do it and I did it and now it's lying on the sidewalk.”

“I think I found the bride,” Chessy said. “She looks terrible in overalls.”

“Chessy! Just salvage what you can—the bride, the groom, a rose that hasn't
actually touched the pavement
—and get back here as fast as you can.”

“I thought you said that was disgusting.”

“No one eats the bride and groom. They save them. We can wipe them off.”

“Okay, fine. But I don't see the groom. It's the bride's day anyway, right? Maybe we can lose the groom.”

“I'm hanging up now,” Georgia said. She put the phone down and laid her head on the granite counter.

Georgia had decided to become a pastry chef because it was the one thing she had found that filled her with a sense of certainty and joy after her mother's death. Evy had been a very good cook, someone who knew how to balance the light, moist texture of a cream cheese coffee cake with a crunchy topping of toasted walnuts and brown sugar, and who loved eating as much as she loved baking. She was blond and blue eyed, lean and wiry like Polly, with a fine spattering of pale brown freckles across her nose. While her height was average (five-six), everything else about her was big—her laugh, her collection of vintage cookbooks (especially 1940s-era Junior League cookbooks from southern states), her sense of fun, her plans. Pink was her favorite color because, as she said, “it makes you happy just to look at it.” She worked part-time as a secretary at the high school, but was home every day by three, baking. She wanted to open her own bakeshop, like the ones she had seen in Paris in her early twenties, a shop with a red awning and blue-and-white tiled floors and glass-fronted shelves filled with delicate, beautiful cakes with glazed strawberries.

At ten, Georgia loved coming home to fresh-baked ginger scones and a house that smelled sweet and warm, if warmth had a smell. At thirteen, she thought her mother was a hopelessly unambitious drudge who couldn't see the world beyond her gas range. Then an aneurysm in Evy's brain burst after she gave birth to Chessy. She died the next day. She was forty years old.

After that, no one in Georgia's family cooked for months, except to warm up the succession of entrées brought by friends and neighbors (which was why Georgia still hated lasagna). Frank, Georgia's father, had done his best. He moved his dental practice from downtown D.C. to an office in an old Cape Cod house on Washington Street just three blocks from their home in Falls Church so he didn't have to commute. He bought a couple of cookbooks and began to make dinner most nights, usually things like chili or short ribs or something he called Irish pasta stew that included spaghetti, bacon, and sauerkraut. He did the laundry, so the girls' clothes were always clean even if their white shirts were often tinged blue from being washed with dark jeans.

Georgia started baking by accident, when her father asked her to make a cake for Polly's birthday in April, six months after they had buried Evy in the tiny cemetery in the little town in the Adirondacks near Lake Conundrum, where the family vacationed every year. Georgia had fished out one of Evy's tattered cookbooks from the shelf in the kitchen and found the recipe for Polly's favorite cake, a three-layer butter cake with caramel fudge icing. She followed the recipe with care, whisking dry ingredients in one bowl, milk and vanilla in another, creaming the butter and sugar in yet another bowl, mixing it all together in alternating batches as the recipe demanded. And the cake was perfect! Georgia was hooked. Here was a world you could control, full of clear rules and predictable outcomes. She couldn't bring her mother back, but she could re-create her Dutch Baby pancake, fluffy and golden brown, or her ginger scones, crumbly and spicy-sweet. Of course, she hadn't anticipated days like this, days in which a perfect white cake with mango mousse and a hint of tupelo honey would lie smashed on the sidewalk.

Georgia heard John's footsteps on the stairs from his office. He walked into the kitchen. “Are you all right?” he said.

Georgia straightened up. “No,” she said. “Chessy just called and there's been an accident with the cake for a wedding tonight.”

John arched one eyebrow. “What kind of accident?”

“It's in pieces on the sidewalk. And the wedding is in three hours.”

“Ugh.” He made a face. “Let me guess: Chessy dropped it.”

“It wasn't her fault. Accidents happen.”

“Right. They just happen more often to your sister than to most people.”

“That's not really the issue right now. Right now I have to figure out how to get a cake to that wedding.”

He glanced at the clock. “I'm supposed to be at the restaurant at five.”

“Can't you get someone else to go early so you can help me?”

“Georgia.” John's look was sympathetic. “You can't make an entire wedding cake and decorate it in three hours.”

“I know. But I can take a cake I've already made—like the peacock cake—and redecorate it. I'll take the feathers off and make roses and a bride and groom and I can take
that
cake to today's wedding, and bake another cake for tomorrow's wedding.”

John raised his eyebrows. “Those are some impressive crisis management skills, Mrs. Bing.”

“Do you think it will work?” Georgia reached for her red apron, which hung on a hook inside the door to the pantry. “Their cake was white cake with mango mousse filling, and the peacock cake is white chocolate with white chocolate mousse.”

“They'll never notice,” John said. “I'm a chef, and I have no idea what flavor our wedding cake was.”

“It was an Earl Grey maple cake,” Georgia said. “One of my best. I still have people come up to me who remember that cake.”

“Can you blame me if the cake wasn't what I remember most about that day?” John flashed her an impish smile.

This was the thing about John: he could be indifferent, inattentive, lazy in a million little ways, but then he would say something utterly charming and smile that dimpled smile and make it impossible to be annoyed with him. Once, a year or two before they were married, he had called at the last minute to cancel their weekend plans to go to the Adirondacks. His friend Paul had tickets to see some unseeded hotshot tennis player named Agassi play in the U.S. Open finals in New York. Georgia had been crushed—she and John were in the heady throes of their first year together, completely besotted, and this would have been their first Weekend Away Alone Together.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” John had said. “You understand, don't you? We can go to your cabin another weekend.”

Which made sense, but also made Georgia feel she was inflexible and unadventurous for being upset. “I hate being dumped at the last minute,” she said.

He went to the U.S. Open anyway.

When he came back the following Monday, she didn't answer his phone calls or his persistent knocking on her apartment door. Tuesday morning she awoke and found a letter and a compact disk he had slid under her door during the night. The letter detailed the dozens of ways she was too good for him. The CD was a collection of music he had put together for her, starting out with a song from
The King and I
(who among her friends could even
name
one song from
The King and I
?) with lyrics about being a man who thinks with his heart and “stumbles and falls” but who tries and tries. The song was called “Something Wonderful.” It took a peculiar mix of humility and hubris to send the song to her, she thought.

The she answered a knock on her apartment door to find a sterling silver tray, with a fresh rose in a bud vase and a plate of French toast made from homemade challah bread, with a dusting of powdered sugar, fresh raspberries, and warm maple syrup, plus coffee just the way she liked it with cream and sugar. John had emerged from around the corner with that same impish smile, those same dark eyes. Of course she'd forgiven him and they'd both been late to work that day because they couldn't stop having sex.

“Very smooth,” Georgia said. “I've got to start on the roses, so they have time to dry. Could you get the peacock cake out of the fridge downstairs and take the feathers off it—gently?”

“Okay,” John said. “What else?”

“I don't know yet.”

John headed toward the basement stairs. Georgia tied her apron behind her waist, took a plastic-wrapped ball of sugar gum paste out of the refrigerator, and set it on the counter to warm up. She was rooting through the drawers for her rolling pin when someone knocked at the front door.

“Liza! Can you get that?” Georgia yelled.

The knocking continued.

“Liza!”

With a sigh of exasperation Georgia went to the front door, where she found, as expected, Chessy wearing her Converse sneakers and holding a plastic bag in one hand.

“Here's the bride and two flowers that didn't touch the ground,” she said, handing the bag to Georgia. “The groom is a mess. Ez stepped on him by accident after we dropped the cake. I couldn't even scrape him off the pavement.”

“Please tell me you can stay and make roses,” Georgia said.

“Yes,” Chessy said. “I can stay. Ez said he'll stay if you want.” Chessy nodded toward her truck, parked by the curb in front of the house. Georgia could barely make out a male figure at the wheel, looking at her with his hand raised in a tentative wave.

“That's sweet, but it's okay,” Georgia said. “I'd rather meet Ez another day.”

Chessy shrugged. “It wasn't his fault, either, Georgia.”

“I know. I'm not blaming anyone. I just don't want too many people in my kitchen right now.”

Chessy looked at her. “Is Chef Boyardee going to help?”

John hated it when Chessy referred to him as “Chef Boyardee,” so she did it as often as possible, even when he wasn't there to hear her.

“Yes.” Georgia waved at Ez, pulled Chessy inside, and pushed her toward the kitchen. Within minutes, Georgia had set up an assembly line, in which John rolled out the gum paste in a thin layer and cut out petals, while she softened the edges of the petals with a ball tool and handed them to Chessy, who wrapped them around little cones Georgia had set up on pieces of wire wrapped in green floral tape. Chessy was supposed to attach three petals to each cone until they had thirty rosebuds, at which point Georgia would add more petals to bring the roses into bloom. But Chessy got bored and decided to make a full-blown rose while Georgia was upstairs telling Liza she needed to come down and help. Liza argued that she had too much homework, and besides, Emilie was having serious issues and had no one to talk to except Liza.

BOOK: Leaving Haven
5.25Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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