Sweet Love (35 page)

“One more question. Michael wasn’t afraid of you, not really. So what kept him from making a pass?”

“Who do you think? He was a full-grown man and you were her”—he pauses to fake a cough—“virgin daughter. Mom was on him like white on rice to keep away from you. Michael didn’t care about crossing me, but he sure as hell cared about crossing Mom.”

Mom and her bizarre codes of sexual conduct, I think, remembering how she pursed her lips when Nadia made that crack about virginity and Teenie confessed her affairs with the serviceman going off to World War II. My mother was open-minded in many ways, but not about sex.

“Look, Julie,” Paul is saying, “I really have to go.”

“Me too,” I say, flying out the door, turning my back on my family, on Em and Lois and all the mourners, to find him before it’s too late.

Michael doesn’t show until the sun has sunk behind the trees, casting rays of subdued light across the gravestones. The ground over my mother’s ashes, in the same plot where my father’s body will be buried and where a space has been reserved for me, too, is covered with new dirt and strewn flowers—daisies, her favorite. She and I have been sitting here, yapping in what, for once, is a refreshingly one-sided conversation.

I understand now why she was so eager to get me into that dessert class with Michael. Because she was trying to make up for past misdeeds.

Here Michael and I had been meant for each other all along. Yet thanks to—as she once said herself—her silly Yankee notion that a relationship between a twenty-one-year-old man and a seventeen-year-old girl would end in some Shakespearean tragedy, she objected. Out of respect for her, Michael heeded her warnings and stayed away.

While I, reeling from my rejection at such a tender age, moved on, subconsciously fulfilling my mother’s goals by dutifully graduating from college, finding a good job, and marrying a doctor—to disastrous results (except for Em, who is anything but a disaster).

Now, at last, we know the truth.

Seeing me sitting on a gravestone, Michael hesitates. In his arm is an ivy plant and it almost brings on a fresh burst of tears. How did he remember her unsuccessful campaign to plant the sloping bank in front of our house with ivy? That was her one wish—to have an ivy-covered house—and yet, despite her gardening savoir faire, she could never pull it off.

“It’s English,” he announces, holding up the plant. “To withstand the New England winters. I think it’s called Twenty-eighth Street.”

“So that’s where she went wrong. She was always a sucker for the romantic Southern stuff,” I say, sliding off Louis Marx’s tombstone and walking toward him. Michael looks good in a light tweed jacket, gray T-SHIRT, jeans, and running shoes. As I get closer, I can tell he’s searching my face to check my emotions.

His hand covers mine, warm and strong. “She was a kick,” he says.

“That seems to be the general consensus. By the way . . . your letter.” I pull it from my bra. “Did you mean what you said?”

“No,” he says. “I was completely smashed and don’t remember a word.”

“I love you, too.”

“Yes, I know you do. You’ve told me only a hundred times.”

“You’re so cocky. What you don’t know is that I also know you’ve always loved me.”

Wrapping his arms around my waist, he says, “Really? What gave you that idea?”

“For starters, all those girls you brought by the house. Never married one of them. Why? Then I got married, so you got married. Then I got divorced, and you got divorced. And then you moved back to Boston for no reason. Or maybe
I
was the reason.”

“Little good it did me. You hated my guts for six years. All because I dared to trample on your journalistic integrity.” There is a sarcastic tone to his voice, as if journalistic integrity is hardly worth denying happiness. He’s right.

“I forgave you.”

Michael opens his mouth to object, but I remind him that was his line.

“And now I find out from Paul that you loved me all along but that my sweet, wonderful mother cowed you into behaving yourself.”

“So we’re star-crossed, are we? Victims of bad timing and miscommunication. Very Shakespearean,” he says. “Though, I suppose, we’re the opposite of Benedick and Beatrice in that you and I, far from scorning true love, have been searching for it.”

“When we didn’t need to. When it was here all along.”

“We could have gotten married young,” he says. “Or, younger. We could have had children together, raised a family. But when you married Donald and got pregnant—”

“Not quite in that order,” I correct.

“I was sure my true love had been taken away forever.” Bringing me closer, he kisses my head lovingly. “Then you were free and I wasn’t and then we burned so many years in a bitter, meaningless feud.”

“Until my mother brought us back together.”

“Thank God.” Bending down to kiss me, he whispers, “I love you, Julie. I always have and always will. My only regret is it took us this long.”

As I rest my head against his chest, I say, “I’m not sad we didn’t get together sooner. I’m glad we found each other at last.”

“After only thirty years?”

“Doesn’t matter how long. The last words my mother said to me were ‘love abides.’ And I guess she was right because here you are and here she’s not and yet my love for both of you is stronger than ever. Love lays waste time and death.”

It’s comforting, this thought that though parted, my mother and I will never really be separated.

Whenever I open her rusted barn recipe box, I will be swept back to her world, to her warm Harvest Gold kitchen with its reassuring smells of meat loaf and banana pudding. I will hear her voice remind me to go easy on the sugar and add vanilla to cake mixes for extra oomph. I will remember the stories of Aunt Charlotte’s ugly china and Pokey the basset hound who lost his zing.

And I will feel her familiar hug reminding me that mothers may come and go, but their recipes—like all manifestations of true love—go on forever.

What is love? ’Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth has present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

—TWELFTH NIGHT, ACT II, SCENE 3

Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without Dutton’s inconceivable faith in me for which I am so very grateful. I am indebted to Brian Tart, Trena Keating, Lisa Johnson, Rachel Ekstrom and, especially, my talented editor, Julie Doughty, who worked relentlessly and thoroughly to give this book legs. Thank you, thank you. I am the luckiest author to have the support of this exemplary publishing house.

My agent and friend Heather Schroder at ICM went above and beyond her job description yet again by helping me hone and refine the concept and manuscript, reading it several times until she was satisfied. I am truly blessed.

In addition, I must acknowledge several excellent dessert cookbooks I consulted for inspiration.
Classic Stars Desserts
by Emily Luchetti (Chronicle Books) and
The Art of Dessert
by Ann Amernick (Wiley) were very helpful, as were
Epicurious.com
and my mother’s own recipes, such as those for peach cobbler and gingerbread with lemon sauce. I have thrown in my own touches here and there in describing the dishes and most are edible. Except for the Roquefort flan. Not quite sure about that one. . . .

R.N. Chris Koonz and Karen George helped me with medical research and The Tarts—authors Nancy Martin, Harley Jane Kozak, Elaine Viets, Michele Martinez, and Margie—came to my rescue many, many times. They can come to your rescue, too, at
The Lipstick Chronicles
, a link for which can be found on my Web site at
www.sarahstrohmeyer.com
as can many recipes in this book.

My family—Charlie, Anna, and Sam—suffered through another year of my preoccupation and obsession as I went through draft after draft working late at night and skipping many ski races. Thank you for your patience, as always.

Finally, I cannot close out these acknowledgments without noting the cosmic wonder of my own childhood crush reappearing after nearly thirty years to remind a middle-aged woman of how there is no more powerful combination in the universe than young love on a hot summer night. Shakespeare knew that, of course, and now so do I.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Agatha Award-winning novelist Sarah Strohmeyer is the author of
The Sleeping Beauty Proposal, The Cinderella Pact, The Secret Lives of Fortunate Wives,
and the successful Bubbles series (
Bubbles All the Way, Bubbles Betrothed, Bubbles A Broad, Bubbles Ablaze, Bubbles in Trouble,
and
Bubbles Unbound).
She has worked as a journalist for numerous publications, including
The Plain Dealer
and the
Boston Globe
. She lives with her family outside Montpelier, Vermont.