Sweet Love (7 page)

From the refrigerator he removes a premade one and carefully inverts it over a plate. Out falls an expertly formed pinkish-red pudding. Again, a trick I’d never be able to achieve. Mine would stick to the pan and mush on the plate.

I’m beginning to get an inkling of what Liza sees in this French dough boy. Every move of D’Ours’s hand is artful, the way he slices the pudding and dollops it with crème fraîche (heavy cream plus buttermilk, easy). How he circles the slice with more fresh berries and tops it with a sprig of mint. A man who devotes himself so wholeheartedly to making food magic can’t be all bad.

My fork cuts into the thick, chilled bread oozing berry juice onto the plate. The pudding is refreshingly tart with just enough sweetness to be satisfying. Definitely benefits from the crème fraîche, which adds oomph to the berries without oversweetening the dessert. I can’t wait for my mother to try this.

We clear our plates and it’s on to peach cobbler D’Ours with ginger ice cream.

“And now,” D’Ours says, taking a swig of champagne, “class participation. Half of you will make ginger ice cream with Angela.” He chops his hand down between the nuns and the Japanese. “And the other half, a peach cobbler with me. In the end we’ll put them together for a spectacular dish.”

I am on the peach cobbler side with Chris, her husband the bald man, and the nuns. The Japanese, Michael, his girlfriend the human Barbie, and Lilly Pulitzer are on ice cream duty. Clearly ice cream duty is the hip crowd. Peach cobbler is so frumpy.

Michael and his girlfriend linger some more, talking. I turn my back to them and join D’Ours as he tosses sliced peaches with brown sugar, tapioca, and—his brainstorm—a touch of balsamic vinegar, to offset the cloying sweetness of most cobblers. Our job is to cut cold butter into a mixture of flour, baking powder, salt, brown sugar, and a half cup of heavy cream, and then to roll it out for the crust.

This is the hard part. I’ve never been any good at rolling out pastry and the cobbler top is no exception. Chris is a pro and the nuns have no problem, but me? When it comes to my turn the dough rolls up on the pin and sticks, splitting the crust and turning it to shreds. This is why I hate cooking. I swear I’m jinxed.

“Julie. Don’t fight it,” D’Ours says, coming behind me, sliding his arms around my waist and placing his hands over mine. Soon he’s rolling the pin methodically as his body rhythmically presses against mine. Roll. Pound. Roll. Pound.

It’s the closest I’ve come to sex since a regrettable night at a conference in Phoenix and I might just faint.

“There,” he whispers, practically nuzzling my ear. “You’ve got to let go and
feel
the dough, Julie. Let the pin take over. That perfume of yours . . .” He inhales deeply. “What is it?”

“Wha min,”
I say, meaning, White Linen.

“That’s not the way Father Tom taught me how to roll out pastry,” one of the nuns, Sister Martha, quips as we pinch the pastry crust to seal the edges. “Maybe since I wasn’t wearing
Wha Min
perfume at the time.”

Everyone’s a comedian these days, even the bride of Christ.

The nuns weren’t the only ones watching us, though. As we line up to wash our hands and get ready for the grand finale, the bald man warns me to be careful, that D’Ours has a reputation as a lady-killer. This is bad news for Liza. And for him. She has a way of dealing with lady-killers that can leave them very messy.

From across the room D’Ours flashes me a sly wink.

Liza’s right. He
does
look like Fabio.

“Making new friends?”

All of a sudden Michael’s by my side and he’s gazing down at me with his dark, smoldering eyes. I’d forgotten how tall he was.

“Hello,” I manage, nearly coughing on my peach cobbler. (Juicy peaches in a comforting syrup baked in a buttery, flaky crust. Yum!) “Fancy meeting you here.”

“I was just about to say the same thing.” Slicing into his cobbler, he says, “When I saw your name on the list, I was trying to figure out if you joined the class to expand your already accomplished culinary skills or if you were looking for a way to bump into me so you could finally apologize.”

“Apologize?” The hairs on the back of my neck bristle. “As if.”

“As if, what? As if had you given me a chance to find out if there was any basis for your lies, we might have a decent man in office instead of an incompetent rube who brutally slashes federally funded health care for children? That kind of
as if
?”

All right. I know I have to be nice to him so he’ll do me a favor. Still, he’s going too far. It’s not my fault FitzWilliams lost. I wasn’t the one going around hitting on volunteers. “It was six years ago, Michael. How about we bury the hatchet.”

“I think you already did. In my back.”

I wince. “
Soooo
dramatic. Looks like your Shakespearean background is coming in handy.
Et tu, Brute
?”

Michael smiles reassuringly at his date, who’s eyeing us with concern. “Look. I didn’t come over to get in a fight with you. Believe me, I never wished for this to happen, to be on the outs with you, of all people. Hell, what you did almost killed my thirty-year friendship with Paul.”

What I did. What
I
did. “Then why
did
you come over? You could have just ignored me, like I was doing to you.”

“Oh, right.” He laughs. “If by ignoring you mean constantly checking me out.”

“You egotist.” I put my plate down and the fork clatters to the table. “I was so not checking you out.”

“When you walked in you zeroed in on me. You were just begging me to talk to you. It’s your guilt, Julie. You can’t ignore it. You’d have to have the hard heart of Lady Macbeth not to feel at least some regret.”

This is so outrageous I don’t know how to respond other than, “Yeah, well, what’s done is done.”

Michael nods. “A direct quote from Lady Macbeth herself. I’m impressed. ”

Excuse me?

I’m about to ask what he means by that when Michael’s girlfriend pops up and regards me with red pursed collagen-filled lips. God. How can he go out with such a poseur?

“This is Carol,” he says, taking her elbow. “A close friend. Carol, this is Julie Mueller. An
old
friend.”

“
Love
the dress,” she says, looking me up and down. “Is it vintage?”

My dress. I forgot about that. Glancing down at the floral pink and green print, I can summon no defense except, “Don’t I wish. My mother made it for a wedding.”

“Julie’s mother is a fantastic woman,” Michael tells Carol. “Giving. Warm. Loving. Generous. Odd, how traits skip a generation.”

Very funny.

“So you two have a history?” Carol regards me with fresh appreciation.

“Michael grew up five doors down from us. He was an urchin.”

To which Michael says, “And Julie was the TV reporter who aired that report about FitzWilliams. The one I was telling you about.”

“Ohh,” Carol says. “The erroneous one.”

Erroneous? That’s such a crock of . . .

“Though I guess she’s finally getting her reward,” he continues, not giving me an inch. “I got a call this afternoon from the Washington bureau chief at WBOS. Apparently my old friend here’s being promoted to the network.”

He got the call already? I try to read Michael’s expression, but he’s a blank slate. There’s nothing written to indicate how the conversation went, if he told or didn’t. I want to jump up and down or shake him until he spills.

“Interesting,” Carol says, meaning the opposite. “I came to remind you, Michael, we better get going. We were supposed to meet up with Jan and Mark a half hour ago.”

With a casual “nice to meet you” she leaves and I grab Michael’s wrist before he can escape. “What happened? What did you say?”

“About what?”

“
You
know. The WBOS call.”

“Oh, that.” He squints, pretending like it’s all a fog. “My memory’s a bit fuzzy. Why don’t you give me a ring next week and maybe by then it’ll come back to me.”

"But ...”

“Monday morning,” he says, pressing a business card into my hand. “Surely you can wait two days, just like I did.”

I have no idea what he’s referring to until I remember how I refused to show him a tape of our FitzWilliams exposé ahead of airing—standard journalism procedure. To do otherwise would have violated WBOS protocol and gotten me fired on the spot.

However, that meant Michael had to wait two days for my report, with no indication of what evidence I had. Thinking back, he must have been tortured over whether it would end FitzWilliams’s campaign or not. How could I have done that to him?

Because there are rules, I tell myself. And rules are there for a reason. Like Arnie’s always complaining, so many journalists these days consider themselves exceptions—inserting their personal opinions into straight news reports, striking deals with their sources, paying their sources,
sleeping
with their sources.

Well, not me. I have always adhered to the highest standards. And though I’m sorry I caused Michael pain by sticking to protocol, it was worth it in the end because I’m going to the network.

However no matter how often I tell myself that, it doesn’t make me feel better in the least.

Chapter Five

—LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST, ACT IV, SCENE 3

“A bread pudding you don’t bake?” Mom hulls a strawberry and frowns with disapproval. “I never heard of such a thing.”

“Every bread pudding I’ve ever made,” chimes in Lois, who’s at the stove stirring the strawberries, “is three eggs and a loaf of bread and milk baked at 350 for fifty minutes.”

“If you don’t bake it, you’ll get worms,” adds Teenie.

Who knew an offhand remark about dessert class would explode into such a cultural breakdown. I’m like a
National Geographic
photographer explaining cameras to a clan of tree-living Indonesian Pygmies.

“There are no eggs. Just strawberries and other berries and bread that you soak and put in the refrigerator.” Grabbing a handful of hulled strawberries, I toss them into Lois’s simmering jam. “Plus some sort of alcohol for flavoring, like Chambord.”

“Now you’re talking,” says Teenie, who’s at the kitchen table, sorting berries. “Though when you bake it, all the alcohol will burn off. I’ve always found that to be such an unfortunate side effect.”

She’s still not getting it. “You know what this reminds me of?” I say.

Mom pulls off a stem. “What?”

“That time you made baked Alaska for Nana. She liked it so much, she asked for the recipe so she could make it for her bridge club. Only she insisted on baking it for thirty minutes at 350 degrees because that’s how she always baked cakes and she refused to change. Which is why it turned into soup.”

“Bread pudding is in no way, shape, or form like baked Alaska,” Mom says. “Hey, we’ve got to get moving. If we don’t can these strawberries by tonight, they’ll be rotted tomorrow.”

They’re already rotted, I think, checking the clock for the umpteenth time. Four p.m., Sunday, only seventeen more hours until I can call Michael. The wait is killing me.
Killing
me. What did he tell Kirk? Does it matter if I hit on Michael when I was seventeen? Would Kirk consider it a lie that I told him Michael and I had nothing more than a platonic relationship? I’m so antsy I could climb the walls. My whole future, all my aspirations, hinge on what he said.

It’s impossible for me to sit still. Yesterday, I took the recyclables to the dump, hoed Mom’s garden, weeded, mulched it, and repaired a gap in the chicken wire. Then I repainted the door to Em’s room, went for a five-mile run, and read an entire mystery until collapsing somewhere between one and six a.m., when I bolted upright and decided what we had to do, simply must do, was pick the last bumper crop of strawberries at a farm in Danvers.

Now we’ve got more strawberries than we know what to do with and Teenie and Lois are stubbornly refusing to consider alternatives to jam, unless it’s strawberry shortcake. Or maybe an easy strawberry cream tart—graham cracker crust into which a whipped filling of sour cream, cream cheese, lemon juice, sugar, and almond flavoring is poured. Top that with fresh whole hulled strawberries, and brush over it seedless raspberry jam liquefied in the microwave. Chill for four hours minimum.

Not bad.

My problem is I’m dealing with three old ladies who are like spiders when it comes to fresh fruit. Their first instinct is to kill it, wrap it up, and store it away.

“Strawberries are too precious to waste,” Lois says, proving my point. “Better to boil them down and put them by to save.”

Lois, also known as “Poor Lois,” is a hulking woman with a cereal bowl haircut and a fondness for macramé along with the color brown. Mom befriended her ages ago in the peanut butter aisle of the Star Market when she found her sobbing over her Smuckers grape jelly. It wasn’t really the grape jelly making her cry; it was her husband and that he never liked grape jelly until he fell for their eighteen-year-old babysitter with whom he was having a scandalous affair.

Just a whiff of peanut butter and jelly can trigger a rant from Lois about promiscuous teenagers and the dangers of free love.

Teenie, on the other hand, is crazy for free love. In her heyday she was the town slut. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. She was
rumored
to be the town slut because of the way she dressed. Unlike Lois, who’s given to hand-knit bulky sweaters and tweed pants, Teenie never quite abandoned the golden age of Pussy Galore.

Tight colorful capris, pointy padded bras, a bouffant of spun white-blond hair, etched-on brows, blue eye shadow, and fabulously pink lips. That was—and still is—Teenie’s getup. Only, she’s eighty now and as shriveled as a shrunken head, so all her Pussy clothes hang on her like potato sacks. You can’t but admire her, though, for keeping up the fight.