The Love Goddess' Cooking School (20 page)

As Juliet crumbled the ground beef and Italian sausage into the bread crumbs and eggs in the large metal bowl on the island, Mia was sniffing the start of the soup, the classic Italian
soffrito
of sautéing onions, garlic, celery, and carrots in a large pot on the stove. Simon and Tamara were on chopping and mincing duty, an array of colorful vegetables and herbs awaiting Juliet’s knife and Simon’s grater and mincer, from basil and bay leaves to leafy green spinach and thyme.

“I always thought orzo was rice,” Tamara said, pouring in the cup of undercooked barley-shaped pasta to the fragrant pot of broth and vegetables. “Which reminds me of my moronic date a couple of nights ago—a monologue on whether couscous is a pasta or a grain. I wanted to jump on the table and shout ‘Who cares?’ at the top of my lungs. This guy went on and on in these fifteen-minute monologues about his deep thoughts on everything.”

“I can’t even imagine dating ever again,” Simon said, taking a sip of champagne. “I can barely figure out what I’m supposed to do as a person now that I’m suddenly not living with my wife and daughter. Every day I feel like I’m living someone else’s life.”

Holly was reminded of her conversation with Liam during the hunt for Mia a couple of weeks ago. “I feel like that sometimes. Like I’m trying to be my grandmother when I’ll never come close to filling her shoes.”

“You got a very big catering job on your own merit,” Juliet said as she ripped spinach into a wooden bowl. “That’s major. You used your grandmother’s recipes, but
you
got the job.”

Everyone raised a glass, and Holly walked around and clinked every last one, unable to believe how far she’d come in these two months. From sobbing with the blankets pulled over her head to leading this class with something close to confidence.

As Simon and Juliet formed the little meatballs, Holly said, “The soup calls for a happy memory, and mine is the last day I spent with my grandmother, right here, watching her crank the
pasta machine and eye the stretch of dough with such love as though it were the first time she was making pasta. Seventy-five years old, and she still loved what she was doing even though she’d been doing it her entire life.”

The meatball Mia was rolling slipped out of her hands and onto the floor. “Oops,” she said. “I was just thinking my happy memory into that one. Does it still work if I start over with a new one?”

“Your memories will always be your memories,” Holly said. “So yes.”

Mia scooped up the dirty one with a paper towel and tossed it in the garbage, then sat back down at one of the island stools and began rolling another. “My happy memory is two years ago when my mom came for my birthday. My dad kept telling me not to get my hopes up, that she might not be able to come, but she’d left a few months before that and I’d only seen her once since, and I did get my hopes up, and when I woke up in the morning, guess who was sitting in a chair by my bed?”

Holly envisioned the sophisticated, beautiful woman with the model hair and high heels in the photograph at the Geller house. She was such a different type from Holly. Holly, drawn to jeans and riding boots and cozy sweaters and ponytails, rarely wore a dress, let alone heels. And her only piece of jewelry was a delicate gold necklace, a chain with three tiny dangling discs that her grandmother had given her for her sixteenth birthday when she’d finally shared Holly’s fortune. On each disc was an initial of Holly’s name, HMM, Holly Marie Maguire.

Discs. Holly reached her hand up to her necklace and walked over to the entryway, where a beautiful round mirror was hung over a side table holding explanations of pastas and sauces. She stared at the necklace. The tiny circles were meant to symbolize the Po River stones. Why had she never realized that before?

“And guess what else?” Mia continued, rolling another meatball. “My mother said she’d been sitting there for over an hour, just watching me sleep. My birthday is this Friday and I know she’s going to come. I haven’t seen her in almost six months, and the last time was for only a couple of days.”

“That must be hard, not seeing your mom very often,” Tamara said. “My mother is a total nightmare, but she’s my mother …” Tamara stopped talking, eyeing Mia, who was looking at her expectantly. She’d seemed to realize she was talking to an almost twelve-year-old and not an adult and that this was a very sensitive subject. “It’ll be exciting to see her. What’s her name?”

“Veronica Feroux. Isn’t that pretty? It’s French. Her maiden name was Smith. And then Geller when she married my dad. And now that she’s married to René, she’s French. It’s too bad Daniel’s name is so boring. Dressler. Not that I’m marrying him.”

“Daniel Dressler. I like that name,” Simon said. “You’ll never forget it, either, since he’s escorting you to your first dance.”

Mia beamed. “This week is going to be my best memory ever. First my birthday and my mom and the next night, the
dance with Daniel. You should see my dress. Holly took me shopping after school this past Friday. It’s a sparkly lavender and has the coolest neckline.”

“We want pictures next Monday,” Simon said. “Oh, I almost forgot to add my happy memory into the soup. The expression on Cass’s face when she opened the door to her bedroom and saw what we’d done. She’d been so … dour a moment before and then she lit up and turned to me and said, ‘This is mine?’ And she walked in so slowly and looked around, taking in every little thing, every star on the ceiling. And then gave me the fiercest hug of my life. She almost knocked the wind out of me and she’s just eight.”

“Awww,” Tamara said. “I love that. I’m so happy our great plan worked.”

“Thank you all,” he said, raising his glass to everyone.

Juliet took a sip of her champagne and set down the glass. “I have a happy memory to put into the soup. A few weeks before my daughter passed away, it was her third birthday, and her father and I threw her a party, just the three of us, and it was the most complete day of my life. We were in the park with a duck pond by our house, and we were throwing bits of bread at the ducks and she was laughing.” A smile lit her face for a moment, but then tears filled her eyes. “I can remember being so thankful. Now that she’s gone I don’t know how to go forward without her. My life was complete with her; how can it ever be without her?”

“Does it help to remember that day at the duck pond, when she was laughing? Or does it just make your sad?” Mia asked.

“Both,” Juliet said.

Mia bit her lower lip. “Then maybe that’s how. By remembering the happy and the sad. Seriously, that’s how I deal with my mother being gone. A few days ago, one of Madeline’s friends said she’d heard my mother
abandoned
me. Can you believe she used that word? First of all, she didn’t
abandon
me, she just moved across the country. If she lived closer, I’d see her all the time. But she lives half the time in Europe. Anyway, sometimes when I really want her, when I wish she was here, I think that maybe she did abandon me and I get really upset. But then I’ll try and think about something that makes me think good thoughts about her, and I feel better. That’s what my dad told me was a good coping mecha-something.”

“Mechanism,” Holly said. “A coping mechanism.”

“Smart man,” Simon added.

And smart girl,
Holly thought, her heart going out to Mia.

“Yes,” Juliet added. “That is smart. Thank you, Mia. I don’t want to forget Evie. So I can’t
not
think of her. But when I do think of her, I just get so overwhelmed by missing her.”

“Doesn’t your husband make you feel better?” Mia asked, and everyone turned to stare at Juliet, curious to know what their story was.

“He tried, but I guess everyone grieves differently. Or at least, that’s what the shrinks said. I found it hard to be comforted by him when he wasn’t grieving the same way I was. And he was getting tired of being accused of not caring that Evie was gone.”

Holly watched Juliet’s face crumple. “Oh, Juliet.”

Juliet sniffled. “I was thinking earlier today about when I was your age, Mia, or a little younger, and taking boats out on the Blue Crab Bay with Holly and talking about our futures, how I’d become a marine biologist and marry a whale specialist, and Holly would become a famous playwright and marry her leading actor. And now here I am, everything so …” She shrugged her slight shoulders and stared at the floor.

“Did you marry a whale specialist?” Tamara asked.

“He’s an attorney like I am.” She smiled. “I never thought I’d become a lawyer. Or marry one.”

“Do you miss him?” Mia asked. “Since he’s … where? In Chicago?”

“Sometimes I do, but sometimes I just want to stay here by myself.”

“I think that’s how my mother feels,” Mia said. “Like she misses me, but she wants to be in France and California with René. That’s my stepfather. I’ve only met him twice. Isn’t that insane?”

“Why does life get so complicated?” Tamara asked.

“Seriously,” Mia said.

Five glasses raised in the air.

Since that coming Friday was Mia’s birthday and Saturday the dance, which Liam was chaperoning, they’d chosen Thursday for their date. Liam had called earlier and asked her to meet him in his backyard at six o’clock—and to wear something warm.

Since they’d agreed on a no-food date, it couldn’t be a picnic. Staring up at the stars? Night bird hunting?

She’d spent a half hour going through her closet and her too-many pairs of jeans, discarding any that would require pointy high heels, and chose a comfortable pair that managed to look both semi-sexy and worthy of a hike in the Maine woods. She went through her shirts and sweaters and came up with a white cotton camisole with a slightly lacy edge, a thin heathered V-neck sweater that both hid and clung, and her favorite heavy tie-wrap cardigan. Her comfy brown cowboy boots, her grandmother’s Po River–stones necklace, and the tiniest dab of one of Camilla’s perfumes, and she was ready.

She glanced into the floor mirror in the corner of her bedroom. She hardly looked like the woman in the photograph in the Gellers’ house. Or Jodie. Liam clearly liked the sophisticated type who wore lipstick. But Holly was a jeans and sweater girl who might slick on some scented lip balm. And since he’d leaned in for a kiss the other day, he had to be attracted to her on some level.
Whatever,
as Mia would say. She was who she was.

And besides, he was taking her on a date involving a backyard and the need for warm clothes.

She took a deep breath and left her house, walking down the path to the water. It was so peaceful and quiet, the only sounds the occasional swoop of a seagull or a child’s voice from a backyard. At Liam’s house, she headed to the backyard, where she found him standing on the little square dock, wearing that sexy black leather jacket, his hands in his pockets, the breeze
blowing his hair.

He waved her over, and as she got closer, she saw the rowboat docked next to him had two cushions on the seats, and the metal holders attached to each side, near the oars, held a bouquet of wildflowers in one and a bottle of wine and two glasses in the other. An old-school boom box was set at the bow, softly playing what sounded like blues jazz.

All the tension in her shoulders slid out at the perfect simplicity of it, the innocent romance of it all. The last time someone had taken her out on a rowboat she’d been a gawky thirteen-year-old with braces at summer camp, and the boy, who she’d had a big crush on, had actually fallen in the water because he’d freaked out when he saw a snake.

“Hey,” he said. “You look great.”

She smiled and accepted his hand up onto the dock, then down into the boat. “I love this.”

His hand was so warm. “I had a feeling you would.”

She liked that he’d planned this with her in mind. She’d spent the past two years going to events and parties at which people stood around talking about futures and securities and stock indexes. Since there weren’t many events and parties for dog walkers and waitresses, Holly had been free to attend all of John’s events, and she’d been glad to, thinking she’d learn something by osmosis and that eventually she’d be able to make small talk about the Dow Jones, something she still didn’t understand. “You shouldn’t try to talk about what you know nothing about,” John had once whispered harshly into her ear when she’d embarrassed him by trying to join a
conversation in which she’d stood by his side like an idiot for twenty minutes. She’d stayed too long at the party—literally and figuratively speaking.

Liam sat across from her and took up the oars, rowing out toward the middle of the bay yet staying in line with his house. The bay at this end was surrounded by huge oaks and evergreens and a rocky cliff on both sides, as private as if the stretch of water belonged to him.

“This is so beautiful and peaceful,” she said, listening to the hum of cicadas and crickets, the moon above an almost perfect crescent.

“I row out here a lot for that reason. I take Mia out when I need to talk to her without her being able to escape, but of course once she was so mad at me that she jumped right in the bay, out here in the middle too.”

“I’m crazy about that girl,” Holly said before she could stop herself. It wasn’t the thing to say to “that girl’s” father while she was on a date with him. It sounded so … Jodie fake. But it was true, she realized. She was crazy about Mia.

“Me too. And I’m worried about her. She’s so sure her mother’s coming Friday for her birthday, and who knows if she will or not? I’ve emailed Veronica twice to ask if she’s coming and even called her chateau or whatever she lives in in France, and she doesn’t respond. Mia’s texted her and emailed her too—three times and same thing. No response.” He shook his head and stared out at the water.

“Is this typical?”

“Unfortunately.”

Holly couldn’t imagine having a child and being so out of touch, out of the child’s life, living in another universe, basically. And not responding to emails and texts.

“And so instead of her birthday being exciting for her, she’ll be a wreck all day at school on Friday, half-expecting her mother to show up during English or history or lunch with a completely inappropriate and overly expensive present.”