The Love Goddess' Cooking School (25 page)

Luciana was silent for a moment, then said, “Oh, yes, that’s been around forever. Well, isn’t that something, Holly. I suppose you’re all right then, up there?”

Except for my worried heart, yes.
“I’m more than all right, Mom. I feel like I belong here. I feel bad saying that to you because I know how much you hated it here.”

“You’re your grandmother’s granddaughter,” she said. “You always were. Tell you the truth, Holly, I was always a bit relieved about the special relationship you two had. My mother and I never saw eye to eye, but I loved her. And I respected her, even if I didn’t like the fortune-telling. I didn’t have an easy time of it growing up, but I’ve always felt bad about all but estranging myself. It helped to know she had you. And that she still does.”

It must have been awful—and at six years old—to hear your mother being called a “disgusting witch.” And from what Holly read in the diary, that was only the beginning. “That means a lot to hear you say, Mom.”

Lucy Maguire was silent for a moment. “I’ve always wanted
you to be happy, Holly. And you never did find your place. Maybe Blue Crab Island is it. Maybe it’s always been it for you.”

“I think it is,” Holly said, picturing the sign Liam had made her.
HOLLY’S KITCHEN
. “I think this is where I belong, Mom.”

“Well, I’m sure your grandmother is at peace. And I’m glad you called, Holly.”

“Me too.” And then after a bit of small talk and a say hello to Dad, Holly hung up, her heart feeling slightly soothed.

Holly bolted up in bed, having awoken from a strange dream she couldn’t quite remember, except that Juliet was in it and that there was something Holly wanted to tell her, but Juliet kept floating behind a cloud with the word
hospital
carved into it (dreams were odd that way) every time Holly tried to get her to listen.

Yes. There was something she needed to tell Juliet.

She glanced at the clock. Almost two a.m. She picked up the phone anyway and called her friend, who she doubted was sleeping.

She answered on the first ring.

“Juliet, it’s Holly. I’m sorry for calling so late, but there’s something I need to tell you.”

Juliet was silent for a moment, then said, “Okay.”

“I’ve been reading my grandmother’s diary about teaching her first class. One of her students was pregnant, and Camilla knew that it would be a difficult birth and cautioned her to deliver in the hospital and not at home with a midwife, as she’d
done with her first child.”

Juliet said nothing, but Holly could feel her listening. Waiting.

Holly got out of bed and walked over to the window and stared out at the few twinkling stars, at the almost full moon. “The baby was born sick, a hole in his heart. But he lived because of immediate medical attention. But then just after his first birthday, he died.”

“Why are you telling me this, Holly?”

“Because the mother of the baby blamed Camilla for her grief. She would rather have lost the baby at birth than loved him and lost him a year later. I just read all this tonight and it’s so heartbreaking and—”

“She would rather have lost him at birth?” Juliet repeated. “I can’t imagine thinking that for a moment about Evie. I had three precious years with her. Three years I wouldn’t give up for anything, not for this unrelenting pain and black grief. No, I wouldn’t give up those years for anything.”

“I didn’t think so,” Holly said, gazing at the perfect white stars in the night sky. It seemed that once again, her grandmother had managed to help Juliet.

Sixteen

Over the next few days, Holly kept busy by making lists of local gourmet shops and then surreptitiously dropping in to make notes on their offerings and what might complement their menus. She set up seven appointments to bring in her pastas and sauces, and today she was determined to work on a couple of pasta salads, something her grandmother had never been a fan of. But Holly could live on cold pasta salads with olives and sun dried tomatoes, and it seemed a safe way to start making Camilla’s Cucinotta a tiny bit her own.

Twice, once on her way out and once on her way in, she’d seen Liam’s navy SUV turning down Cove Road, a dark-haired woman in the passenger seat. She wished she knew what was going on. She missed Mia. She missed Liam. She missed that brief few hours when she’d given in to how she felt about him and had allowed herself to be excited about a new romance, a new relationship.

Nothing soothed her and distracted her as much as making fresh pasta. And today she was determined to make her own
rotini, a spiral pasta, for her cold pasta salads. She measured out the semolina and durum flour onto the wooden work surface and cracked in the eggs, mixing and kneading until it was beautifully elastic, when the bell jangled and Liam appeared under the archway. Looking serious.

She glanced at the clock. Almost ten. “Taking the day off today?” The question was so light and banal that no one would guess she she’d seized up inside at the sight of him, her stomach full of those butterflies. And knots.

He looked at her so intently, with a mixture of what seemed like confusion and surety at the same time. “I’m actually taking the week.”

“I can understand that. You want to be around and available while Mia’s mother is in town. Just in case she up and leaves again, despite all the talk about buying a house.” She was rambling. “How is everything going, by the way?”

He stared at her for a long moment, then took a deep breath. “Holly, I—” He ran a hand through his hair. “Veronica, Mia’s mother, she’s very convincing.”

Holly could feel her stomach drop. “Convincing?”

“About how she feels. What she wants. Mistakes she made.”

“About you?”

He leaned his head back for a moment. “Yeah. About me. About Mia. What she gave up and what she’s supposedly learned.”

“Supposedly?” she asked, hating the hopeful note in her voice. Hopeful that he was putting air quotes around the “supposedly.”

“She wants a second chance.”

Holly turned away for a moment, tears filling her eyes. She blinked them away. “And what do you want, Liam?”

He was silent on that.

If only she had the gift of knowing. If only she were even 30 percent psychic so she could have seen this coming and could have stuffed Liam’s mouth with the cheese and grapes and then sent him home instead of to her bed.

Do not burst into tears all over the pasta,
she ordered herself, tightening her lips.

He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I thought I
hated
her. For what she did to me. To Mia. To our family. My family was everything to me, and she shattered it without a thought to me or her own daughter. And now she’s back and she’s asking for a chance, and at first I told her I’d never take her back—never. And then she talked and talked and talked, and after a while I found myself listening, and—” He stopped and glanced out the window. “And this part of me thought, maybe she
has
changed, got what she needed out of her system, realized what she really wanted.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “I don’t know if I’m the biggest idiot in the world or what the hell I’m doing. What I’m
supposed
to do.”

He sounded so distraught that she wanted to go to him and put her arms around him and tell him everything would be okay, but of course she couldn’t. She had no idea what “okay” meant in this situation.

“And this morning, to see Mia so full of hope, so happy, so completely wrapped up in this fairy tale that her parents will
get back together—” He glanced down. “It’s powerful, Holly. All of it is very powerful.”

For a second she was so overcome with emotion that she could only nod. “I can understand that.”

“But you know what else is powerful?” he said, holding her gaze. “This amazing thing between us. I have strong feelings for you, Holly. I don’t know what the hell to do.”

She looked at him, searching his eyes for something to hang on to here, but not knowing what that was. Was she supposed to try to pull him over the line to her side? It would be wrong.

“I have strong feelings for you too, Liam. And I have strong feelings for Mia. So … if there’s a chance for you and her mother to get back together, to become a family again, you owe that to yourself and to Mia to at least try, right?” How she managed to say that without bursting into tears was amazing.

He took a deep breath and let it out, his hands jammed into the pockets of his leather jacket. “You think so?”

This time she couldn’t even nod. The tears stung and she started to cry. “Yes. I think so. Don’t you?”

He was silent for another moment. “I’m so sorry,” he said, stepping toward her and reaching his hand out.

She shook her head. “No, don’t. Just … go do what you have to do.”

He stared at her and she looked away. “I am sorry. I hate to hurt you, Holly. I mean that more than I mean anything else.”

She glanced at him but was so afraid to burst into wracking sobs that she nodded and managed some kind of rueful smile.

“I believe that, Liam.”

“You’re an important person in Mia’s life. I hope she can still … take the class—if you think that’s all right. You mean so much to her.”

“Of course she can still take the class. Just go and be with your family,” she said, the tears burning.

The moment the door clicked closed, the bells stopping their jangle, Holly slid down against the wall and sobbed.

The next night, Holly sat at the kitchen table, facing the view of oaks and bird feeders instead of the sign Liam had made for her, writing out a binder copy recipe of her first own creation: Fusilli alla Holly, with pine nuts and black olives and sun dried tomatoes in a creamy pink sauce. She’d spent last night and today making several iterations until she got the measurements just so. Cooking had helped heal one broken heart and would have to work overtime on another.

The bells jangled and Tamara came in, uncharacteristically dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt and sleeveless puffy vest. She looked as though she might burst into tears at any second, and then she did.

“I got the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ bullshit.” Tamara’s shoulders slumped and she dropped down in the chair beside Holly. “And what makes it even worse? I didn’t see it coming. I
always
see it coming—you always know when a guy is only half there, or even three-quarters there. You know when there’s the slightest thing wrong. But this time, after that amazing third date, amazing third-date
sex,
he dumped me. Apparently sleeping with me
made him realize he still loves his ex-girlfriend and that maybe he is ready to commit to a future with her, after all. Do you believe this?”

Yes, Holly did. She filled in Tamara on everything that had happened between her and Liam, including the bad-timing speech she’d gotten the day before.

“Oh, Holly, I’m so sorry. Men suck.”

“Love sucks,” Holly corrected.

“And even love is great until it falls spectacularly apart, though. I’m never dating again. I’ve had it. I’ll happily go to my sister’s wedding alone.”

“At least you’ll have some good Italian food,” Holly said, trying to smile.

“Let’s make something right now. Something gooey and fattening.” She stood up. “I know. Let’s make tiramisu. If I don’t take it back for myself it’ll forever be ruined for me. I made it for that jerk on our third and last date.”

“My grandmother always said tiramisu was the Italian version of chicken soup and could cure anything.”

“Do you happen to have a hundred ladyfingers in the cupboard?” Tamara asked. “Because I need at least ten servings.”

Holly squeezed Tamara’s hand. “Let’s go shopping. We can pick up a good bottle of wine and a tearjerker movie to make us feel better about our miserable love lives.”

Ten minutes later they were at the supermarket across the bridge in Portland, their cart full of mascarpone cheese and
savoiardi
ladyfingers.

“So all this with Liam happened yesterday?” Tamara asked
as she selected a white wine. “I wished you would have called me. Not that I have any good advice for getting over anyone.”

“When he left and I was all cried out, I thought about calling you, but I didn’t want to heap all that on you when you were so happy. I just threw myself under the covers and stayed there for a while, and then I got this sudden urge to make something. I wrote my first recipe—just a pasta salad, but I wrote it out and put in the binder.”

“That’s great, Holly! What’s the final ingredient? A wish?”

“Yeah. Just a plain old wish. And after I added the delicious sausage to the pasta, I wished that I’d wise up.”

“You’re plenty wise, Holly. You fell in love with a great guy. Not that that’s gonna make you feel any better.” She laid their groceries on the checkout table. “I guess mine wasn’t such a jerk either. Oh, who the hell knows. Maybe he
was
being honest. Maybe sex with me suddenly did make him realize how empty and nothing sex with someone you barely know can make you feel and maybe it did make him realize what he had with his ex. I actually have been through that myself. It’s just so hard to know what’s real or not, what’s a bullshit excuse for ‘I’m just not that into you.’”

“Well, I like thinking that they were being honest and we just got caught in the fallout. Makes me feel better than being all cynical.”

Tamara nodded. “I think we should double the tiramisu recipe so we can stuff our brokenhearted faces all night.”

“Agreed,” Holly said, grateful for her new friend.

When they walked back into Holly’s cottage, Tamara said,
“Hey, something’s different in here.” She glanced around. “What is it?”

“I took down that big brass mirror that was on the wall by the kitchen nook and put up a bunch of smaller oil paintings. Antonio. That sweet little one of this house. And those two above the kitchen table. Look how vibrant the colors are. Oh, and there’s that sign,” Holly added, staring at Liam’s gift.

“Holly’s kitchen,” Tamara read. She smiled. “This
is
your kitchen. But were you afraid to change anything? Like maybe some of your grandmother’s magic would leave with it?”