The Love Goddess' Cooking School (28 page)

Eighteen

Holly was making a béchamel sauce for her grandmother’s famed lasagna, whisking the scalded milk into the roux of flour and butter, when she heard the knocking at the door again. She’d heard it earlier and thought someone was there, but it was just the November wind rolling off the bay and banging the screen door against the frame. She had to get that fixed. She went to make sure the screen door hadn’t flapped open again, and Liam was standing there.

She was so surprised to see him that she was speechless for a moment.

“Can I come in?” he asked.

“Sure.” She stepped back and wiped her flour-dusted hands on her apron, reminding herself to look everywhere but at him.

“Something smells amazing,” he said as he walked into the kitchen. He glanced at the pots and pans on the stove, at the bowls on the center island, then stared out the window for a moment before turning to face her. “I’m afraid I’m going to say this wrong, so I’m just going to say it. I’ve come to realize something over the past couple of weeks.”

“What did you come to realize?”

“That as much as I wanted to make Mia’s dream for us come true, I can’t. I got pulled back in by Veronica’s big pronouncements of wanting to stay, wanting to be a family again, wanting back what we had before. I think I fell for that for a number of reasons, including the fact that I was afraid of what was starting between us.”

She stared at him. “So you and Veronica
aren’t
planning a second wedding?”

“No. I just don’t have those feelings for her anymore, Holly. Two years is a long time to be on your own, raising a child—and one with a lot of hurt and anger over the divorce and her mother’s abandonment. I’ve changed too much. Veronica tried very hard to create this new romance between us, and I tried too, but I don’t love her, Holly. I don’t know if it’s because I really can’t forgive her for how she’s treated Mia these past two years or because I have changed. Probably both. I know there’s no love there anymore. And that I have very serious feelings for someone else. You.”

She finally let out the breath she’d been holding. “Liam, this is very complicated stuff. Suddenly I’m coming between you and your ex-wife, and Mia is involved—”

“No, Holly. You’re not coming between us. My ex-wife came between
us
—for a little while.”

“Does Mia know?”

He shook his head. “I just came from Veronica’s hotel. I told her how I feel and I thought I’d just go home and sleep for two days, but instead of turning down my road, I pulled in your driveway. This is where I want to be, Holly. If you’ll even give
me another chance.”

“I don’t know, Liam. I don’t know if I can believe in this, if I can handle how messy this is.”

“Can we go back to the start of taking it slowly, then?” he asked.

“I really don’t know.”

“Then let me say this. I want to be with you, Holly. And not for any other reason than the fact that I’m crazy about you.”

I’m crazy about you too.
“I need to think about all this, okay?”

He stared at her, his blueberry-colored eyes so intense, so serious. She wanted to fling herself into his arms and take him upstairs, but she wasn’t going to be stupid about this. He’d just been through something very emotionally heavy and adding herself to it didn’t feel right. If a week or two passed and his feelings were the same, if he still believed what he’d said, then maybe she’d give this all a chance again. Maybe.

When Liam left, Holly dropped down on the living room sofa, mentally and physically exhausted. Antonio jumped up and lay his head on her thigh. She sat there for a good half hour, unsure and afraid. Then she called Tamara, hoping she’d be around for another tiramisu and talking session, but her cell phone went directly to voice mail. The moment she set her phone down, it rang, but it wasn’t Tamara, it was Juliet.

“Holly? Are you busy?”

“Not at all.”

“Can I stop over? I’m so confused. I’d really like to talk to you.”

“Jump in your car and come right over,” Holly said. “And I’m glad you called me.”

“Me too.”

In fifteen minutes, Juliet was sitting on the sofa next to Holly, a pot of lemon zinger tea, Juliet’s favorite, on the coffee table in front of them.

“I did it,” she said, her pretty hazel eyes worried and tense. “I called Ethan and told him to come. But now that he’s here, I’m … all shut down again. I picked a fight with him and he stormed out, booked a room of his own, and said he’s flying back home in the morning, that he’s tired of the false starts and has had it.”

“And what did you say?”

“Nothing. I just let him go.”

“Do you want to let him go, Juliet?”

She burst into tears and Holly put her arms around her, then went into the kitchen for a box of tissues. “When I saw him, when he appeared in the doorway of my room when he first arrived, what I felt was relief. Like, here’s here, everything is going to be okay. But then he asked if I was ready to come home, and I said I wasn’t sure, and he got upset and started pacing and telling me that he lost our daughter too. And that then he lost me and it wasn’t fair, and it turned into a fight. And then he said he was booking a room and leaving in the morning.”

“Can you imagine your life without him?” Holly asked.

Juliet sniffled and shook her head. “But I’m not ready to go home.”

“Will you ever be ready?”

‘I can’t see how. He said we could move, buy a new house near the lake so that I’ll be reminded of here, yet get a fresh start. But how can we start fresh? I don’t want to forget Evie.”

“Maybe he just feels that a new home, one without her nursery, will help you begin to start living again.”

“That’s what he said. That I need to let Evie’s memory become a part of me instead of something that keeps me in perpetual grief.”

“That sounds right to me, Juliet. I know it’s not the same thing, but it’s close to what my grandmother said when your father died. How his memory would become a piece of you and when you needed him, needed to feel him with you, you could make his favorite dish and just the making of it, the eating of it, the putting the memory into the food, would bring you comfort.”

“And it did. But this is different.”

“Let’s try, Juliet. Let’s try making her favorite thing to eat. What was it?”

“Cheerios and scrambled eggs with a sprinkling of cheddar cheese.”

“I assume the Cheerios weren’t mixed in?”

She smiled. “No. She just liked to carry a baggie of Cheerios whenever we went out.”

“So let’s make her favorite meal, right now. We’ll write up your recipe, exactly how you made it, and you’ll decide on the
final special ingredient.”

She took a deep breath, nodded, and followed Holly into the kitchen. And for the next five minutes, there was the cracking of eggs and whisking of eggs and scrambling of eggs in a pat of butter. And just before the eggs set, Juliet stood over the pan and said, “I love you, baby girl,” and then sprinkled on some cheddar cheese.

Holly took the pen and wrote
Sprinkle cheddar cheese
. And below that she added the final ingredient:

One true statement

They ate the eggs, which were delicious, and after a bracing cup of Camilla’s espresso, a slightly stronger Juliet took the recipe and went back to the Blue Crab Cove, where hopefully she knocked on her husband’s door.

One true statement. A perfect final ingredient.

Alone in the bungalow, too many thoughts racing through her head, Holly decided to create her own recipe for lasagna, since she finally had to admit she didn’t love ricotta cheese and that for years lasagna was ruined for her because of that cheese. She would use a different kind, find the right one, and add the final ingredient of One True Statement, and another recipe would be hers.

I love Liam
was one true statement that she didn’t want to utter right then, so she stopped herself from thinking about him, about Mia, if he’d told her that he wasn’t getting back together with her mother after all, that Mia would not be her
mother’s maid of honor.

She put away the flour and eggs and closed the recipe binder.
I’ll lose myself in your life instead, Nonna,
Holly thought, pouring herself another cup of the espresso and settling on the sofa with it and her grandmother’s diary.

October 1965

Dear Diary,

For years after little Richard Windemere died, Lenora Windemere tried to get rid of me. Someone from the health department would knock on my door to make sure my kitchen was spick-and-span, as I sold packaged foods. Someone from the town hall stopped by to discuss whether my home was properly zoned for business purposes, and I had to go through some rigmarole to get all the proper paperwork. But at least now all of that is in order. I am officially a business.

And then there were the rumors. Lenora’s mother supposedly got food poisoning after trying the takeout dinners that I started selling. One of her friends almost choked to death on a bone—in the veal parmigiana she ordered special. Luckily, most people know that cutlets are boneless.

But still I stayed. This is my home. This is where I’m meant to be. And lately I’ve had this new feeling, that someone is meant to come home here. I have no idea what this means. Or for who. A cousin, maybe, from Italy. Luciana herself, when she’s older
?

Though, no, that’s not it. Luciana will live a happy enough life far from Blue Crab Island; I know that with certainty
.

But someone will come live in this house after me. Someone near and dear to my heart. Someone who’ll love it here as I do
.

“Me, Nonna,” Holly said, her gaze on the painting of the olive tree. “That someone is me.”

Just before midnight, Holly’s cell phone rang. She grabbed it, hoping it was Juliet to say she wouldn’t be at class on Monday, that she and her husband were leaving together in the morning.

But it was Liam.

“Hey,” he said, and she could picture him sitting on the back deck with a Shipyard beer beside him, the beagles scampering in the yard over their squeaky moose toy. He’d be resting his elbows on his knees and staring out at the water.

“Hey.”

“I just wanted to say good night, Holly. And that I was thinking of you. I don’t know how to exactly do this, if I’m supposed to give you space or what, but if there’s one thing you can count on with me, I’m an honest guy. So I’m just going to tell you honestly that I’m sitting here thinking about you and wishing you were here. And one more thing. That I’m really sorry for hurting you.”

Her heart pinged and she sat up in bed, hugging her knees up to her chest.

“I’m thinking about you too,” she said. But she wouldn’t say
more. That she was scared to believe in this. That she wanted to run down Cove Road and sit beside him, watching the dogs, watching the water, watching their hands entwined.

“I’m glad you called,” she said. “Very glad.” And left it that.

“Sweet dreams,” he said.

“Sweet dreams.”

She put the cell phone back on the table and slipped the Po River stones out of the white pouch, holding them up to her face. “Can I trust this?” she asked as if the stones were a Magic 8 Ball.

Ask again later
was the response she gave herself before turning off the lamp and snuggling back down under the covers, the stones in her hand.

Nineteen

The next morning, Holly was having her own personal cheese tasting, from three kinds of blue cheese, including the king of cheese, Stilton, to a few different cream cheeses, trying to figure out which would work best as replacement for ricotta in the lasagna, when the bells jangled.

“Hello?” called out a woman’s raspy voice, the kind affected by a lifetime of smoking.

Holly headed into the entryway, where a beautiful elderly woman, who indeed smelled faintly of clove cigarettes, stood holding a black and white canvas tote bag that read:
Friends of the Blue Crab Island Library.
She looked to be around her grandmother’s age, seventy-five, perhaps even eighty. And she was also somewhat familiar, but Holly couldn’t place her until she realized she’d noticed the woman at her grandmother’s sparsely attended funeral. Her hair was luminous silver in a bun high atop her head with two diamond-encrusted pins poking out of the top. She wore black pants with a long white sweater, a sheer red silk scarf at her neck.

“My name is Lenora Windemere,” she said, and Holly almost
gasped. “I knew your grandmother. I took a cooking class here over forty years ago.” There was no emotion in her voice, no nostalgia. This was not about reminiscing.

Holly smiled and held out her hand, and Lenora took it in both of hers for a moment and then let go.

She reached into the tote bag, her many gemstone rings, including an enormous diamond, sparkling on her fingers. “I found this in town.” She pulled out the Camilla’s Cucinotta recipe binder and handed it to Holly.

Holly did gasp this time. “The recipe binder! Oh, thank God! I’ve looked everywhere for it. Where did you—”

“I found it in town,” she repeated, her hazel eyes steady on Holly’s.

You found it in your granddaughter’s bistro, in the kitchen, most likely, as Avery prepared for the “Italian segment” of her own cooking class.
That Holly knew with Camilla Constantina certainty.

She clutched the binder against her chest, so relieved to have it back.

Either Avery Windemere or a friend of hers had stolen the binder. And Lenora had either found out or come across it and brought it back. She was telling Holly that her granddaughter didn’t need to resort to crime to get rid of the competition, or that Holly
wasn’t
any competition, or possibly, that the binder
belonged
to Camilla Constantina and now her granddaughter—and belonged in this bungalow. Regardless, Lenora was saying something.

“Thank you,” Holly said, holding her gaze. “Very much.”

Lenora stared at her for a moment, perhaps seeing Camilla in her features, in her dark eyes and hair. She glanced around for a moment, stopping at the blackboard menu noting today’s pastas. She opened her mouth to speak, and for a moment Holly thought she might buy one of the pastas, but she just eyed the case and walked out.