The Love Goddess' Cooking School (24 page)

Holly squeezed Juliet’s hand. “Oh, Juliet. You’ve been grieving the loss of your husband just as much as your daughter.”

She shrugged, her slight shoulders barely rising. “Here I go again, sucking all the air out the room like Ethan accused me of. I don’t want to turn this class into some depressing sob story. You two go create amazing risotto. I could use some fresh air, anyway.”

“So let’s all just go sit out on the porch with the bottle,” Simon said, taking two more glasses from the cupboard. “I’m bone tired from work today. No energy to mince garlic, let
alone deal with beef marrow.”

“Me either,” Holly said. “A glass of wine and two friends sounds just like what the doctor ordered for all of us.”

And so the three headed outside to the side deck and lay in the chaise lounges facing the evergreens and the beautiful swing between the oaks, sipping their wine and talking about love and loss until Simon started to snore.

Juliet laughed, a welcome sound.

Holly was in bed with her grandmother’s diary in her hand and Antonio curled at her feet when her phone rang. For once, she didn’t lunge for it. She almost didn’t answer. But of course she did.

“Hey,” Liam said.

“How are you?” she asked, holding her breath.

“I’m okay. Except for the fact that my head feels like it’s going to explode. Mia’s mother has thrown a few curveballs, and”—he stopped for a moment, and she realized she was holding her breath—“and suddenly things are …
complicated
when they weren’t a few days ago.”

Complicated. Her least favorite word.

She lay back down and stared up at the ceiling. “I know. Mia stopped by before class tonight. She told me everything. I don’t think she left a single thing out.”

“Ah. That’s probably a good thing.”

Or a very bad thing.

“Veronica says she’s really staying, that she’s going to look
for a house—to buy. She seems to really mean it.”

This was good for Mia, Holly reminded herself as worry crawled back inside her. “So she just left her husband, just like that?”

“That’s her M.O.”

This was so confusing. She had left two husbands. And Holly was supposed to root for her to take one back, the one Holly had fallen in love with?

You’re supposed to root for Mia,
she told herself.
For a fractured family that could have a second chance.

Not that they were a family. Veronica was an
ex
-wife. Ex. She chose to leave. Holly supposed she could think her away around this in circles forever and never know what was right for her to feel.

“I’m sorry that I kind of defended her the other night, for Mia’s sake,” Holly said. “I can see why you’re so worried about her mother’s intentions. But I guess if she’s serious about staying, that is a good thing for Mia, right?”

“Have you seen her jeans? Her eyebrows? She’ll be getting a tattoo next. I don’t know how good it is.”

Holly had no idea what to say to this, to any of this.

“Listen, Holly, I might make myself a little scarce for the next few days, just until I know what’s really going on, what Veronica’s intentions are, if she’s serious.”

“Could she be?”
And are you part of those intentions?

“I guess. She was serious enough about leaving me and Mia for a life in Santa Barbara and Paris with the husband she’s now leaving. If she left us, I’m sure she could leave him too.”

“So maybe there’s another man in the picture?” Holly asked.
Not you,
she added silently. Meanly. Selfishly.

“I wouldn’t be surprised, but I don’t see her going from an international banker with houses in four countries to a Maine lobsterman. We’re meeting tomorrow night to talk, so I’ll find out everything then.”

Meeting. As in getting together. At Liam’s house, most likely. No, most likely at Veronica’s hotel, so they could talk privately.

She tried to remember Juliet’s words about not being able to control everything. But she would do anything for a magic wand or her grandmother’s gift of
knowing.

The kitchen couldn’t get any cleaner. Despite not even holding class earlier, Holly had scrubbed the stove, refrigerator, counters, and floors. She was out of things to scrub. And the one thing that did need a good scrubbing was her brain, to get Liam and Mia out.

“What’s going to happen, Antonio?” she asked the cat, who stared at her from his cat bed. She held out her hand with his favorite liver snap and he waddled over, his little belly pooch swinging from side to side. He gobbled it up and wound his warm body between her legs.

At least she’d won him over. Even if it took liver snaps.

“Come, Antonio. I’m going to take a long, hot bath. You can curl up on the fluffy rug.”

And indeed, the cat followed her up the stairs and sat in the
doorway, then came in and lay down on the gold rug beside the tub. Holly ran the bath, pouring in bath beads, large mother-of-pearl ones that smelled like baby powder and comfort. She headed into the bedroom and picked up the diary from where she’d left it on her bed, then undressed and slid into the hot water, holding up the composition book so it wouldn’t touch a drop of water. She needed to exit her life for a little while and perhaps she would find some lesson in her grandmother’s experiences about how to deal with the unexpected.

The moment she read the first sentence, though, she closed the book, not sure she wanted to find out just what happened to Lenora Windemere’s poor baby. But she adjusted her little bath pillow and took a deep breath and began to read.

May 1964

Dear Diary,

Lenora Windemere did not have her baby at home with a midwife. When the contractions started, according to Annette, Lenora began timing them, and then when she knew it was time, Richard grabbed her bag and off they went to the hospital
.

It was a difficult birth
.

And the baby, sickly and underweight, was born with a hole in its heart. “The baby would not have survived if you’d had him at home,” the doctor told Lenora. “Thank God you had the sense to deliver in the hospital
.”

But the baby, named Richard after his father, did not get better. Given weeks to live, then perhaps months, little Richard Windemere died just after he turned a year old, in his little bassinet at the pediatric intensive care unit at Maine Medical Center, where he’d spent the past several weeks fighting for his life
.

The morning of the funeral, I cooked and packed a week’s worth of dishes I knew the Windemeres liked and would freeze well. Then I bundled up Luciana in her good wool coat and drove across town to the Windemeres’ mansion on the water
.

“Remember, Luciana,” I said as we waited for someone to answer the door. “You do not need to say anything while we are here, but please use your best manners.” Luciana is now six and has lovely manners, yet I worried because I was afraid the gathering of solemn faces in black, the crying, would bring back memories of her own father’s funeral, and she might start to scream. I did not plan to stay long, for that reason. A funeral is not a place for a little girl who’s already experienced the loss of a parent
.

Martha, the Windemeres’ live-in housekeeper, opened the door and said that Lenora and her friends were in the formal living room, having coffee.

The moment I stepped across the threshold, I felt it. The anger. It swirled in violent slashes of black and purple in front of me, like tiny floaties before my eyes that would not go away. I held tighter on to Luciana’s hand, not quite sure that I should even go in, yet I was there, with the food and my sincere condolences. I would stay just a minute or two
.

The anger grew stronger as I entered the living room. Lenora sat on the camelback sofa, flanked by Annette and Jacqueline, two older women, Lenora’s mother and grandmother, whispering on the sofa across from them. Lenora held a white handkerchief under her eyes. Annette was holding on to her hand
.

“Oh, Lenora, I’m so—” I began
.

“Get out of my house,” Lenora screamed at me. “You should have let well enough be. I should have gone with my instincts and had the baby at home with the midwife. I hate you
!”

Luciana gasped and I felt her stiffen. I tucked her closer against me
.

“But Len, he would have died minutes later,” Annette said, rubbing Lenora’s shoulder. “He wouldn’t have made it to the hospital
.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Lenora screamed. “And the past year wouldn’t have been a living nightmare, always waiting for him to die. You made the last year hell, Camilla. My little boy would have died peacefully as a newborn. Instead he had a life of pain! Surgery after surgery! And it’s all your fault. You’re a disgusting witch. Get out of my house
.”

Luciana started to cry. In shock, I dropped the bag, which thudded to the floor. I just stood there, unable to move, unable to think, as though Lenora’s hatred had blocked everything inside of me
.

“
Get out!” Lenora screamed again. “It’s your fault
!”

She was crazy with grief, I knew. She needed someone to take her pain and anger out on. And I was that someone. There was nothing I could possibly say. I held on to Luciana’s hand and hurried out and down the steps, tears stinging my eyes.

That was the end of my relationship with Lenora Windemere.

Yet it was the beginning of my fortune-telling business taking off. The sad story of the poor Windemere baby spread all over Blue Crab Island and the nearby towns. How I had saved the baby’s life by telling Lenora to deliver in a hospital instead of at home with a midwife. That the baby had died was like a sad afternote to the story that went around; what people cared about was that the baby had lived for a year, had had a fighting chance. And my phone began ringing with appointments. To save my sanity, I limited fortune-telling to one client per day and I charged twenty-five dollars.

But things between me and Luciana were never the same, not since that terrible day in Lenora Windemere’s living room. When she called me a witch. A disgusting witch. And threw me out of her house.

When Luciana had questions, concerns, fears, dreams, she turned to her teacher, a lovely woman who looked like a princess with blond hair and blue eyes and a very sweet manner. She insisted on being called Lucy and refused to answer to Luciana. And she looked at me with something like suspicion in her eyes. As if I could do something bad to her.

So I turned even kinder, and for a while things were better. But only for a while
.

The entry finished, Holly closed the book and realized her hand was shaking.
Oh, Nonna,
she thought, trying to imagine that moment in Lenora Windemere’s living room, her mother as a frightened six-year-old hearing all that, being a part of it.

She got out of the bath and slipped on the thick blue robe her grandmother always had hanging on the hook for her, went into her bedroom, and called her parents’ house in Newton. It was almost eleven p.m., and her mother and father were likely watching
Law & Order
in bed, getting ready for the news, after which they’d watch a little of
The Tonight Show
and then turn off their bedside lamps.

Her mother answered on the third ring, as always. She could be sitting right next to the phone and reading
Good Housekeeping
magazine, but always waited for the third ring so as to seem like she was busy and leading a full life, a phone call just one of her many activities.

“Hi, Mom. How are you?”

“Holly? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I was just getting ready to head up to bed and wanted to say hi and see how you are. How Dad is.”
And to somehow transmit through the telephone wires that I’m sorry about what happened that day in the Windemeres’ living room. You must have been so scared.

“Oh, well, we’re fine. Same old, you know. I won a contest at the library and am getting a signed copy of a mystery author’s book. And your father’s cholesterol check was much better this time. If I could just get him to stop it with those disgusting cigars already. He’s like an eighty-year-old man, your father.”

Holly could hear her father muttering, “Oh, please, Lucy.” She laughed, picturing Bud Maguire with his almost bald head and auburn fuzz on his ears puffing on his cigar and absently watching TV while flipping through his favorite magazine,
Popular Mechanics.

She thought about telling her mother what she’d read in Camilla’s diary, then decided against it. If she brought it up, her mother would stiffen and go silent. She knew her mother that much. It would not be a conversation that would bring them closer; it would only widen the gulf. Holly was choosing to take over the life her mother couldn’t wait to escape.

“So you’re still teaching the cooking class?”

“Yes, and in fact, I just had my fourth class tonight.” Not that they’d actually cooked anything. “Once I started calming down and just following the recipes, really paying attention to the ingredients themselves instead of how much work was before me, I got pretty good.”

“Well, to be honest, I don’t know how you stand it up there. But you were always a decent cook. Remember that prime rib you made your father for his fiftieth birthday when you came to visit a few years ago? And the garlic mashed potatoes? He loved those. He always asks for the garlic mashed when we go
to Olive Garden. You could sell the house and open a diner.”

Holly smiled. Now that she knew more about her mother’s childhood, why she was so negative about the island, Holly didn’t quite attach an attack to everything her mother said. “Well, I’m committed to Camilla’s Cucinotta, so maybe you and Dad could come up sometime and try my risotto alla Milanese. I’ve almost got it down. In fact, I’m going to be catering a local wedding at the Blue Crab Cove. Was that here when you were growing up?”