The Love Goddess' Cooking School (3 page)

Holly reached for a spatula from the row of canisters holding every imaginable utensil, still unsure if she should use plastic or wood or metal. What made her think she could do this? She was thirty years old—
thirty
—and had never been able to
succeed at something like a career except when it came to kid-focused work, like manning the aquarium tank at the children’s museum during the marine educator’s maternity leave (Holly had memorized every sea creature, from anemones to starfish, and thrilled four-year-olds) and she was a decent waitress, which was how she’d earned her living in San Francisco, but at a la-di-dah coffee shop that sold eight-dollar bowls of basic coffee and fifteen-dollar sandwiches a gourmet chef created. Her ability to make spaghetti with jarred marinara and a side of garlic bread, a passable lasagna and veal parmigiana (for the nondiscerning, such as herself) did not qualify her to teach her grandmother’s famed Italian cooking class. Her grandmother hadn’t even considered lasagna and veal parmigiana Italian food. “Those are American dishes,” she’d scoff.

“How am I going to keep Camilla’s Cucinotta going when I can barely make a decent tomato sauce?” she asked her grandmother’s ancient gray cat, Antonio, who was grooming himself in his red cat bed by the side door. The class started in one week. One week. One week left to learn the recipes for the eight-week fall course and sound like she knew what she was talking about. She stared at the risotto, nothing more than a clump of rice, and told herself she could do it. “You follow the recipe,” her grandmother used to say. “That’s all there is to cooking.”

There was a world of difference between Holly Maguire and Julia Child. Julie Powell, even.

A glance at the recipe, handwritten in her grandmother’s beautiful scrolling script, in red ink, told her she’d forgotten
one of the essential ingredients. The fervent wish. She’d been so focused on studying the steps for spreading the risotto in the pan, and then she’d interrupted herself to do a Google search of
gilded
to see exactly what was meant by
gilded edges of the risotto pancake,
and then she’d gotten lost in the One Sad Memory and forgot all about the last essential ingredient. When she’d made the risotto alla Milanese earlier that day (both too salty and too tasteless at the same time), the recipe had called for a wish, just a plain old wish, not a most fervent one, and a memory, neither happy nor sad. Just a plain old memory.

And so after adding the dry white wine into the beef marrow broth (she had not liked the sound of that the first three times she’d attempted the risotto but had gotten used to it) and then letting the rice absorb it, she’d closed her eyes and let a wish come to her, and the one that formed fully inside her was that her grandmother would come back. Would once again be standing at the island in the middle of the bungalow’s kitchen, stirring, chopping, talking.

“Nonna, my most fervent wish is that you’re watching over me, guiding my hand so I don’t mess this up,” Holly said as she spread the sticky risotto into the pan. She couldn’t mess this up. Not her grandmother’s kitchen, this magical place.

She studied the recipe for how long before she was supposed to flip the pancake. Not that the risotto al salto would be any good; it would be as good as the risotto it was made from, which Holly would grade a solid C. But it was better than her first five attempts. Risotto and the risotto al salto were on her grandmother’s list for week two of the cooking class that would
start next week, but Holly would switch it to a later week. Her students knew that Camilla Constantina herself would not be teaching Camilla’s Cucinotta Italian Cooking class this term (except for one student, who Holly couldn’t reach). They knew there would be changes to the proposed menu of recipes in her grandmother’s little brochure, which Holly saw all over town.

At the funeral, Holly’s mother had been stunned to hear that Holly was taking over the course. “For God’s sake, Holl, just sell the house and be done with it.” But Holly couldn’t—wouldn’t—do that. She would not sell the house or business she’d inherited. She would not sell out her grandmother. The grandmother who’d been so kind to her while Holly was growing up, never fitting in anywhere except in her grandmother’s kitchen, where Holly could barely peel a potato without slicing the skin off her finger. Camilla’s Cucinotta had been her grandmother’s life. It had been her grandmother. And despite being a so-so cook, Holly was determined to continue what her grandmother had started as a young widow with a young child in 1962. For the past two weeks, since her grandmother had died, she’d spent her days surrounded by flour and eggs and garlic and onions and veal, following the recipes for the pastas and sauces so exactly that they’d come out okay for the past several days. Progress. Not with that extra delicious quality of her grandmother’s, but enough to satisfy your basic penne in vodka sauce lunch eater in Maine.

And Holly had four students enrolled—the same number of students Camilla had had in her first cooking class in 1962. The other twelve had requested their money back at the news
of Camilla’s death, but Holly could understand that. After all, Holly wasn’t the seventy-five-year-old Milanese Love Goddess Camilla, whose
maccheroni
in secret sauce had supposed aphrodisiac properties, whose exotic black-eyed gaze upon you, her Italian stones in your hand, could determine just the man for you, the
life
for you. Whose very essence had earned her the title Love Goddess and her business The Love Goddess’s Cooking School.

Holly as the love goddess. That was laughable. Cryable too.

Holly had students. Enough for a class. Enough to purposefully buy fresh ingredients at the supermarket and farmer’s markets in Portland. Some neighbors and past students had assured her (she couldn’t tell if they were just being kind) at Camilla’s funeral and later at the bungalow that her grandmother’s magic was in her blood, that if she wanted, she could do it. Holly desperately wanted to believe this, but all her practice tiramisus and pumpkin ravioli with their ingredients of wishes and memories hadn’t changed a thing for
her:
John hadn’t come back with that diamond ring, saying he’d made the biggest mistake of his life, that he wanted a future with her, that his daughter missed her. In fact, she hadn’t heard from him at all. Her crying voice mail about her grandmother’s death got her only a text message the next morning:

Sorry about your gm’s passing.

Perhaps she hadn’t needed
sa cordula
to tell her this man was not her great love.

Holly was about to turn on the gas burner when a banging interrupted the stillness in the kitchen. For a moment she thought the wind had dislodged the screen door again. It was early October, and the wind rolled off Casco Bay a quarter mile into the center of town, where the cottage stood at the end of the road, nestled between a stand of evergreens that separated the house a bit from the rest of the houses and businesses that lined the main street.

The banging continued and Holly glanced up through the large archway that led into the entryway, surprised to see someone at the door, knuckles against the glass. It was a girl, around eleven, maybe twelve, holding something in each of her hands with the hopeful, confident expression of a child about to attempt to sell a magazine subscription or Girl Scout cookies, which Holly would happily buy. A sleeve of Thin Mints and a glass of Chianti while watching an old movie later sounded great. Holly glanced at the wall clock. It was just after eight p.m.
Risotto al salto, you will just have to wait.

Holly walked over to the door, slid the silver bolt, and was immediately struck by the girl’s coloring. Her long, shiny hair was the color of chestnuts, which Holly had used to make Italian chestnut cake yesterday morning, and her eyes the beautiful dark blue of blueberries. The girl reminded Holly of one of her favorite (to look at) customers, a man who’d been in several times since Holly had come to the island, the always-in-a-rush, two containers of penne and two containers of vodka sauce. Mid-thirties. Tall, lanky, yet muscular. He had those same
blueberry-colored eyes. But his hair was darker.

“There isn’t really vodka in the sauce, is there?” he’d asked the first time he’d come in, a woman, wearing a very pink and frilly suit with black patent leather heels, beside him.

“Silly,” the woman had said, smiling and resting her pink-manicured hand on his arm. “It burns out in the cooking.” She’d turned to Holly and added, “Men,” with a delighted headshake. And Holly had smiled and filled the orders, surprised that this man, this stranger she’d never seen before on the island, had registered on her radar at all.

“May I help you? Holly asked the girl.

“This is all I have.” She held up the twenty-dollar bill. In her other hand was a brochure for Camilla’s Cucinotta’s Italian cooking course. “I know it’s not enough. But I can wash dishes or sweep up. Whenever I try to cook or my dad does, half of everything ends up on the floor, so I know you’ll probably need a sweeper for your students. And I could fetch stuff, like from the pantry or the markets or anything. Every report card I’ve ever gotten says I’m a good listener.”

Holly smiled. Her own report cards had always said the opposite. “Are you saying you want to take the class but you don’t have enough money?

The girl bit her lip and looked away, and Holly realized she was trying very hard not to cry. “My dad’s going to marry that totally fake pink bobblehead if I don’t learn how to cook.” Tears pooled in those blueberry-colored eyes.

So. Her father
was
the two containers of penne and two containers of vodka sauce guy.

“Why don’t you come in and sit down for a moment,” Holly said, gesturing to the tasting bench just to the right of the doorway. The bungalow’s Tuscan-inspired foyer constituted Camilla’s Cucinotta’s takeout shop. One hundred rectangular square feet, it held a chalkboard menu of the day’s pasta offerings, and one wall was a built-in refrigerated shelf from which customers could choose their pastas and their sauces. A large, open archway separated the entry from the kitchen; Camilla had discovered that folks liked to see her cooking, that it helped business. “Does your dad know where you are?” Holly asked, glancing again at the clock on the wall.

“My curfew’s not till eight fifteen and I live just down Cove Road,” she said, glancing out the window and pointing her thumb across the street to where Cove Road led to the bay. “When I turn twelve next month, I get to stay out till eight thirty. Not that there’s anything to do on this lame-o island, anyway. When we moved here a few months ago from Portland, I asked my dad if we could go looking for blue crabs, and did you know there are
no
blue crabs in Maine? The whole island is totally made up. Like the bobblehead.”

Holly couldn’t help the smile. And she knew all about the history of Blue Crab Island, from her grandmother, who thought the old story was hilarious.

“Well, since you have fifteen minutes, how about a cup of hot chocolate?” Holly asked. “My name is Holly Maguire, and I recently inherited this house and the cooking school and the pasta shop from my grandmother. She’s the Camilla of Camilla’s Cucinotta.” She pointed at the cameo-esque photo of her
grandmother on the brochure.

“What does
cucinotta
mean?” the girl asked. “Oh, and my name is Mia. Geller. And I love hot chocolate. But I hate those gross, hard little marshmallows.”

Holly laughed. “I hate those too. And
cucinotta
means kitchen in Italian. Little kitchen, really. And it’s very nice to meet you, Mia.” Mia smiled and tucked the brochure in her pocket, and Holly went into the kitchen and within minutes had made two steaming cups of hot chocolate. She sat in the antique rocker across from the bench, the one her grandmother always sat in to discuss the pastas of the day with her customers. Holly wanted to keep the girl in view of the big window, just in case Mia’s father came looking for her.

Mia sipped the hot chocolate. “Wow, this isn’t from a packet, is it?”

So. Add that to Holly’s small list of achievements in the kitchen. “My grandmother would turn over.”

“You know who’d totally use an instant mix with those gross hard minimarshmallows? Jodie, the bobblehead. And get this, her name is really spelled Jodi with just an
i,
but she added the
e
because it’s supposedly ‘more interesting,’ which I don’t think it is at all—it’s
fake.
Why doesn’t my dad see it? Oh, wait, I know why. Because she wears these tiny pink skirts and tight pink shirts. Has she ever heard of feminism?” Mia took a sip of her hot chocolate and leaned her head back against the windowsill, her chestnut-colored hair falling behind her narrow shoulders. “When I ask my dad if he’s going to marry her, he always says he doesn’t know,
maybe,
that we can’t live on his burned
cooking and grungy housekeeping skills and that it would be great for me to have a mother figure who understands almost-twelve-year-old girls. Like Jodie the Fake understands anything but which lipsticks have SPF and match her shoes.”

Holly was loving this girl more and more by the minute. She took a sip of her hot chocolate. “
Can
she cook?”

“She made a great lasagna the other day,” Mia said, her shoulders slumping. “It was so good I had seconds. I would have had another piece, but I noticed my dad smiling at Jodie just because I actually was shoveling her lasagna into my mouth. God, I’m such a traitor to myself. So I
have
to learn how to cook, especially Italian, my dad’s favorite, so that he won’t need to marry her. Plus, I
know
that my mom is gonna come back. Maybe even for my birthday. She’s married to some rich guy and lives in L.A. and France like half the year, but I know she’s going to come back—for good—when she gets her fancy life or whatever out of her system. It’s already been two years, and that’s a long time.”

Over a plate of the chestnut cake, which Mia took one bite of and then ignored, Holly learned that Mia’s father, whose name was Liam Geller, was an architect who specialized in the very unfancy building of dairy and cattle farms with their outbuildings and barns and chicken coops. Apparently, the chicken coop in the backyard of the Gellers’ antique farmhouse in Portland, which had been Liam’s concession to city living, even though they weren’t downtown, was one of the final straws that sent the wife running two years ago. From her backpack, Mia took out a wallet-sized photo of her mother and
father in happier days, Mia as a toddler on her dad’s shoulders.