The Love Goddess' Cooking School (30 page)

Juliet smiled. “Chicago by a landslide. But we’re not going back to Chicago to stay. We’re subletting our house and Ethan is taking a leave of absence from the law firm and we’re traveling around Europe for an entire month. First stop, Milan, Italy.”

Holly smiled. “Land of Camilla Constantina. Send me a postcard?”

“You bet,” she said, the most hopeful of smiles on her face before turning back to the pasta, which her husband was having a heck of time sliding through the pasta machine. Simon came to the rescue, an old pro now.

Tamara was on the béchamel sauce, whisking the scalded milk into the roux of flour and butter, and Holly on the signature Bolognese when the front door slammed open against the frame and Mia came rushing in, stopping under the archway, tears streaming down her face. She stared at Holly.

“I hate you. I hate you. I hate you! I just want you to know that!”

“Mia, I—”

“My dad told me everything,” she shouted. “This is all your fault! How could you steal him away from my mother?” Tears fell down her cheeks and she stood there for a moment just sobbing. But when Holly stepped forward, Mia screamed, “I hate you!” And then she went running out, the screen door slamming behind her.

Holly excused herself to call Liam and rushed upstairs with her cell phone, bursting into tears the moment she walked into her bedroom and closed the door. She dialed his number and he picked up on the first ring.

“Mia?”

“Holly. She just left. She ran in sobbing and yelling that I betrayed her and that she hates me, and then she just ran out. I was hoping she went back home, but clearly she didn’t.”

He was silent for a moment. “I’ll go look for her. You stay put.”

This time she wasn’t the comforter. She was the Jodie.

“Holly—everything will be okay. Okay?”

She burst into tears again, trying to keep silent. “Okay,” she managed. She dropped down on her bed and took a deep breath, picking up the white satin pouch. “Please let this work out okay,” she said to the stones, and she set the pouch down on the bed and went back downstairs.

For the next hour, the two couples cleaned up every speck of the kitchen while Holly paced the living room, coming in every few minutes to help, but being shooed back out with a glass of wine. With the twenty-fifth assurance that she’d be all right, Holly walked both couples to the door.

“I promise to stay in touch,” Juliet said. “You’ll be getting that postcard from Milan.”

“I’d better,” Holly said, hugging her tight. And after good-byes all around, Juliet in her lavender sweater and her husband, his arm around her shoulder, were gone, heading up Blue Crab Boulevard.

“It’s a nice night for a romantic walk,” Holly said absently as Tamara and Simon put on their coats, hoping Mia was safe and sound at home and not in one of her four places—three places, Holly corrected, as the swing on her side yard was not going to be one of her safety zones tonight. Tears stung her eyes and she wiped them away.

“She’ll be okay,” Tamara said, rubbing Holly’s back. “It may take some time, but she’ll be okay.”

“She thinks I betrayed her, though. And she’s twelve.”

“A twelve-year-old who’s going through her first romance and who’s been talking about betrayals and breakups for weeks,” Simon said. “She’ll come to understand that you didn’t betray her.”

“I hope so.”

Simon put his hand on Holly’s shoulder. “If my daughter can come around, anyone can, trust me. And wait till she finds out I’m dating the mastermind of her space-wizard bedroom.”

Holly offered a brief smile and squeezed his hand. “Thanks for everything tonight, you two. Now go. Make out or something.”

“Or something,” Tamara said, a gleam in her eyes as she and Simon headed out, hand in hand, toward his car.

Holly waved as the car left the driveway and then she sat down on the porch, wrapping her sweater tight around her and straining to hear down Cove Road, as if Mia’s voice could carry that far.

An hour later, no call. Which meant Liam hadn’t found Mia yet. He’d call to assure Holly that Mia was safe, Holly knew that. But just when she was about to call him, her phone rang. He’d found Mia in their unfinished basement, which they used for storage and the washer and dryer. She’d been lying in her sleeping bag, which she’d dusted off and unfolded next to the dryer. Liam hadn’t even thought to go down there, since Mia was usually scared of the basement, but when he’d heard the dryer, he went down and found her, leaning against it for company and warmth. She’d been there the entire time.

“She’s so exhausted and upset that she didn’t push me away,” Liam said. “She let me hold her for a half hour without saying a word. And then I picked her up and carried her to her room and stayed with her for a while till I thought she was asleep, but as I was tiptoeing out, she broke my heart.”

Holly braced herself. “What did she say?”

“She sat up in bed and said, ‘Daddy? I’m really sorry about
all the stuff I said. I just wish things were different.’ And I said, ‘I know, sweetheart.’ And then we talked for another half hour about how you can care about someone very much but just not love them the way you once did, and she started crying again and said she was afraid I’d feel that way about her, and I assured her I never would, that it didn’t work like that with parents and kids, and she finally let it all out about her mother having left for those two years, that she was afraid I’d up and do that too one day, that that was why she wanted us back together so bad, so that she’d at least have one of us at any given time.”

“Oh, Mia,” Holly breathed. “What a thing to have to worry about.”

“Give us a few days, okay? I know I keep saying that. I guess I might be saying that a lot. But I’m not going anywhere, Holly. And if you need me, I’m here. Okay?”

“Okay.”

The last time he needed a few days, he was full of I’m sorrys for hurting her.

She wondered if anyone in the state of Maine knew how to make
sa cordula.
She should just get it over with now. In her dreams, he would like it and she’d know he was The One, her great love.

But Holly was beginning to think that there was no real Great Love. That maybe there was just love. And like her grandmother had written, when you had it, you knew it.

• • •

That night Holly and Antonio curled up on the sofa, both of them staring into the fire that Holly had dared start in the stone fireplace. So far, the house had not burned down. Her heart feeling like it might burst any second, Holly reached for her grandmother’s diary to read the fourth and final one, hoping to lose herself in Camilla’s world, find comfort in her voice.

June 1966

Dear Diary
:

I always knew I had the gift of knowing. As a child, I would suddenly get a notion, so strong, such as a man proposing, and sometimes it would be accompanied by the image of a man I couldn’t quite see, on one knee, a ring proffered in a velvet box. And then I would actually see Adrianna, my mother’s young sister, slipping into the yard from the chicken coop, her cheeks flushed, her eyes full of love and hope. And if I watched for a full five minutes, I’d see Guiseppe, the neighbor’s son, sneak away in the opposite direction. And I’d know that a proposal was coming. Sometimes I would see more in my mind, sometimes less. And sometimes there would be nothing. I realized the nothing was fine too
.

I can remember having the flashes as a little girl of three—seeing things with my mind’s eye that hadn’t happened yet. Such as Daddy coming home from the war. Such as our married neighbor kissing our other married neighbor. I was so young and the flashes sometimes so confusing. In one of the flashes, I was picking stones from the shore of the Po River, so when we went there on one of our many family picnics, I chose the three I remembered in the flash. They were just there, set in a semicircle at the water’s edge, waiting for me. When I picked them up, I remember feeling a tingle in my hand. I slipped them into the pocket of my shorts and they’ve been with me ever since. They are not the source of my knowing, of course, but I was meant to choose them for a reason. I believe they heighten my knowing. As I would hold them and look at someone or think of someone, I would sometimes feel something very strongly when I otherwise would not.

Anyway, the more I started telling fortunes, the more I used the stones, since people responded to them so well, as though they were crystal balls. That made it easier for people to accept. Especially Luciana. She could blame the stones for my “witchery,” not me.

She will go her own way as I went my own way, off to America with Armando at twenty-two, saying good-bye to my homeland. My daughter has never gotten over being different from the other girls in Maine and that never changed. But all the flashes I’ve gotten about Luciana have been fine. That she’d settle down with the dull man, si. But she would be happy. And she would not have a dull child. No.

The child, my grandchild, will be mine. It won’t be obvious. The child will not have my gift of knowing. She will not be able to scramble eggs without sloshing the egg out of the bowl. She will not be full-blooded Italian like her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother. She would be half of what I started by coming to America. But she will be mine. There will be an unbreakable bond that will carry on. Of that I am sure as I am of anything.

The diary left Holly with the urge to look through Camilla’s photo collection, so she headed upstairs to the beautiful mahogany wardrobe in her bedroom for the stacks upon stacks of albums. Holly had looked through them over the years. Black-and-whites of Camilla as a young girl, with shiny black hair so long it almost reached her waist. Polaroids of Camilla and Armando having great fun, in the yard of the house Camilla had grown up in. In front of quite possibly every lighthouse in Maine, one of Armando’s weekend missions. Snapshots of Camilla pregnant in her maternity dresses, achingly beautiful. Way too many shots of Antonio doing nothing more than staring at the camera looking very bored. And album after album of Luciana growing up, reading books in the very living room Holly had been sitting in. Helping her mother cook in the kitchen that had changed Holly’s life. One album was devoted to shots Camilla had taken at Luciana’s wedding. And there were more than twenty devoted to Holly, of visits down to Newton, Massachusetts. Of summers spent on Blue Crab Island. There were several of Holly and Juliet in flowered bathing suits and sunglasses. In Holly’s favorite, they were jumping
off a low cliff into the ocean, holding hands. Holly would scan it and email it to Juliet.

And there was a final photo, Holly’s favorite, that she’d looked at every time she sat down at the dressing table to put on a little makeup and blow-dry her hair. The photo was tucked inside the mirror’s beveled edge. Camilla had taken the photo with the digital camera Holly had bought her for her last birthday. She’d held it out at arm’s length and snapped the picture of her and Holly on the porch, the night before she died.

“I miss you, Nonna,” she said to the photograph, picking it up and kissing it before putting it back. She was about to put the albums away when she heard the doorbell ring. She glanced at the clock. Almost midnight.

It had to be Liam.

She hurried downstairs, opened the door, and there he was.

“I just needed to see you and give you this,” he said, pulling her into a hug. Then he kissed her, full on the lips, looked into her eyes, and squeezed her hand before turning to walk away. At the other side of Blue Crab Boulevard, he stopped, turned, and held up his hand, and she held up hers.

Twenty-One

Give us a few days” turned into a week. She had not heard from Liam since his midnight hug last Monday night. She’d spent the time creating more pasta salads for her gourmet clients, signing up
three more
students for the winter course, working on the lasagna, going back to ricotta cheese but using less and making up the difference with Stilton and adding a touch more garlic. She’d also received a call from an old high school friend of Francesca’s who was planning a wedding in Portland next summer and scheduled a tasting, which Holly celebrated by taking Tamara and Simon out for Mexican food. She’d been eating so much pasta, so much Italian food, that she’d almost forgotten there were other cuisines. The three of them made a vow to go out to dinner once a month, a different ethnicity every time. Next up was Indian.

Holly was so busy—so happily busy, with her own work, her own life—that she’d barely given her love life a passing thought. Well, in between recipes and the call for a wish or a memory or a true statement. And then how much she cared about the two
Gellers would flood over her, sometimes so much that she’d have to sit down for a second and a take a deep breath. She also had strange dreams of both of them. In one, she and Mia were in the rowboat, and Madeline Windemere and the M Club and Daniel Dressler were suddenly in the boat too, and then there was Liam, swimming in the ocean, away from them. Her grandmother had once told her that dreams were impossible to analyze and seek deep meaning from, except for the classic taking-a-test-you-forgot-to-study-for or going-to-school-without-pants ones.

Just before class was about to start Monday evening, Holly saw something slide under the door. It was one of Mia’s strawberry-scented envelopes. She held it up to her nose for a moment, then hurried to open it.

Dear Holly,

Sorry about the stuff I said. I don’t really hate you. Can I still come to class? If the answer is yes, just open the front door.

Love, Mia Geller

Holly’s heart lurched and she pulled open the front door. Mia stood there, biting her lip, her dark blue eyes worried yet full of hope. Holly opened her arms in a hug. Relief flooded Mia’s face and she rushed over, squeezing Holly tight.

“Are you mad at me?” Mia asked, looking up at her.

“No. I understand why you were so upset.”

Mia came inside, leaving the door open for Tamara and
Simon, who had yet to arrive. “I still am. What was the point of all that wishing and remembering if what I wanted didn’t come true?”