The Love Goddess' Cooking School (6 page)

“What’s that, Daddy?” a little voice said.

Holly glanced over to see a girl about Lizzie’s age sitting on her father’s shoulders, a half-peeled banana in her hand. She pointed to a basket of eggplants.

“Those are eggplants,” he told her.

Well, at least Holly knew more than a toddler about vegetables, she consoled herself.

“They look like Grandpa Harry’s feet,” the girl said.

Holly laughed and the man and girl smiled at her before moving along. She closed her eyes at the fresh pierce to her heart. Had Lizzie forgotten her already? Had John? She imagined Lizzie atop John’s shoulders, chewing at cotton candy, the administrative assistant walking beside them where Holly should have been.

Holly stood amid the baskets and bushels, of vegetables and fruits, every color and size imaginable, of organic eggs and artisan breads, and what looked like jar after jar of jams, and it was all so overwhelming that Holly had to close her eyes for a moment and remember this was about buying some tomatoes, sage, basil, and onions. Just ask for help, she reminded herself. Ask the tattooed vendor which onions were best for Italian cooking. Her grandmother had once told her that one of life’s best lessons was not being afraid to look foolish—to just ask the question.

She waited until a woman plucking several small, round purple-ish somethings and long green leafy somethings had paid before announcing she couldn’t select a simple onion without help.

“The plain old everyday yellow onion,” the man told her, tossing one up in the air and catching it as he multitasked with another customer. “Does its job by being itself. Good motto for life, eh?”

Holly smiled. Certainly was. She’d always been trying to be herself, but she couldn’t seem to pin down what that was. Female was all she was certain about. And unlucky in love, when it came right to it.

An hour later, everything on her list in bags in the trunk of her grandmother’s trusty little Toyota, Holly drove back across the Blue Crab Island Bridge, the
WELCOME TO BLUE CRAB ISLAND
sign a comfort, as always. This was home now. She followed Bridge Road, waiting for the curve that never failed to send goose bumps, good ones, up along her arms as the thick of evergreens stopped to reveal the open blue waters of Casco Bay. Holly drove on to the center of town, down the mile-long main street (the entire island was only two miles long and two miles wide) with its charming downtown: a small library funded by the wealthy Windemere family, the tiny town hall, the bakery, which had been expanded to include a small café, a general store, a bistro called Avery W’s (Lenora Windemere’s none too nice granddaughter), a yoga studio/knitting shop, a used bookstore, and a seafood restaurant. A very expensive hotel, the Blue Crab Cove Inn, jutted out in the bay a mile away from the center of town.

Next to the yoga/knitting shop (two things Holly could not do), and right in the middle of Blue Crab Boulevard, Holly noticed a banner in the window of Avery W’s.
COOKING CLASSES—STARTING OCTOBER 22. SIGN UP NOW! EACH WEEK A DIFFERENT REGION, FROM JULIA CHILD’S BELOVED FRENCH CUISINE TO GIADA DE LAURENTIIS’S ITALIAN TO YOUR FAVORITE CHINESE! TAUGHT BY AVERY WINDEMERE—WHO HAS A CERTIFICATE IN COOKING FROM USM!

Holly frowned. There had never been any competition for cooking classes on Blue Crab Island. And of course, her sudden rival was Avery Windemere, who, along with her friends,
particularly the vicious Georgiana Perry, had been mean to Holly every summer, starting when she was seven, old enough to be dropped off on her own, her parents returning for her a month later. Holly could remember the way Avery had treated her as though it were last summer.

“Could her pants be any stupider?” Avery would say, giggling, a few other girls surrounding Holly as she’d sat on the front porch, peeling carrots or snapping peas. “Aren’t you like
eight
? No one wears little lobsters on their clothes.” Laughter. “And, omigod, is she really wearing a red and green and white striped scarf?”

They’re the colors of the Italian flag
, she wanted to scream at them, but Holly had learned at school that it was better to ignore bullies than to react.

And when Holly would continue with her peeling, Avery would add, “Your grandmother is a witch; my mother and grandmother say so. The only reason they’re nice to her is because they’re afraid she’ll cast a spell on them and make them funny-looking like you.”

And when they tired of bullying her and continued on their bikes past the house into the woods, where they probably stepped on chipmunks and slugs for fun, Holly would run inside and tell her grandmother how mean they were and ask her to assure Holly that their lives would turn out terribly. Her grandmother would hug her and assure her that everyone got theirs, that there was such a thing as karma that took care of meanies.

The bullying had stopped when Holly was a teenager,
around sixteen. Avery and her friends had basically ignored her as they walked around town in their bikini tops and shorts, holding the hands of cute boys. Ever since, when Holly would visit her grandmother—and for the past month—Avery simply pretended that she didn’t know Holly. Fine by her.

A certificate in cooking. Ha. Not that Holly had even taken a single cooking course. But she’d learned at her grandmother’s hip. That was worth a degree and then some.

Still, if Holly lost her remaining four students to Avery, she’d never be able to prove herself, never be able to start something of a grassroots, word of mouth campaign that Holly had inherited her grandmother’s cooking skills. If just a little. No one would continue buying the pastas and sauces. No one would take the courses. And Camilla’s Cucinotta would become a memory.

Holly would not let that happen. Not to her grandmother’s legacy.

She drove on down Blue Crab Boulevard and parked her car in the driveway, then headed up the winding cobblestone walkway to the porch, her arms laden with shopping bags of ingredients. A replica of an Italian statue stood by the door, holding a stone sign that read:

CAMILLA’S CUCINOTTA: ITALIAN COOKING CLASSES

Fresh take-home pastas & sauces daily Benvenuti! (welcome!)

Holly loved walking into Camilla’s Cucinotta, loved the Tuscan-inspired entryway, with its golden-yellow walls and painted blue wooden floor, the beautiful round rug. The blackboard listed the two pastas of the day (Camilla had always done three, but Holly couldn’t keep up) and the sauces. Today there was penne, and gnocchi, and the sauces were vodka, Bolognese, and Camilla’s famous garlic and oil. A carpenter had built in the refrigerated shelf with French style doors, from which customers could come in, choose what they wanted, ring the little bell, and chat with Camilla while they paid. The antique cash register on the counter worked. Often when customers stopped in for pastas, they would ask if Holly told fortunes, but she had to tell them she did not.

She glanced at the row of brochures on the counter. Just before her grandmother had passed away, Holly had helped her plan the menus for the fall class. Camilla had offered the same class for the past three seasons and wanted to do something a little different, go back to basics, almost like she had when she first started teaching. When Camilla had arrived on Blue Crab Island in 1962, a widow with a young daughter, and offered Italian cooking classes to the residents from her bungalow’s kitchen, there were no written recipes, only memory and instinct. But Camilla had forced herself to write down the ingredients, the amounts, the steps in a way that her neighbors could understand (apparently they hadn’t been able to understand her shorthand those first few times).

When Holly had first arrived last month, Camilla spoke a lot about wanting to offer a course that would lure those attracted
to Avery Windermere’s American bistro, which had opened this past spring and was an instant hit with the summer tourists, not that Blue Crab Island attracted summer visitors the way Peaks Island did. Camilla’s classes had always been so popular among the locals that she’d never had rivals, except for catering that didn’t involve Italian dishes. But Avery had moved back to the island with her husband and opened the bistro. And was now offering cooking classes. And an Italian segment.

The night before her grandmother died, Holly had cooked alongside her, making gnocchi stuffed with potato and cheese. She’d added the garlic to the pan while Camilla excused herself to answer the jangle of bells and sold eight containers of pasta and seven quarts of her sauces.

“I must move with the times, yes?” Camilla had asked, moving slowly back into the kitchen. She was seventy-five and appeared in good health, but she grew tired easily and often needed to sit down at the kitchen table for a rest. “They come and buy my old-style pastas and sauces, but perhaps the cooking class needs a little something, like on the Food Network?”

“You should have your own show on the Food Network, Nonna,” Holly had said. “Your food is what people really want and crave. Classic. The real thing.”

Camilla smiled. “I hope you’re right.” She glanced in the pan and patted Holly’s hand with her tiny, age-spotted one. “What are we up to?”

Holly glanced at the binder, open to the recipe. “A happy memory.”

“Ah, I love the happy ones,” she said. “Since we’re cooking
together, I will share mine.”

Holly expected her grandmother to recall either of her two favorites: the day four-year-old Holly had dislodged a sheet of fresh pasta, which had draped over her and had to be combed out of her long hair for two hours under the shower. Or the time Holly had pretended to cook for a previous boyfriend’s very traditional parents, then fessed up during dessert that her grandmother had made everything. The boyfriend had been embarrassed and dumped her a week later, since “It’s not like I could marry you now.” Holly had called her grandmother, barely able to get the breakup out because she was laughing so hard. “Definitely not your great love,” Camilla had agreed.

“A happy memory I will always keep with me is the night you arrived here two weeks ago,” Camilla had said as she’d stirred the sauce. “You were brokenhearted,
si
, but you were home, Holly.”

Home. She’d never thought of Blue Crab Island as home because she spent such little time there, except for the month every summer growing up and a few school vacations. And then her romances and trying to find where she belonged and what she should do with her life had kept her moving around, first in various Boston neighborhoods and then west to Seattle and Portland, and then east to Philadelphia and then back to Boston and then to San Francisco, where she’d lived for the past almost two years. Until lately, she’d never noticed how good she felt when she drove over the bridge from Portland.

I will not let you down, Nonna. I will be ready on Monday when my students arrive. I will not let Avery Windemere drive Camilla’s Cucinotta out of business.

And so, with her Camilla’s Cucinotta apron tied tight around her, which always made her feel a bit armored, she set to work on one of the day’s special pastas, which she was also retesting for the third week of class: ravioli al granchio, with fresh crabmeat, one of Camilla’s homages to her adopted home state.

Holly’s first three attempts were awful. The first time she hadn’t sealed the edges of the ravioli squares tight enough, and the crabmeat came out in the boiling water. The second time, she’d forgotten a step entirely, to let the dough for the pasta sit for a half hour to allow the gluten to rest, and the dough was ruined. And the third time, she’d gotten everything right, but the results were meh. Still, at least once a day, someone stopped in to ask if she’d be offering it soon.

She liked making her own pasta, creating the well inside the heap of flour and cracking in the eggs and the kneading and twisting until it was elastic. As she rolled out the pasta on the big wooden board on the center island, remembering to roll it thin, but not so thin that it ripped, she glanced at the white binder, open on the counter to ravioli al granchio. The final ingredient was One Sad Memory.

She sighed, setting aside the stretchy, shiny sheet of dough to rest. She refused to think about John Reardon. Or Lizzie. She took a Diet Coke break and stared out at the evergreens through the big window over the sink, her mind too full of the next steps for the ravioli to let a sad memory enter. She went back to the dough and cut out the squares using an espresso cup, as her grandmother had always done. As Holly put a
thimble-sized drop of the crab-meat mixture onto each square and then carefully covered it with another square, pressing down on the edges to form a seal, the sad memory came with such force that it brought tears to her eyes.

Two weeks in her grandmother’s loving, magical care almost had Holly feeling better, almost had her waking up without that dull ache, when she’d remember that John and Lizzie were at that very minute just going on without her, that she wasn’t part of their lives. Every morning that ache was less pronounced because of her grandmother’s TLC, because she’d come downstairs to the smell of strong Milanese coffee, to which she had to add half a cup of milk, and the subtle scent of dough, to find Camilla in the kitchen in her shirtwaist dress and Clarks shoes, opera playing softly, Antonio batting at his mouse toy, and she’d have a purpose that required following directions, adding flour, collecting two cans of tomatoes, taking Camilla’s list to the supermarket or farmer’s market.

But
that
morning, two weeks ago, Holly awoke in the white bedroom to the sound of silence. She’d gone downstairs and realized Camilla wasn’t awake, making gnocchi or tourte Milanese and discussing the three essential steps in classic Italian cooking with someone on the porch where she had her morning tea, Antonio at her ankles. The soothing kitchen, with its wide-planked pumpkin floors, white-tiled counters, and the Tuscan blue of the painted wood cabinets and the pale yellow walls that were not the colors of Nonna’s Milan but nonetheless made Nonna happy, were as they’d been last night, when Holly had come downstairs for a cup of tea, unable, again, to
sleep, unsure where she would go, what she would do with her life now. Perhaps she would stay here forever, she’d thought, breathing in the utter peace of the kitchen, the comfort of knowing her grandmother was upstairs, sleeping, a balm to her heart.