The Cookbook Club

by Beth Harbison

“Actually, I brought cleaners,” she said, and crinkled her nose in embarrassment. “I don’t want to butt in but, gah, the idea of trying to eat or sleep in this place in this condition . . .”

  “Oh, I got the bedroom and bathroom in good shape,” he said. “I haven’t just been sitting on my ass.” He laughed. “I just have my priorities, so I’ve been going out to eat. But not today. I’m starving. Let’s dig in!”

  “You go right ahead,” she said, not wanting to reveal her squeamishness. “I ate not long before I called. I’m going to go out to the car and get the cleaning stuff. I’d love to tackle this range and see what’s under it. If you don’t mind?”

  He was already digging into the casserole dish directly with a plastic spoon. “God, this is good. This is really, really good. I didn’t realize I was so hungry. Or that you were such a good cook.”

  She laughed. “I suspect your hunger is making me seem like a better cook than I am.”

  He took a huge forkful and shook his head. “I’m not going to turn down help,” he said, covering his full mouth with a napkin. “This is so good.”

  “You know,” she said, “I think I’ll start with the fridge, so if there’s anything left we can put it away.” But the way he was going at it, there would be little, if anything, left. It was very flattering. Calvin had never relished anything she cooked and he’d certainly never eaten so much as a bite without getting a full nutritional breakdown first.

  She took out a roll of paper towels and a spray cleaner with bleach and went to the fridge. She opened it carefully. To her surprise, it wasn’t too bad. It was bad but not as bad as she’d anticipated. She was braced for live animals at this point. “Huh.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, mouth full. “I took some Windex to it earlier because that’s all I could find, but it’s not bad.”

  “None of the bulbs are even out.” She sprayed some cleaner in and started to wipe it down.

  “What about the garbage disposal?” She peered over into the sink. “Looks like there’s one of those.” She looked for a switch.

  “There is, but don’t flip—”

  Too late. She’d flipped the switch and got a shock. She cussed and drew her hand back fast.

  “—the switch,” he finished. “I figured that one out earlier myself.” He laughed. “I can’t believe you never even tried to clean this place up . . .”

  “Me neither! When I found out about the farm, my first idea was to use it for a massive herb and vegetable garden. Turned out I don’t know much about that stuff, so I gave up, but the house seemed like an overwhelming amount of work, and since I was married at the time, I thought we’d just hire contractors when we got around to it.”

  “And I’m your contractor now,” he finished. “For whatever it’s worth.”

  “The world would have a hard time believing that, huh?”

  He shot a finger gun at her. “I don’t know that the world thinks I can do anything practical at all. I have no idea.”

  “Even I was a little surprised,” Margo confessed. Then she realized she hadn’t yet seen if he could. No point in adding that, though.

  “You’ll see.” He smiled. “I wasn’t born on a stage in shiny shoes and a top hat.”

  “You wear a top hat in your show?”

  “You haven’t even seen it. What kind of friend . . .”

  She covered her face with her hands. “I’m sorry! I’m a terrible friend! But, to be fair, you know it’s impossible to get tickets. Or it was when you were in it. People would post their Ironsides tickets online like they’d gotten one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets. In fact, a place in Frederick is actually selling one of the golden tickets from the movie for three hundred dollars so it’s easier to get.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh my God, are you kidding? You know that! People have been trying for years to get to your show!”

  “I mean about the golden ticket. Is there really one for sale around here?”

  “Oh. Yeah. But it was signed in Sharpie by the guy who played Mike Teavee.” She shrugged.

  “Ah.”

  “No one’s favorite.” She turned back to the refrigerator and sprayed the second shelf area. “Now, if it was Violet Beauregarde, we might have something.” She wiped. “I want an Oompa Loompa now, Daddy!”

  “Was she the one who turned into a blueberry?”

  “Yup.”

  “What about the German kid? What was his name?”

  “Augustus Gloop.” She gave a laugh. “I’m kind of an expert on Willy Wonka. I had a crush on Gene Wilder when I was little and watched it so many times the VHS tape ripped. Don’t judge me.”

  “Huh. Wish I’d written it.”

  “You’re doing okay.” She wadded the paper towels she’d just used and tossed them. She moved to the next level, sprayed and wiped. “If there’s one thing we learned from the Wonka Chocolate Factory tour, it’s don’t get too greedy.”

  “Salient point.” He milled through the cleaning solutions on the counter. “Which one of these is best for the oven?”

  She paused. “Is it self-cleaning?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look at it. Does it have a self-clean cycle?”

  He went and frowned in front of the collection of dials on the front of the range. “There’s a warming drawer.”

  “Nice.”

  “I never knew what that was for.”

  “Warming food.” She laughed. “Well, keeping it warm. Honestly, I haven’t used mine since the great hockey puck roll saga of Thanksgiving 2018. It was a little too warm. Dried them out completely.” She shook her head, remembering.

  “I prefer mashed potatoes, for what it’s worth.”

  “Me too! But it was still a pretty major failure. Now I just keep my broiling dish in the warmer, like the rest of the world.” She pulled the crisper drawers out and took them to soak in the sink, then returned to finish the back and walls.

  “Self-clean!” Max clapped his hands. “Should we give it a go?”

  “Absolutely. Set it and lock it with that handle and push ‘start.’”

  “That’s it?”

  She nodded. “It doesn’t clean it like magical elves or anything, but it will burn off anything gross and make it easier to scrape and clean.” She stepped back and looked at the inside of the fridge. It gleamed like new. “This is really satisfying, I have to say.”

  He came up behind her, his proximity making her shoulder blades tingle. She actually shivered and, embarrassed, said, “Man, it is hot in here.”

  He didn’t move away. “It’s not so bad.”

  “Glad you think that, because there’s no central air.”

  “When I get the ceiling fans cleaned up, they’ll do fine. I turned that one on earlier”—he pointed to the far end of the kitchen, where the table should go—“and a plume of dust kicked up off of it.”

  “Nice. Who needs Parmesan cheese when you have the dust of ages?”

  He made a face. “I probably should have left it running and vacuumed.”

  “Let’s do it.” Margo took the casserole and put it in the now-clean fridge and closed the door while Max went to the switch for the fan.

  Sure enough, a cloud of dust shook down underneath it.

  In fact, the whole place suddenly seemed dusty. There was a mist filling the entire room.

  “What’s burning?” Max asked, alarmed.

  “Oh no.” She looked at the oven. Smoke was rising from the back and there was no vent overhead to clear it. “All that crud is burning off in there.”

  “Is it okay?”

  “Yeah, but maybe not the best place for us to hang out. Good thing it’s nice out. Want to go breathe?”

  He laughed outright. “Stellar idea. I even have some warm beer on the porch.”

  “You went out and got beer but not food?”

  He shrugged. “Priorities.”

  They opened all the windows and propped the door open. As they stepped onto the crea
ky porch, Max reached down and grabbed a six-pack of Flying Dog Numero Uno. It was one of her favorites, a Mexican-style lager, but with a little kick and lime zest.

  He brought beer. He wasn’t a complainer. He was hot. He had become the damn-near perfect man.

  “I’ll grab the chairs.” She picked up the two light plastic chairs that had been there forever, and hoped they wouldn’t break when challenged with weight.

  Then she hoped if one broke it wasn’t hers.

  They walked far enough into the yard that they could no longer smell the burning oven and propped the chairs up. A field spread out in front of them, with the large empty barn to the left, and a hill in the distance on the right, dotted with the silhouettes of horses quietly grazing in the night.

  A creek ran the perimeter of the property, and the frogs were as loud as if they were three feet away. Crickets too, though they probably were. The moon was almost full, suspended in the sky like a distant balloon, slowly moving across, under stars and through tree branches, never speeding and never stopping on its course.

  “You seem to have it all,” Margo said after they’d been there awhile, talking and dipping into silence, then talking again. The warm beer was lubricating her nerve. “Do you regret that?”

  “No,” Max said quickly. “Not regret. Never regret. I’ve been poor. I don’t ever want to be poor again. The feeling of not being able to buy so much as ramen noodles at the grocery store is . . . unforgettable. No, I never want to go back to that. But I wish I’d set myself up for a private life more realistically.”

  “How?”

  He considered, tipping his face up toward the sky. She watched his profile in silence, thinking of the boy she’d known and the hugely successful—frankly iconic—man he’d become. “I guess all it would have taken was to grab a piece of land like this under another name. It’s easily done. Not the loan, of course, but the title.” He chuckled. “But who the hell has that kind of confidence when they’re just starting out? For a long time, I was glad to be able to buy a block of good cheese without checking the price, but I sure didn’t have the money or confidence to buy anything substantial. Honestly, Margo, I wasn’t even trying to be famous.”

  She looked at him for a moment and said, “God, then you’re a real failure.”

  He gave a laugh and looked back at the moon. “In a way, yes, I am. And I feel like an ungrateful jerk for not enjoying the success more fully, but it’s just that . . .” He paused for a long time. “It always felt like a mistake. Like it was someone else’s success and it was being piled on me. I mean, hell, this was just an idea I came up with while I was working and bored. It never occurred to me that I, of all people, could come up with something that resonated with others. It just . . . happened.”

  “Luckily.”

  “Oh yes, very luckily,” he said quickly. “Which is why I feel like such a jerk for not just lapping it up and enjoying the notoriety.” He looked in her direction. “Sometimes I feel like I can’t breathe. Like I can’t get away. In fact, I honestly thought I couldn’t until now.” He leaned back and sighed heavily. “Not one siren. Not one horn. It’s been so long since I experienced this kind of quiet that I don’t even know if it’s real.”

  Margo nodded and returned her gaze to the sky. “It’s real. I’ve never needed it in the way you do, but I spent a lot of lonely nights with the blinds open, looking out at the stars as I fell asleep, hoping that every old love song about fate was right.”

  “‘Stardust.’”

  “Yes. And ‘Deep Purple.’ I don’t know what, exactly, ‘sleepy garden walls’ are, but I know I want that garden.”

  “‘And the stars begin to flicker in the sky,’” he said. “My grandfather used to play that on the piano.”

  “I had a CD of World War Two songs and it was on there.”

  Max nodded and reached out his hand. Margo looked, uncertainly, for a moment, then put her hand in his.

  He squeezed, and they spent the rest of the evening in silence, while the moon crossed the sky, making way for the sun.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Aja

  For a moment, she thought it was the heat getting to her. Aja had moved ten bags of topsoil from her car to the garden in heat so muggy it felt like she was slapped in the face with a hot wet washcloth when she got out of her car’s air-conditioning. She was trying to stay hydrated and thought she was doing fine until she found the ring.

  It was buried in the dirt right next to the small stone wall that partitioned off a section of flowers from the vegetable garden.

  The area had been in shadows until that moment, when the sun had moved just enough to touch the stone with its light. The sparkle caught Aja’s eye and she dug carefully, worried that there was broken glass in the soil.

  But it wasn’t broken glass, it was a gold ring with what appeared to be a large emerald-cut diamond flanked by smaller diamonds and, now, dirt. She pulled off her gloves and tried to examine the ring more carefully, pouring her bottled water over it until the dirt loosened and ran onto the ground.

  It was still dirty, of course, and Aja was no jeweler, but it sure looked like the real thing. And it had the heft that rhinestone baubles just never had. A certain, telling weight in her hand.

  She sat there for a moment, completely unsure of what to do. If this was some old piece of junk that she was mistaking for precious gems and she took it in to Lucinda like she’d found pirate’s gold, she was going to look like an idiot. And, really, how could it be anything else? Michael had grown up here, which means it had been Lucinda’s property for a long time. Why would she have real jewelry buried in the garden?

  She was still contemplating her next move when she sensed someone watching her and looked up to see a child dodge behind a tree about five yards away.

  “Hello!” she called, but the child remained hidden.

  Again, she questioned whether the heat was making her imagine things. Why would a kid be roaming this property? She stood up, tucked the ring into her pocket, and headed for the tree.

  When she got to it, she was half sure she was going to look and there would be no one there, but, sure enough, a narrow, tanned girl with a wild tangle of dark hair and bright blue eyes looked up at her. She appeared to be about ten or eleven, though Aja wasn’t very good at the age-guessing game with kids.

  “Hi,” she said to the girl. “Who are you?”

  The girl straightened her back and crossed her arms in front of her. “I’m allowed to be here.”

  Aja laughed. “Good. Me too. But that doesn’t answer my question. Who are you?”

  “I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “No, you don’t,” Aja agreed, and put her hand out. “My name is Aja.”

  The girl ignored her outstretched hand. “Like the country?”

  “It’s a continent, but no. It’s A-J-A. It just sounds the same.”

  “That’s a weird name.”

  “I suppose you have a better one?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “What is it?”

  She lifted her sharp little chin. “I don’t have to tell you anything. You’re just a worker.”

  Aja swallowed a laugh. “I can think of much worse things to be called than that.”

  “I can’t. It means you’re just a hired hand and you don’t really belong here.”

  “Oh, wow. Do you?”

  The girl pressed her lips into a hard, thin line. “Well, I don’t think so but they do, so they make me come here.”

  “Who are they?” Aja wondered if this was a runaway or if she should be alerting the authorities.

  “My parents. They leave me here because they think it’s good for me or something, but it’s just stupid. I hate it here.”

  That didn’t answer any of the more pressing questions Aja had. “Where are your parents now?”

  The girl shrugged, her bony shoulders rising up then flopping down in pretty classic nonchalance.

  “Are you lost?”


  “No!” Indignation colored the girl’s cheeks. “I’m not stupid. It’s kind of hard to get lost here.”

  “Well, you just said you don’t know where your parents are,” Aja pointed out, trying not to insult her by showing her humor. “That sounds like you’re lost.”

  “I meant they’re at work or something.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “And it’s none of your business anyway.”

  “True.”

  “What are you even doing here?”

  “Working, as you pointed out.”

  The girl rolled her eyes outright. “On what? Why are you digging?”

  “I’m making a garden for the lady who lives here.”

  She looked over the yard. “There are already like a million gardens here.”

  “I’m making a garden filled with things you can eat.”

  “Eat?”

  Aja nodded.

  “I don’t eat stuff from the dirt.”

  “Of course you do! Where do you think”—she was going to say carrots and changed her mind—“french fries come from? You do like french fries, don’t you?” What kid didn’t?

  The girl nodded reluctantly. “But they don’t come from the dirt.”

  “The potatoes do.”

  “They come from the store.”

  Maybe this kid was younger than Aja had initially thought. “That’s true,” she said, “but before that they are grown in the ground. And then the farmers pull them up, package them, and sell them to the store. Or the restaurant.”

  “Whatever.”

  She could have—and probably should have—told the kid to scram and gotten back to work, but she’d always had a soft spot for snarky preteens, given that she was so able to remember the hell of being that age herself. It made her want to dig in a little, maybe see where the girl was coming from and give her some much-needed understanding.

  “Do you like to dig?”

  The girl’s eyes darted away. “Why?”

  “I thought you might want to help make the garden.” She’d finished with the larger plants and was now working on a border of herbs along the stone wall.

  Apparently it was exactly the wrong thing to say, because she squared her shoulders and said, “I don’t have to help you do your work. You’re just being lazy. I’m going now.” And with that, she turned and walked away, across the wide-open lawn toward the overgrown and now-obsolete bridle trails that ran behind the property.