by Linda Seed
The talk they’d had at the pizza place had made Sofia both angry and ashamed. Angry, because Bianca had no right to tell Patrick everything she had, no right to invite him behind her back. And ashamed, because she should have invited him—and told him everything—herself.
She kept the anger in check for the rest of the evening because Patrick didn’t deserve for it to be directed at him. But when Sofia got home that night, she confronted Bianca before she’d even closed the front door.
“What the hell were you doing telling my personal business to Patrick?” she demanded.
Bianca was on the sofa watching a movie with Martina and Benny. She was wearing a USC sweatshirt and yoga pants, with thick socks on her feet. Her hair was in a messy ponytail.
“Uh-oh,” Martina said. She picked up the remote and paused the movie.
“Someone needed to invite him for Thanksgiving,” Bianca said. “It’s less than a week away, and you hadn’t even asked him yet.”
“Okay. Fine. But you didn’t need to tell him … everything.”
“He wanted to know why you’re so weird about holidays,” Bianca said. “So I told him.”
“He said that? He said weird?” Martina asked. “That doesn’t sound like him.”
“Of course not,” Bianca said. “That part was implied. But you know he was thinking it.”
“Bianca, damn it …” Sofia began.
“Why didn’t you tell him about Mom and Dad?” Martina clicked on the lamp on the table beside her, bathing the room in soft light. “You’ve been seeing him for months.”
“Avoidance,” Benny said. “It’s Sofia’s way.”
Frustrated, Sofia threw her purse and jacket onto an accent table next to the front door and closed the door against the cool night air. “I didn’t tell him because … because things with him are happy! And I wanted them to stay happy. Is that so wrong?”
“Of course not.” Martina patted the spot next to her on the sofa, and Sofia sat down beside her sister. “But it’s not enough for a relationship to be happy. It’s also got to be real.”
Sofia knew Martina was right, but she wouldn’t admit it because she didn’t want to give her sisters the satisfaction. She slumped in her seat, defeated.
“So, are you going to let him come for dinner, or are you going to make the poor guy sit at home alone with a Swanson’s frozen turkey dinner?” Benny asked. “Because, I’ve got to tell you, those frozen dinners suck.”
“He can come,” Sofia conceded. “He’s bringing pie.”
The college was closed the week of Thanksgiving, so Patrick had plenty of time to obsess over recipes, plans, and preparations for his lemon meringue pie. He didn’t bake, really—he made cookies on occasion—so it probably would have been a good idea to simply order the pie from one of the local bakeries.
But he wanted to impress Sofia and her sisters by doing it himself. Besides, how hard could it be?
He began to get a sense of how hard it might be on the day before Thanksgiving, when he tried to make a pie crust from a recipe his mother had given him and he burned it to a crisp in the oven.
The problem was that he’d tried to do too many things at once; he’d become absorbed in some research he was doing for a book project, and he’d forgotten to set the oven timer. By the time he’d remembered that the crust existed in the first place, smoke was billowing out of the oven and the fire detectors in his little house were screaming.
He’d taken the crust out of the oven, doused it in the sink, then aired out the house for the next hour until it no longer smelled like he’d held a bonfire in the living room.
Clearly, he’d have to concentrate a little better next time.
He had enough flour to make another crust, but he was short on butter. He went to the Cookie Crock, bought more, then came back home to try again.
The hardest part was cutting the butter into the flour. His mother said she used a food processor for that, but Patrick didn’t have one, so he had to settle for crisscrossing the blades from a pair of steak knives through the dough until he thought it looked right. The dough still had visible chunks of butter in it, but he thought it would have to do.
This time, it went better. He remembered to set the timer, and he was careful not to concentrate too hard on anything else while he was waiting.
No alarms went off on the second attempt, so that was a plus. The crust was nicely browned, but not too brown, and that was also good. But it didn’t look exactly right; the bottom of the crust was puffy, arcing up into the area where the pie filling would be. And the outer crust looked weird. He’d tried to make a nice design with his fingers and the tines of a fork, the way he’d read about online. Instead, it looked like it had been partially eaten by weasels.
Doing it a third time didn’t seem like a viable option, so he pressed ahead.
The directions for making the lemon filling seemed self-explanatory, but it didn’t thicken up the way it was supposed to when he whisked the mixture over the stove. He went online to a baking message board to ask whether it might thicken up in the oven; the consensus was that it would not. He realized the problem: he’d forgotten to add the cornstarch. He tried adding it after the fact, but the result was a yellow, lemon-scented, gloopy mess.
He threw it out and started again.
On the next try, he got a filling that looked more or less like the YouTube videos said it should. He poured it into his messy but passable crust and got started on the meringue.
Ah, the meringue.
After the fact, it seemed to him that whoever had come up with the concept of meringue had to be a petty, vengeful person intent on inflicting suffering on his or her fellow man.
On his first try, the egg whites didn’t rise into stiff peaks the way they were supposed to. The second time, the meringue did rise, but then it became grainy and lumpy. The third time, it did what it was supposed to do, but when he put it in the oven, the peaks burned and the rest of the meringue was dotted with condensation that looked unappetizing at best and like a series of oozing sores at worst.
He ended up throwing the whole thing out and was utterly dispirited by the time Sofia stopped by late in the afternoon.
She put down her things, kissed him, and said, “Smells like you’ve been baking. How did it go?”
He led her to his kitchen trash can and pressed the pedal with his foot to raise the lid. Inside were the broken yellow remnants of his pies, looking like the doomed casualties of some horrible pastry-related collision.
“Yikes.” Sofia peered into the trash and then looked at Patrick with sympathy. “There’s more than one in there. You’ve had a rough day.”
“I followed the recipe,” he told her. “Carefully. I don’t know what went wrong.”
The little galley kitchen was a shambles of mixing bowls, pans, ingredients, and various implements covered in yellow and white goo.
“Why don’t you let me clean this up?” she said, her arms around him.
“No, no. It’s my mess. I’ll do it.”
“But you made that mess trying to bake for me.” She rose onto her tiptoes and kissed him. “Let me clean it up, then I’ll find some way to show you my appreciation.”
His eyebrows rose. “Really?”
“Really.”
It was true that Sofia was not going to have lemon meringue pie for her Thanksgiving dessert. But she had something far better: a man who was willing to go through hell trying to make one for her.
As she cleaned up the kitchen, plunging various cooking implements into a sink full of hot, soapy water, she realized that no other man had ever done anything this sweet for her. Yes, it was just a pie; it wasn’t a kidney donation. Still, he’d worked hard, outside of his comfort zone, to do something he’d thought would please her.
She thought about the other men she’d dated.
Jason might have offered to bring a pie, but would have brought a six-pack of his favorite beer instead, claiming he’d “forgotten” about t
he pie. Steven wouldn’t have offered anything in the first place. And Greg would have asked her to make the pie, saying, “You’re so much better at it, babe. Why don’t you do it?”
But Patrick? This man had thrown himself into the task with single-minded determination, trying and failing and trying again, all in an effort to provide something pleasurable for her.
It was a revelation.
When she’d finished cleaning up, she went into his miniature living room and found him sitting on the sofa, looking defeated. She sat on his lap and wrapped her arms around him.
“Well … this is nice,” he said.
“You think so?” she purred into his ear.
“I do.”
“I’ll bet I can make it even nicer,” she whispered to him in her most sensuous voice.
“Oh. Ah … all right.”
She got up, offered him her hand, and led him into the bedroom.
Some things were even better than pie.
24
In lieu of pie, Patrick brought a bottle of wine to the Thanksgiving celebration at the Russo house. By the time he got there, the place smelled of turkey, sweet potatoes, and the pumpkin pie spice blend that was so ubiquitous this time of year.
“All right, here’s the plan,” Bianca was saying to Benny. “You get set up outside Target, and I’ll take Barnes & Noble and World Market. Martina will line up at Express, then head on over to Bed Bath & Beyond. We’ll meet up afterward at the Big Sky Café for breakfast.”
“What about Sofia?” Martina sounded slightly whiny.
“We need Sofia at home to get the online deals as soon as they come up, Martina. Jeez. Don’t you remember what happened two years ago?”
“Yes. All right,” Martina conceded, looking unhappy about it.
“Ah … What are you doing?” Patrick came into the kitchen and put the wine in the refrigerator.
“We’re planning our Black Friday strategy,” Bianca told him. “Those fifty-percent-off deals don’t just buy themselves.”
“I suppose they don’t,” he conceded.
Sofia, who’d been given the task of chopping celery for the dressing, was silently standing at the kitchen counter wielding a chef’s knife as though she were planning some kind of bloody assault.
She didn’t look up when he came in, and she didn’t stop viciously hacking at the celery, which was piling up at a rate that far exceeded what was needed for the recipe.
“Sofia,” he said gently, afraid that if he startled her she might lose a finger.
“What?”
“I just … I wondered if you needed any help.” He stood awkwardly beside her, his hands in his pockets.
“I don’t.”
He caught Benny’s gaze; she rolled her eyes in sympathy with him.
“That’s probably enough celery,” he said. A veritable mountain of celery was accumulating on the cutting board, leading him to wonder exactly how many guests they might be expecting to require quite so much.
“Really. You think so? If you know so much about it, why don’t you take over?” She smacked the knife down on the cutting board and stormed out of the room. She went into her bedroom and slammed the door behind her.
“I didn’t mean …”
“She’s been like this all day,” Bianca said. “It’s not you.”
He went to the door of her room and knocked softly. “Sofia? Can I come in?”
She didn’t answer, so he tried again. “Sofia?”
He tried the door; it wasn’t locked. He went in slowly, carefully, in case she was planning to throw something at his head. She was lying on her bed without any heavy objects in her hands, so he figured he was safe.
“Are you all right?” He closed the door behind him.
“This damned day.” She stared at the ceiling, her eyes dry. “She had three days to live two years ago on Thanksgiving. Three days. She was in hospice. When I went to visit her, they had paper turkeys taped to the walls. As though there were anything to celebrate. As though there were any way to forget what was happening to her.”
He lay down beside her and pulled her into his arms. “You can cry if you want to. It’s okay.” He tucked her into the curve of his arm and stroked her hair.
“I can’t, actually.”
He looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“I can’t cry. Not about this. I haven’t been able to, even once.”
Could that be true? “Not once?”
“No. There’s something wrong with me.”
He didn’t think that was true, but he also didn’t think it was healthy that she’d never released her feelings. “You’ll cry when you’re ready.”
It seemed to him that when she did—when she was ready to fully experience everything she’d been through—she would need him to be here for it. And he had no intention of letting her down.
Patrick’s pie would have been superfluous. Once everyone who was invited had arrived, many of them bearing desserts, it came out to ten people and five pies—half a pie for everyone in attendance. The varieties included pumpkin (of course), sweet potato, pecan, mince, and apple crumb. Patrick was pleased to see there was no lemon meringue, because that would have meant someone had shown him up, and his ego had been damaged enough as it was.
When they were all seated, the parties around the table were the four sisters; Patrick; two nurses from Bianca’s practice; a couple of teachers from the science department whom Benny had invited because they’d had nowhere else to go; and a contractor Martina regularly worked with in her interior design business.
It was a pleasant mix of backgrounds and interests, and Patrick enjoyed the conversation. Even if he hadn’t, the food would have been enough to occupy him. Bianca was an excellent cook, and she’d prepared twice as much turkey, dressing, potatoes, rolls, salad, and cranberry sauce as the group could possibly eat, even if everyone were to indulge in third helpings.
A couple of people—including Bianca and one of her nurses, a motherly middle-aged woman of generous proportions—commented that Patrick was too thin, and they urged more food on him. Who was he to argue, when everyone had gone to so much work?
Sofia didn’t say much during the meal, and she picked at her food. But she didn’t snap at anyone, so they all took that as the best they could expect under the circumstances.
After dinner, the two other men present, along with Benny, left the table to settle into the well-worn leather sofa and watch football on TV. In the spirit of the thing, they’d traded in their wineglasses for beer bottles, and they were all yelling things at the players on the screen as though they thought it might make a difference in the outcome of the game.
In all of the Thanksgiving dinners Patrick had eaten at home over the years, he’d never seen his father help his mother clean up. Patrick loved his father, but that was one habit he didn’t want to inherit. He got up from the table, took a serving dish of leftover potatoes out of Bianca’s hands, and said, “Let me do this.”
Her eyes widened. “Really?”
“Yes, really. Go sit down. You’ve worked hard enough.”
“If you’re just doing this to try to win me over,” Bianca said, “it’s working.”
He hadn’t been doing it for that reason, but the idea of having her approval pleased him anyway.
When the guests had gone home and the last dish had been put away, Sofia and Patrick went to his house so they could spend the night together in privacy. She was glad one holiday, at least, was behind her, and though she’d had a lot of difficult feelings, it hadn’t gone that badly.
“Your sister’s quite a cook,” Patrick said when they were in the car on their way to his place. She knew he was attempting to make conversation that wouldn’t blow up in his face.
“She is.” Sofia hadn’t said much all day, but this was hardly something she could disagree about. “Our mother was an excellent cook. She taught Bianca everything she knew.”
Sofia understood that, by mentioning her mother,
she was opening a door. And maybe she was ready for that. Maybe she was ready to talk, just a little, on the most superficial level. It was something.
“Today must have been hard,” he said. That was all. He didn’t claim to know how she felt; he didn’t try to guess what kind of hard she must be feeling. And he didn’t insist that she tell him. Somehow, that made it easier for her to let out just a fraction of the truth.
“It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” she told him in the seclusion of the car, with only the lights from the dashboard to illuminate them. “It was hard. But somehow I thought … I didn’t think it would be survivable. I got through it, so …”
There was so much more to say. For instance, there was the question of how her sisters had managed to behave as though nothing was wrong. How they’d laughed and talked and ate as though it were any other Thanksgiving, as though their parents were still there to celebrate with them.
She didn’t understand that and didn’t know if she ever would. It created a feeling of resentment like a bright, burning lump in the center of her chest.
But she wasn’t ready to tell him everything, so she kept that part to herself, a malignant secret.
Still, what she’d told him was true. It hadn’t been the emotional cataclysm she’d expected.
“You did. You got through it.” He reached for her hand and held it, warm and safe in his, as they drove to his place.
“That’s one down. Now I’ve got to get through Christmas.”
He shot her a glance as they pulled into his driveway. “Right. About that …”
“… And the next thing I knew, I’d agreed to fly to Grand Rapids to meet his parents.” Sofia let her head thunk down onto the table at Jitters, where she’d met Martina for coffee. Well, she was having coffee. Martina was having one of her frou-frou organic herbal teas—probably made from grass clippings and hemp and God knew what else.