The Secret Ingredient for a Happy Marriage

by Shirley Jump

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Shirley Jump

  Excerpt from The Perfect Recipe for Love and Friendship copyright © 2017 by Shirley Jump

  Reading Group Guide copyright © 2018 by Shirley Jump and Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Cover design by Elizabeth Stokes

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First edition: May 2018

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  LCCN: 2018930205

  ISBNs: 978-1-4555-7202-1 (trade pbk.), 978-1-4555-7203-8 (ebook)

  E3-20180417-DA-NF

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  An excerpt of “The Perfect Recipe for Love and Friendship”: TeaserOpener

  Author Note

  Reading Group Guide

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Also by Shirley Jump

  Newsletter

  To Dad and Kathy, who have that secret ingredient for a happy marriage and whose warm and loving relationship made me believe in love again.

  ONE

  From the street, Nora O’Bannon Daniels’s life looked almost perfect. The quintessential three-bedroom, two-bath house in a decent neighborhood, with a wooden swing set in the backyard and a pink bike leaning against the garage. The pale green Dutch Colonial sat a hundred yards back from the sidewalk on a leaf-covered quarter-acre lot of weedy grass peppered with the detritus of two kids. A trio of pumpkins marched down the stairs, still whole and uncarved. The brick stoop had weathered from the harsh winters, and the black paint on the railing had peeled down to gray metal, but the house had a well-worn and loved air.

  If her life had been a TV show, there’d be some quirky, close-knit family on the other side of the front door, a family whose biggest problem was a lost set of keys. Within thirty minutes, the keys would be found, and the family would be sitting down to a dinner where they’d laugh and hug and pass the creamed corn.

  But when Nora parked her aging sedan in the driveway, the grumpy engine ticking as it cooled, she could see the truth she’d been avoiding for months. She didn’t live in a sitcom, and there wasn’t going to be a lifesaving solution in the next half hour, punctuated by commercials for GEICO and Smucker’s jam on either end.

  No, in Nora’s world, life pretty much sucked. She hadn’t thought that the bank would actually do it—some unrealistic part of her had been hoping for some last-minute sympathetic, divine intervention—but the threatened end had finally arrived. While she was at work, a bright yellow sheet of paper had been tacked to her front door, its message stamped in black block letters underscored with a paragraph of red warnings.

  NOTICE OF AUCTION

  On the welcome mat sat a cellophane-wrapped orange chrysanthemum topped with a Mylar balloon. The balloon waved back and forth in the fall breeze, screaming HAPPY BIRTHDAY in neon green letters.

  Happy birthday, Nora O’Bannon. You’ve lost your house. Your family is now homeless.

  Not exactly the way she’d wanted to turn thirty. The irony of it all would have made her cry, if she’d had the energy to work up some tears. For a year, she’d argued and prayed and strategized and negotiated, so sure she could head off this disaster. Her husband, Ben, had done what he always did, buried his head in the sand and left her to handle the incessant phone calls and letters. Nora, who was the one everyone had said could do anything she set her mind to, had failed. The faceless person on the other end of the phone had no interest in letting them skate on the mortgage. No heart for the two children she was going to have to uproot. And no solution that Nora could actually afford.

  Nora got out of the car, carrying a takeout pizza in one hand and a bag of fabric in the other. Sarah wanted to be a princess for Halloween, and in a thick cloud of denial, Nora had bought yards of pink tulle and dozens of sparkly rhinestones. She figured she could whip out the old Singer and stitch up something that would pass for a princess, all in time for Sarah to go trick-or-treating on Friday night. Jacob was still wavering between being a pirate and a ninja, so Nora had grabbed a couple yards of black fabric.

  Ben pulled in behind her and climbed out of his ten-year-old Toyota. Every time he got out of the sporty little two-door, Nora wondered how he fit inside. Ben towered over her, a lean but fit six-foot-three man with brown eyes that softened when he was tired, dark wavy hair that curled against convention, and a ready smile for everyone he met. She’d fallen in love with that smile at a party one stormy winter night twelve years ago. She’d been a senior in high school, Ben a college freshman, the two of them on Christmas break and crammed into Tommy O’Brien’s basement while Aerosmith thudded from the speakers.

  She’d been sitting on a fraying blue cloth sofa, clutching a red Solo cup and pretending to sip Budweiser. Her sisters had always been the ones who fit in at parties, especially Magpie, who made friends with everyone she met. Nora always felt like the little old lady at a party—the one who didn’t stay late, didn’t drink, and didn’t sneak into an empty bedroom to have unmemorable sex.

  But going to Tommy’s had sounded better than staying home with her mother on a Friday night, especially in her senior year when that kind of thing spelled loser. After a bit of small talk when she first arrived, Nora had taken up residence on the sofa, invisible to everyone else. She could have been another throw pillow, given how few people talked to her.

  Then Ben sat down beside her, tall and lanky and with longer hair that brushed his brows. “Hey,” he said.

  She gave him a nod. Lifted the cup to her lips but didn’t drink.

  “You know, I read somewhere that Canada Dry is a gateway drug.”


  She turned to him, this stranger with nice eyes and a Rolling Stones T-shirt. “Excuse me?”

  He nodded toward the cup in her hands. “You start with ginger ale and next thing you know, you’re smoking a candy cigarette before you get out of bed in the morning. When you find yourself on the floor, clutching a bag of gumdrops in one hand and an Orange Crush in the other, you know you’ve hit rock bottom.”

  Her cheeks heated, and she wanted to crawl into a corner and die. “How did…how did you know this isn’t really beer?”

  “I saw you, in the kitchen earlier. You dumped the Bud down the drain and replaced it with some Canada Dry. Not much of a drinker, I take it?”

  “Oh, I don’t…I’m not…” She didn’t have the confidence of Magpie, the easy conversational ability of Bridget, or the tough exterior of Abby. Talking to a boy left Nora flustered, nearly mute.

  “It’s okay,” Ben said. “You’re not like everyone else here. I like that. And I have to say, I have a fondness for people who like ginger ale. It’s a very underrated soda, if you ask me.” He’d smiled then, the kind of smile that spread across his face as easy as butter and lifted a rather ordinary face into something bright, unforgettable.

  For twelve years, that smile had convinced her that everything was all right. That things would work out. That if she was just patient—give me a chance, Nora, to make it right—the sinking ship they were living on would right itself. She’d given him a hundred chances, and time and time again, he’d blown it. The trust she’d once had in Ben had eroded until there was nothing left.

  “Hey,” Ben said now. But the word didn’t have the friendly note from over a decade ago. It was cold, dispassionate, a greeting issued out of expectation. “They finally did it.”

  “They told us they would.” Nora sighed. “I don’t know what I’m going to tell the kids.”

  “Easy. Don’t tell them anything.” Ben jogged up the stairs, ripped the yellow notice off the door, and stuffed it into his interior jacket pocket.

  The exact way Ben always lived his life. If he didn’t say it out loud, it wasn’t real. “That doesn’t make it go away, Ben. We’ve lost the house. There’s no going back, no passing Go again, no deal to work with the banker.”

  “There’s always a deal, Nora. Just give me a chance—”

  She wheeled on him. “You are the reason we’re in this mess. You’re the reason our kids are being evicted. You—”

  “I didn’t get here on my own, Nora.” He waved at the pizza and the bags. “Takeout? Shopping? What happened to ‘we’ve got to buckle down so we can get caught up’?”

  He was really going to compare twenty dollars’ worth of pizza and fabric to what he had done to them? She was doing the best she could here, working full-time, being a mom, trying to keep them above water. “We are three hundred thousand dollars in debt, Ben. I could buckle down until I’m a hundred and ten and still not pay that off.”

  “I, me.” He threw up his hands and cursed. “What about we, Nora? Till death do us part?”

  “That ended the day you walked into Mohegan Sun and blew your paycheck at a roulette table. And then did it again two weeks later, and a month after that. Chasing a stupid white ball.”

  Ben shook his head. “You’re never going to let that go, are you? Fuck it. I don’t need to listen to this.” He slid his key into the door and went inside.

  Nora grabbed the plant and balloon—a gift from her sister Abby—bumped the door open with her hip before it could close, and then dumped the pizza on a small table and the flowers and bag of fabric on the floor. She charged down the hall after his retreating figure. That was what Ben did—leave when the conversations got tough. Avoid, withdraw, ignore. “Our kids don’t have a home, Ben. You don’t get to be selfish now.”

  “Nora, let it go.” He took out his phone. “I’ll fix this.”

  She snorted. Fix it? There was nothing he could do now. That yellow paper said it all. “I’ve heard you say that twelve thousand times, Ben. And all you’ve ever done is make it worse.” Her gaze skipped over the kitchen, half painted, still missing three upper cabinets, a renovation started four years ago. Yet another of Ben’s promises that had been broken the second the work got inconvenient. Once upon a time, she’d thought she could create a home here. Now some other family would stand on the front lawn, hold up a hand, and buy the house she loved for pennies on the dollar. Every memory she had, every mark on the wall for the kids, every fingerprint on the glass, would belong to someone else. “I’m going to pack some things and take the kids to my mom’s until I find a better solution.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Yeah, Ben, I’m leaving. And I don’t want to argue about it or cry about it. Let’s just be adults here and admit we screwed this up. We”—she waved between them—“screwed us up. This whole thing with the house is a sign. We should go our separate ways and start over.”

  Silence. She’d finally spoken the words both of them had danced around for two years. Ben’s gambling had taken a toll on their marriage, damage they’d never recovered from. He’d gone to rehab almost a year ago, thirty days of a desperate attempt to save his family. But the fractures only widened. It wasn’t just the money he’d lost. Nora had watched him put a deck of cards or a roulette table ahead of their marriage, as if it were just another thing to gamble. The promises they’d made to each other on their wedding day became nothing more than words, and at some point, Nora simply stopped trying. They’d gone through the motions for the sake of the kids, but the death knell had sounded the night they’d moved into separate bedrooms.

  Ben crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re not taking my kids from me, Nora.”

  “You already did that yourself, Ben.” She turned on her heel and walked out of the kitchen. If she stayed there for another second, her foolish heart would cave to the haunted look in his eyes, the pain etched in his forehead. How many times had she done that? How many times had she believed things would change?

  All staying with him had done was cost her the only home her children had ever known. Cost her the family she’d wanted to build. The future she had dreamed of having. In the back of her bedroom closet, she found a trio of suitcases. She threw them open on the bed—the bed she had stopped sharing with her husband over a year ago—and started stuffing clean laundry inside. Enough for a few days. She’d figure out the rest later.

  Ben leaned against the door, watching her for a long time without a word. Finally he said, “Don’t go, Nora.”

  She hesitated at the hitch in his voice. The exposed wound in those words. Stay, some foolish, hopeful part of her whispered. Stay and work this out.

  Instead she zipped the largest suitcase shut and then started filling the next one. “Why? Because there’s something to save here? You and I both know there isn’t.”

  “It’s your birthday. We always go to dinner at Giovanni’s on your birthday.”

  Her hands stilled, halfway through folding a Power Rangers T-shirt. “We used to go to Giovanni’s, Ben. We haven’t been in a long time.”

  “We went last year—”

  “Last year, I spent my birthday driving to Foxwoods. You’d sold your car to some guy in the parking lot for five hundred bucks.” There was more, but she didn’t say it. Some secrets were better left in the past.

  “I know I fucked up. A lot. But things have changed, Nora. I’ve changed.”

  She looked up at him, into the eyes she’d once thought could see inside her soul. At the face of the man she’d imagined growing old with, sitting on the back deck sipping wine as the sun set. “You have. The trouble is, Ben, so have I.”

  She closed the last suitcase, propped it on the floor, and wheeled it out of the room and down to her car, leaving the rest behind.

  In the end, Nora chickened out on taking the kids to her mother’s house. Colleen O’Bannon would have questions, and if there was one thing Nora didn’t want right now, it was questions. Instead, she told the kids they w
ere doing something special for Mommy’s birthday, and she took them to a hotel. One night there nearly maxed out her remaining credit card, which meant…

  Talking to her mother today. Procrastination was clearly one of her special talents.

  Nora had bought herself a short reprieve from the tough conversation. Maybe a miracle would occur in those hours, or the world would end, or the Publishers Clearing House folks would show up at her door with a giant cardboard check.

  Until that happened, Nora kept putting off the act of finding a living solution by working. Right now, that meant frosting four layers of vanilla sponge before stacking them for a wedding cake. Her sister Bridget was here, both of them working in the family-owned bakery where they’d spent most of their lives. Abby, her younger sister, would be in tomorrow morning, getting started at the crack of ungodly early to bake all the bread orders. Their mother, who used to be full-time in the shop, came in less and less as she got older, not to mention busier with a social life. In the last few months, Ma had started volunteering at a shelter named Sophie’s Home and spending a lot of time with the director, Roger. Planning programs, Ma claimed, but Nora had detected a hint of a blush whenever Ma talked about Roger.

  Bridget slipped into place beside Nora. She was leaner than Nora, a body yet unthickened by having children, but she had the same long, dark hair and blue eyes as all the O’Bannon girls. It had been a year and a half since Bridget’s husband, Jim, had died, and in that time, Nora had begun to see her sister blossom and grow as she found herself and a life of her own. She was now dating a great guy named Garrett and wore that happy smile of new love. A part of Nora envied that smile. Once upon a time, she’d smiled like that when she talked about Ben.

  “Want some help?” Bridget asked.

  Nora shook off the thoughts of the past and glanced at the work order, flipping past the wedding cake they were working on to what was next, so she could plan the hours ahead. “Sure. I need to have this out the door by four.”

  The directions on the clipboard gave her pause. A Torta del Cielo cake, something they made often in the shop for a quinceañera, but this time, the customer requested a cake pull. The Victorian tradition used silver charms attached to ribbons that were hidden inside the tiers. Guests would pull on the ribbon and be rewarded with some little trinket.