The Love Goddess’ Cooking School

by Melissa Senate

  So. Her father was the two containers of penne and two containers of vodka sauce guy.

  “Why don’t you come in and sit down for a moment,” Holly said, gesturing to the tasting bench just to the right of the doorway. The bungalow’s Tuscan-inspired foyer constituted Camilla’s Cucinotta’s takeout shop. One hundred rectangular square feet, it held a chalkboard menu of the day’s pasta offerings, and one wall was a built-in refrigerated shelf from which customers could choose their pastas and their sauces. A large, open archway separated the entry from the kitchen; Camilla had discovered that folks liked to see her cooking, that it helped business. “Does your dad know where you are?” Holly asked, glancing again at the clock on the wall.

  “My curfew’s not till eight fifteen and I live just down Cove Road,” she said, glancing out the window and pointing her thumb across the street to where Cove Road led to the bay. “When I turn twelve next month, I get to stay out till eight thirty. Not that there’s anything to do on this lame-o island, anyway. When we moved here a few months ago from Portland, I asked my dad if we could go looking for blue crabs, and did you know there are no blue crabs in Maine? The whole island is totally made up. Like the bobblehead.”

  Holly couldn’t help the smile. And she knew all about the history of Blue Crab Island, from her grandmother, who thought the old story was hilarious.

  “Well, since you have fifteen minutes, how about a cup of hot chocolate?” Holly asked. “My name is Holly Maguire, and I recently inherited this house and the cooking school and the pasta shop from my grandmother. She’s the Camilla of Camilla’s Cucinotta.” She pointed at the cameo-esque photo of her grandmother on the brochure.

  “What does cucinotta mean?” the girl asked. “Oh, and my name is Mia. Geller. And I love hot chocolate. But I hate those gross, hard little marshmallows.”

  Holly laughed. “I hate those too. And cucinotta means kitchen in Italian. Little kitchen, really. And it’s very nice to meet you, Mia.” Mia smiled and tucked the brochure in her pocket, and Holly went into the kitchen and within minutes had made two steaming cups of hot chocolate. She sat in the antique rocker across from the bench, the one her grandmother always sat in to discuss the pastas of the day with her customers. Holly wanted to keep the girl in view of the big window, just in case Mia’s father came looking for her.

  Mia sipped the hot chocolate. “Wow, this isn’t from a packet, is it?”

  So. Add that to Holly’s small list of achievements in the kitchen. “My grandmother would turn over.”

  “You know who’d totally use an instant mix with those gross hard minimarshmallows? Jodie, the bobblehead. And get this, her name is really spelled Jodi with just an i, but she added the e because it’s supposedly ‘more interesting,’ which I don’t think it is at all—it’s fake. Why doesn’t my dad see it? Oh, wait, I know why. Because she wears these tiny pink skirts and tight pink shirts. Has she ever heard of feminism?” Mia took a sip of her hot chocolate and leaned her head back against the windowsill, her chestnut-colored hair falling behind her narrow shoulders. “When I ask my dad if he’s going to marry her, he always says he doesn’t know, maybe, that we can’t live on his burned cooking and grungy housekeeping skills and that it would be great for me to have a mother figure who understands almost-twelve-year-old girls. Like Jodie the Fake understands anything but which lipsticks have SPF and match her shoes.”

  Holly was loving this girl more and more by the minute. She took a sip of her hot chocolate. “Can she cook?”

  “She made a great lasagna the other day,” Mia said, her shoulders slumping. “It was so good I had seconds. I would have had another piece, but I noticed my dad smiling at Jodie just because I actually was shoveling her lasagna into my mouth. God, I’m such a traitor to myself. So I have to learn how to cook, especially Italian, my dad’s favorite, so that he won’t need to marry her. Plus, I know that my mom is gonna come back. Maybe even for my birthday. She’s married to some rich guy and lives in L.A. and France like half the year, but I know she’s going to come back—for good—when she gets her fancy life or whatever out of her system. It’s already been two years, and that’s a long time.”

  Over a plate of the chestnut cake, which Mia took one bite of and then ignored, Holly learned that Mia’s father, whose name was Liam Geller, was an architect who specialized in the very unfancy building of dairy and cattle farms with their outbuildings and barns and chicken coops. Apparently, the chicken coop in the backyard of the Gellers’ antique farmhouse in Portland, which had been Liam’s concession to city living, even though they weren’t downtown, was one of the final straws that sent the wife running two years ago. From her backpack, Mia took out a wallet-sized photo of her mother and father in happier days, Mia as a toddler on her dad’s shoulders.

  And there he was. Younger. With a more hopeful look in those dark blue eyes. He was so attractive. There was something in his serious demeanor combined with an absentmindedness that had managed to actually charm Holly out of her misery for the past few weeks. Liam Geller had been in to Camilla’s Cucinotta five or six times over the past month—only once with the girlfriend—and the very sexy sight of him, always in a hurry, barely noticing anything around him, like that during the past two weeks, the penne was a little too toothsome and the sauce either too sweet or not enough—or the woman wearing the yellow and blue Camilla’s Cucinotta apron—had motivated Holly to put on a little makeup herself, a little spritz of something sexy from her grandmother’s perfume collection.

  “Very attractive man, si?” her grandmother had said with her Mona Lisa smile the day Holly had come downstairs one morning wearing a sweep of mascara and a touch of lipstick, her long dark hair in a low ponytail instead of the slapped together atop her head as it had been for the prior two weeks. Holly had smiled for what seemed the first time since arriving. It wasn’t so much the man, but what he represented. Hope. Optimism. That flirtatious, sweet feeling of a crush.

  Twice, the call for wishes in her grandmother’s recipes had turned unexpectedly erotic at the thought of him. He was her secret nameless crush, and because she felt gutted out from the inside, she was grateful for his lack of small talk, his lack of interest in her as even the person selling him his penne. She didn’t want to like him beyond her harmless crush.

  Even more so now that she knew he had a girlfriend—and a daughter. Another man and another child to love and lose? Holly wouldn’t even go there.

  “So can I be your helper?” Mia asked in a rush of words, the blueberry eyes pleading. She gnawed her lip for a moment. “I’ll do anything you need. I’ll even risk stinking of garlic. Even though that will totally turn off Daniel. Well, in American history, because that’s the only class where he sits next to me. Not that he ever talks to me anyway. He doesn’t even know I’m on this earth.”

  “Daniel?” Holly repeated, thinking about the girl’s request. She could use a helper. But a preteen girl wasn’t what she’d had in mind.

  “He’s this boy at school. He’s so cute I can’t even bear to look at him sometimes. You know?”

  “I know,” Holly said, her heart opening. “I know exactly. And I’ll tell you what. I could use a helper, an apprentice. You can take the course for free that way.”

  Mia’s face lit up and she pocketed the twenty-dollar bill. “Oh, my God, thank you!”

  “If every Monday night from six to seven-thirty is too late or interferes with your schoolwork, you can come after school as often as you’d like and do practice runs of the weekly recipes and even help make the daily pastas and sauces if you want. I need all the help I can get.”

  Mia threw her arms around Holly and squeezed. “That’s so perfect. Like you’re my own cooking tutor! The bobblehead is so gonna be history!”

  Holly tried not to laugh. She liked Mia’s exuberance. She could use some of it. “You’ll need to let me know your dad said it was all right, though.”

  “Are you kidding? He’ll be thrilled. I’ll actually be ‘takin
g an interest in something, getting a hobby, something that is just mine.’ Ha. How funny is it that my hobby is actually getting rid of his beauty pageant loser girlfriend?”

  Holly couldn’t help laughing. The girl had verve. Camilla Constantina would not only approve of what Mia was trying to do, she would come up with her own special wish-mix of ingredients to add to the penne in vodka sauce.

  Three

  When Mia left, Holly returned her attention to the risotto al salto. Though she’d already made her wish, she said, “Please don’t burn to a crisp,” into the garlic-scented air, then turned on the burner, low-medium. She stood at the stove, staring at the risotto pancake, which began to slightly crackle, and then leaned over to the counter to reread the instructions. Melt butter in skillet. Check. Spread risotto on bottom of pan, forming a pancake. Check. On low-medium heat, cook until gilded a golden brown, then cover pan with a lip-less lid. Flip pan and lid—risotto should now be on the lid. Return pan to the burner. Slide the risotto from the lid back into the pan and cook other side until gilded.

  All was well until she flipped the pan. This was her fourth attempt at risotto al salto, and the pancake stuck to the top of the lid and couldn’t be pried off.

  “If the dish does not turn out as you expected, you simply try again,” her grandmother had always advised her students. And Holly.

  This was what Holly did like about cooking. The do-over aspect. There were no do-overs in love, in relationships, unless the It’s Not You, It’s Me was willing. But risotto, overcooked pasta, underseasoned sauce—there were not only second chances but hundreds.

  After washing the dishes and pots and pans and utensils, she cleaned up the center island, counters, and stove and swept the floor until it was spotless, then made sure Antonio’s water bowl was full, shut the kitchen lights, and headed up the narrow, steep stairs to the second floor, which held two bedrooms and a huge bathroom with a claw-footed tub. She took a fifteen-minute soak in her grandmother’s soothing lavender bath salts, which did wonders for her tired muscles, then changed into her comfiest pajamas and pulled her wet hair into a ponytail.

  It was only nine thirty, but she was exhausted and wanted to fling herself under the covers, forget about pancakes made out of arborio rice, and perhaps let her mind wander over the hotness of a six-feet-plus guy with blueberry-colored eyes and a slight cleft in his chin. But instead of going to her bed, she was drawn to her grandmother’s room.

  The bedroom was both spare and cozy at the same time, dominated by the queen-sized iron bed, its black headboard adorned by the tiny oil painting of the three Po River stones. The bed was covered by a white down comforter with four plump pillows. A huge mahogany wardrobe with intricate carvings stood in one corner; in another was a wrought iron vanity with a huge round mirror and a chair covered in white velvet. There was a dresser by the window, topped by a glass tray of old-fashioned perfume bottles, the kind with sticks, and surrounded by photos of Holly and her parents. She loved this room. Holly moved over to the vanity and picked up the photograph her grandmother had slid inside the beveled edge, of Holly and her grandmother the day before she died, a photograph her grandmother had taken by holding the camera at arm’s length. Holly treasured it.

  She turned off the lights and switched on the lamp on the bedside table, then got under the covers and picked up the white-satin pouch of stones next to the lamp. She slid the stones onto her palm, closed her eyes, and waited, hoping the stones would tell her something, reveal something. Such as: You will be all right. You will wake up one day and not feel a gnawing emptiness in your heart and stomach. And you will not let your grandmother down. She left you Camilla’s Cucinotta because she believed you could carry on her legacy your way.

  Did she even have a way? That was the question. She’d graduated from Boston University with a degree in English literature and no idea what to do with her life. And so she’d tried a bit of everything. She’d been everything from a private investigator’s assistant, which involved lots of simple background checks via Google, to a dog walker. She’d sold ads in the back of a newspaper. She’d volunteered at a hospital, reading to children awaiting surgical procedures. She’d temped everywhere from a literary agency, sending out form letters that said This isn’t quite right for us, to a real estate agency. And nothing gripped her. Not even the three months she’d thrilled children with the facts of sea life at the children’s museum. She liked being a waitress except when someone, usually a flirting guy, would ask, “So, what are you—a waitress slash what?” And Holly would have to say, “Just a waitress.”

  “What do you love doing?” John had asked, exasperated. He was an investment banker and had had his heart set on money from his first finance course in college.

  Holly had shrugged. She knew she loved Blue Crab Island and her grandmother, yet instead of moving to Maine after college graduation, she’d stayed in Boston for a guy with whom she’d fallen deeply in love. And then another. Until she’d followed John Reardon to California, three thousand miles away. She’d let her relationships take center stage of her heart, mind, and soul. Maybe because she’d never found her niche.

  So what did she love doing? She loved watching cats, even old, lazy ones like Antonio. She loved walking across bridges. She loved sitting in the little alcove in her grandmother’s kitchen, sipping tea and watching Camilla Constantina, a Sophia Loren lookalike who wore dresses every day for every occasion, roll out her fresh pastas, stuff the gnocchi, breathe in the aroma of her sauces with a satisfied expression.

  “So maybe you should go to culinary school,” John had suggested. “I’m sure you picked up the basics by osmosis. You could go to that famous French cooking school, Le Cordon Bleu.”

  That had been one of the first hints that John Reardon wouldn’t be devastated if an ocean separated them.

  I’m not a cook, she thought then and now, the memory of her grandmother clutching her stomach in pain because of seven-year-old Holly forcing its way into her mind. She wished she could get back the way she’d felt that day in the kitchen, when she hadn’t realized she was sprinkling rat poison on her grandmother’s lunch. The wonder and intrigue and possibilities and fun of choosing ingredients. She wanted . . . what? To feel the way she did in her grandmother’s kitchen that day. Completely absorbed in what she was doing. In love with what she was doing. Confident, despite her inability to roll the pasta thin enough without ripping it, something her grandmother never did. And like she belonged, despite everything. She’d never felt that way anywhere else but in Camilla’s Cucinotta. And now that it was hers, she was scared. Despite not having a clue how to cook, how to teach people how to cook, she felt inexplicably safe in this house, in the kitchen.

  Holly gripped the stones tighter in her palm. Tell me I can do this. Just tell me that. But the stones said nothing. She didn’t expect them to, of course, but she wouldn’t mind a sign. A crackle of lightning, perhaps.

  She sighed and put the stones back in the pouch and onto the bedside table. She’d slept in the other bedroom since she’d come a month ago and for the past two weeks since Camilla had passed. The room she’d slept in every summer of her childhood. It was the smaller of the two bedrooms upstairs, but Holly still wasn’t ready to move into her grandmother’s beautiful master bedroom with the ornate bed she had shipped from Milan when she’d first moved to Blue Crab Island. For the past two weeks Holly had kept the door to both rooms open so that Camilla’s spirit would flow through into her bedroom. And because Holly loved looking inside, loved sitting on the bed with its pristine white covers, loved looking at the painting of the Po River stones, at the large painting of the Po River that had soothed her grandmother to sleep every night.

  Holly glanced at the photos on the dresser, of her parents, and one of her mother as a little girl and another as a teenager, and she tried to imagine her mother disliking this magical house, biding her time until she could leave at eighteen. Her mother’s childhood room, which had become Holly’s room,
held nothing of Italy or her heritage; it was full of white Maine cottage furniture and glass bowls of seashells. Holly’s mother found Camilla and her sexy dresses, fortune-telling, and busybody matchmaking an embarrassment and left the “creepy” island the minute she could to settle in a suburb of Boston, where she lived with Holly’s father, who had no appreciation of his exotic mother-in-law or Blue Crab Island. Luciana Maguire couldn’t understand why Holly wanted to spend as much time as possible on the island when she herself had wanted to escape, but Holly’s mother never claimed to understand her. And so Holly spent every school vacation and summer with her grandmother and loved the island and the lore surrounding Camilla. She’d grown up with comforting assurances of what was to come (a constant “You will be fine,” which Holly believed, whereas her own mother, a self-professed realist who didn’t believe in “that nonsense,” was just a big old cynic).

  Growing up, when Holly used to spend an entire month every summer on Blue Crab Island, the locals would ask Holly if she’d inherited her grandmother’s gift of “knowing.” She hadn’t. She could not, as Camilla Constantina could, assess someone and know that her true love wasn’t the man beside her but the next man she’d meet, perhaps at the supermarket. Or that she really shouldn’t wear her new suede boots the next day because it was going to rain by late morning, despite what the forecast said.

  Holly had inherited the Maguire trait of not knowing.

  She recalled her grandmother telling her last year at Thanksgiving that she wasn’t so sure John was the one, that he didn’t seem to be serious about Holly in that place deep inside him. John and Lizzie had been invited for Thanksgiving, but John went to his parents instead with Lizzie and Holly hadn’t been invited. Yet the next day he’d told Holly he loved her, and as she sometimes did, though it made her feel bad, she thought perhaps her grandmother didn’t really know, that it was just old-world wisdom and worry.