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.
Some mornings, depending on when Holly woke up, her heart so rended that she’d sleep until ten or eleven, her grandmother would be out, walking the path of the bay with Antonio, who waddled beside her like a dog and had not run off in sixteen years. But it was too early for her grandmother’s walks, and so she knocked gently on her grandmother’s door and went in. “Nonna, are you feeling all right?”
Silence.
And when Holly went in, there Camilla lay, the three Po River stones loose beside her on the bed. She had passed away in her sleep. The loss had both shaken Holly and slapped her across the face with the need to get up and take care of her grandmother’s business, to keep her lore and legacy alive. The past weeks, studying the recipes her grandmother had planned for the fall class, trying to remember her grandmother’s words as she’d cooked beside her, had saved Holly from staying in bed with the blankets pulled over her head.
The night before she’d died, her grandmother had sat with her on the rocking chairs on the porch, holding Holly’s hand as they sipped Nonna’s special wine. At her usual sad, wistful expression, her grandmother said, “He’s a fool, Holly, so you’re lucky he’s not your great love. Trust me.”
Holly had nodded. “Is anyone going to like sa cordula?”
“Si, your great love,” she’d said, unwinding the pins in her braided bun and letting the silver braid fall to her narrow shoulder.
Holly wasn’t so sure she believed in great loves anymore. How could you think you’d found it, only to be mistaken a year or two or three, or in some cases twenty-five years later?
Forget about great love and focus on great cooking, she ordered herself now, the final ingredient hovering over the ravioli. When she was little, she used to think the sad memories in the food would make those who ate the food feel sad, but her grandmother had assured her time and again that only the heart’s call went into the food and not the memory or wish itself. It had taken Holly a while to understand what that meant.
The sad memory was taken care of. So now, with the sauce recipe calling for a wish, she couldn’t help it. Her heart spoke first into the pan of seasoned chopped tomatoes, sautéing in garlic-infused olive oil.
Come back to me.
The image of John, Lizzie on his shoulders, his hands raised up to keep her steady, came to mind. “Come back to me. Tell me you were wrong. That it wasn’t love with your administrative assistant. That you know that now. Beg my forgiveness.”
But he’s not your great love, she reminded herself.
According to a dish no one would like. And her grandmother wasn’t always right with her fortunes. Seventy percent of the time. But Holly believed in her grandmother’s abilities. One hundred percent of the time.
He wasn’t her great love. She knew that; she’d known that for months. And her life was this now, she thought, glancing down into the crackling sauce and realizing she’d forgotten to remove the garlic before she’d put in the tomatoes.
The bells jangled over the front door. Holly jumped; for the briefest moment she thought it would be John and Lizzie magically transported via her wish. But it was very likely a customer stopping in to check on the pastas for lunchtime. Or another student wanting her money back for the cooking class. While Holly had been at the farmer’s market, one of her four students had left a message on the Cucinotta’s answering machine. Sorry, can’t take class, after all. Please mail refund to . . . Which thankfully still left four enrollees, since Mia was as much a student as her assistant.
Holly turned down the burner on the sauce, wiped her hands on a kitchen towel, and headed to the front door. It was Liam Geller standing there. His dark wavy hair was still damp in places and he was dressed nicely, in dark gray pants and white button-down shirt, no tie. A gray messenger bag was slung over his torso, a long tube extending out of the top edge. Blueprints, Holly figured.
At the sight of her, he smiled through the glass, and she slid open the bolt.
“I’m sorry to bother you so early,” he said, “but I saw you cooking through the window so I figured it would be all right.”
Holly smiled. “No problem.”
“I’m on my way to work and I wanted to double-check with you—my daughter Mia was here last night, and she said you invited her to be your apprentice?”
His eyes were beautiful. Such a vivid dark blue, like Maine’s blueberries or the darkest stripes of the Carribbean Sea. And so like his daughter’s.
“Yes. I told her I’d love to have her as my apprentice if it’s all right with you. The class is every Monday night for eight weeks, six o’clock to seven thirty.”
“It’s more than all right. It’s great. She could really use a little hobby right now, something besides school and friends and she doesn’t seem to have found her extracurricular interests yet.”
Actually she has, Holly thought. Getting rid of your girlfriend. Poor guy.
“She’ll be a great help,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Well, I’d better get going.” He glanced at the hand-painted wooden sign, CAMILLA’S CUCINOTTA, hanging on the wall above the cash register. “Camilla, is it?”
Holly stared at him. He’d been served by Camilla at least five or so times during the two weeks th
at Holly had been here with her grandmother. How could he not know who Camilla Constantina was? “Camilla was my grandmother. Beautiful, elderly Italian woman with pitch black eyes and silver bun?”
Recognition dawned in those gorgeous eyes. “Oh, yes, she waited on me a few times. Tell her I said the sauce she’d suggested for the macaroni was great; I was going to get the usual, but she talked me into it.”
Are you that self-absorbed? Holly wanted to scream at him. “She passed away two weeks ago.” How could he not know? This was a small island, and he’d moved here months ago, Mia had said. He was in his own world, distracted, unnoticing. Holly could envision him going through the motions, marrying a bobblehead who was superficially kind to his daughter, his daughter who was in emotional pain.
It was interesting how crushes could end just like that.
The bell jangled again. Two attractive women in their late twenties or early thirties, whose expressions reminded Holly of her mother, came in. They were dressed similarly, in slim-fitting jackets and low-slung, dark-washed jeans tucked into riding boots. They both ogled Liam.
“Liam, isn’t it?” the redhead said. “We met at our daughters’ school the other day. You’re new to Blue Crab Island, right?”
“Few months,” he said.
They stared at him, watching his face, his muscles. They both moved a bit closer to him.
“Divorced?” the blonde asked, tapping his ring finger. God, they were intrusive. And obnoxious.
He nodded with a Hugh Grant smile.
“May I help someone?” Holly asked.
“Please, go ahead,” he told them, and they smiled seductively and came closer to the counter Holly stood behind.
The Love Goddess’ Cooking School Page 5