The Lost Recipe for Happiness

by Barbara O'Neal

  Dazzling.

  Between the craggy peaks, a thunderstorm gathered, and she remembered suddenly how violent those late afternoon storms could be. She pressed on the gas, realizing she’d slowed down to drink it all in.

  “Man!” Elena said to Alvin, who was hanging his nose out the window she had rolled down for him, his long fur blowing back from his face in red-gold streams. “Can you believe this place?”

  There were spiderlike cyclists in vivid spandex, and runners with muscular thighs and skinny torsos; backpackers with dreadlocks and ponytails; golfers in pale pastels dotting a green settled against an astonishing view of a big, big mountain carved with ski runs.

  “What am I doing here, Alvin, huh?” she asked. The smell of millions wafted through the fine, thin air on currents of privilege. Houses the size of her high school were tucked away all over the valley, only visible when the sunlight caught their windows and made her turn her head to see what flashed. “I’m so out of my league.”

  Alvin grinned at her, his purple chow tongue dripping. His long fur glistened red and gold in the sunlight, his big black face agreeably blunted and broadened by what his vet theorized was probably Newfoundland. Or Saint Bernard. Or something. When he walked, he pranced, and his tail swept up in a perfect curl.

  “Yeah, of course you’re happy,” she said. “You’ll probably be discovered here and become a big movie star and then you’ll never want to take walks with me again.”

  Place to place, she thought, following the directions Julian had emailed to her. Don’t get too attached to this one. She found a complex of townhouses scattered along a creek, and her apartment was on the end, close to the road. A pair of ancient cottonwoods stood sentry, and a fenced area butted up to the river, providing a safe place for Alvin to get outside.

  Beneath a pot of bright pink petunias, she found an envelope with a key, and let herself in. Alvin raced ahead, relieved to be out of the car at last. Elena dropped the keys on the table, opened the back door for Alvin, and happily walked around.

  It came furnished, with a southwestern mountain flavor—heavy wooden furniture and pottery-patterned fabrics. A few expensive-looking prints of local landscapes and portraits of Native Americans hung on the walls. The kitchen was small but high-end, with granite countertops and two sinks and lots of storage. She pulled open the fridge and was touched to discover it stocked with milk and eggs and cheese, and a couple of bottles of wine. Nice.

  Upstairs was a loft bedroom, tucked beneath the eaves and overlooking the slopes. On the bathroom sink—also granite—was a bowl of beautiful fruit and chocolate, a very expensive bottle of French bath oil, and a heavy linen card with a note scrawled on it in a thin, somehow aristocratic hand:

  Welcome, Elena! I hope you’ll be happy here. Rest tonight and call me tomorrow. Julian.

  Bemused, she raised her head, tapping the note against her hand as she admired the glass bricks making a swirl around the shower, the giant raised tub, the elegance of detailing. Alvin padded into the room, snuffling things along the route. She patted his head. “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

  Toto flopped down on the thick aqua carpet and licked his balls.

  She had planned to head for the restaurant almost immediately, just to take a look around, but a thunderstorm stomped into the valley, violent and flashy. Alvin was not pleased, and Elena curled up with him in the bed, putting her arms around his shivering body. Rain pounded down on the skylights, and the bed was deep and soft, cozy with a thick duvet. She fell asleep.

  When she woke up, the rain was gone, birds singing. She leashed Alvin and headed out to visit the restaurant.

  The newly washed sky was a brilliant, rubbery blue, and leaves on the famed aspen trees glistened with beaded rain. Even in August, there was a bite to the air, and Elena inhaled with pleasure, half dizzy with altitude. She would get used to it again, but in the meantime, it made her feel slightly giddy.

  There were lots of other people about—dogs and runners and tourists. A skinny mother with her healthy brown hair in a ponytail jogged by with a stroller. “Great dog,” she called out as she passed, and Elena smiled in return. Perhaps Aspen would be like Paris, where a dog could provide entrée.

  As if he’d heard the woman, Alvin pranced more prettily, lifting fringed legs like a Clydesdale horse. He stopped periodically to snuffle deliriously at the blog notes left by who-knew-what animals on the bases of trees and lampposts and the springy ground. He’d never lived anywhere but the city. The wild animal scents were making him drunk.

  The restaurant stood on a side street in an older neighborhood, a Victorian-era house that had been refitted as a restaurant in what appeared to be the late seventies, that ever so elegant decade. Ugh!

  Elena paused on the sidewalk to get a feel for it. And suddenly, there was Isobel, a slim teenager with curly hair tumbling down her back and pale constellations of sexy freckles over her golden skin. A tattoo of a sun adorned her left breast. “Huh,” she said, tucking her hands in the pockets of her jeans. “Not very welcoming, is it?”

  “Not very.”

  Alvin leaned hard on Elena’s knee, shivering slightly. She reached down and threaded his floppy ear through her fingers in a soothing gesture. Very softly, he growled.

  There was a lot of work to be done, but there was a lot of potential here, too. Elena nodded to herself, pulling her fingers through the down-soft hair beneath Alvin’s ears. The old sign, reading The Steak and Ale, hung in weathered neglect over the wide wooden porch, where tables and chairs were scattered in clusters. Good. Since Colorado had no indoor smoking, an outdoor smoking area was a boon. She climbed the steps. “Let’s check out the inside.”

  A sign in the window said the restaurant had been closed for remodeling and would be open under new management on November 2. A ripple of nervousness went through her. A little more than two months. Not much time.

  Tying Alvin to a post on the porch where he could watch the passersby, she took the key out of her pocket and fitted it into the front door. It groaned open into a small foyer with a set of stairs leading up immediately.

  “Bad feng shui,” Isobel commented. “All the chi will flow right outside.”

  “Mmm.” It would also be a headache for wait staff, who’d have to navigate the tiny area and compete with guests waiting to be seated. She pulled a notebook out of her pocket and wrote, front door/stairs.

  Moving through the rooms, she eyed the window treatments and art on the walls and the table settings laid out for diners who would never see them. The whole place was faintly bedraggled, dated. Dark. The rooms were too small. In her notebook, she scribbled, upgrade fireplace, paint, Diego Rivera or Oaxaca art. Milagros? Day of the Dead?

  Upstairs was the bar area. A tiny secondary kitchen was tucked toward the back, and everything that was wrong with the rest of the place was magnified here. One positive was a bank of windows high on one wall that let in a lot of natural light. Elena pursed her lips. A good granite countertop and more workspace and it might be a good pastry kitchen.

  Near the freezer were the service stairs. Not great stairs, either—narrow wood, with a landing—but someone had installed high-quality rubber gripping on the treads. She’d seen worse.

  The downstairs kitchen area was, thankfully, much larger, with several workstations, a large walk-in fridge, and a bank of high-end dishwashers. Good. Nothing like falling behind in dishes to throw the rhythm of a night’s service out of whack.

  There were upgrades needed here, too, and she wrote them down—stoves, new rubber matting, fresh paint, if only to give it a feeling of being modernized. The old paint was grimy, a pale industrial green.

  All in all, it wasn’t terrible. Elena hummed under her breath as she opened drawers, checking the inventory of pots and pans, then she headed down a short hall. In the back was what seemed to be a staff room. Elena peeked in, flipped on the light, and jumped a foot when a body sat up on the cot. She gave an involuntary cry.

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sp; “Jesus,” said a grouchy voice.

  The man was as lean as a sword, with springy hair pulled into a ponytail. He swung his feet to the floor and glared at her with very bloodshot, very vivid blue eyes. His long face was overly sensual, the mouth wide and full, the nose aggressive, his chin sporting the grizzling of a black beard.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he growled. Despite the foul words, his voice was stunning—dark and rich. He held a hand up against the light.

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “Sleeping. Or I was.”

  “Maybe your house would be a better place to do that.”

  He glared at her. “Don’t tell me—you’re the princess come to save the restaurant.”

  “Princess? Hardly.” She crossed her arms, leaning against the threshold. “I am the chef Mr. Liswood hired.”

  “Mr. Liswood?” he echoed. “You mean the big dick director?”

  “You must be Ivan,” she said, and thought, Shit.

  “Bingo.”

  He looked at her, challenge in his eyes. She wondered what he expected her to do right now. “Why are you sleeping here, Ivan? Do you have housing issues?”

  He snorted. “‘Housing issues.’ That’s rich. Is that how they teach you to talk out there in the big city?”

  “Don’t be a dick. It’s an honest question.”

  For a moment, he peered at her. Alcohol fumes came off him in waves, and the odor—human male sweat mixed with the specific bite of tequila—made Elena think of Espanola, of the men who would play poker in a garage set aside for the purpose. They all smelled like this the next morning, and if you were smart, you steered clear of them.

  “Everybody has housing issues in Aspen, sweetheart,” he said, and even with all the sarcasm and nastiness, his voice was unruined—the velvety darkness of an orator. He pulled himself to his feet and paused, staring down at her, his shirt in his hands. He made her think of Rasputin with that long face, the intense blue eyes. She swung backward to let him pass, but only just enough.

  He shot a look sideways as he went. “I’m the best cook that’s ever lived,” he said, and sauntered away, his back too thin, a tattoo of vines curling around his spine. A sense of brokenness, something lost, came to her, and she let it waft around in the air between them, the smoky purple of bruises. She smelled lemons. Lemon bars? Lemon meringue? No, not so sweet.

  It would come to her.

  “That would be impossible,” Elena replied, “because that title belongs to me.”

  He turned, his mouth lifting on one side.

  She said, “I’ll see you Friday.”

  It startled him, but he covered with a nod, tossing his shirt over his shoulder as he headed out.

  Elena stayed where she was. Trouble, trouble, trouble. Something cold walked down her spine, and she looked for her ghosts, but none were there, or at least, they did not show themselves. Shaking it off, she took a breath and turned off the light. “I need to cook,” she said in case they were listening. “Let’s go see the grocery stores.”

  And then Isobel was there, wandering in from another room. “I wanted to see where he went from here,” she said. Her teenager hair was as glossy as fingernail polish. “That one is broken, I think. Be careful.”

  Elena nodded.

  “You need to call Mama,” Isobel said, putting a hand on the counter, admiring the space. “Dolores is sick.”

  The usual thread of resistance spun itself around her spine. “I will. Later. Come on. Let’s go check out the stores.”

  Kitchens were often the only safe place in Elena’s world, and when she needed to think or rest or feel centered, she headed right for the stove. This afternoon, she wanted to find out what kind of ingredients she could buy off the shelves here, what would have to be ordered.

  As she headed toward the grocery store she’d found on MapQuest before leaving the apartment, she heard her sister’s nudge again, “Call Mama,” and knew she needed to do it. Mama, who was Maria Elena, was technically Elena’s grandmother. Technically, because her real mother had abandoned her, so Mama took the role.

  Elena’s father, Roberto Alvarez, had gone into the Army during Vietnam. The second son of the family, all proud, poor farmers in New Mexico, descended from the Spanish conquistadores who settled the area in the 1700s, Roberto had been born with wanderlust. When a recruiter showed up at his high school one day, Roberto joined the Army on the spot. He did his basic training in El Paso, where he met Donna DeWalle at a 7-Eleven store. Donna was fifteen, ripe as a peach. Roberto, lonely so far from home, fell in love with her in three seconds flat.

  Donna, fast and busty and blonde, was the daughter of a bartender at a roadhouse that did a brisk business serving soldiers. She, predictably, got pregnant—and this being before legal abortions, they got married at a justice of the peace just before Roberto shipped out and got himself killed six months later. Before he left, he made Donna promise to name his child either after him if it was a boy, or after his mother, Maria Elena, if it was a girl.

  Elena, the little girl born on a windy moonless night, was left a lot to her own devices. Donna was a party girl who left Elena with her own mother, Iris. All three lived in a little apartment nearby the roadhouse where Iris worked, and Elena had her own bedroom overlooking the river. Mexico was there on the other side, looking much the same as America. But it was different. Everyone said so.

  She went to school with migrant workers and played jacks with the children of soldiers and learned that she was very smart. Every year, she was the smartest girl in the class, and there was one reason why—they lived right around the corner from a library.

  Elena’s grandmother Iris loved reading, especially big sagas by the likes of Sidney Sheldon, and historicals and gothics by the thousands—Victoria Holt and Mary Stewart and Norah Lofts. It was her escape. She didn’t drink and she didn’t like people very much and thought television was idiotic, so she would sit on the porch and smoke cigarettes and read novels. To this day, when Elena heard someone cough in that rattly, heavy-smoker way, she had a flash of Iris reading, her breasts spilling over her ribs and down her sides beneath a housedress, a light shining over her shoulder, smoke rising in a blue cloud around her.

  The pair of them went to the library every week to check out books. By the time she was seven, Elena could read chapter books, and she read them by the zillions.

  Nobody cooked in that world, not at home. Breakfast was Cheerios or Life cereal. For lunch on weekends, she had grilled cheese sandwiches and bowls of chili. Supper was whatever the roadhouse was serving as the special of the day—open-faced turkey sandwiches with gravy on squishy slices of white bread; refried bean burritos; tacos fried crisp; beef stew; or posole. Sometimes, the old cook, a man with a grizzling of white on his chin, would let Elena help with something—tearing lettuce, or peeling ears of corn, or putting sliced pickles in a dish for the counter.

  While her grandmother served beer and rum and Cokes, Elena curled up in a warm corner of the kitchen, like Cinderella, and read her books. It was safe and cozy and there was always a friendly adult around to get her a drink of water, or soda if she begged. She felt protected there.

  When Elena was eight, Iris got cancer and died. For a while, Donna tried to do the right thing, but she was mixed up with a man who didn’t want anything to do with children. He wanted to move to Dallas and Donna wasn’t about to miss her chance, so she put Elena in the car and drove to Espanola and the Alvarez family home.

  Donna pretended that she’d just brought Elena to visit, counting on their grief and love of their lost son to get them to let the little girl into their world a little bit, even if she did have the bad luck to be born as white-looking as her mother, all blue eyes and pale hair.

  But Roberto’s mother, Maria Elena, for whom Elena was named, insisted they make her welcome. She was tucked into the couch with blankets and pillows, in a place that smelled strange and felt strange, and she cried, missing her grandmother.
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  In the morning, Donna was gone. Gone like a wisp of smoke. The Alvarezes adjusted, shifting a little to make room—there were already twelve children in that house, including two cousins, what was one more? Elena was right between Isobel and Margaret, technically her aunties, one six months younger, one a year older. They all shared a room with a sister two years older, Dorothy, who hated Elena and never did warm up.

  All she had with her were the clothes she’d worn, a pair of extra underwear, and a Victoria Holt book her grandmother had been reading when she died, The Mistress of Mellyn, which Elena was ashamed to have stolen from the library. She had never lived anywhere but the little apartment near the restaurant.

  That was the beginning of Elena’s betweenness. Between the world of white and Spanish, as they said in those days, not Mexican, which meant something else. Spanish, to differentiate from Indian, which is what some white people wanted to be elsewhere, but not in New Mexico, where Spanish ruled. Spanish the language. Spanish the colors. Spanish the food. Spanish the music and the dances at the VFW. Spanish the customs. Spanish the everything.

  Every night, Elena curled around the book and buried her face in a blanket and cried silently. It was like she had a hole in her heart, or maybe even worse, like there was a hole in her chest where everything she loved had been cut out. She couldn’t breathe with it.

  There were two points of light. One was Isobel, so close to Elena in age that they were nearly twins, their birthdays exactly six months to the day apart. Isobel, the youngest girl, made room for Elena, pushing her socks and underwear to one side in a drawer so Elena could put in her meager belongings, shoving chairs around at the dinner table so Elena could sit beside her.

  Elena was smitten with Isobel and her shiny hair and her curvy mouth and her big teeth, coming in with their little ragged edges. She had a big, loud belly laugh and she liked blue fingernails and she was always getting in trouble for something. They slept in the same bed, were in the same class at school, wore each other’s clothes. At night, when Elena wept in homesickness, Isobel just curled up next to her and smoothed her hair, murmuring Spanish words of comfort: Sleep, little child. You’re safe now. Words Elena didn’t understand at the time.