“No, you did not park entre las líneas. I saw exactly where you parked the coche.”
“Gah, you always act like you know it all. Tan molesto!”
“Sí, that’s because I do, especially when it comes to driving. You’re terrible.”
“Well, if only you knew as much about cooking as you do about driving, maybe no estaríamos aquí.”
“Welcome!” Bren said, proffering a basket of warm honey-glazed apple oat muffins, her attempt to create an inviting atmosphere that would make her students feel at home and as if they could trust her. “Muffin?” she asked hopefully.
“No, gracias,” one of them said. “We are not hungry.”
“Never mind Lulu,” the other said. She reached for a muffin, but the other one smacked her hand away. “My sister thinks she always speaks for both of us.”
“Teresa,” she scolded. “We are here to learn, not to eat.”
“Oh,” Bren said, trying a breezy laugh. “I’m sure we’ll do a fair amount of both.”
Lulu smiled. “Teresa needs to do the first before she worries about doing the second. Our business relies on it. Gracias, though, for the offer.” She motioned with her head for her sister to follow her. Biting her lip, Teresa reluctantly let her hand fall away from the basket and followed Lulu to the back of the room.
The ladies found spaces at two stations near the back, right behind Aunt Cathy, who was listening raptly to the argument, nodding her head as if she had been speaking and understanding Spanish all her life.
Aunt Cathy barely spoke English well, much less any other language. Especially in an argument.
Bren slunk back to her station at the front of the room, trying to look relaxed and inconspicuous, but unable to ignore the fact that soon everyone’s eyes would literally be on her. She caught a whiff of fresh doughnut and wished she were next door, pulling one out of the grease right at this very moment, biting into Tod’s new prune-berry concoction that he’d been talking about lately.
Oh, but the last thing she needed was another doughnut. She peered down at herself—still trying to be as unassuming as a wallpaper border—and noted that her Mrs. Claus–style apron really looked pretty filled out. In fact, she could be described as jolly in it. And everyone knew jolly was just another way of saying fat.
God, she was a fat cooking teacher. Cliché much?
“I think your sister is right,” she heard her aunt Cathy say to one of the ladies at the station behind her, before rattling off a bunch of nonsense that could, at best, be called Spanglish. Bren tried to ignore it, even when she was ninety-nine percent certain she heard the words “hakuna matata” come out of her aunt’s mouth.
“Am I late?” a booming voice called. Bren turned to see a large woman in a knee-length flower-print dress beaming in the doorway, a giant purse slung over her shoulder. Everything about her, from the voice to the oversized handbag to the dazzling yellows and reds and fuchsias and emeralds in her dress to the white of her teeth, was bold.
A prim-looking young woman slunk in behind her, squirted past without a word, and slithered to the back of the room, silently taking up residence on a stool and whipping out a notebook. Everything about her was brown—brown hair, brown clothes, brown shoes, brown notebook. She didn’t much look like the type to eat muffins—although Bren’s muffins did have the advantage of severe brown-ness.
“No, no, you’re right on time,” Bren said, choosing to concentrate on the woman in the doorway, rushing toward her. “Muffin?”
The woman patted her ample behind and chuckled. “No, thanks. I can probably do with a few less muffins in my life, if you know what I mean,” she said.
“I definitely know what you mean,” Bren said, feeling herself blush. She wondered if she should pat her own behind to show solidarity, or at least to show that she wasn’t talking about this particular woman’s butt. She could hear Kelsey’s gasp in her mind. Mother! How rude! How that child loved to chastise her. It was endearing when she was two, annoying when she was twelve, and now just made Bren doubt herself. As if she needed more reason and opportunity for that.
Rather than take offense, the woman seemed to take this as an invitation for a longer chat. She plopped her bag at the nearest station and placed her hands on her hips. “I told myself, Tammy Lynn, you need a cooking class like you need a hole in the head. I cook too much already, but I can’t help myself.” She cupped her hand around her mouth conspiratorially and leaned forward. “I suppose it’s better than some addictions out there, right?”
“Right,” Bren said, glancing uncomfortably at the clock. It had turned seven. Her palms bloomed sweat. She felt so out of control—how could she ever start class while she felt so out of control?
“I have a cousin who snorts stuff. You know? Not cocaine, either. Like . . . stuff.”
“Stuff,” Bren repeated uncertainly. 7:01.
“His kids’ candy and sugar, crushed chalk, whatever he can find. He ain’t right. You know, up here.” She tapped her temple, and Bren noticed she even wore bold orange fingernail polish.
“No, doesn’t seem so,” Bren said, wondering how she’d gotten into this conversation at all.
“I keep telling him, Charlie, you’re going to rot your brain right out of your head with all that sniffing. But my auntie says he never could keep from shoving things up his nose. She had a pair of tweezers that were just for digging stuff out of there when he was little.”
Bren noticed the prim woman with the notebook sit up straighter, a look of disgust crossing her face. She gave her as apologetic a look as she could muster without being overtly rude.
“The man probably has no nasal passages left. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just one big cavern up in there.” Tammy Lynn waved her hand around in front of her face. “Just boogers and blood and gummy worms everywhere.”
This last sentence came out particularly loud—loud enough to make everyone stop talking. All eyes turned to Tammy Lynn and Bren. Bren felt her forehead flood over. She wanted to tell them that she was not a part of this conversation at all, that it had waylaid her, that she was dull and slow from the doughnut addiction, and that they should all have mercy on her because her own two flesh-and-blood children had betrayed her this holiday season.
In the long moments of silent staring that followed, Bren imagined herself flinging the muffin basket over her shoulder and bolting for the door, possibly moving to a new town. And then she imagined just taking up residence in another one of the class stations, looking expectantly toward the front of the room, and then after a few minutes wondering aloud who the teacher was supposed to be, and if they all shouldn’t just give up and go home since she hadn’t shown.
But then her aunt Cathy started cackling—long, slow, guttural guffaws that sounded a bit like someone had tossed a handful of rusty nails into an old coffee can—and Bren knew she had to do something to save this train wreck, or she would never get out alive. Once a laugh like that came out of Aunt Cathy, it was hard telling what kind of humiliation would follow.
“I should . . . Good evening, everybody,” she said, trying to be Bright and Cheery Bren, which was, admittedly, not a Bren she’d been in a long while now. She thought about Gary, who was probably wrecking “One After 909” right at that moment. It helped. She had something to smile about as long as she wasn’t there to witness that.
She hustled to the front of the room, not even registering whether anyone had responded to her. Her hands were shaking as she set the muffin basket on the floor, so she clasped them together on the cutting board in front of her to still them. She remembered that her cutting board was broadcast onto the big screen behind her, and clasped them together tightly to make them stop. And then worried that her white knuckles would show instead. Mistake, mistake, this was such a mistake.
But she was in it now.
“I’m Bren,” she said, hoping her
voice wasn’t shaking as much as her hands. “Epperson,” she said, then cleared her throat. “Uh, Bren Epperson. This is a holiday dinner course.” She closed her eyes. This was ridiculous. She had to get over it. “We’re, uh . . . we’re going to be trying some new recipes, and uh . . . learning some basic techniques. Like, uh . . . piecrust.”
An image of Kelsey and Kevin flooded her eyelids. The two of them, sitting down to dinner together—some funky, trendy attempt at dinner, something beautiful, no doubt. They placed their napkins in their laps, tucked into their plates of fish and banana leaves, and mocked the droll and backwoods holiday the bumpkin family must be having back in Missouri.
When she opened her eyes, the edges around things were sharper. The sky was crisper, the passersby redder in the face. The scent of the completed pie more intoxicating. Christmas was in the air, and these people, these wide-eyed women staring up at Bren with anticipation, they appreciated it. They cared. She pulled open the oven door, the aroma of butter and berries and cooked flour billowing into her face like a warm kiss.
“Today,” Bren said, picking up her pie and holding it up for everyone to see. This was her big moment. Her opening line. Her chance to do this holiday up right. “We make dessert!”
“Oh no, you don’t,” she heard, the front door banging open one last time, letting in air that was suddenly a lot less magical holiday and a lot more bleak winter day.
Bren turned to find a woman with white hair curled so close to her head that her scalp gleamed under the Kitchen Classroom’s fluorescent lights. She had a dog so old he looked nearly mummified tucked under one arm and a cane gripped in the hand of the other.
Bren blinked, taken aback. Trying to make sense of what she was seeing. Was this a student? With a dog? Was that allowed? She wondered if she should go to the back, try to find Paula. Surely there were health department regulations about such thing. “Excuse me?” she said in her sweetest voice. “Can I help you?”
The old woman, whose left eye got squintier and squintier the longer she stood in the doorway—was the dog’s left eye squinting to match, or was it Bren’s imagination?—took the time to gaze at each woman in the room, in turn. It seemed to take forever.
“I said there will be no dessert,” the old woman finally said. “Not tonight. Not ever.”
CHAPTER NINE
From the smell of things, she had thought her apartment was on fire. And that the blaze was set by one of those potpourri candles that women were always falling all over themselves about. One of the stores farther down the square, something with a stuffy name that involved a whole lot of cursive writing that Virginia couldn’t make out, sold those candles. Virginia and Chuy avoided the sidewalk in front of that shop. The stench stuck in her clothes, and it took at least two washes to get that awful perfumey smell out.
And at this time of year, the place took the happy stench up a notch.
Cranberries, pears, and . . . was that piecrust she smelled?
Virginia scooped up Chuy and rushed down the stairs, only to find that the town was not ablaze, but it was the sidewalk in front of her very own front door. Ablaze, not with an out-of-control potpourri fire, but with light, spilling through the front window of that ridiculous Kitchen Classroom. How she’d hoped something would happen to close it down before it got up and running.
Worse, the smell was coming from within.
And even worse than that, there were cars lined up in front of it, their cooling engines giving off ticks and hisses and hideous engine vapors that intertwined with the rancid sweetness (though if she had to choose one over the other, she would definitely go for the engine oil).
She didn’t even need time to think, although she could still hear her dear old Ernie in her head: Think it through, Ginny, he’d always tell her. You can’t just go charging in like a bull in a china shop.
“The hell I can’t, right, Chuy?” she muttered, and then stumped right through the front door into the haze of berry-scented hell itself. The fiery undershorts of Satan couldn’t have reeked more.
“Today, we make dessert!” a chubby woman on a riser was saying, holding up a pie as if it were a baby being presented to the gods.
“Oh no, you don’t,” Virginia said, not caring one whit that the heads of all the dumb broads lined up in the room had whipped around to gawk at her. Let them gawk, she thought. She even narrowed one eye to give them something to gawk at.
“Excuse me? Can I help you?” the flustered woman asked, setting her stinky pie down.
“I said there will be no dessert . . . ,” Virginia said, and then, not liking the tentative trail in her voice—they could stop gawking at some point, for heaven’s sake!—gathered herself up sturdier and added, “Not tonight. Not ever.” There. That sounded final.
It was then that the herd began looking at one another with confusion, whispering, which brought Virginia’s confidence back up a notch or two. The one on the riser in front actually started sputtering a little.
“I’m sorry,” she said, cocking her head to one side and pasting on a smile that was way too tentative for Virginia Mash not to believe she could crush it in an instant. “This is a holiday cooking class. Are you a student?”
“If she is, she’d better not get dog hair in my pie,” a kooky-looking elderly lady near the back said.
“Shh, now, Cathy,” another lady next to her warned.
Cathy, affronted, placed her palms on her chest. “I’ve got allergies.”
“You do not.”
“Yes, I do. I’m allergic to dogs.”
“Catherine Marie, I have known you all my life and you have never had one single sniffle around dogs,” the lady said, pulling herself up off her stool and leaning in toward Cathy, the elastic waist of her perfectly pressed pale blue slacks peeking out from under her cardigan. “You know I hate it when you start fibbing. You used to have a dog of your own. Don’t think I’ve forgotten about Petey. He had a full coat, too.”
“Mom,” the one up front said through gritted teeth, “not now.”
Virginia Mash watched the scene with astonishment. Here she was, shutting them down, and they were only arguing with one another about dog hair? Chuy growled low in his throat, as if telling her to put a stop to this.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, seeming to gather herself as she came down off the riser and offered her hand to Virginia. “This is our first night, and we just got started, so you’re definitely not too late.” She made a concerned face. “But I’m not sure about your puppy here. It might be against some kind of code. I can get the owner.”
Chuy growled again, and she yanked her hand away, stuffing it instead into the front pocket of her apron.
“I don’t need to see the owner,” Virginia snapped, moving Chuy away from the offending hand, even though the fat cook had already hidden it. “I need to be able to breathe in my apartment. Between those infernal doughnuts and your pie, it stinks to high heaven. And it’s hot. These ovens are making it hot.”
The fat cook shook her head, looking confused. “But we haven’t even turned the ovens on,” she said. “Just this one.”
“I feel my throat closing up,” the woman named Cathy piped up, scratching at the front of her neck. “I’m going into anaphylactic shock.”
“You are not,” the other woman said. “Maybe you’re just talking too much.”
“Oh, that’s rich, Joan. That’s very, very rich. Go ahead and make light of it. And then when the paramedics have to punch a hypodermic into my heart, we will see how much you’re laughing.”
“Dios mío,” a dark-haired woman muttered behind the two old ladies.
The fat cook whipped around. “Aunt Cathy! Not a good time,” she whispered.
“And all the cars! How can anyone concentrate with all that traffic going up and down these streets all the time?” Virginia Mash pounded her cane on the floor, mak
ing several of the women jump.
“It was okay to park there, wasn’t it?” a woman in a flowery dress asked, and general murmurs followed her question.
“Yes, of course it was,” the leader said.
“Good, because I would have frozen if I’d had to walk,” one of the dark-haired women said. “Since this one can’t park to save her life.” She jerked her thumb toward the woman next to her.
“No, no, the flyer said ‘convenient parking,’” the other dark-haired woman said.
Unbelievable! Unacceptable! They were totally missing the point! “It’s not that you can’t park there,” Virginia stormed. “It’s that it’s miserable for those of us who live here. It’s loud, and it stinks.”
“It’s hard to get used to a new apartment,” the fat cook said, reaching out toward her again. What was wrong with this woman that she couldn’t keep herself from pawing at people? As if reading her mind, as he so often did, Chuy barked, a high-pitched string of his most terrifying yaps. The fat cook jumped away. Virginia used the moment to her best advantage. She thumped the floor with her cane again.
“Now, listen here,” she commanded, and everyone stopped and stared with great wide eyes, even the one with the dog allergy, long red fingernail streaks running down the front of her throat. “I have lived upstairs in that apartment for eleven years. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to see it turn into a commercial venture. Eleven long years, all alone. By myself.”
She felt her throat close up at the words. All alone. By myself. Eleven years. Had it really already been that long? She glanced at Chuy for proof. His eyebrows—yes, he had eyebrows, dense, bushy tufts of fur that gave him the look of an old man—had grayed. His whiskers were no longer straight. He was missing teeth and his bark was hoarse and he walked with the slightest limp. Most days Virginia knew exactly how Chuy felt. She imagined them growing old together and dying together, yet she knew that Chuy would die before her. It wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. Losing Chuy would be like losing so much more than just a pet, and the very thought of it filled her with such despair she refused to think about it.
The Hundred Gifts Page 8