Aunt Cathy snorted. “Now, there’s your title right there,” she said, snatching Joan’s rolling pin and pointing it at Rebecca, who didn’t even notice.
“Catherine,” Joan said, but she was smiling while she said it. Tammy Lynn let out a huge bark of laughter that made everyone jump.
“Sorry,” she said through hiccups of giggles. “Continue.”
Bren hopped up onto her stage and pulled the bowl of pecans under the projector. “Okay, we’re just going to add a little—”
Just then the door opened, letting in a whoosh of cold night air that made everyone shrink into themselves. Over the past two days, winter had really begun to set in. No more wearing a button-down and a scarf to ward off the chill. No more running out in just a Windbreaker. It was coat time.
A young, impossibly fit girl wearing spandex and neon tennis shoes—the expensive kind that Bren’s sister-in-law bought by the armload for her kids—rushed in, alongside a man so round he made Humpty Dumpty look like a personal trainer.
“You ready?” the girl said, pulling a pink headband down over her ears. Her cheeks were red, as if she’d been outside for a while. Come to think of it, Bren hadn’t seen any headlights. Had the girl walked here?
“I’m in the middle of a cooking lesson,” Tammy Lynn responded. She turned to Bren with an uneasy smile. “This is my daughter, Janelle. And my husband, Elwood. We just call him El.”
Bren waved, but the girl only glanced at her impatiently. “Mom,” she said through clenched teeth. “We need to go.”
Tammy Lynn seemed to flush. “I’m sorry, I’ve just been a big old jumble of distraction today, haven’t I?” she said. “I’ve just put the crab cups into the oven, Janelle. Can’t it wait ten minutes?”
“No,” the girl said. “I’ve got a spin class to get to. This has waited long enough, if you ask me.”
“Just let your mother cook her things,” El said. He offered Bren a smile, which hoisted his massive cheeks and lit up his entire face. Santa, Bren thought. If he were only white-haired, he could be Santa with cheeks and a belly like that.
“She has cooked enough things, Dad,” the girl said. “And you’ve eaten enough things. You both have. Why you let her take this class in the first place, with us trying to make some progress, is beyond me.”
“Janelle, honey,” Tammy Lynn said, although she didn’t look up from her hands, which were resting in her bowl of pecans. For the first time, she seemed timorous, maybe even a bit meek. Even her brightly made-up face seemed to pale. “You’re embarrassing me.”
Bren flicked a glance around the room. Everyone was trying not to look interested, but she knew they all were. Tammy Lynn was such a lighthearted person, and this felt like a private moment that they couldn’t escape from. “There are only eight minutes left on the cups,” she said, trying to be helpful, while knowing that she wasn’t.
“Come on, we’re embarrassing your mother. We’ll wait outside, Tammy,” the man said. He tugged his daughter’s sleeve, but she didn’t move.
“I’m sorry if I’m embarrassing you,” she said, “but this is important. Much more important than embarrassment. The doctor told both of you if you don’t lose the weight, the next heart attack could be the one that kills you. And that you are just as much of a ticking time bomb, Mother, as Dad is. So I’m sorry if I’m embarrassing you, but Murphy and I are getting married in two months, and I would like my children to have grandparents who are alive.” She looked from Tammy Lynn to El. “Well?”
Tammy Lynn nodded slowly, still not taking her eyes off her hands. But after a moment, she pulled her hands free and untied her apron, slipping it over her head and folding it up.
She let out a breathy, self-conscious laugh. “Janelle is studying to be a personal trainer. She’s been working so hard. It’s a lot of hard work, isn’t it, honey?” She stuffed her apron into her cavern of a purse, not bothering to wait for Janelle’s answer, which was good, because it amounted to not much more than an impatient come on gesture. Tammy Lynn snapped her purse closed and pushed it up onto her shoulder. “Would you be so kind as to make sure my cups don’t burn?” she asked Joan.
“Of course,” Joan answered, her voice low and uncertain.
“There are low-fat alternatives,” Bren blurted, not sure where on earth that came from. She knew it must sound rich to this skinny young thing to have someone Bren’s size talking about low-fat anything. She was clearly high-fat everything, and after witnessing this little scene, was feeling a little painy in the chest area, too. Was her left arm going numb? Or was it supposed to be the right? She never could keep symptoms straight. The very thought scared up an itch on her shoulder. She scratched at it absently. “In fact, I was just telling your mom that I have fat-free cream cheese in the walk-in for just such substitutions.” Her heart quickened. She was lying, right here in front of everyone. But it quickened in a giddy way, especially once she caught Tammy Lynn’s eyes and saw the gratitude in them. Just please, please don’t let Aunt Cathy start talking, she thought.
“Right,” Tammy Lynn said. “We were going to use low-fat cream cheese. And crabmeat is good for you. Lean protein, just like the doctor said.”
“And the rest is just vegetables and seasoning,” Bren supplied. “We even discussed using a cauliflower dough option instead of flour.”
“And you know I love cauliflower,” Tammy Lynn said, rubbing her belly.
“And our other dish is tomatoes,” Teresa said.
“Heart healthy,” Lulu added.
“Pecan?” Joan said, offering the young girl a bowl. “More protein. Looks like you’re going on a run. You could use the energy.” She looked so kindly, so innocent, an old lady who would have nothing but one’s best interests at heart. The type of lady who would invite trick-or-treaters in for fresh-baked cookies, and would meet the garbage collectors at the curb with lemonade on a hot summer’s day.
But the woman could lie like a convict, and at the moment—and not for the first time, either—Bren loved her with every fiber of her being for it.
The girl turned her nose up at the nuts. “I’ve eaten,” she said mildly. “And those are covered with sugar. You do know sugar is the culprit behind our world’s current obesity epidemic, right?” She shifted from foot to foot, and then rolled her eyes. “Fine. Just don’t dawdle when you get done. I don’t want to miss too much of my class. I’ll meet you outside. Not you, Dad. I don’t trust you to be standing around by the doughnut place. Stay in here, where the food is at least . . . healthy.” She said the last word like it was a dirty word, even though she looked to Bren like the type to eat an artichoke leaf and call herself full. You never knew with those girls, though—she could live on a diet of pasta and candy bars, for all Bren knew. She sucked in her gut self-consciously. Or doughnuts and lattes.
“Here, El, you can help me with the crab filling,” Tammy Lynn said, waving her husband into her station as Janelle sulked into the night air. Bren could see her neon shoes, but that was about it. She appeared to be stretching, and then ran off down the sidewalk. Jogging to warm up for her workout, she supposed. Definitely the artichoke type.
It took a minute for things to settle back to normal, as everyone hopped around and rubbed their arms against the cold and Bren tried to re-corral her jumbled thoughts. Something had just happened here, but she couldn’t really define what exactly.
Tammy Lynn retied her apron, while El took a wooden spoon to the crab mixture. He stirred so hard his jowls jiggled, and Bren could have sworn he was humming something while he did it. “The Little Drummer Boy”? Yes, that seemed to be it.
Tammy Lynn’s eyes flicked up to Bren very briefly, her smile full of gratitude, the color back in her cheeks. They’d lied for her. And it was then that Bren was able to pinpoint what had just happened—they had become a unit, this class. Not just a bunch of strangers failing at crab cups; a bunch of strange
rs failing at crab cups together.
Bren let out a big breath. “Okay. So we’ll start with some cayenne. Not much, just enough to give it a little kick. A little heat at the end of the sweet—that’s how I like to think of it.”
“Oh, like Venezuelan chocolate,” Aunt Cathy said. She elbowed Joan in the side. “Like the kind we had in South America, remember?”
“We’ve never been to South America.”
“Yes, we have. Remember, the place where I got that food poisoning from the chicken salad right in the middle of my hot rock massage? Dear Nelly, that was a mess.”
“Oh,” Joan said. “Yes. That wasn’t South America. That was our trip to Louisiana.”
“Same thing.”
“No, it’s not the same thing at all.”
Aunt Cathy planted her hands on her hips. “It’s south. It’s in America. What’s the damn difference?” She spun and pointed to Rebecca. “And don’t you write that down. I’m a Christian woman. I can’t be immortalized saying Satan’s talk.”
“Satan’s talk?” Bren asked. She’d known Aunt Cathy to be a lot of things, but a Christian woman was not one of those. “You curse all the time, Aunt Cathy.”
“Not when there’s a reporter present.”
Bren squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, and when she opened them again, she saw it was already eight o’clock. On track. She had to keep them on track, or they would never get out of there. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw pink running shoes streak past again.
“Back to the nuts,” she said.
“Oh, title of Rebecca’s novel,” Lulu said, and she and Teresa leaned into each other, snickering.
“What’s that she said?” El asked, his arms nearly covered to the elbow with cream cheese. “What novel?”
“Oh, never you mind. You just spoon some of that filling into the cups. Go ahead, Bren. We’re listening.”
Bren nodded. “So you’ve got your cayenne, now let’s add some sweet spices. You’ve got cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cardamom, whatever, it’s up to you.”
“Tammy,” El said.
“Not now, El. Let the woman talk. I’m spicing it up over here.”
“Title of the novel!” Lulu and Teresa yelled together.
“What novel?” El asked.
“El, I’m busy. We’ve got to hurry before Janelle comes back. You know she’ll be mad if we’re not done when she gets here. Put the filling in the cups.”
“But that’s what I was going to say,” he said, pointing into the bowl.
“After you’ve got your spice profile worked out, go ahead and set that aside. We’re going to toss the pecans in egg white and vanilla vodka.”
“Tammy Lynn, where is the—”
“Shh, now, I’m separating eggs. You know my eggs break when I’m nervous.”
“Title!” Lulu and Teresa shouted again. They had to sit down to catch their breath from all the laughter.
“What on earth are they talking about with the novel?”
“Just stuff the cups already, would you, man?” Aunt Cathy shouted, bringing the room to a standstill.
“Well, that’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Elwood finally said, his voice going high and loud, beads of sweat popping out on his balding forehead. “There are no cups to fill!”
“What do you mean, no cups?” Tammy Lynn said, finally looking up from her pecan bowl.
And it was in that moment that Bren smelled the smoke. “Oh my God! The cups!” She rushed toward Tammy Lynn’s station, forgetting about the platform and stumbling off it, landing hard on her knees. “Get them out! Get them out!” she said, reaching up from her position on the floor. She knew she looked pathetic, and that her knee was definitely going to smart later, but she was too busy noticing, with horror, the haze of smoke that was rising above them as the ladies each pulled out their burned crab cups.
At first there was nothing but silence, punctuated by a few quiet coughs from Rebecca’s station. Everyone seemed to be gazing forlornly at their blackened appetizers.
“Oh, so those are the cups,” El said softly.
“Maybe they’re salvageable,” Joan said, and as Bren pulled herself to standing, she could see her mother bravely chipping at the charred sides of one cup, blackened pieces skittering across the counter.
“Sure, once you put the filling in, you won’t even taste it,” Aunt Cathy said, in a surprising display of support. But it was a lie.
Bren leaned over Aunt Cathy’s disastrous cups and made a face. The stench of burned flour filled her nose. “You could put a partridge in a pear tree in that thing and you would still taste it. I’m so sorry, you guys.”
And even though the room echoed with soothing forgiveness—It’s okay and It’s not your fault and We should have been watching them better ourselves—Bren couldn’t help feeling like this was a huge failure that was all her doing. She should have quit when her gut told her to. She shouldn’t ever have come into this place to begin with. This was a whole elaborate message from God that binge-eating doughnuts on a Thursday morning is nothing but a bad idea piled on top of bad ideas.
Although she could have really gone for a Hole Shebang caramelized Vidalia–filled Bismarck at that moment.
She tried not to feel the familiar tingling in her nose that meant tears were close by. She wouldn’t cry. Not over this, not now, not in front of everyone. Later, she would get out her telephone pad and look up dengue fever, think about eating congealed diner gravy, listen to Yoko Ono warble about war being over, and cry her eyes out. She would cry until her tongue felt fat. She would cry until Gary actually noticed.
But right now she was the teacher. The leader. She was supposed to be in control and in charge. She would act like this was just another bump in the road to exceptional and creative holiday cooking. She would lead these ladies to an excellent holiday meal.
“Right,” she said. “This is a good opportunity to see how easily crab cups can be burned. Very quickly, in fact. Now that we’ve seen what not to do, let’s go ahead and dump them out and start over.”
Lulu rubbed her eyes with one hand and waved a dish towel in the air with the other. It was doing no good. Teresa looked utterly perplexed by what had happened. Her crab cups looked like the burning was the least of their problems.
“Maybe we should prop the door open,” Tammy Lynn said, fanning the air in front of her face as Elwood thunked the muffin pan against the side of the trash can, emptying it, the burned mess clinging valiantly to the sides of the pan.
Teresa shook her head. “It’s freezing out there.”
“But the smoke is killing my contacts,” Lulu said.
“Don’t be such a baby,” Teresa said. “You get the truck so smoky I feel like I’m in a hookah den.”
“Truck?” Aunt Cathy asked.
Lulu waved her hand dismissively. “Taco truck.” She turned her attention to Teresa. “And if you could cook, you wouldn’t have anything to complain about with the smoke. But obviously this is doing you no good. Look at these cangrejo cups. Patético.”
“Maybe if we open the door just a crack,” Bren said. She went to the door and reached for it, but just as she got there, it flung open, with that same old woman who invaded the last class standing in the dark on the other side. That same scraggly dog tucked under her arm like a grizzled, growling football.
“What in Sam Hill is going on here?” the old woman asked, thumping her cane on the ground.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Bren muttered. No way was this happening, too. As if the night hadn’t been disastrous enough on its own.
“I was watching my shows up there, minding my own business, even though you’re all so loud I could barely hear the TV over you, and next thing I know, I’m seeing smoke coming up through my floor.”
“I’m sorry,” Bren said. “We had a
mishap.”
“This whole class is a mishap. I never got to talk to that boss of yours, but this is your last warning. Either this class goes or the cops come. And move your cars. I can barely get Chuy to the grass without rubbing your car dirt all over my clothes.”
She turned as if to go, but Bren hurried to step between her and the door. “Please. Ma’am. I know you’re upset, but, really, those are public parking places. There’s nothing you can do to keep people from parking there.”
“I can take my key to the sides of their cars.”
Behind Bren, Tammy Lynn gasped. “You wouldn’t.”
“Don’t think I won’t.”
“Someone ought to take a key to—,” Aunt Cathy started, but Bren held out a hand.
“I’m very sorry this has been so upsetting to you. But, really, it was an accident. We’ll try to keep from burning things in the future. Maybe you should join us. But you simply can’t keep bursting in here on us like this. We have a right to hold this class.”
The old lady held her gaze for an uncomfortably long time, during which Bren held her breath. Outside, she was poised and calm—assertive, even. Inside, she was shaking like a leaf.
Finally, the old lady simply turned and disappeared into the night with her dog, letting the door close behind her. Bren didn’t know exactly what she had been expecting the woman to do, but she knew she hadn’t been expecting that. A feeble fight, maybe. A parting verbal jab. A threat of some kind. Anything but silence.
But Bren could scarcely wrap her mind around what had happened and what to do next when the door was whipped open again. She half expected it to be the woman, coming inside to fling flaming dog poo at her, or maybe to let the pup tinkle on her shoe. But instead, what came in was a blur of pink shoes and black spandex.
“Mom, Dad, we really have to . . . Was there a fire?”
Bren opened her mouth to answer, but it was at that moment that the smoke detector started buzzing, and only seconds later that the sprinklers kicked on, drenching everyone in a shrieking, flour-gooey frenzy.
The Hundred Gifts Page 11