by Donna Ball
Everything got very still. Paul closed his eyes slowly, unwilling to look, afraid to move.
One of the children said, “Ew, gross.”
Paul swallowed hard, opened his eyes, and turned slowly to face the stunned faces of his accusers. “Um, Bobby,” he said, “I’ll have to call you back.”
~*~
At Ladybug Farm
~*~
“Well, you know Paul,” Bridget said with a sigh, setting a basket of fresh-baked blueberry muffins on the table. “He was horrified. Distraught. Beside himself. He offered to buy the little girl another frog, but where do you go to buy a frog?”
They liked to have breakfast on the side porch in the summer, and the white wicker table was set with a bright blue and yellow tablecloth and Bridget’s Wedgewood-patterned china. Lindsay came up the steps with a handful of giant blue hydrangea blossoms, and Cici followed Bridget out of the kitchen with the coffee pot. Cici groaned out loud as she poured the coffee.
“Of all the things to happen,” she said.
“And of all the people for it to happen to,” Lindsay added. She took a vase down from a weathered wooden cabinet mounted to the wall and went to fill it from the utility sink around the corner.
“So he tried to give the little girl’s parents twenty dollars but they just thought he was weird,” Bridget went on. “And the librarian asked them—nicely, he said—not to come back.”
“Well,” Cici said, “you do have to sympathize with her point of view. Seriously, I can’t imagine two people less suited to handle a roomful of six-year-olds and their farm animals.”
“It’s just that they take everything so seriously.” Bridget went back into the kitchen and returned in a moment with a bowl of fruit in one hand and the butter dish in the other. “Now they’re worried they won’t even be able to get a library card.”
At this, Cici had to compress her lips against a bubble of laughter. “I’m sorry,” she said at Bridget’s look, “I just got a mental picture of that frog jumping into the lime Kool-Aid.”
Even Bridget’s lips dimpled with that. “I’m sure it wasn’t funny at the time.”
Lindsay set the vase of hydrangea blossoms in the center of the table and sat down, reaching for a muffin. “Well, I suppose it could have been worse.”
Bridget sat down and stirred cream into her coffee. “It was. They didn’t get Bobby Flay for their grand opening after all. It turns out he’s going to be in Italy the whole month of August.” She sighed. “I don’t know who’s more disappointed, them or me. You know they hired me to cater the breakfast the next morning and the very thought that a real chef might be tasting my cooking …”
“You are a real chef!” Lindsay protested.
Cici added, “You have your own restaurant, don’t you?”
Bridget grinned wryly and shook her head. “Thanks, guys, but I don’t think I’m ready to take on an Iron Chef yet, and …” she held up a hand in protest, “before you even suggest it, there’s not enough money in the world to persuade me to cook dinner for that grand opening, even if they did ask me, which they know better than to even try. You know I love them, but can you imagine working for them on an event like this?”
Her two friends shuddered appropriately, and Cici said, “Derrick told me they invited Katie Couric.”
“They knew each other from college, didn’t they?”
“That was a long time ago.”
“And Neil Patrick Harris.”
Lindsay’s eyes lit up, and she paused with a neatly sliced and buttered muffin partway to her mouth. “Oh, I’d love to meet him. I’ve loved him since Doogie Howser.”
“I think he hates it when people say that,” Cici said.
“Wait,” Lindsay said, “we are invited to this thing, aren’t we? I mean, the celebrity part, not the breakfast, no offense, Bridget.”
“We’d better be,” Bridget said, “after all those blueberry baskets we helped them wrap. Of course,” she added, “they were sweet enough to order Ladybug Farm gift baskets for all the rooms—the deluxe edition—which is bound to be fabulous for business. So even if I don’t get to meet Bobby Flay or Doogie Howser, I can’t complain.”
“We’re invited,” Cici assured them. “To cocktails and dinner.” She bit into her muffin and added, “Fabulous muffins, Bridge. We should take the boys some this afternoon.”
“It’s going to take more than muffins to cheer them up, I’m afraid,” she answered.
Lindsay said, “Who are they going to get to cater the dinner now?”
“I have no idea. I’m sure Paul has some more contacts up his sleeve, but it’s awfully short notice.”
“Not to mention,” Lindsay added, “a bit of a logistical challenge for anybody willing to take it on. Remember all the trouble we had getting vendors out here for that wedding we did? We had to get chairs from the funeral home! And we wouldn’t even have thought of that if it hadn’t been for Paul.” She took another bite of her muffin and said, “That’s why I’ve decided to have my wedding catered on site.” She winked at Bridget. “And on my budget, it’s a good thing she’s a friend.”
“Speaking of which,” Bridget said, “how are we coming on picking a date?”
Lindsay shrugged. “No rush. Dominic will be back this weekend. We’ll talk about it then.”
Cici scooped some fruit onto her plate. “Anyway, the boys have got bigger problems than finding a caterer. What are they going to do about their community service now that they’ve been kicked out of the library?”
Bridget put down her fork, her expression unhappy. “It’s not good news.”
The other two looked at her curiously.
“The only place that could take them on such short notice,” she said, “was the animal shelter. They start today.”
~*~
SEVEN
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
Megan had met Nick twenty-two years ago at a wedding. She was the bridesmaid in the ugly cocoa brown organza dress with a yellow sunflower pinned to the sash, and he was the caterer who was making such a ruckus in the kitchen that the guests were starting to give each other alarmed looks. She was the one the mother of the bride grabbed by the arm and ordered, in a desperate whisper, to “For God’s sake, find out what’s going on!” before the bride, who was currently posing for photos and calling for her mother, got wind of the disturbance. Megan had been on the receiving end of the stressed out bride’s disappointment more than once over the past several weeks, and she lost no time in complying.
She could hear the shouting and the crashing long before she reached the kitchen of the reception hall, and she burst through the door just in time to be splattered by a froth of cream and pastry that had been thrown by a fat man in a chocolate-stained white apron at a curly haired blond man who had ducked just as Megan came through the door. Berry sauce dripped from her sleeve and heavy cream frothed the sunflower sash like snow. The man with the curly blond hair straightened slowly, looking at her with a mixture of suspended rage and stunned horror in his churning green eyes. Everything in the kitchen was suddenly quiet. The uniformed servers, the assistants, even the bartenders daring hardly to breathe. He said very quietly, “Are you all right?”
Instead of answering, she replied calmly, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
He walked over to the fat man, who, to his credit, was now looking much more frightened than angry, and jerked the apron right off his neck. He said quite clearly, “Get the hell out of my kitchen.”
While the erstwhile dessert-thrower scrambled away, rubbing the rope burn the straps of the apron had left on his neck, the other man turned back to Megan, running an agitated hand through his curls as he snatched up a napkin. “I’m so sorry about the dress. We’ll pay for it, of course. You’re sure you’re not hurt?”
She took the napkin from him and began to brush ineffectually at the mess on her dress. “Don’t worry about the dress. Thi
s is actually an improvement.” She dipped a finger into the berry sauce, tasted it, and grimaced at the sour taste. “On second thought …”
He grinned at that. “I see you are a woman of discriminating taste. You wouldn’t by chance be a pastry chef, would you?”
She wiped the berry sauce off her fingers and replied, “I’m not a pastry chef, but I hardly ever throw my desserts at people. And I’m pretty sure I can do better than this.”
That was when he, with laughter dancing in those fabulous green eyes of his, took her arm and said, “You’re hired.”
Later he would tell her he had known he was going to marry her the moment she had said, in that oh-so-calm voice of hers, “Is there anything I can do to help?” And later she would tell him she had fallen in love with him because he had thought, even for an instant, that she was pastry chef.
And much, much later, eleven years later to be exact, he would look into her eyes and say sadly, “You’ve changed, Megan. You’re not the girl I married anymore.”
And she would say in a small tired voice, “I never was.”
She was not a pastry chef, nor would she ever be, but she rescued her friend’s wedding dinner with a tiramisu made from store-bought ladyfingers and chocolate ganache, and had lost her heart to a passionate green-eyed Italian who didn’t even blink an eye as he served it to the bride’s table and told them it was a treasured family recipe featuring an imported chocolate liqueur produced only in a small hill town in Tuscany. Since the bride and groom were honeymooning in Tuscany—a fact Megan might have let slip as she was chopping and melting ordinary baker’s chocolate for the ganache—they declared Nick a genius and tipped him half again the cost of the entire dinner.
Megan and Nick had laughed about that for years. They never went to an Italian restaurant without ordering the tiramisu. And it always made them smile.
“Aren’t you going to eat that?” Annabelle asked, eyeing the untouched dessert in front of Megan.
Megan blinked and came back to the present. “Oh,” she said. “No.” She pushed the dish of tiramisu across the table to her grandmother. “I really don’t know why I ordered it. I’m stuffed.”
“I can’t imagine how.” Annabelle picked up her spoon and scooped up some whipped cream. “You barely touched your lasagna.”
“It wasn’t very good.”
“Neither is this.” She wrinkled her nose and put down the spoon. “How did you know?”
Megan managed a small smile. “Canned whipped cream,” she said.
“Ah well, you can’t expect five star dining every night when you’re on the road.”
“Especially when you choose to dine at a place called Pizza and More.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers, my dear.”
Megan looked around for their waitress to request the check. “Well, it wasn’t that bad.”
Her cell phone rang. She checked the caller ID and rejected the call. “It’s Mom,” she explained. “I’ll call her later.”
They were just outside of Nashville, which wasn’t the shortest possible route, but her Grandmother insisted on seeing the Grand Old Opry and Megan had to admit she was looking forward to touring Music City herself. They were already three days behind the schedule Megan had plotted in her head—a schedule that she should have know would turn out to be useless—partly because her grandmother kept finding things she wanted to see, and those things were always off their route, but also because everything with her grandmother took longer than planned. “I’m ninety-seven,” Annabelle kept reminding her. “Nothing about me is as fast as it used to be.” And the truth was, Megan didn’t mind taking it slow. They drove four or five hours a day with long pit stops for lunch or sightseeing or just so that Annabelle could get out and stretch her legs. They checked in to their motel in late afternoon, had a leisurely dinner, and Annabelle would be tucked into her bed with the remote control by seven. Sometimes Megan would walk around the motel grounds or sit by the pool until dark, but most of the time she enjoyed sitting with her grandmother, watching the Food Channel or reading until they both grew sleepy. They were in their own little world, and as long as they were on the road, nothing outside the two of them could intrude. Megan could forget what she had left behind, and what awaited her when she returned home. She still did not know why they were traveling or what, exactly, they were looking for. In a way, it didn’t really matter. But still, every now and then, curiosity poked its head up and she remembered that this great meandering adventure did, in fact have a point—more or less.
“Gram,” she said as she glanced over the check the waitress set before them, “I’ve been meaning to ask. Who took the picture?”
Her grandmother sipped her coffee. “What picture, dear?”
“The picture that started this cross-country trek.” Megan counted out some bills. “That picture.”
Her grandmother reached for her purse, and Megan assured her, as she always did, “My treat.”
And her grandmother replied, as she always did, “At least let me leave the tip.”
“Thank you,” Megan replied with a smile, because it would be pointless arguing with her.
Annabelle pulled out two dollar bills and left them on the table. Megan surreptitiously tucked another three under her plate. “You and your mother were both in the picture,” she explained. “So who was behind the camera?”
Annabelle appeared to consider that as she lifted her coffee mug again. It was one of those generic white ceramic mugs with not even the embellishment of a logo on the front, which meant the restaurant could not afford to squander money. Megan tended to notice things like that.
“Why,” said Annabelle after a moment, “my father, I suppose.”
Megan’s brows came together. “Wait a minute. You said he died before you were born. In the war, right?”
Annabelle’s perfectly powdered and made-up face creased into a mysterious smile. “Well, now, that’s the gentle lie they told back then, isn’t it? The fact is, I don’t think the fellow even went to war, much less died there. All I know for certain is he never bothered to marry my mother.”
Megan sank back against the sticky vinyl booth, astonished. “Well, I’ll be … How do you know that? Why did you keep it such a secret?”
“Oh my, I didn’t keep it a secret. It was kept from me. Until Mother died, and I found this.” She opened a zippered compartment in her purse and pulled out another small, stiff photograph in shades of faded sepia. She passed it to Megan.
The photograph was of a young man in a white shirt kneeling with an arm around a blond-haired little girl. His face was turned toward hers and there was a tenderness in his expression that even the faded, imperfect snapshot could not disguise. The little girl, who Megan recognized as the child Annabelle, had an arm draped around his neck and was grinning broadly into the camera.
“Turn it over,” Annabelle suggested softly.
Megan did so, and read the faded brown handwriting out loud. “Jackson and Annabelle.” She looked back to her grandmother, puzzled.
“My father’s name was Jackson, at least according to my mother. She didn’t talk about him much but I do remember she always smiled when she said his name. She was in love with him all of her life, I think. She never remarried … or I should say, married.” Annabelle smiled. “He looks pretty good for a man who died ten years earlier, doesn’t he?”
“Wow,” Megan murmured, looking at the photo again. “A scandalous secret in the family. What do you know about that?”
“Look closely at the picture,” Annabelle said. “I’m wearing the same dress I was in the other one. I think the two pictures were taken on the same day.”
“Why … it could almost be the same place,” Megan said, squinting to make out the details. “Maybe taken from a different angle? I don’t see the sign, but those mountains in the background definitely look familiar. ”
“And look what we’re sitting on,” prompted Annabelle.
Megan brought the p
hotograph closer, then farther away, trying to make it out. “A bench?”
“Steps,” said Annabelle. “Stone steps. In my dream I’m going up a set of stone steps.”
Megan’s eyes widened. “Oh my goodness. I just got a chill. What else happens in your dream?”
“I’m looking for something,” Annabelle said, “something my daddy gave me. A birthday present, I think. I don’t know what it is, but it’s terribly important that I find it. The details fade as soon as I wake, but it all seems very vivid at the time. I’ve had the dream all my life.”
“Oh my goodness,” Megan said on a breath, “after all these years … Do you think there really was a birthday present? Or could it be, you know, metaphorical?”
Annabelle shrugged. “Goodness, child, your guess is as good as mine. I suppose I’d have to go into therapy to find the real answer, and at my age it seems rather academic. What I do remember is a fight between the two of them, my mother being very upset, and I remember we left very early in the morning, before it was light, and in a great rush. I cried because I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye.” Her expression grew melancholy for a moment. “The happiest summer of my life ended in one of the saddest moments of my childhood memory.”
“Which is why,” said Megan softly, “you’ve been dreaming about it ever since.”
“My mother never spoke about him again,” Annabelle went on, “at least not to me. My theory is that my mother took me to visit with him that summer in hopes, somehow, that he would come back to us. When he made it clear that wasn’t going to happen, she took me away in the middle of the night without saying good-bye, breaking both our hearts. But, that’s just a theory. I do know though that we would receive money from time to time, and it had to be from him. Sometimes it was considerable—enough for a piano, or a new ice box—other times there would be an extra present under the tree, or a roast on Sunday when I knew we could barely afford chicken. And I think this photograph …” she gestured toward it, “may have been the last—perhaps the only—time I saw him.”