Three Blonde Mice

by Jane Heller

  “A screenplay, huh?” he said. “You wanna do a movie about a humble little guy like me?”

  “Not about you, no,” said Alex. “My story is about a chef like you. I’d just be using you for research.”

  Ouch. Even my ego would have been bruised. “Well, I’ll see what we can set up,” he said. “I’ll have one of my people get back to you before the week is out.”

  As she thanked him and turned away, Jonathan, who was sitting next to me, remarked, “She’s kind of attractive.”

  “Alex?” I smirked. “And I thought I was the object of your affection this week.”

  I was flirting with Jonathan again, and what about it? Yes, Simon was sitting in the row right behind me, but I was a free woman. My slavish devotion to him was officially over. As a matter of fact, the minute he’d left my cottage last night, I’d gone inside and googled Jonathan. I’d found the website for his law firm and read the “About Jonathan Birnbaum” section along with testimonials from clients. I’d even found a food blog he’d been writing—all of which convinced me that he wasn’t a serial killer and that I should make every effort to get to know him better.

  “You are the object of my affection, Elaine,” he assured me with a twinkle in his eye. “Alex is a distant second. No, make that a very distant second.”

  “Well, in any case, she’s engaged, although I don’t know when she ever sees her fiancé. He sounds like a busy man.”

  “Martha, my last ex-wife, is an ER doc at Good Sam Hospital in West Palm Beach. I never saw her either.”

  “How did you meet her?”

  “I brought my mother to the hospital one night after she called my cell—while I was on a date, naturally—and said she was having a heart attack. It turned out to be the General Tso’s chicken she’d ordered from our local Chinese place. She doesn’t do spicy.”

  “Then why did she order it?”

  “So she had a reason to ruin my evening. Her manipulation backfired when I ended up marrying Martha.”

  “Sounds like she makes a habit of having medical emergencies that aren’t,” I said.

  “If you’re referring to her slip and fall during the foraging lesson, that was a good example. My interest in a woman brings out her less charming side.”

  “But you were only being friendly to me.”

  “I was being more than that, Elaine.” He smiled mischievously. “Is it okay if I keep it up? I don’t want to come on too strong.”

  “Actually, it’s refreshing for a man to be so forthright,” I said, having endured a year of Simon’s vacillating. “By all means, keep it up.”

  10

  I was stuck with Lake for the cheese making. Each group—Jackie got Jonathan, Pat got Ronnie, Alex got Connie and Beatrice, Gabriel got Simon—was given a large pot of the milk that had just flowed from Missy’s teats.

  “The milk you’re working with is the purest of the pure,” said Chef Hill. “Compared to the milk you buy in the supermarket, it’s like the difference between a tomato from the garden and a container of ketchup. I want you to taste a teaspoon of it before we begin—just to sample what our planet, if left unspoiled, has to offer us.” He actually wiped a tear from his left eye. “Look at me, getting all emotional,” he said. “I can’t even talk about our planet anymore without choking up.”

  “Please don’t apologize,” said Lake. “You’re a beautiful person, Chef. You care so passionately.”

  “Yeah, you’re really passionate,” said Connie, not to be outdone in the fawning department. She must have forgiven him for yelling at her yesterday. “I was at that food fair in Seattle when you got emotional about overfishing. ‘Every time an Atlantic halibut gets caught in a gillnet, the planet cries,’ you told us.”

  “Your first cookbook is my bible,” said Lake.

  “Yeah, but I have all his cookbooks,” said Connie, eyeing Lake as if they were bidding against each other at an auction. “And they’re all my bibles.”

  “Ladies, the important point is that I believe we should treat the planet with tenderness,” said Chef Hill after clearing his throat and mopping his tear-stained face with a dishtowel. “My cooking has always reflected that belief, long before others promoted themselves as farm-to-table know-it-alls. It amazes me how many pretenders there are out there. I see all those ridiculous blogs written by people who claim to be experts about food. I don’t take them or their recipes seriously, and neither should you.”

  I glanced over at Jonathan, hoping he wasn’t deflated by the swipe at bloggers, but I could tell by his flared nostrils that he was more than a little annoyed. And who could blame him? Between his mother dissing his interest in being a chef and his cooking teacher dissing his blog, the guy couldn’t get any respect.

  Chef Hill instructed us again to dip a teaspoon into our pot of milk and taste it.

  “Wow, it’s still warm,” I said, thinking of Missy’s teat and wondering if I’d collapse and die (cause of death: non-pasteurization of milk).

  “That’s why it’s called pure,” said Lake. “It’s from a cow, not a carton.” She sighed showily, as if I’d just said the earth was flat. “But don’t worry, Elaine. We’re all here to learn and grow and absorb, so you’ll come to appreciate what the farm-to-table movement is about in time.”

  I laughed. She was unintentionally funny with her foodie nuttiness. “Thanks for your patience while I learn and grow and absorb,” I replied.

  “Now, are we all ready to make our ricotta and have a true cow-to-kitchen experience?” asked Chef Hill. “Let’s do it. Bang bang.”

  Lake and I went about our business. She added the tablespoon of citric acid to the pot, and I tossed in the teaspoon of cheese salt. She stirred, and then I stirred, and we were supposed to keep stirring until the heat reached 185 degrees.

  “This ricotta recipe, as well as the others that we’ll be utilizing today, is included in the Whitley tote bags Rebecca Kissel handed out at your arrival,” the chef reminded us.

  Ah yes, the tote bag I still hadn’t looked through. I made another mental note to hunt it down when I got back to the cottage later. “As soon as the curds and whey separate, take the pot off the heat and let it set for ten minutes,” Chef Hill advised as he stopped by our station and had a peek at our milk.

  “How will we know when the curds and whey separate?” Jackie asked from across the kitchen. “I don’t even know what curds and whey are except from the Little Miss Muffet nursery rhyme.”

  “The curds will show up when you get close to that 185 degrees,” Chef Hill replied. “You’ll begin to see little shiny white lumps, sort of like in cottage cheese.”

  He made it sound as if the milk would get to the desired temperature quickly. No such luck. Cheese making, I discovered, was a slow, tedious, watching-paint-dry process involving stirring and checking the thermometer and stirring and checking the thermometer and waiting for the curds to show up and then waiting some more. But when we did get curds and they did get shiny, it was very exciting. I even called out to Jackie and Pat, “We have curds! Do you have curds?”

  “I have curds,” Simon called back to me. “I’ll show you my curds if you show me yours.”

  “Time to stick a fork in it,” said Chef Hill. “You’ve got cheese.”

  “Oh my God,” I said after my taste. “It’s light and fluffy and sweet—like what you’d buy, only way better.”

  “Of course it’s good. It came right from one of the earth’s creatures,” said Lake, who lowered her face so close to the pot to scoop the ricotta onto her fork that I was tempted to drown her big lollipop head in it.

  Per Chef Hill’s instructions, we poured our cheese into a colander, let the curds drain in a cheesecloth, and transferred the ricotta to a large bowl, setting the stage for the real cooking to begin.

  11

  We used our homemade ricotta in three ways. We stuffed it into zucchini blossoms, lightly fried them, and sprinkled them with fresh thyme leaves and lemon zest. We stuffed it into
the fresh tortellini we made and baked them with a zippy tomato sauce. And we stuffed it into the chickens that were the very creatures we’d said hello to that morning on our way to the dairy barn when they were still alive and pecking—chickens that we roasted over a layer of hay moistened with white wine. (Wine or no wine, the hay still smelled like pot.)

  “Did you have fun cooking with Ronnie?” I asked Pat as the Three Blonde Mice sat at the dining table with the others, enjoying our meal at the end of what was a long day on our feet. While Jackie was polishing off another glass of Pinot Gris, Pat and I were savoring the peach galette over which Lake and I had nearly come to blows. Yes, I was clumsy rolling out the dough for the galette—I had rolled it so aggressively that it had careened right off the countertop onto the floor and we’d had to start over—but she didn’t have to keep flicking me with flour and getting it in my hair. She said she was just kidding around, but being a humorless sort, she didn’t know the first thing about kidding around and the end result was that I looked like some eighteenth-century British monarch in a powdered wig. Gabriel saw what had happened, hurried over, and said to me in a low, confessional tone, “She’s been under a lot of stress lately,” as if that explained her behavior.

  “Ronnie had his fingers in everything,” said Pat. “We didn’t have any ricotta to stuff our chicken with because he ate it all.”

  “Jonathan told me how much he likes you, by the way,” said Jackie.

  “Maybe he just wants to get laid,” I said.

  “Then he should have picked me to like,” she cracked. “Did you tell him you’re taken?”

  “No,” I said, “because I’m not.”

  “Elaine,” Jackie sighed.

  “Simon and I are not a couple.” I watched her pour herself another glass of wine and couldn’t help myself. “Do you really need to drink so much?”

  “It’s not ‘so much.’” She gave me a “Jackie” look, which involved jutting out her chin. “I’m not an alcoholic. I just like to drink. You need to stop being a cop, Elaine.”

  I held up my hands in surrender. “I care about you, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, well care a little less,” she said, and went right back to her wine. “So are you interested in Jonathan or just trying to make Simon jealous enough to propose?”

  “Both,” I admitted.

  She took another sip of wine. “Speaking of proposing, Alex told me her fiancé proposed at the observation deck at the Empire State Building. The view was great, but when they went through all those metal detectors, one of the inspectors made him empty his pockets and out came the ring. Not very romantic.”

  “Or original,” I said. “The dreaded Eric proposed to me in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. He kept getting jostled by the crowd and ended up dropping the ring on the street and not being able to find it. Then a guy in earmuffs and a pointy red party hat picked it up and said he’d give it back for a hundred bucks. Since Eric couldn’t find a cop willing to take on such a trivial matter on the city’s busiest night of the year, he haggled with the guy while I stood there freezing my ass off, and eventually they settled on fifty dollars. He bitched and moaned about having to shell out more money for the already-expensive ring and in between the bitching and moaning he asked me to marry him. He was a jerk for screwing up the proposal and I was a jerk for saying yes to it.”

  “Getting back to you and Jonathan,” said Jackie, “it’s a little weird with Simon here, but you two seem to be hitting it off. You and Jonathan, I mean.”

  “You do,” Pat agreed.

  Just then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I spun around in my chair and there was Jonathan. He smiled at my friends but saved his biggest smile for me. “Do you mind if I have a quick word, Elaine?”

  Jackie winked at me unsubtly, reached for her wineglass, grabbed Pat with her other hand and led them both toward the other end of the table where Simon was sitting. He was making faces at me—the kind of faces a child makes: sticking out his tongue, crossing his eyes, pulling on his ears and wiggling them. Very mature.

  Jonathan planted himself in Jackie’s chair and pulled it closer to mine. He smelled of pastry dough, which made me think of my flour fight with Lake. “Great meal, wasn’t it?” he said.

  “A little too great,” I said, patting my stomach. I was so full I was dying to open the zipper on my jeans.

  “The only negative was that I didn’t get to cook with you again,” he said, draping his arm along the back of my chair in a way that felt proprietary, courtly, as if he were wrapping his arm around my shoulders, around me. He really was good looking, with his intense eyes and aristocratic nose. I liked the way his hair curled around his ears too—short enough to be well-groomed but long enough to announce that he was not just another buttoned-up lawyer.

  “So you don’t mind that Chef Hill has it in for food bloggers?” I asked. “I googled you and you write one—a blog, I mean. It’s impressive, Jonathan. Did you come up with all those recipes yourself?”

  “I did, thanks. Chef Hill is crazy if he thinks food bloggers are going away anytime soon. We may not have trained at Michelin-starred restaurants, but we know what we’re doing and we’re sick of being put down by food snobs like him. One of these days somebody will make him eat his words.” He cleared his throat, shifted in his chair. “Sorry to get so wound up. On a more pleasant note, I could order us a couple of cognacs and we could sit on the terrace, sip the brandy, gaze up at the stars, and listen to the goats bleat.”

  “How do you know what it sounds like when goats bleat?” I teased. “Are there that many of them in Palm Beach?”

  “Are you kidding? We have plenty of goats, but ours are special: They play mahjong.” He laughed his jolly laugh. “The offer of a terrace rendezvous expires in five minutes.”

  “I’d like to,” I said, “but we got up so early to milk the cows, and I’m dead.”

  He looked wounded. “I promise not to keep you out late. I won’t even regale you with stories about my legal work, as riveting as wills, trusts, and estates are. Come on. Say yes.”

  He was such a decent man. I would grow to love him in time. We would have one of those long, happy marriages that begin with friendship and blossom into a sexual relationship aided and enhanced by pharmaceuticals. We would be supremely compatible. I would continue to climb the ladder at Pearson & Strulley, commuting to Palm Beach on weekends, and he would continue to draw a healthy income from his law practice with a possible restaurant venture on the side. We’d never have to lose sleep over money. We would travel often and eat well and invite Beatrice to our home on Sundays and holidays until such time as she was ready to relocate to one of those upscale, beautifully appointed memory care facilities. It would be a wonderful, enriched life full of culture and shared values. Jonathan, for example, would never be late for my birthday dinners nor surprise me with microwaves. “Sure. I’ll meet you for cognac and goat bleating. Give me ten minutes.”

  “Great.” He looked ecstatic, which was flattering. It was nice to know that the prospect of being in my presence could instill such enthusiasm in an attractive man, a man who was so unafraid of committing to a woman that he’d done it twice.

  12

  After a quick trip back to my cottage to apply more insect repellent and throw on a long-sleeved top—the bugs came out in force once the sun went down—I met Jonathan in the area of the farm between the dairy barn and the hen house. There were wrought iron chintz-covered chaise lounges on a large stone patio illuminated with tasteful ground lighting and tall citronella torches. Jonathan was stretched out in one of a pair of side-by-side chaises, two brandy glasses set up on a small table next to him.

  “Have a seat and sit a spell,” he said. “The stars are out, but I haven’t heard a single bleat yet. A cow mooing here and there, but no bleats.”

  “Mooing will do,” I said, getting comfortable in the other chaise. He clinked his glass with mine, and we each took a sip. I tried not to make a face. It tasted like ker
osene, but there was no point in spoiling the moment.

  “What should we talk about?” he said. “I promised not to drone on about my legal work, but feel free to tell me about your work at Pearson & Strulley.”

  “I’d rather hear about you, Jonathan. You mentioned that your second wife was a doctor. What did the first one do?”

  “Ah, Joni with an i.” He sighed in a way that suggested she’d been a handful. “She’s one of the war stories I mentioned. When I met her, she was a real estate agent with the Sotheby’s office in town. She sold me my house, as a matter of fact. After we got married, she stopped showing houses and became passionately interested in polo—or, to be more specific, polo players. I had a miserable sinus infection one winter and left work at about three o’clock to crawl into bed. Unfortunately, it was already occupied: Joni and Marcos, an Argentinian stud from the polo club, were road-testing the mattress. When they saw me standing in the doorway, they grabbed the sheets to cover themselves, just like in the movies, and blurted out, “It’s not what it looks like,” which made me laugh. Why do people say that? It’s always what it looks like. Anyway, I kept my house in the divorce and Joni moved into a condo at the polo club where she’s been running through their roster of players ever since.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t catch my ex and his girlfriend in the act, but being cheated on isn’t fun.”

  “No, but when I look back on both my marriages, I can see that I made poor choices,” said Jonathan. “Martha was consumed with her job and didn’t really want a personal life, and Joni gave up her job so she could have a personal life that didn’t include me. The next time around I wouldn’t mind a wife who’ll make me more than an afterthought.”

  “Sounds like a reasonable qualification.” I liked that Jonathan was so open about his relationships. Prying information out of Simon about anything was hard work. Jonathan was easy, and I was in the mood for easy.