Last Bite: A Novel of Culinary Romance

by Nancy Verde Barr

  “That’s harsh.”

  “No. It’s true.”

  “There’s someone else, isn’t there?”

  “No. There isn’t.”

  “Well, then you’re still angry, and you have a right to be.”

  “Richard, if I were angry, I’d be swearing at you in Italian.”

  He was quiet for a moment and must have realized that what I’d said was true. “Is there anything I can do to change your mind?” he asked.

  “Not about us, but I could use an appointment to get my teeth cleaned.” Sometimes you have to be practical. Good dentists are hard to find.

  FRIDAY MORNING WE HAD no live spot and we prepped for Monday’s Baked Alaska. Mondays are always a tough day for live spots because none of us are there on Sunday. We baked the cakes, laid out the trays, molded and froze ice cream, and I mentally prepared myself for the deep-freeze treatment I expected from Danny.

  Chapter 24

  Maybe I didn’t treat you quite as good as I should have.

  —Willie Nelson

  I couldn’t remember ever going into the studio to work with Sally feeling as down as I did on Monday morning. I hadn’t heard one word from Danny and I wondered if he planned to continue the silent treatment all morning. Maybe I hadn’t handled it all that well after all. I hadn’t expected this reaction from him, and I decided that if he was in the kitchen alone when I got there, I would act cheery, as though nothing unusual had gone on.

  Danny was not in the kitchen when I arrived. In fact, he didn’t come in until after everyone else was there. Obviously, he wanted to avoid having to be alone with me. At least he said hello to me—after he’d said hello to Sonya, Sally, Mae, Jonathan, and two Tonys. That “hello” was the extent of our exchange, and then we all went on with our work. Everyone but me seemed to be in great spirits. I made Jonathan look like a one-man comedy show.

  With the eight of us crowded into the tiny kitchen, we were testing the limits of its capacity. We had the door open, since it was just about six o’clock and the show wasn’t on the air yet, but I still felt like we were circus clowns ready to pop out of a Volkswagen or college kids cramming ourselves into a phone booth. I felt claustrophobic, but no one else complained. They were recounting stories about their first experiences with Baked Alaska, and Danny was telling us his.

  “When the government gave me the scholarship, they held a fancy dinner for me and four others who had also been given money for school. It was held in the state dining room of the president’s residence, and I was a bit nervous since I’d never been to such a posh affair. But my mother said just to watch the president and do what she did. So, that’s what I did, and I made it to dessert without embarrassing myself. They served individual Baked Alaskas—flaming, mind you. Halfway through eating it, I realized that President Robinson had a doily on her plate and I didn’t. Mine had been so frozen to the cake that I was eating it as well. Then I had to decide whether to eat the rest of it and make out that I’d never had one, or leave the half-eaten paper on the plate and give myself up for a fool.”

  “What did you do?” asked Mae. “Leave it?”

  “No, I’m a proud son of a whore. I ate it.”

  Sally gave a great hoot. “That’s wonderful,” she said, wiping her eyes.

  They were all trying to decide what they would have done with the half-eaten doily when the director called down for a beauty shot. Sonya said it would be a good idea for Sally and Danny to assemble the Baked Alaska so they could see how it would go on the air. They stood next to each other on one side of Romeo, Mae gave them a bowl of meringue, and Jonathan gave them a doily-lined glass plate with a génoise on it. “Take it from the point after the egg whites are ready,” Sonya said.

  Sally dipped a pastry brush in rum-flavored sugar syrup and spread it on the cake. “This is pig’s blood. I think you’ll find it very tasty.”

  Danny didn’t miss a beat. He turned the bowl of ice cream upside down on the cake and said, “And here are the pureed snouts and tails. What’s pig’s blood without the rest of the pig?”

  When they got to the point of swirling on the meringue, Sally thought they should have a race. Danny was faster and got to the top first. Sally said he’d cheated and she squirted meringue on his nose. Danny laughed and gave her a wicked grin as he went after her with his pastry bag. Sally tried to step back, but she stepped on Mae and had nowhere to go.

  “Food fight, food fight!” yelled Jonathan.

  “Stop. We need that meringue,” Mae said, laughing so hard she dislodged several of her hair clips.

  “Uncle, uncle,” cried Sally, and the minute she opened her mouth Danny squirted meringue in it.

  Sally licked her lips. “That’s quite good,” she said.

  “I think you two need to work on that spot a bit,” Sonya remarked.

  We finished assembling the cake. Considering what it had been through, it looked very impressive. If Sally and Danny carried that same sense of fun on the air—minus the talk of pigs and the meringue fight—they would be equally impressive. It was obvious that Italy had cemented their relationship, which had already begun as a good one. He had been shamelessly flirting with her all morning, and she was flirting right back. My relationship with him, on the other hand, had obviously gone down the toilet. I missed the flirting.

  WHEN OUR PREP WAS finished, and I decided not to do a pastry run and started to sit down at Romeo with my scripts, Sally took my arm and said, “Let’s go to the buffet, Casey.”

  I hadn’t had anything to eat that morning, but when I got there, nothing was appealing, so I just stood there and let Sally fill up her plate.

  “Aren’t you going to have anything to eat, Casey?”

  “No. I’m not really hungry.”

  “Ah.” She nodded. “Hell has frozen over.” Then she looked at me and asked, “Could your loss of appetite have anything to do with the fact that you and Danny are acting like two children fighting over a shovel in a sandbox?”

  “You noticed?”

  “How could I miss it? You have never been very good at hiding your emotions. I don’t know Danny as well, but I know when a person is in a snit.”

  “He was perfectly cheery in there.”

  She looked over the top of her glasses at me. “Do you want to tell me what this is all about?”

  “You know the beginning: we had a fling in Italy. The end is that I didn’t want to get involved here.”

  “I think you left out a lot in the middle. I think you care for him more than you want to admit, but I don’t have time to talk about it now. I have to get up to makeup. Let’s have lunch together after my voice-overs.”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you going to get muffins now?”

  “No. I’m really not hungry.” We started to walk back and I thought about what my father had said about being “lose-your-appetite in love.” If that was what this was, it didn’t feel so good.

  THE MINUTE THE CAMERAS began to roll, they picked up that Sally and Danny were crazy about each other. She put her arm around him and said how pleased she was to be here with her good friend Danny O’Shea. She told the audience that they were going to make a fine old chestnut, Baked Alaska. “First you have to have a soft meringue, at just the perfect stage.” The camera went in for a close-up of the meringue. “We have six egg whites, superfine sugar, and vanilla, with some cream of tartar to keep them stable. Are they ready, Danny?”

  “Not quite,” he said and ran the machine for a few seconds. “There.” He removed the bowl and held it out for Sally to see.

  “Stiff, but not dry,” she said. “But we’d better be sure.” And she rested an egg on the whites and told the audience that it should sink in exactly one inch. “Perfect. Let’s put the Baked Alaska together.”

  Sally brushed the cake with rum-flavored sugar syrup while Danny explained what it was; then Danny turned the ice cream out on top of the cake and Sally pulled off the plastic wrap. They filled their pastry bags and sw
irled on the meringue. Sally beamed at Danny and said that everyone should cook with a friend. “It’s so much more fun.” Danny dusted the cake all over with powdered sugar and then reached under the counter and pulled out a blowtorch. Sally looked at it and said, “Huh,” then pulled out a blowtorch twice the size and grinned at Danny.

  “Yours is kind of small. Can it do the job?”

  “We’ll see,” he said and together they torched the dessert.

  When the show was over the People photographer began to take photos of Danny and Sally and a Baked Alaska that would be a Floating Island if he didn’t work fast. Mae and Sonya stayed to watch the fun and I went back to the kitchen to help the Tonys clean up. I told them cake was on its way as soon as its modeling gig was up.

  TEN MINUTES LATER, Danny came in. I was sweeping the floor. “Hey, Tony and Tony,” he said. “There’s Baked Alaska on the set that needs eating. Grab some before it’s gone.”

  The Tonys looked at me for approval. “Go for it,” I said. As soon as they left, Danny closed the door. He took the broom of out my hands and leaned it against the wall.

  “Okay, Casey. It’s taken some three thousand miles and eight days for my Irish temper to cool down, but now it’s cool and I want to talk to you.”

  My heart was racing, and I hoped and prayed it was something positive. Bad news is never good on an empty stomach.

  “You not only made me mad, Casey. You hurt me.”

  My empty stomach sank to the floor. “Hurt you? How did I hurt you?”

  “You used me for a good time in Italy—a roll in the hay. Then, at the airport, you gobsmacked me. Let me know that I was nothing more than a little diversion.”

  My mouth flew open and I stood up straight. “Wait a minute. You’ve got it all wrong. That’s not what I did at all.”

  “Oh really?” He was frowning at me and the blue of his eyes took on the color of a stormy ocean. “Then maybe you can tell me exactly what it was you did do.”

  I couldn’t say anything for a minute because it struck me that what he said was exactly how it looked. I was the one who came on to him in Italy, after telling him repeatedly in New York that I wasn’t interested. After Florence, I acted as though we were getting it on just fine, and then in Milan I iced him, without an explanation.

  I owed him an explanation, so I told him about seeing the photo of Kim and told him I didn’t think people went around with near-nude photos of casual acquaintances. “I just don’t do well with relationships that aren’t monogamous, Danny. I should have explained that to you at the airport, but I guess I didn’t think it would matter to you.”

  My explanation did nothing in the way of removing the storm from his eyes. “That photo was in my backpack because it came in mail I received the day I left Ireland to go to your party in Florence. I opened all the mail on the plane and put it in my backpack. It’s all still there. Kim was on vacation and sent everyone the same photo. The staff has it tacked it up in the kitchen.”

  “So you’re saying that Kim means nothing to you.”

  “No, I’m not saying that. Kim means a lot to me. She’s been with the restaurant since it opened and she’s a great asset. She keeps all those young male businessmen coming in every day for lunch. But I am not involved with her and never have been.

  “And, just so you’ll know, I don’t play around, Casey. Sure, I flirt, but that’s just part of the blarney. For one thing, I don’t have the time to fool around. I’m at the restaurant twenty-four/seven. And, for another, I’ve always been a one-girl-at-a-time guy. My past serious relationships, all two of them, have been long and monogamous.”

  “I didn’t know” was all I could get out.

  “No. You didn’t. But you never even asked. Even if you had, I don’t think you would have believed me anyway.”

  He was right. I wouldn’t have. Everything he’d said was true. It did look as though I’d used him, and it must have felt like that—but only to someone who cared. And he had shown me a number of ways that he cared. But I had written them off. I felt absolutely horrible and couldn’t think of a thing to say in my defense. So the emotions I was so poor at hiding took charge, and I started to cry.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Don’t do that. That’s hitting below the belt.”

  “I wasn’t using you, Danny. I loved being with you. I wanted to be with you.” And then I took a really bold move and looked directly in his eyes. “I want to be with you.”

  The storm went away and he reached up and wiped the tears from my face. “Apology accepted.” Standing with his back against Romeo, he put his hands behind him, easily hoisting himself up to sit. He quickly stretched his legs out, wrapped them around my waist, and pulled me to him. He held me there with his knees and put his hands on my shoulders. “You know, I think you wanted to believe that I was that meadow vole because you were attracted to me from the first time you met me and couldn’t deal with it.”

  “Well, that’s an arrogant thing to say!” I tried to step back, but he tightened his legs around me.

  “It’s that. But it’s true. Just as I was immediately attracted to you. I knew I wanted you the first time I saw you. Standing there in those wet, disheveled clothes, commenting on my ass.”

  “Hey. That was a very expensive silk Chloé shirt!”

  He ran his hands over what he’d remembered seeing through the wet shirt. “I don’t know what it looks like dry, but wet it’s worth every penny.”

  I looked toward the door. “You are aware that we are in a studio with an awful lot of people who could walk in at any minute.”

  “Sally’s standing guard. I told her not to let anyone in until I’d finished throttling you.”

  “And she agreed to do that?”

  “Yep. She said if you didn’t get the point by the time I finished with you, she’d have a go at you herself.”

  I smiled at that. Sally the yenta. “I guess she thinks I was acting like an idiot as well.”

  “In truth, the vote was unanimous. The Tonys held out for a bit, but as soon as Mae came down on my side, they threw their lot in with the majority. Sally defended you by saying it’s part of your charm.” I leaned into him and he wrapped me in his arms and legs and kissed my neck. “You have no idea, in spite of how angry I was, how much I’ve missed touching you.” Then he stopped kissing me and sniffed. “Umm. Do I smell mimosa?”

  “Mm-hmm,” I said.

  He slid off the counter and kissed me at the bottom of the V on my V-neck T-shirt. “Where else is it?” he asked, coaxing the V away from center.

  “No place I can show you here.”

  “I told you, no one will come in. Besides, isn’t that why you all call this counter ‘Romeo’?”

  “Not exactly,” I laughed and reached up to run my fingers through his hair. “Anyway, I think there are more appropriate places for you to inhale mimosa than the kitchen.”

  “You’re right. My place. Tonight.” He smiled. “Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “And the night after? And the night after that? And . . .”

  I answered him by reaching my arms around his neck and kissing him while “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” played loud and clear in my head.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said. “Okay, we can open the door. But do it slowly. My guess is there are at least six people leaning against it to see if I could do what I said I was coming in to do.”

  “What’s that?

  “Convince you that I want to be a prairie vole.”

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2006 by Nancy Verde Barr.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are bas
ed on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for a previous edition of this work.

  E-book ISBN 978-1-61620-283-5

  ALSO BY NANCY VERDE BARR

  We Called It Macaroni: An American Heritage

  of Southern Italian Cooking

  Make It Italian: The Taste and Technique

  of Italian Home Cooking

  In Julia’s Kitchen with Master Chefs

  (with Julia Child)