On Lavender Lane

by JoAnn Ross

“Oh, that sounds fabulous. And if it works, I can serve it in the restaurant.”

  “Speaking of the restaurant, I ran into Lucas on the beach.”

  “Oh?” Her grandmother took a stack of Tupperware containers filled with what looked like lasagna from the refrigerator. “How did that go?”

  “Okay, I guess.” Madeline wasn’t about to tell her grandmother about his ridiculous claim that he was going to marry her. As if she didn’t have anything to say about it. Which she most certainly did. “He mentioned taking a job to restore the old cannery.”

  “Oh, how wonderful!” Sofia clapped her hands. “I’ve been so hoping someone would come along and do something with that old building, but with the recession, I feared we’d have to wait a very long time.”

  “Some stockbroker from Seattle bought it. He’s retiring and looking to turn his woodworking business into a second career, and thought that building would make a good workshop. Then he’ll lease out the rest of it for shops.”

  “That’s a marvelous idea. Why, I know several people right off the top of my head who’d probably be interested.”

  “It might work,” Madeline allowed as she began rinsing the sand off the closed shells of the clams in the sink. “But, you know, I’m a little concerned about Lucas being able to handle such a big job and still have time for your kitchen remodel.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he’ll manage. He is, after all, a former SEAL. I suspect they’re very good at multitasking.”

  “Well, it’s your restaurant,” she allowed, thinking that for someone who’d always dreamed of her own place, she was certainly spending a lot of time helping others create theirs. Not that she begrudged her grandmother this change in lifestyle.

  She glanced over at the stack of containers as she put the clams in salted water in the fridge. “Whose army do you intend to feed with all those?”

  “I’m taking them over to Haven House,” Sofia said. “It’s a shelter for women escaping domestic abuse.”

  Just the idea was so sobering that Madeline decided, on the spot, to stop feeling sorry for herself. It also explained why her grandmother had asked her if Maxime had ever been violent.

  “They don’t have anyone there who can cook?”

  “Apparently not. At least not proper meals. Zelda, who runs the home, says that the only resident who did know how to operate the oven got a job at Take the Cake and moved out, so they’ve pretty much been living on frozen microwave dinners. Which, of course, is a very expensive way to eat.”

  “Not to mention unhealthy,” Madeline said.

  “Which is why I’ve been helping out.” Sofia pointed toward a covered five-gallon bucket. “Those are scraps from the garden. I’m dropping by the farm to pick up some eggs and give them to Ethan for feed.”

  “From garden to chicken and back to the garden,” Madeline murmured.

  “The perfect food recycling,” Sofia said. “Nothing gets wasted because I also use the shells in the compost that goes on those vegetables.”

  “I love it. I’d also like to come meet your farmer.” A thought suddenly occurred to her. “If you promise not to try to fix me up with him.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it, dear.” Sofia’s tone was innocent. Too innocent, Madeline thought suspiciously.

  “I don’t understand how people can reach adulthood without knowing how to cook a few basic dishes,” she complained to her grandmother as they drove the short distance to the shelter.

  “They teach sex education in schools. Why can’t they teach culinary basics, which are equally important?

  “At the very least, everyone—men and women—should know how to properly roast a chicken or make mashed potatoes that don’t come out of a box. And breakfast. Not only is it the most important meal of a day, but if a man’s going to sleep with a woman, it seems the least he can do is make her a decent omelet and brew her a cup of coffee the next morning.”

  “Your grandfather brought me a cup of coffee in bed each morning, made with freshly ground beans.”

  “See? That’s what I’m talking about. What woman wouldn’t love a man who’d do that? Even if they’re willing to live on take-out pizza and fast-food burgers, they need to realize that food is also seduction.”

  She shook her head, getting fired up on a topic very close to her heart. “And, excuse me, but is it asking too much that any meat shot up with hormones and chemicals and treated with ammonia should not be shipped to the market for human consumption?”

  “You’re preaching to the choir, darling.”

  Madeline folded her arms and looked out the window as they drove past the harbor, then up the hill. An idea was forming in her mind. It was as filmy and amorphous as fog skimming in from the ocean, but she decided to share it.

  “How wedded are you to the idea of the restaurant?”

  Her grandmother shot her a curious look. “I’ve been considering it for some time. Since your grandfather passed. I need something more to do with my days, and, to be perfectly honest, I could use the additional money. Taxes on the farm have gone up, while revenue has dipped. Not as badly as many businesses, but too many people view fresh herbs, and especially flowers, as an indulgence.”

  “Flowers, perhaps,” Madeline agreed reluctantly. “But growing your own herbs actually saves money over buying dried, and good seasoning can make less-expensive cuts taste better.”

  “Agreed. But it’s often a difficult message to get across.”

  “Well, it shouldn’t be.” The idea was beginning to establish clarity. “What if you opened a cooking school?”

  “Me?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t have to be the one doing the cooking. Although you certainly could,” she said quickly. Her grandmother, after all, had had a major hand in developing Madeline’s own culinary skills. “You were going to hire a chef. Why not hire someone who can also teach? People will pay for lessons, but we could also teach the women at that shelter—”

  “Haven House.”

  “Haven House,” Madeline said. “After all, the entire idea of a shelter is to get women back on their feet and out into the world, right?”

  “That’s Zelda’s goal. Apparently, she had a ballerina friend who was killed by an abusive husband. Which is why she established the home in the first place.”

  “That’s tragic. But learning to cook is a basic skill, so even if they don’t get a job working in some restaurant, it will give them self-confidence. I mean, it’s just too sad not to be able to feed yourself.”

  “You do have a point,” Sofia mused. “But even if Lucas gives me his best price, which he’s already told me he’d do, the construction isn’t going to be inexpensive. I’m not sure there’s enough people in town to support such a project.”

  “Lavender Hill Farm is well-known because of all the special herbs you and Grandpa have brought in from all over the world,” Madeline argued.

  Damn. Too late, she was wishing she’d taken Maxime up on his offer. Not to fund a restaurant for her, but if she’d taken the money the beer baroness had offered, she could just hand it over to this woman who meant more to her than anyone in the world.

  “I know if the word got out, you’d have people—even chefs—coming in from all over. But here’s another idea. Why not have the students cook for the restaurant? You could keep the costs down because you wouldn’t be paying them. They’d learn basic dishes, you’d build a customer base in town, plus among tourists, and it would be a win-win all around.”

  “It is an interesting idea,” Sofia murmured as she pulled up in front of a Victorian at the top of one of Shelter Bay’s many hills, which often inspired descriptions of the coastal town as a little San Francisco. “Though a bit ambitious.”

  Madeline was not used to hearing any hesitation in Sofia’s voice. Usually her grandmother was the empress of self-confidence. Now, for the first time, she was forced to acknowledge that the woman who’d put her own life, traveling around the globe, on hold to raise her granddaughter, was not
as young nor as vigorous as she’d been when Madeline had left home ten years earlier.

  The unpalatable realization that Sofia wouldn’t always be in her life had just hit when Madeline’s phone rang.

  The caller ID showed a New York area code. But it wasn’t Maxime. Unable to make up her mind whether she was unhappy or glad about that, she answered. “Hi, Pepper. Can you wait just a minute?”

  She turned toward her grandmother. “Would you mind if I take this?”

  “Of course not, dear. I see Ethan’s truck, which means he’s already here. I’ll just go in and have him come out and help me with the food and scraps.”

  Madeline watched her grandmother climb the steps to the house’s front porch. Was she moving slower? Did she actually seem a bit shorter than the last time Madeline had been home? Frailer?

  Putting that concern on a back burner for now, she returned to the phone call. “What’s up?”

  “What’s up?” Her agent didn’t bother to hide her frustration. “I’ve been calling for hours.”

  “Sorry. I hadn’t noticed my phone’s battery had died.”

  “Was that before or after the dog ate your recipes?” Pepper asked dryly. One thing that made her one of the best agents in the business was her excellent bullshit detector.

  “Okay. You caught me. It really did die. But mostly I just needed some time to absorb all that’s happened in the past couple days.”

  “I totally understand. Especially after what I read on Page Six this morning.”

  “What now?” The Post’s celebrity gossip column was the city’s guilty pleasure. Even people who swore they subscribed to the more sedate New York Times couldn’t resist at least checking it out online.

  “You haven’t seen it?”

  Why am I always the last to know? “I wouldn’t have asked if I had. Also, I’m not in New York.”

  “Which brings up another question. Where the hell are you? When I couldn’t get hold of you, I called Maxime’s cell. He said you hadn’t returned to the apartment for your things.”

  “I haven’t returned because I’m back home.”

  “Home? Surely you didn’t go running back to Sunnybrook Harbor?”

  “I didn’t go running anywhere. And it’s not Sunnybrook Harbor; it’s Shelter Bay. Given that it’s west of the Hudson River, I can understand why you might have trouble remembering its name.”

  “Ha. I happen to know that it’s in Oregon.”

  “Wow, and you did that without even having to call a friend.”

  New Yorkers were, by nature, some of the most provincial people Maddy had ever met. Pepper, except for summering at her house in the Hamptons, behaved as if venturing anywhere off the island of Manhattan required a passport.

  “Don’t be snarky, darling. If you remember, I helped write your Cooking Network bio. Getting back to my reason for calling—which, by the way, how are you?”

  “Surviving. Better than that. I’m actually planning the next stage of my life.”

  “Then my timing is once again perfection. I bring news. Business news.”

  “Which I want to hear.” Not really, but Maddy didn’t think Pepper would want to hear that her career wasn’t exactly at the top of her concern list right now. “After you tell me about Page Six.”

  The other woman’s sigh was audible. “Maxime and Katrin were out last night at a fund-raiser.”

  “Good for them.”

  Madeline wasn’t surprised that her husband had already moved on with his life. But if she were Katrin, she wouldn’t exactly be comfortable out in public when most of that public had seen her not only naked, but in the throes of passion with another woman’s husband.

  “She was flashing a ring the size of Alaska. On her left hand. I’m guessing ten carats at the very least.”

  Okay. That was annoying. “I hope she bought it herself.”

  Bad enough she’d been working her tail off to keep Maxime’s damn restaurants afloat. The idea of any of her money having gone to buy his mistress an engagement ring had her risking her molars again.

  “I suspect she’s had it waiting in the wings,” Pepper said. “There are also some rumors floating around that didn’t make it into the paper. Though the writer did hint at the idea that Katrin, not her husband, is the one who arranged for the video to be secretly taped. And that she’s the one who released it.”

  “Why would she do that?” Madeline had no sooner asked the question than she guessed the answer. “Maxime was stalling about leaving me.”

  Not because of any loyalty to his wife. But because of what Sofia had once told her when she’d started dating. Men were less likely to buy the cow if they could get the milk for free. If he’d thought he could get Katrin to put money into his business without having to enter into any type of monogamous personal commitment, so much the better.

  “And she needed to get me out of the picture,” Madeline guessed. “So she could move in for the kill.”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “They deserve each other.” Once again Madeline was more annoyed at how naive she’d been. “He did explain that it wasn’t personal. But she had the deep pockets necessary to fund his empire.”

  “Better her than you.” Pepper had always been outspoken about where the majority of Madeline’s earnings had ended up. “I received a call from ChefSteel yesterday.”

  “They want to drop the endorsement deal.” She’d been worried about that. In the beginning. Now, with her entire life in flux, she was almost relieved.

  “Didn’t anyone tell you that jumping to conclusions can land you in hot water? No. Just the opposite. They’re so happy with how the sales have jumped in the past month, they want to renegotiate the contract. To give you your own line.” She paused dramatically. “How does the Madeline Durand Professional Chef Collection sound?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s not to know? Did you not hear me? They want to renegotiate. That means more money, Madeline. Especially since we’ll hold out for a much larger percentage of sales this time.”

  “The money would be nice.” Especially since she could use some of it to help her grandmother with her new business venture. “But—”

  “I know. You don’t want to use the bastard’s last name. I can totally understand that reasoning. Which is why I suggested they just go with the Madeline Collection. In many ways, what Maxime did is going to help with your brand. We can start shifting you to a single name. Like Madonna. Beyoncé. Oprah.”

  “Lassie,” Madeline added to the list.

  “Why do I get the feeling you’re not doing cartwheels?”

  “Because I’m not as limber as I was when I was eight years old. Plus, I’m not sure I want to do it.”

  “What?” It was not often Pepper was caught by surprise. This was obviously one of those times. “Why on earth not?”

  “Because I woke up this morning thinking that life’s become a treadmill. I’m totally in the weeds right now, Pepper.” And had been for longer than she’d realized. “In fact, I was going to call and ask you what you thought it would cost me to get out of that original contract.”

  “Bite your tongue!” Now she was not only surprised, but poleaxed, as Sofia would say.

  Even as Madeline braced herself for a long, forceful, and undoubtedly practical, business-minded argument about why she needed to get back to New York City now, Pepper pulled out a surprise of her own.

  “We need to talk. I’m coming out there.”

  It was Madeline’s turn to be stunned. “Here? To Shelter Bay?”

  “Well, apparently, if I showed up in Sunnybrook Harbor, you wouldn’t be there. So, I suppose I’ll be flying to Shelter Bay.” There was another brief pause. “Your little village does have an airport, right?”

  “Actually, there is a regional airport about twenty-five miles away. But you’d have to change planes in Portland.”

  “Oh, I won’t fly in those little puddle jumpers. They’re like sardine c
ans with wings. And they don’t even have a first-class section.”

  “Horrors. But it’s only a forty-minute flight from Portland. And they do serve cupcakes and muffins.” Sofia had told her that Sedona, who ran the Take the Cake bakery, had recently signed a contract to supply the small, regional airline. “Though, granted, then you’d have to drive up the coast from there.”

  “In a Conestoga wagon, no doubt.”

  Madeline laughed. “If you’re determined to come—”

  “Not if you’d just come back to the city. Where you belong.”

  “I can’t do that right now.” Madeline wasn’t sure where she belonged. Which was what this trip home was all about.

  “Fine. Then I’m coming.”

  “You’ve always loved negotiating.”

  “That’s like saying, ‘I enjoy breathing.’ ”

  “Great. So, here’s a counteroffer for you from me. Get back to ChefSteel and buy me a month to let all this stuff sink in. Then we’ll talk.”

  “A week.”

  “Two. And that’s my final offer.”

  “You drive a hard bargain.”

  “I had a good teacher.”

  “All right. Two weeks. Then either you’re coming back to New York, where you belong, or I’m coming out there to drag you back.” She let out a long breath. “That works, since I have meetings for the next few days I can’t get out of. And speaking of negotiations, I’m in ongoing talks regarding a mouthwateringly handsome astronaut client, who, if things work out, will be the next Bachelor handing out a red rose to some lucky girl on national TV.”

  There was another signature pause. “I could introduce you.”

  “Thanks. But I think I’ll pass.”

  Having already lost her husband to another woman, Madeline wasn’t the least bit interested in meeting a man who was actually going to go on live TV to find his soul mate. As if that was going to happen. Worse yet, he was going to possibly break the hearts of other women while America tuned in week after week. Was nothing private anymore?

  “It’s probably just as well. If he does get on the show, he’d have to keep you a secret, and that’s no way to begin a relationship.…You know, the more I think about it, the more appealing I find the idea of my coming to you. Where better to talk than some quaint, seaside town with surfers as eye candy?”