The Italian wave of immigration that brought many Italian families to New Orleans in the late 1880s is based in fact, including the descriptions of the two primary Mafia crime families seeking dominance and the death of the police chief that spurred a new wave of violence. I simply placed Jillian’s fictitious Parisi ancestors in the midst of the socioeconomic patterns known to be true of the time. While occasional groups of Italian immigrants came to Denver in the very early twentieth century, for the most part the Italian Mafia’s stronghold in Denver came much later than the timing of my historical story. Thus I have used the arrival of a fictitious Parisi in Denver as a way to escape true events going on in New Orleans and created the playful intersection of Jillian’s ancestry with the very mysterious person she is trying to discover.
I know there’s a lot of food in this story! Maybe in the next story, Nolan will be too busy to cook. (But I sort of hope not.) Communal meals nourish the body, but they also gather us around tables and memories and remind us that we are better together than on our own. Feel free to gather friends and family with food of your own and share the Duffy blessing.
May you always find nourishment for your body at the table.
May sustenance for your spirit rise and fill you with each dawn.
And may life always feed you with the light of joy along the way.
Olivia Newport
2020
COMING NOVEMBER 2020
WHAT YOU SAID TO ME
Book 4
Enjoy the following preview chapter.
CHAPTER ONE
While slightly on the monochromatic end of the culinary spectrum, the dish would pass for edible—more than edible in most family kitchens that wouldn’t have Jillian Parisi-Duffy’s father due to come through the door before it came out of the oven. Every food he prepared was better than everything she made, but she tried to hold up her end of the household balance of chores. Nolan had been coming home late more and more evenings recently with a bulging briefcase, reminiscent of her childhood when it was her mother who fed the family and her father either missed the evening meal or ate hastily so he could work again in his home office.
That was before Nolan discovered his inner chef self because circumstances thrust upon him the responsibility to feed a motherless child.
Jillian was fairly certain she had no inner chef self waiting for discovery. She just plodded along following recipes the way most people did.
This one had been successful enough to repeat every now and then. The casserole dish held cubed chicken with peas, carrots, celery, and onions covered in a roux. Jillian stabbed at a lump in the sauce with a fork and sighed, wondering how many other clots had gotten past her effort this time. In a mixing bowl, she had dough ready to drop biscuits over the top. A cheater’s chicken pot pie, she called it. No real crust, which she would have failed at miserably, but plenty of hearty satisfaction, reasonable nutrition, and leftovers for easy lunches.
Jillian had a year and a few days before her thirtieth birthday. Maybe if she didn’t share a home with a widowed father who had become such an enthusiast in the kitchen, she would be more impressive herself by now.
Doubtful. She was one of those people who enjoyed eating interesting meals but found less pleasure in creating them.
She turned on the oven to preheat and dropped rounds of biscuits at carefully calculated intervals. The refrigerator held arugula, avocado, and plum tomatoes for a salad she could throw together at the last minute.
While she waited for her dad, Jillian cleaned up after herself, rinsing the pans and utensils she’d used before loading the dishwasher and wiping down the gray-speckled granite counter and breakfast bar. By then the oven was just about ready. Nolan’s pickup rumbled into the driveway, and a couple of minutes later he ambled through the back door.
“You cooked?” Nolan dropped his keys in the copper bowl on the counter.
“I sent a text telling you I would.”
He plopped his briefcase on the breakfast bar and dug for his phone in a pocket. “I see that now. Sorry. It’s been a hairy day.”
“The mediation isn’t going well?”
“I can’t seem to get the parties in the same library, much less reading the same book or on the same page.”
“You’ll do it, Dad. I know you can.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Jilly. And for dinner.” He inspected her offering. “I don’t see enough little black flecks.”
Jillian rolled her eyes. “Pepper is your department. Just don’t overdo it, all right?”
“I don’t conceive that as a possibility in the existing universe.”
“Your taste buds live on steroids.” Jillian tossed her sponge in the sink. “Do you want to make the dressing for the arugula?”
“Happy to.” Nolan sprinkled pepper on the main dish and put it in the oven. “I arranged some help for you today.”
Jillian cocked her head. “I wasn’t aware I needed any help.”
Nolan spun her around by the shoulders and marched her into the dining room. “Has it occurred to you that we have been unable to dine in this room for quite some time? That in fact it is becoming increasingly difficult even to traverse safely through on the way to the living room?”
“You can always go by way of the hall. I have it under control, Dad.”
“I beg to differ.”
Jillian scowled. Usually she kept her work contained to her office, which was right off the kitchen on the ground floor. Overflow files might temporarily occupy the two side chairs across from her desk, but not often for long. Many of her genealogical research projects required no physical files at all.
The St. Louis project was different. It involved hundreds of physical papers from the client dating back long before the internet was in everyone’s house. It would take time to sort through what she had to work with and find credible starting points for all the genealogical trails the work involved. Files from decades ago rambled over the dining table and on half the chairs. Several stacks on the floor converged in a trail leading into the living room. But she knew generally what everything was and what she intended to do with it. Eventually.
“I have a system,” she said. “I know how to do my job. This contract is just larger than most.”
“Monstrously,” Nolan said. “I know you plan to subcontract some of it out to other genealogists once you get a better grasp of what all is here, but don’t you think you could use a teeny bit of administrative help on the front end?”
“Maybe.” She wasn’t persuaded. “I don’t even know how I’d figure out what to pay someone. I’m still getting my head around the project.”
“The beauty of my plan,” Nolan said, “is you don’t have to pay a penny.”
“Oh no.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means—Dad!”
“Aren’t you getting a little old to use that suspicious tone?”
Jillian cleared her throat. “Would you like to explain?”
The doorbell rang.
“No time.” Nolan headed for the front door. “She’s here.”
“Who’s here?”
“Just give her a chance.”
“Dad!”
He wagged a finger at her.
Nolan opened the door on one side of the spacious Victorian home that served as its main entrance. Jillian hung back, but she could see the figure on the porch.
A waif of a teenage girl, with bright pink hair, ripped cut-off shorts, and twigs for legs met Nolan’s exuberant greeting with the deadpan expression of a comedic straight man.
This was help?
Surely she had a crate at her feet and was about to launch into a canned speech about how buying candy or magazine subscriptions would help underprivileged youth such as herself go to camp to develop leadership skills. Someone else would come to the door in response to Nolan’s arrangement.
Instead, Nolan opened the door and welcomed the girl in.
No crate of i
tems to sell.
“Jillian, this is Tisha Crowder.”
“Hello.” Jillian knew who she was—at least by sight—and who her mother was. Jenna Crowder was three years ahead of Jillian in school. Everyone knew her. She’d always been popular. Then the rumors started flying that she was pregnant even though she’d never had a steady boyfriend in Canyon Mines—that anyone knew about—and she was tight-lipped about who the baby’s father was. But Jillian was a freshman and Jenna a senior, or would have been, when the baby was born. She’d dropped out. The rumors shifted to saying that she never told a single person who the child’s father was. Not her mother. Not her best friend. Not her doctor. No one. Jillian didn’t care. By the time Jenna had her baby, Jillian was mourning her mother. Speculating about another student she barely knew was the last thing on her mind.
Jenna kept the baby and continued living with her mother and grandmother. Over the years, the three women rotated through working in one Main Street shop or another, so their faces were familiar to everyone. Jillian always tried to ignore the gossip about why there were never any men in that family. Tisha’s hair had been blue and then green before this summer’s pink. Once it had even been half and half. Then there was the year she’d cut the hair on two sides of her head two different lengths.
It would be hard not to notice Tisha Crowder.
Jillian eyed Nolan. It was true her father could strike up a conversation with every stranger he met, but even for him it seemed a stretch to propose Tisha as an answer to Jillian’s need for help.
Help she did not actually need and hadn’t asked for and didn’t want.
“Tisha is in a bit of a pickle,” Nolan said. “She needs to do some volunteer hours between now and when school starts again in a few weeks.”
“Oh?” Jillian looked from her father to the girl. “A school project of some sort?”
“No.” Tisha blew a bubble with her gum and popped it, staring at Jillian all the while. It was as if she was reading off a script about how to fail a job interview.
Look like a punk. Check.
Wear inappropriate clothes. Check.
Seem uninterested. Check.
Display annoying habits. Check.
“Not school,” Nolan said. “A legal matter.”
Jillian returned her gaze to Nolan, feeling her eyebrows lift involuntarily.
“Why don’t we sit down?” Nolan cleared a stack of yellow file folders from the purple chair where Jillian liked to sit. While she settled in, he sat beside Tisha on the navy sofa.
“Tisha pleaded guilty to shoplifting at a downtown Denver department store,” Nolan said.
Tisha shrugged and muttered, “They had me on camera.”
Undeterred, Nolan proceeded. “It was her first time in court, and the value of the item was low enough that she qualified for alternative sentencing. No one is interested in ruining a young person’s life over one overpriced silk scarf.”
Jillian tried to picture a silk scarf from a department store around the neck of Tisha Crowder. The mental image lacked coherence. Wouldn’t a designer shirt or even a handbag make more sense? Or electronics?
“Her lawyer was someone whose services her mother once used, a long time ago.”
“I see.”
“I know him from family court connections. It’s pro bono all around. When he saw Tisha had a legal address in Canyon Mines,” Nolan said, “he reached out to me to see if I would be willing to supervise something.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t follow,” Jillian said. “Supervise?”
“Tisha needs some sort of structured community service or volunteer work experience over the summer to meet the terms of her alternative sentencing. Doing it in Denver isn’t practical. We’re already past the fourth of July. Half the summer is gone. The rest will go fast. If she completes her hours successfully and stays out of more serious trouble for the next twelve months, the incident will go off her record. Happily I knew somebody who could use an extra pair of eyes and hands for a few weeks.”
Oh Dad oh Dad oh Dad. You’ve got to be kidding.
“Tisha,” Jillian said, “do you have any work experience?”
“Nah.” She smacked her gum and crossed her bare legs, letting a yellow flip-flop dangle from one big toe.
“Tisha just turned fifteen,” Nolan said, “so she would have needed a work permit. But I had quite a lengthy conversation with her case worker, and she is confident of Tisha’s abilities.”
And what abilities are those?
In response to a buzz, Tisha pulled an iPhone several models newer than Jillian’s from her back pocket and began texting. Where did she get the money for that? Or had she bypassed cash in the manner in which she acquired it?
Monosyllabic responses. Check.
No prior experience. Check.
Text during interview. Check.
“What kinds of things are you interested in?” Jillian asked. “Do you like history?”
“History?” Tisha didn’t look up from her phone. “Not really.”
“Do you have computer skills?”
“Duh. Internet native generation.”
Jillian glared at Nolan. Tisha didn’t look up.
“Are you good at sorting information into files?”
“Don’t know. Never tried.”
“Tisha needs about fifteen hours a week for the rest of the summer,” Nolan said. “That sounds right, doesn’t it, Tisha?”
“I guess.” Tisha finally shoved her phone back in her pocket.
“We can make up some kind of a time sheet. It doesn’t have to be the same three hours a day, as long as it comes out to fifteen every week. And this week we need to make up for missing today.”
“So you’re thinking we’d start tomorrow? Tuesday?” Jillian said.
“Can you think why not?”
“Kris might need some extra help down at the ice cream shop. She hires teenagers,” Jillian said. “And summer housekeeping is always busy for Nia at the Inn. She takes on extra people for the season. We could check around for something we’re sure is the best fit for Tisha’s skills.”
“Every plan should always be open to adjustments, of course,” Nolan said, “but I’d like to see us give this a chance before we reevaluate. You could really use some help in an immediate way.”
He pointed toward the dining room, and Jillian’s gaze followed his finger.
So you brought me a juvenile delinquent who clearly doesn’t want to be here?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Olivia Newport’s novels blend the truths of where we find ourselves now with insights into what carried us in the past. Enjoying life with her husband and nearby grown children, she chases joy in stunning Colorado at the foot of Pikes Peak.
When I Meet You Page 27