And the past few weeks, he was more distant than ever. They always got together on Wednesday nights, so there Holly was, changing Lizzie into her favorite Curious George pajamas after her bath while John avoided Holly. He was on his cell phone (first with his brother, then with his boss), texting a client, emailing a file, looking for Lizze’s favorite Hello Kitty cup. He was everywhere but next to Holly.
She sat on the brown leather sofa in the living room, Lizzie cross-legged next to her as Holly combed her long, damp, honey-colored curls and sang the ABC song. Lizzie knew all
her letters except for
LMNOP,
which she combined into “ellopy.” Usually when Holly gave Lizzie her bath before dinner and brushed out her beautiful hair and sang silly nursery rhymes that made Lizzie giggle or they got to the “ellopy,” John would stand there with
that
expression, the one that always assured Holly he loved her, that he was deeply touched at how close she and his daughter were. That one day, some day, maybe soon, he would ask her to marry him. And that this wish she walked around with, slept with every night and woke up with every morning would come true.
This wasn’t a fairy tale, though, and Holly knew in her heart that John wasn’t going to propose. Not in the near future and probably not ever. She knew this with 95 percent certainty, even though she wasn’t psychic like her grandmother.
But how was she supposed to give up on John? Give up on what she wanted so badly? To marry this man, be this child’s stepmother, and start a new life here in this little pale blue house on a San Francisco hill? Yes, things were strained between her and John, though she wasn’t sure why. But that didn’t mean things could not be unstrained. A long-term relationship went through lulls. This was a lull, perhaps.
There was only one way to know.
And so, when Lizzie was occupied with her coloring book and a new pack of Crayolas, Holly went heavy-hearted into the kitchen to make the dinner she’d promised Lizzie, cheeseburgers in the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head (the only food she cooked really well) and to heat up the Great Love test. With the cheeseburgers in front of them all, a side of linguini for
Lizzie in butter sauce with peas (which looked a bit like the
sa cordula
) and two small plates of
sa cordula
before her and John, Holly sat down beside this pair she loved so much—and waited.
If John liked the
sa cordula,
she could relax, accept what he said, that he was just “tired, distracted by work.” Etcetera, etcetera. He
was
her Great Love. If he didn’t like it, then what? No, she wouldn’t let herself go there. Her breath caught somewhere in her body as John placed his napkin on his lap and picked up his fork, eyeing the
sa cordula.
In one moment, everything between them would change because of hope or lack thereof, and yet John looked exactly the same as he always did, sitting there at the dinner table in front of the bay window, so handsome, his thick sandy-blond hair hand-swept back from his face, the slight crinkles at the edges of his hazel eyes, the chiseled jawline with its slight darkening of five o’clock shadow.
Holly sucked in a quiet breath and took the quickest bite, keeping her expression neutral—despite the gritty, slimy texture of the
sa cordula.
The intestines of a lamb did not taste “just like chicken.” Did not taste like anything but what it looked like. Savory butter sauce or not. And as if the peas could help.
John forked a bite and stared at it for a moment. “What is this again?” he asked.
“An old-world Italian dish my
nonna
sometimes makes,” Holly said, trying not to stare at his fork.
Lizzie twirled her fork in her linguini the way Holly had taught her. “I wish I had a
nonna.
”
“You do, pumpkin,” Holly said, treasuring the idea of Camilla Constantina showing Lizzie how to roll out pasta with a tiny rolling pin. “You have two. Your mom’s mother and your dad’s mother.”
“But if you and Daddy get married, then I’ll have a
nonna
Holly too.”
Out of the mouths of babes. Holly smiled. John stiffened. Lizzie twirled her linguini.
And then, as if in slow motion, John slid the fork of lamb intestines, topped with one pea, into his mouth. He paled a bit, his entire face contorting. He spit it out into his napkin. “I’m sorry, Holly, but this is the most disgusting thing I ever ate. No offense to your grandmother.”
Or me,
she thought, her heart breaking.
Maybe her grandmother was wrong.
But forty minutes later, after Holly had helped Lizzie brush her teeth, pulled the comforter up over her chest, read half of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and then kissed the sleeping girl’s green-apple-scented head, John had come right out and said it. That he was sorry, it-wasn’t-her-it-was-him, that despite not meaning to, he’d fallen in love with his administrative assistant, and she had a young son, so they really understood each other. And no, he didn’t think it was a good idea if Holly continued to see Lizzie, even once a month for a trip to the playground or for ice cream. “She’s four, Holl. She’ll forget about you in a couple of weeks. Let’s not complicate anything, okay?”
Holly wanted to complicate things. She wanted to complicate this whole breakup. And so she pleaded her case,
reminded him of their two years together, of Lizzie’s attachment to her, of the plans they’d made for the future. Which, Holly had had to concede, had dwindled to maybe going to the San Francisco Zoo the weekend after next. And when he just stood there, not saying anything and taking a sideways glance at the clock, she realized he was waiting for her to leave so he could call his new girlfriend and tell her he’d finally done it, he’d dumped Holly.
As if in slow motion, Holly went into the bathroom, afraid to look at him, afraid to look at anything, lest she start screaming like a lunatic. She closed the door and slid down against the back of it, covering her face with her hands as she cried. She sucked in a deep breath, then forced herself up to splash water on her face. She looked in the mirror over the sink, at the dark brown eyes, the dark brown hair, and the fair skin, so like her grandmother’s, and told herself,
He’s not your great love. He’s not meant to be.
It was little consolation.
And what if he had liked the
sa cordula
? Then what? How could she fight for a great love with someone who’d said he didn’t love her as easily as he’d said the
sa cordula
was disgusting?
After a gentle yet impatient, “Holly, you can’t stay in there all night,” she came out of the bathroom. He handed her a shopping bag of her possessions he’d clearly packed earlier that day in anticipation of dumping her—a few articles of clothing and her toothbrush, and again said he was sorry, that he never wanted to hurt her. And then she stood in the doorway of Lizzie’s room, watching the girl’s slight body rise and fall
with each sleeping breath.
“Good-bye, sweet girl,” she whispered. “I’ll bet if I’d given you a taste of the
sa cordula,
you would have asked for another.”
Two
One month and three thousand miles later, as Holly stood at the stove in her grandmother’s kitchen—
her
kitchen now, she had to keep reminding herself—the breakup, the final good-night kiss she’d blown to sleeping Lizzie—was the One Sad Memory that went into the bowl of risotto on the counter.
In the month she’d been living in her grandmother’s house, going through Camilla Constantina’s easiest recipes, she still wasn’t used to wishing into a pot of simmering marinara sauce or recalling a moment that made her cry while pounding a thick breast of chicken. She wasn’t used to pounding a chicken breast, period. She wasn’t used to anything—being alone in this country kitchen with its Tuscan-yellow bead-board walls and gleaming white-tiled center island, the copper pots and black cast-iron frying pans hanging from the rack above her head. The six-burner stove. And especially the recipe book. The very thing that had saved her, given her something to do, something to focus on.
She would not be bested by a bowl of risotto. If one could call
the sticky mess in the bowl risotto. It tasted nothing like her grandmother’s famed risotto alla Milanese. And now, Holly, who wouldn’t even call herself a passable cook, unless you counted omelets, Micky Mouse–shaped cheeseburgers, spaghetti (if she didn’t overcook it), and the homemade chicken nuggets she’d made often for picky-eater Lizzie, was attempting risotto al salto when she couldn’t make a Bisquick pancake without half of it being burned and half being undercooked.
She glanced at the loose-leaf binder of Camilla’s Cucinotta hand-scrawled recipes, which lay open to page twenty-three:
Risotto al salto.
Risotto al salto
Leftover risotto alla Milanese
1 pat butter
1 sad memory
1 fervent wish
All of Camilla Constantina’s recipes called for wishes and memories, either sad or happy or unqualified. They were as essential to Camilla as were the minced garlic or the tablespoon of olive oil. Her grandmother had told Holly that when she first started cooking as a young girl at her mother’s hip, she began the tradition of adding the wishes and memories, which had delighted her elders. “She is saying her prayers into the osso buco,” her mother and grandmother and aunts would say, patting little Camilla on the head. And since little Camilla would
invariably wish for her father to return safely from war—and he did—the tradition was born. Much later Camilla would wish her own husband would recuperate from his heart attack and it would not be, yet she’d explain as best she could to Holly that the magic was in the wishing, not so much the getting. And that memories, particularly the sad ones, had healing properties, just like the basil or oregano she regularly used in her dishes.
During the past month, the memory of saying that final good-bye to John, of watching Lizzie sleep for the last time, of missing both of them with a fierceness that stopped her breath, had made it into quite possibly one hundred overcooked pastas, countless too sweet or too salty sauces, and three rubbery veal scallopinis alla something. She’d been trying not to think about John and Lizzie and the breakup that had brought her to her grandmother’s house on a rainy September evening. Or what had happened since—on the chilly October morning she woke to find her grandmother lying lifeless in her bed, a tiny painting of the three Po River stones watching over her from the iron headboard. But Holly’s new life—and the white binder containing her recipes—
insisted
upon memories.
No, she didn’t want to think about John, who would likely be putting Lizzie to bed right then (it was his weekend, a schedule she’d have in her head forever), or Lizzie, who was probably asking him to read
Green Eggs and Ham
for the third time. Because if Holly let herself remember too much, she’d remember herself in that scenario, of hoping every weekend for a proposal, an engagement ring, that never came. And the pain of what she’d lost would knock her to her knees, as it had many
times since she’d come running to her grandmother’s house. The place she always ran to. And now the house was here, but the source of the comfort was gone.
What was left was this kitchen and the recipe book, her grandmother in the form of walls and ceiling and stove and hundreds of utensils—and recipes. Very
original
recipes.
She pulled a broad-based black frying pan from the wall of pots and pans adjacent to the stove (the other day she’d had to type
broad-based frying pan
into Google for a picture, since her grandmother had so many pans), set it on a burner, and sliced a pat of butter into the center. Risotto al salto was simply (ha—supposedly simply) a thin pancake made from leftover risotto. She reached for the binder and checked the recipe for how high to set the burner and for how long to let the pancake fry in its swirl of butter. She had to get this right. Camilla’s Cucinotta was hers now, hers to keep going for her grandmother, who’d left her the house and the business—the popular Italian cooking class and the tiny takeout pasta shop. There was no time for sobbing against the refrigerator for what she’d lost. There were pastas and sauces to make for tomorrow. There were recipes to get right so that Holly could teach her students how to make them like her grandmother did.
There was learning to cook.
Though Holly had spent a month every summer of her childhood with her grandmother on Blue Crab Island, helped cook beside her, rolled out fresh pasta so thin it was almost see-through, knew which pastas took which sauces, Holly was not a cook. She might have been, had she not almost killed
her grandmother with her culinary experiment at the age of seven. She’d made her grandmother a sandwich piled high with ridiculous ingredients like a slice of cheese, a spoonful of ice cream, two slices of hard salami, a mashed scoop of banana, and, unknowingly, rat poison. Her grandmother had been in the hospital for almost two weeks, and despite her assurances that Holly was only seven, that it was an accident any child could make, and that the sandwich had been delicious otherwise, Holly had developed a fear of the kitchen, of what lurked inside cabinets and inside food, like the weevils her mother had always cautioned her about. She’d lost the love of cooking. During subsequent summers, Holly still helped in the kitchen, still loved sitting at the table, peeling potatoes, watching her grandmother hum along to the Italian opera that always played on a CD player. But she’d stopped trusting herself as a cook that day and she’d never gotten the trust back. Now, though, she had to trust herself. Her grandmother’s bank account, one combined for personal and business, totaled $5,213, when property tax was due in December. When heating oil was $2.57 a gallon. When a half pound of veal was over six bucks. Her grandmother had always said she was doing fine financially. But clearly she’d been scraping by. If Holly couldn’t keep the cooking course going, keep the little pasta business going, Camilla’s Cucinotta would disappear with her grandmother.