She missed cooking as profoundly as an amputated limb. It felt odd, sinful, to be back at it; it felt like she was breaking some kind of vow. Only for her, she thought. And it was just the one meal. Marguerite bumbled around at first; she moved too fast, wanting to do everything at once. She took three stainless-steel bowls from the cabinet; they clanged together like a primitive musical instrument. The bowls were dusty and needed a rinse, but first, Marguerite thought, she would get warm water for the bread (a hundred degrees, as she’d advised in the column she’d written about bread baking for the Calgary paper). There used to be a rhythm to her process, one step at a time. Slow down, she thought. Think about what you’re doing! She proofed her yeast in the largest of the bowls; then she mixed in sugar, salt, and a cup of flour until she had something the consistency of pancake batter. She started adding flour, working it in, adding flour, working it in, until a baby-soft batch of dough formed under her hands. Marguerite added more flour-the dough was still sticky-and she kneaded, thinking, This feels wonderful; this is like medicine, I am happy. She thought, I want music. She pushed the play button of her stereo, leaving behind a white, floury smudge. When she dusted the smudge away in three or four days, would she remember this happiness? It would have evaporated, of course, transmogrified into another emotion, depending on how the dinner party went. What Marguerite was thriving on this second was the energy of anticipation. She had always loved it-the preparation, getting ready, every night a big night because at Les Parapluies the evenings when the numbers were the smallest had been the best evenings, the most eventful. The locals came, and the regulars; there was gossip flying from table to table; everyone drank too much.
Ella Fitzgerald. Marguerite felt like singing along, but even shuttered inside her own house she was too shy-what if her neighbors heard, or the mailman? Now that it was summer, he came at irregular hours. So instead, Marguerite let her hands do the singing. She covered the bread dough with plastic wrap and put it in the sun, she pulled out her blender and added the ingredients for the pots de crème: eggs, sugar, half a cup of her morning coffee, heavy cream, and eight ounces of melted Schraffenberger chocolate. What could be easier? The food editor of the Calgary paper had sent Marguerite the chocolate in February as a gift, a thank-you-Marguerite had written this very recipe into her column for Valentine’s Day and reader response had been enthusiastic. (In the recipe, Marguerite had suggested the reader use “the richest, most decadent block of chocolate available in a fifty-mile radius. Do not-and I repeat-do not use Nestlé or Hershey’s!”) Marguerite hit the blender’s puree button and savored the noise of work. She poured the liquid chocolate into ramekins and placed them in the fridge.
Porter had been wrong about the restaurant, wrong about what people would want or wouldn’t want. What people wanted was for a trained chef, a real authority, to show them how to eat. Marguerite built her clientele course by course, meal by meaclass="underline" the freshest, ripest seasonal ingredients, a delicate balance of rich and creamy, bold and spicy, crunchy, salty, succulent. Everything from scratch. The occasional exception was made: Marguerite’s attorney, Damian Vix, was allergic to shellfish, one of the selectmen could not abide tomatoes or the spines of romaine lettuce. Vegetarian? Pregnancy cravings? Marguerite catered to many more whims than she liked to admit, and after the first few summers the customers trusted her. They stopped asking for their steaks well-done or mayonnaise on the side. They ate what she served: frog legs, rabbit and white bean stew under flaky pastry, quinoa.
Porter had pressed her to add a seating to double her profits. Six thirty and nine, he said. Everybody’s doing it.
Yes, said Marguerite. And when I left high school all the other girls were becoming teachers or nurses. University was for boys; culinary school was for Europeans. I don’t do what other people do. If people want to eat at Les Parapluies, they will come at seven thirty. In return for this inconvenience, they will get their table for the entire night.
But the profits, Porter said.
I will not send Francesca out to breathe down somebody’s neck in the name of profits, Marguerite said. This restaurant is not about profits.
What? Porter said.
We’re in love, Marguerite had said, nodding at the dining room filled with empty chairs. Them and me.
The song came to an end. The clock chimed the hour. Ten o’clock. Marguerite retreated to the bedroom to phone the A &P and order the meat. A three-pound tenderloin was the smallest available.
“Fine,” Marguerite said. It would be way too much, but Marguerite would wrap the leftovers and send them home for the fiancé on Hulbert Avenue.
There was another startling noise. Marguerite, who had been sitting on the bed next to the phone, jumped to her feet. In the last twelve hours, the noises had come like gunshots. What was that high-pitched ringing? The CD player gone awry? Marguerite hurried out to the living room. The CD player waited silently. The noise was coming from the kitchen. Aha! It was the long-forgotten drone of the stove’s timer. The mussels were done.
10:07 A.M.
Renata hadn’t counted on being alone, and yet that was exactly what had happened. Cade and his father were sailing and Suzanne was off for tennis, leaving Renata with two blank hours until she was expected at the yacht club. She wanted to go running; it was the coffee, maybe, combined with the antsy-weird feeling of being alone in the house. As Renata climbed the back stairs-she had never stayed in a house that had back stairs-to the guest room to change, she found Mr. Rogers weaving deftly between the spindles of the banister. So she was not alone after all.
She dressed in her exercise clothes and gathered her hair into a ponytail. On a scale of one to ten, her guilt was at a six and a half and climbing. Before she embarked on this weekend trip to Nantucket, she had promised her father only one thing: that she would not, under any circumstances, contact Marguerite. But how could Renata resist? She had been dreaming about contacting Marguerite since she and Cade boarded the plane yesterday morning; she had been dreaming of it since the day, ten months earlier, when Cade told her his parents had a house on Nantucket.
Nantucket? she’d said.
You know it?
Know it? she said. I was born there. My parents’ life was there. My godmother is there.
But Renata didn’t really know Nantucket, not the way Cade did, coming every summer of his life.
I’ll take you this summer, Cade had said.
That was back in October; they had been dating for two weeks. But even then, Renata had thought, Yes. Marguerite.
To Renata, Marguerite was like a shipwreck. She had, somewhere within her hull, a treasure trove of information about Candace, information Renata had never been privy to. And now that Renata was an adult, now that she was a woman about to be married, she wanted to hear stories about her mother, even silly, inconsequential ones, and who better to tell her than her mother’s best friend? The fact that Daniel Knox had forbidden Renata from contacting Marguerite-had, in fact, kept them apart since Candace’s death-only fueled Renata’s desire to see the woman. There was something her father didn’t want her to learn, possibly many somethings. She’s crazy, Daniel Knox had said. She’s been institutionalized. But Marguerite hadn’t sounded crazy on the phone. She had sounded just the way Renata always imagined-cultivated, elegant, and delighted to hear Renata’s voice. As if she couldn’t believe it, either: They were finally going to be reunited.