by Shirley Jump
“He’s nice, and he does treat me right, and…that’s all I’m going to say about Garrett right now.” Things with them had only just begun, and she wanted to hold that sweet newness to herself a little while longer. Bridget grabbed the clipboard, flipped through the orders. She looked up when she heard the back door open again and Abby entered. Everyone stopped working, and a hush fell over the bakery.
“Good morning,” Abby said. She parked a fist on her hip and glared at her sisters. “Quit staring at me like you’ve never seen me before. God, I was just in here two days ago.”
“Yeah, but aren’t you supposed to be on a beach in Key West somewhere?” Nora twisted the icing bag, pushing a thick wad of buttercream to the tip. She leaned over and began adding delicate pale pink flowers to the edge of a sheet cake.
“I will be—on Friday. Jessie and I changed the plane tickets. I told her I needed some time to”—Abby looked at her sisters and her mother—”get caught up. She understood. Plus, I couldn’t leave you guys to bake the bread. You all are amazing at cakes, but your sourdough skills are sorely lacking.”
“You’re going to be here all week?” Magpie said. On the radio, Meghan Trainor yielded to an Adele ballad. “Me too! Which means there’s going to be trouble in the bakery.”
Ma wagged a finger. “There better not be any shenanigans here. We have work to do.”
“Ah, but, Ma, what’s life without a few shenanigans?” Magpie nudged her mother and gave her a grin. Ma pursed her lips but couldn’t hold the feigned disapproval, and her face dissolved into a smile.
“Just don’t burn anything, Margaret. We’re already behind from the last two days.”
Abby grabbed her apron and slipped it on. She dipped into the storage room, grabbing a small container of yeast as she talked. “You will need to find another bakery to supply the bread by this weekend, Ma, but hopefully me being here for a few days gives you some time to do that and keeps you from getting further behind.”
Ma spun the piecrust circle a quarter turn and rolled it again, repeating the turn and roll as the circle widened. “I’ll make a few calls later this morning. I appreciate the help for now, Abigail. We have missed your breads. No one is as good as you.”
“You know…me being here doesn’t have to be a temporary thing.” Abby leaned against the counter and toed at the tile floor. “If you want…I can come back to work after I get home from Key West. I have really, really missed working here and working with all of you.”
The rolling pin stopped spinning. Ma held it over the crust, frozen for a moment. Then she nodded, and when she spoke, her voice was thick. “I’d love it if you came back, Abigail. We need all the help we can get, especially since we just landed that order with the organic food emporium. And especially since Bridget’s newest cake is getting a write-up in Boston magazine.”
“My newest cake?”
Ma nodded. “Remember that chocolate peanut butter one you sold to those women a few weeks ago? Turns out, they worked at the magazine and gave the food editor a slice. They called me this morning and asked if they could do a piece on it. You’ll need to make another one—”
“Maybe a lot of other ones, if we get that kind of publicity,” Nora said. “That’s the kind of thing that could really turn things around for this bakery and put us back on the map.”
“It could,” Bridget said. “Which means we’re going to need a lot of help.”
“Good thing Ma had a lot of daughters,” Abby said with a grin.
“Wait, are we bringing the old gang back together again?” Nora asked. “Because I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?” Bridget dumped butter and sugar into the giant stand mixer, turned it on, and let them blend before sliding in the eggs, one at a time.
“Because whenever all the O’Bannon girls are together, there’s trouble. Like food fights and screaming arguments and—”
“And I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Ma said.
“Me neither,” Magpie said. “That’s what makes us O’Bannons. For better or worse.”
Abby poured warm water in with the yeast and watched it begin to bubble and foam, working together to form the basis of all she would create today. “From here on out, I’ll gladly take the better and leave the worse behind.”
“May the saddest days of our futures be no worse than the saddest days of our past,” Bridget said softly, reciting the toast she had heard her father make dozens of times at weddings and birthday parties and Sunday dinners.
“Indeed,” Nora whispered. On the radio, Adele’s voice drifted away, replaced by “Best Day of My Life” by American Authors. One by one, the O’Bannon girls began to sing along, the harmony rising and falling as cakes baked and tarts were filled and the bakery woke from its nighttime slumber.
Bridget watched the pale yellow blend of butter, sugar, and eggs accept the new additions of flour and baking soda, incorporating them until all those disparate ingredients merged into one. Alone, none of these ingredients did a thing, but once they were brought together, they created magic.
Just like her crazy, complicated family.
Reading Group Guide
Dear Reader,
I grew up in a small town outside of Boston with a family who believed food was part of the glue keeping us all together. When I was a little girl, my mom and my grandmother ran a donut shop out of our repurposed front porch. Even after the shop closed, my mom and my grandmother baked often.
I can still remember coming in from playing outside and being greeted by the sweet, tempting scent of fresh-baked bread. My mom would butter the hot loaves, making them glisten. Many times, she’d cut me two slices of hot fresh bread for a quick peanut butter and jelly (or peanut butter and Fluff, a Massachusetts lunch staple). To this day, I miss those loaves and wish my mom was around to bake them for me.
Families, I have found, are messy. They fight, they make up, they hate, and they love. My own was no different. But when things were at their worst and I needed to call someone, my family has always been there, always had my back. There’s something comforting in that, and it was the starting point for writing THE PERFECT RECIPE FOR LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP.
I added several Massachusetts-unique things to this book: The gas tank with the rumored image of Ho Chi Minh that you can still see as you drive into the city on I-93. The strong delineation between neighborhoods outside of Boston, and the pride they have in being their own special places. Wollaston Beach, a place I went to more than once when I wanted a moment to clear my head. For me, writing about those places is almost like going home again, and for those few pages, I’m back in that kitchen with my mom and my grandmother.
I hope you find the same solace in this book, that sense of family and community that we all crave. And that you grow to love the O’Bannons, in all their messiness, as much as I did. This novel is my tribute to my own family and to the memories that linger in my mind, as sweet as that first bite of fresh, warm bread.
Discussion Questions
The hummingbird appears at the beginning and the end of the story. How does the hummingbird help Bridget cope with her grief? Do you think it was a symbol, as she does? Do you have things in your life that are symbols or messages?
The Perfect Recipe for Love and Friendship is filled with secrets and devastating revelations. What was the most shocking secret?
Each of the women is hiding a secret. Some seem to believe that keeping a secret is wrong while others appear to feel that keeping a secret may be the right thing to do to spare others’ feelings. Do you believe that family secrets should be revealed or hidden forever? What do you think is most important in a relationship, total honesty or sensitivity to the other’s feelings?
How much of a marriage’s success or failure do you think can be attributed to the love between husband and wife and how much to external factors, such as jobs, finances, location, and other people? Do you think that Bridget and Jim loved each other enough to get married?
What was the biggest factor in the failure of their relationship? Could their marriage have been saved?
Shirley Jump has often been praised for writing stories that pull at readers’ emotions. Looking back on the story, discuss the moments that were the most emotional for you. What moments made you cry? What moments made you laugh?
Who is your favorite of the four sisters: Bridget, Nora, Abby, or Magpie? Why?
Discuss the roles of sisterhood and friendship in the novel. Are the four sisters also friends? Which character proves to be the greatest friend to one of her sisters? Does the way Bridget values sisterhood and friendship change as a result of her husband’s death?
Baking is a creative and therapeutic activity for Bridget. How do you think baking alleviates her grief? Does Colleen have a similar experience with baking? Does Nora? Does Abby?
Why do you think Colleen is so controlling and critical of her daughters? What was your impression of Colleen at the beginning of the book? What about at the end? Over the course of the novel, how does she change and what does she learn about herself?
Each of the women struggles with religion throughout the story but Colleen has the closest relationship with God, so she has the most conflict. Do you think it’s possible for Colleen to resolve her issues with faith and religion? Do you think she can accept Abby and Jessie’s marriage?
If you had to reinvent yourself the way Bridget did after her husband’s death, what would you do? Was Bridget right to go back to the family business or should she find a way to strike out on her own?
At one point in the story, Bridget and Nora fight about bananas. Nora feels that Jim was being too controlling but Bridget says that she would be happy just to have Jim back to complain. Who did you side with? Have you lost someone and would you be willing to take the bad along with the good to have them back? If Jim were still alive, does the story about the bananas make you think that Bridget should try to make her marriage work? Do you think this event was one that made Bridget finally start seeing how deep the problems went in her marriage?
Bridget meets Garrett soon after her husband dies but several months pass before she is ready to go out on a date with him. If they had met sooner or later, do you think Bridget and Garrett’s relationship would have evolved differently? Would they have even struck up a friendship without Bridget’s grief? Will they get married or is this just a rebound relationship for Bridget?
When Bridget looks out at her yard, the primroses bring happy and sad memories. Are you a gardener? What brings you joy about gardening? Do you use gardening to reduce stress?
Aunt Mary is a colorful character with an interesting past. She is a bit of a loner and has missed out on a lot of family events due to her travels. Do you have an unconventional person in your family? Do you envy their freedom or do you think that they have wasted their life?
Everyone thinks there’s nothing Nora O’Bannon can’t do. In reality her picture-perfect family is on the verge of falling apart. She can’t imagine life getting worse—until she is forced to make a decision that could cost her everything she holds dear…
A preview of The Secret Ingredient for a
Happy Marriage follows.
From the street, Nora O’Bannon Daniel’s life looked almost perfect. The quintessential three-bedroom, two-bath house in a decent neighborhood, with a wooden swingset in the backyard and a pink bike leaning against the garage. The cornflower blue Dutch Colonial sat a hundred yards back from the sidewalk on a leaf-covered quarter-acre lot of weedy grass peppered with the detritus of two kids. A trio of pumpkins marched down the stairs, still whole and uncarved. The brick stoop had weathered from the harsh winters, and the black paint on the railing had peeled down to gray metal, but the house had that air of well-worn and loved.
If her life had been a TV show, there’d be some quirky, close-knit family on the other side of the front door, a family whose biggest problem was a lost set of keys. Within thirty minutes, the keys would be found, and the family would be sitting down to a dinner where they’d laugh and hug and pass the creamed corn.
But when Nora parked her aging sedan in the driveway, the grumpy engine ticking as it cooled, she could see the truth she’d been avoiding for months. She didn’t live in a sitcom, and there wasn’t going to be a life-saving solution in the next half hour, punctuated by commercials for Geico and Smucker’s jam on either end.
No, in Nora’s world, life pretty much sucked. She hadn’t thought that the bank would actually do it—some unrealistic part of her had been hoping for some last-minute sympathetic, divine intervention—but the threatened end had finally arrived. While she was at work, a bright yellow sheet of paper had been tacked to her front door, its message stamped in black block letters underscored with a paragraph of red warnings.
NOTICE OF AUCTION
On the welcome mat sat a cellophane-wrapped orange chrysanthemum topped with a mylar balloon. The balloon waved back and forth in the fall breeze, screaming Happy Birthday in neon green letters.
Happy birthday, Nora O’Bannon, you’ve lost your house. Your family is now homeless.
Not exactly the way she’d wanted to turn thirty. The irony of it all would have made her cry, if she’d had the energy to work up some tears. For a year, she’d argued and prayed and strategized and negotiated, so sure she could head off this disaster. Her husband Ben had done what he always did, buried his head in the sand and left her to handle the incessant phone calls and letters. Nora, who had always been told she could do anything she set her mind to, had failed. The faceless person on the other end of the phone had no interest in letting them skate on the mortgage. No heart for the two children she was going to have to uproot. And no solution that Nora could actually afford.
Nora got out of the car, carrying a takeout pizza in one hand and a bag of fabric in the other. Madeline wanted to be a princess for Halloween, and in a thick cloud of denial, Nora had bought yards of pink tulle and dozens of sparkly rhinestones. She figured she could whip out the old Singer and stitch up something that would pass for a princess, all in time for Madeline to go trick-or-treating on Friday night. Jacob was still wavering between being a pirate and a ninja, so Nora had grabbed a couple yards of black fabric.
Ben pulled in behind her and climbed out of his ten-year-old Toyota. Every time he got out of the sporty little two-door, Nora wondered how he fit inside. Ben towered over her, a lean but fit six-foot-three man with soft brown eyes, dark wavy hair that curled against convention, and a ready smile. She’d fallen in love with that smile at a party one stormy winter night twelve years ago. She’d been a senior in high school, Ben a college freshman, the two of them on Christmas break and crammed into Tommy O’Brien’s basement while Aerosmith thudded from the speakers.
“Hey,” Ben said. “They finally did it.”
“They told us they would.” Nora sighed. “I don’t know what I’m going to tell the kids.”
“Easy. Don’t tell them anything.” Ben jogged up the stairs, ripped the yellow notice off the door and stuffed it into his interior jacket pocket.
The exact way Ben always lived his life. If he didn’t say it out loud, it wasn’t real. “That doesn’t make it go away, Ben. We’ve lost the house. There’s no going back, no passing Go again, no deal to work with the banker.”
“There’s always a deal, Nora. Just give me a chance—”
She wheeled on him. “You are the reason we’re in this mess. You’re the reason our kids are being evicted. You—”
“I didn’t get here on my own, Nora.” He waved at the pizza and the bags. “Takeout? Shopping? What happened to ‘we’ve got to buckle down so we can get caught up’?”
He was really going to compare twenty dollars’ worth of pizza and fabric to what he had done to them? “We are three hundred thousand dollars in debt, Ben. I could buckle down until I’m a hundred and ten and still not pay that off.”
“I, me. What about we, Nora? Till death do us part?”
“That ended
the day you walked into Mohegan Sun and blew your paycheck at a roulette table. And then did it again two weeks later, and a month after that. Chasing a stupid white ball.”
Ben shook his head. “You’re never going to let that go, are you? Fuck it. I don’t need to listen to this.” He slid his key into the door and went inside.
Nora grabbed the plant and balloon—a gift from her sister Abby—bumped the door open with her hip before it could close and then dumped the pizza on the hall table and the flowers and bag of fabric on the floor. “Our kids don’t have a home, Ben. You don’t get to be selfish now.”
“Nora, let it go.” He took out his phone. “I’ll fix this.”
She snorted. “I’ve heard you say that twelve thousand times, Ben. And all you’ve ever done is make it worse.” Her gaze skipped over the kitchen, half painted, still missing three upper cabinets, a renovation started four years ago. Yet another of Ben’s promises that had been broken the second the work got hard, inconvenient. Once upon a time, she’d thought she could create a home here. Now some other family would stand on the front lawn, hold up a hand, and buy the house she loved for pennies on the dollar. “I’m going to pack some things and take the kids to my mom’s until I find a better solution.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Yeah, Ben, I’m leaving. And I don’t want to argue about it or cry about it. Let’s just be adults here and admit we screwed this up. We,” she waved between them, “screwed us up. This whole thing with the house is a sign. We should go our separate ways and start over.”
Silence. She’d finally spoken the words both of them had danced around for two years. Ben’s gambling had taken a toll on their marriage, damage they’d never recovered from. They’d gone through the motions for the sake of the kids, but the death knell had sounded the night they’d moved into separate bedrooms.
