by Gina LaManna
Nora waved her hand like a lunatic. “I’ll start.”
Candace nodded. “Sure! Go ahead.”
“I’m trying to get my granddaughter hitched,” Nora said, grinning broadly in my direction. Then, she gave me a big, fat wink. “She’s got a handsome man, but she just can’t seem to clinch the deal.”
“Yeah,” Meg chimed in. “She keeps undies in her purse and sleeps over there every night, but won’t admit to moving in, yet. We think she’s in denial. Consider this her intervention.”
“I have moved in,” I whispered.
“Since when?” Meg didn’t whisper. She spoke loudly enough for everyone in our classroom to hear, and probably everyone in the next skyscraper, as well. “You just told me—”
“It’s a new development,” I said to her. Raising my voice, I smiled at Candace, Mr. Winky, and the normal couple off to the side of the room. “I live with my boyfriend, and I don’t carry underwear around in my purse, just to be clear.”
“Anymore,” Meg clarified. “But that took like a month and a half.”
“A month and a half?” The girl half of the “normal couple in the corner” opened her mouth in shock. “A month and a half?”
Meg gave a solemn nod. “And that was after he asked her to move in. They’d already been dating for quite some time.”
The girl stared wide-eyed in my direction, while her boyfriend got real busy stirring his empty pan. I put them on date number two or three, and judging by their reaction about moving in together, they weren’t on the same page when it came to their future hopes and dreams.
“Everyone’s different,” I said, trying my best to not scar their relationship for life. “I’m sure you two will figure it out.”
“Let’s get back to my reason for being here,” Nora said. “It’s my granddaughter’s boyfriend’s birthday on Leap Day. I figure if Lacey cooks him a meal that’s the Bomb-diggity-dot-com, then maybe he’ll get over his fear of commitment.”
“Anthony doesn’t have fear of commitment!” I worked on slicing my tomato into small squares, but the insides just got all mushy, and seeds leaked all over the countertop. “We love each other.”
“Plenty of couples love each other and don’t get married,” Meg said. “Who knows? Maybe Anthony’s one of them.”
“We want to get married,” I said. “We’ve talked about it. Kind of. He says he wants a long life with me, so I assume he’s not getting rid of me soon.”
“Did he say he was going to propose?” Meg asked. “Or are you assuming?”
I fell silent, mopping up the tomato juice.
“Well?” the girl at the end of the table asked. “Does he want to marry you or what?”
“It’s none of your business,” I said. “We’ll figure it out in our own time.”
The boy half of the couple sighed in relief. The girl gave him a look that said she wasn’t all too happy with his reaction.
“Well, shall we start on margaritas?” Candace came through with another forced smile. “No sense waiting until the food is all prepared or else the tacos will get cold…or something. Let’s just drink some margaritas.”
“Hang on,” Meg said. “I didn’t give you my reasons for being here.”
“Oh, go ahead then,” Candace said. “I’m just going to grab the tequila while you start talking.”
“I’ve got myself a nifty new boyfriend,” Meg said with a grin the size of a large banana. “Cool, huh?”
“And you want to learn how to cook for him?” Candace asked.
“Oh, no. That’s not my reason.” Meg wafted her hand in dismissal. “I just wanted to announce that fact. It’s new, and I still think it’s fun saying he’s my boyfriend. He doesn’t know it yet, but basically we’re together.”
Candace let out a gargled noise in her throat and began pouring tequila and ice cubes into the blender. “That’s great.”
“I thought so,” Meg said. “But my real reason for coming is because Lacey paid for the class, and I’m always in for free food and beverages. Speaking of, how are those margaritas coming along?”
Candace showed us – quite rapidly, and without her usual grandeur – how to properly salt our glasses. Then we each took turns mixing up a small batch of margarita mix and poured them into our cups. To my surprise, Candace filled and emptied hers by the time I finished licking the salt from my glass.
“Uh, would you like more?” I extended the blender towards her. I wasn’t particularly in the mood to drink, and Meg didn’t need to adopt any more of my alcohol. Her cheeks had surpassed rosy twenty minutes ago, and I didn’t want to see them hit beet color.
Candace nodded. “Yes, please.”
I hesitated for a brief second. Candace was a small girl, and two margaritas in the same number of minutes would be enough to knock me to the floor. This girl was either a tank dressed as a pixie stick, or she’d be sobbing in no time.
Five minutes later, we had our answer.
“Shhhh,” I rubbed a hand in soothing circles over Candace’s back while my chicken burned and smoked on the griddle. Meg had finally poked Mr. Winky in the eye to stop his advances, and Nora was drilling the poor, normal couple on their thoughts regarding children. “It’ll be okay. There, there. Just cry it out.”
“He just up and left,” Candace sobbed. “My husband. I didn’t see it coming.”
I closed my eyes. I hadn’t asked her what was wrong, and I didn’t particularly want to know. I had enough of my own problems without lumping my cooking instructor’s marital issues on top of them.
“I cooked him breakfast every day,” she wailed. “I got up early to make his favorite fiesta eggs, and now…I make too many eggs and there’s no one to eat them!”
“There, there,” I said, not feeling exceptionally creative with my soothing words.
“I’ll eat them,” Meg said. “Just package them up and leave them outside on the front steps of Lacey’s apartment, since I’m practically moving in. We’ll start a delivery service. It’ll be fun. You can feel like you’re cooking for someone, and I’ll get to eat the results. The best of both worlds.”
For a minute, I thought Meg had scored major points. Candace just stared at her, the crying subsiding, the big, fat tears stalling halfway down her cheeks. But after a minute of stunned silence, it turned out Candace was just in shock. When the shock wore off thirty seconds later, the wails came back for Round Two, which was even louder than the first.
“I think we should be going.” The normal couple at the end of the table grabbed their margaritas – to go – and slunk out of the room, away from the probing questions, courtesy of my grandmother. “Good luck with…” The girl waved in my general direction. “Well, goodbye.”
Mr. Winky, holding an ice pack over his face, watched the whole situation with his one good eye while stirring the party in his pan.
“I’m sure it’s just temporary,” I said to Candace. “Maybe your husband is confused and needed time to think. What’s not to love about you? You’re smart, you’re pretty, you can cook…heck, even I want to marry you.” I parroted Meg’s words about the housekeeper back at Candace. “You make the rest of us look bad.”
“That’s what I thought!” The pretty, sweet blonde dropped her head to the table. “I worked so hard to be perfect!”
“Hey, Lacey, your chicken is flaming. And I’m not talking about its sexual orientation,” Meg said. “It is turning into ashes as we speak.”
“Can you turn off the burner?”
Meg turned the burner up for a few seconds before realizing it had gone the wrong way. By the time she got the flames to die down, I had little more than a charred black lump in the pan.
“Whoops,” she said. “Lace, when you cook for Anthony, you’re gonna not want to burn the chicken. But then again, if you start with four margaritas as an appetizer, he just might not notice.”
I was too busy concentrating on Candace to listen all too closely to Meg’s advice. “Why did he say he was
leaving? Like I said, you seem like you have it all together.”
“He said he wasn’t in love with me anymore,” Candace said. Quivering, ginormous teardrops threatened to leak from her ducks, as Meg would say. “He said that he loved me, but he wasn’t in love with me.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “How can he not love you?”
She bobbed her shoulders up and down. “I don’t know. It’s like a switch flipped. One day I thought we were happy, and the next…”
I swallowed. “It’s okay.”
“Hey, check this out,” Meg said. “I’ve always wanted to try this fancy sort of pepper. Can I bite into it?”
“No!” Even amid Candace’s tears, she lunged across the table to try and stop Meg from eating the pepper. “That is very…hot!”
Her warning came too late. First, Meg’s face turned red. Her cheeks went from rosy to plum, skipping right past beet. Then the sweat started. Little droplets at first, sprinkled along her hairline. And then…just all over. Sweat rained from every duck on her face.
“That has…” Meg tried to swallow, her face contorting in pain. “A bite to it.”
“Yes,” Candace said, her tears stopping as her face fell slack in awe. “Some kick.”
“I’d say!” Meg fanned her face with one hand and downed a margarita with the other. Then all of a sudden, she was rolling around on the floor and moaning in pain. “How do I make it stop?”
“You just have to wait it out,” Candace said. “I can give you milk to sip if you stop moving.”
“Hurry.” The sounds coming from Meg’s person were downright frightening. I hated to see my best friend in pain, but really, seeing how it was her fault for biting into an unidentified pepper, it was a little bit funny. The real silver lining, however, was that it gave Candace a reason to stop crying.
With a sense of purpose, Candace leapt to action and grabbed a jug of milk from the fridge. She put one kitten-heeled foot on Meg’s right shoulder and then rested her left knee on the other one. Opening the jug of milk, she tipped it into Meg’s mouth, slowly at first, then faster and faster until Meg was inhaling the Niagara Falls of milk down like a funnel.
However, it was apparently flood season around the Falls. The milk overflowed, splashing to the ground and forming a sizeable puddle around Meg’s head. Candace stopped pouring and held up the jug for all to see, raising her eyebrows in surprise.
“Wow,” she said. “I’ve never seen someone drink half a gallon of milk in one session like that.”
“I’m an impressive force of nature.” Meg sat up, hiccupped, and swiped her arm across her face. “Thank goodness for all that practice with the beer bongs. That was a fun flashback if I’ve ever seen one.”
“Fun?” Candace shook her head. “You have a terrible definition of fun.”
“Tell me about it,” I groaned. “She usually tries to drag me with her.”
Candace looked over at me. This time, her gaze was filled with pity. “You poor thing.”
“Meg, are you doing okay?” I walked around the table, but kept a good distance from her. She’d consumed a lot of things – both liquids and foods – in a short amount of time. There was no telling what might happen next.
“I’m doing great! In fact, I’d say I could go for another pepper.” Meg wiped her forehead with her shirt, exposing some bare stomach for all to see. I looked away to give her some privacy, but she didn’t seem to care. “However, I just drank a lot of lactose.”
Candace furrowed her brow. “Is there something wrong with that? I was just trying to help you dull the flavor. You didn’t mark any allergies on your form…”
“Oh, honey, you didn’t do anything wrong.” Meg gave a shudder, looking at something that neither Candace nor I could see. “In fact, I love me some milk. The problem lies in the fact that my stomach doesn’t love the milk back.”
“Oh.” Candace blushed. “Lactose intolerance?”
“More like lactose rebellion.” Meg rolled over, pulling herself to her feet in stages. “And I’m just saying, we should probably end class a little early. I’m gonna have to do some bombing of the porcelain harbor, if you know what I’m saying.”
I closed my eyes.
“Get it?” Meg gave Candace a light love-tap on the shoulder. “It’s a joke, see back when World War II was starting—”
“I think she gets it,” I said. “Anyway, Candace, thank you so much for class. We all had a great time.”
Candace looked shell-shocked, but she nodded anyway. I glanced towards my skillet, where a charred slab of chicken had completely disintegrated.
“Look, you cremated your chicken, Lacey,” Meg said, picking up a few ashes and letting them drift down on the plate. “Should we have a funeral over the Mississippi for him? We could do a real Viking goodbye.”
I shook my head. “We’ve done enough here. It’s best if we just get going.”
Underneath my feet, the small puddle of milk spread out across the tile. On the table, the fancy wine bottle looked significantly more empty than it probably should have, and I wondered if Meg hadn’t done some tastings in the midst of the Fiesta Fiasco.
Nora, meanwhile, seemed unfazed by everything. She puttered over her skillet, slicing and flipping and humming and generally looking like she was having a ball. It wasn’t until I stepped closer and watched for an extended minute, that she looked up in surprise.
“Look at that!” Nora pointed towards her skillet. “By golly, I think I’ve done it.”
“Well, I’ll eat my hat.” Meg lumbered over and peered over Nora’s shoulder. “That smells delicious. I’d even eat it.”
Candace cleared her throat in a dainty fashion. Then she lowered her voice and spoke only to me. “I’m beginning to think your friend might eat anything.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said back. “Her intestines are frostbitten, steel-encased, and spice-resilient. If anyone can survive the apocalypse, it’s that girl. I’m pretty sure she could survive off dirt and pond water.”
Candace nodded.
“How about you? Are you feeling any better?” I turned to the tiny instructor, scanning her face for signs of looming tears. I wasn’t anxious to jump back into “comforting” mode, but after the havoc we’d wreaked in her classroom, the least I could do was extend a sympathetic ear.
To my surprise, she turned dry eyes towards me and answered my question with one of her own. “I actually do have one more question, if you don’t mind?”
“Sure. What is it?”
“Does she actually have a boyfriend?” She tilted her chin towards Meg. “And is he real?”
“It’s hard to believe, huh?” I smiled at Candace. “But in all actuality, she does. Believe it or not, the man’s a good catch, too. I should know since he’s my cousin. Granted, Clay’s a little odd himself, sure. But he’s got money and he’ll treat her really well. I think he loves her, even though it’s still early and he’d never admit it.”
“Huh.” She didn’t seem to believe me.
“I promise you’ll find someone else,” I said. “If your husband left you, he’s crazy. You seem really nice. You can cook and run your own business. Believe me. There’s a man out there who’ll be lucky to have you.”
“You really think so?” Candace raised her eyebrows and gave me a searching expression, one filled with equal parts hope and equal parts fear. “Do you mean it?”
“Of course I mean it,” I said. “There’s someone for everyone. And Meg is living, breathing proof of that.”
Candace reached out her bird-like fingers and gripped my shoulder with more force than I’d expected. “Thank you. Thank you so much for everything.”
“I didn’t do anything.” My face heated under her gaze. “Really, if anything, I should apologize.”
“No apologies necessary,” Candace said, her voice brightening by the second. “In fact, don’t worry about Meg’s fee. Her session today’s on me.”
“Oh, no. I do
n’t mind paying.”
“No, really.” Candace smiled, real joy turning her face sunny for the first time since we’d walked into the room. “I hadn’t been able to shake my sad funk for at least a month. But after today, for the first time, I think there might still be hope.”
“There’s a lot of hope,” I said. “And anytime you don’t think so, just invite Meg back here. You’ll be reminded exactly how much hope there is for you.”
We shared a quiet laugh.
Then Candace turned her gaze back to me. “But seriously, don’t come back here too soon. I can’t afford to go through all those ingredients again, plus the bottle of wine. She’s not sneaky.”
I sighed. “She thinks she is, though.”
“I’m not joking. You’re banned for at least a month,” Candace said. “Please.”
I gave an awkward laugh. “Okay.”
“I’m kidding.” She smiled lightly, but then faced Meg. “But not really. A month.”
“This is delicious. Can you believe it?” Meg’s voice boomed from across the table as she pointed to the plate in front of Nora. “Lacey, your grandmother has broken through her cooking block. I tried everything she made, and it’s all tasty!”
I skeptically glanced at the taco, which was laden with rice, beans, chicken, guacamole, and a bunch more colorful things, all made from scratch. “Nora, that looks exactly like the picture on the recipe book!”
“Have a bite, dear.” Nora pushed the plate towards me. “I think I might’ve put a pinch too much salt on, but Meg seems to like it.”
I sucked in a breath. Maybe looks could be deceiving. Maybe Nora’s concoction would taste like old fish on a platter. Maybe…maybe I should just try it. Running out of excuses, I folded the taco into an edible size and took a bite. And swallowed.
I blinked. My jaw wasn’t broken. My taste buds were not singed. In fact…my taste buds seemed to like all the flavors. “Holy Hannah, you have nailed it!”
“My name’s not Hannah, dear,” Nora said with a jolly grin on her face. “But I’m glad you like it! It’s amazing what happens when you follow directions, isn’t it?”
“This is…” I took another bite and savored it. “I want to eat the whole thing!”
