The Hundred Gifts

by Jennifer Scott

  “It was a little bland, but that was because I was too afraid to salt it because of the sausage in the stuffing. I thought it would get too salty, but you were right, I should have been more liberal with it.”

  “Did it look like roadkill, though?” Lulu asked. “Mine looked exactly like a raccoon we hit with the taco truck last week.” Teresa nodded in agreement.

  Aunt Cathy’s bracelets jingled as she pantomimed the shape of her turducken. “Mine looked like a headless baby. I thought about freezing it for a Halloween decoration next year.”

  “That’s disturbing,” Tammy Lynn said.

  “I left mine on the top of my car,” Joan said. Everyone got quiet. “I forgot I put it up there while I was trying to help Catherine put the seat belt around hers.”

  “You seat-belted your turducken?” Bren asked.

  Cathy shrugged. “I told you, it looked like a baby.”

  “So what happened?” Tammy Lynn asked. “To the one on the roof?”

  “Oh, it fell off about the time we turned onto the highway,” Joan said. “Bounced right off the hood of the car next to us. Landed in the gutter. There was too much traffic for us to stop, so I figure someone would pick it up with the dead raccoon.”

  There was a moment of pregnant silence, during which Bren could hear the tinny sound of “The Little Drummer Boy”—again!—over the speakers. And then all of them burst into laughter.

  “Imagine,” Tammy Lynn said, holding her stomach with one hand and wiping her eyes with the other, “you’re driving along and all of a sudden this naked turkey just sproings across the hood of your car.”

  Even Joan chuckled, after at first looking a little annoyed. “I suppose it’s a shock enough when a live bird flies into your car. But a plucked one . . .”

  “A plucked one with stuffing hanging out its behind,” Cathy said, and there was more laughter.

  “So Rebecca’s the only one who cooked hers?” Bren asked, after the laughter had died down.

  “Oh, I cooked mine,” Tammy Lynn said, “but Janelle wouldn’t let us eat it. The sausage. And the butter. She took it to work.” Her face got serious. “Come to think of it, we haven’t heard from her since.”

  “Dear God, you better check to make sure she’s still alive,” Joan said, and there was more laughter.

  Bren couldn’t help it. She felt better. There was something about this group of women that could do that for her without even trying. Without even knowing about Kelsey and Kevin and Gary’s basement band. Without knowing about how beautiful Thailand was and how wild those nights in Rome could be. Without knowing that she had no Christmas tree in her home, no stockings or garland, not even a single drop of eggnog.

  “Seriously, though, I think Tammy Lynn is right. We should try something new,” Teresa finally said.

  “Like what?” Bren asked. “My batting average with ‘new’ isn’t the best.”

  “We could all bring in our favorite dishes and share them,” Joan said. “I could bring creamed corn. Catherine could bring that root beer cake she makes.”

  “Oh! And tamales!” Lulu cried. Teresa nodded vigorously. “We always make tamales for Christmas Eve anyway.”

  “I’ve got a great cranberry salad recipe,” Tammy Lynn said. “I could bring that. And maybe Elwood could come with and make some of his famous Italian cornmeal cookies.”

  They’d all begun standing up again, excited about their new plan.

  “This just sounds like a potluck to me,” Bren said, standing with them, but also more than a little relieved to be off the hook for trying to find something new and exciting to teach them for the next class.

  “We’ll all bring recipes and give fifteen-minute demonstrations,” Teresa said.

  “It will be like team teaching,” Lulu added.

  Tammy Lynn clapped excitedly. “I love it. It’s settled, then. Next Tuesday is potluck night. I’ll tell El.”

  “Let’s stop by the store for root beer,” Cathy said to Joan, and they all began to move toward the door.

  “Wait a minute,” Bren kept saying, but she couldn’t get anyone’s attention. “But that’s not . . . I’d have to ask Paula. . . . That’s going to be a lot of smells in one place . . .” Nobody listened. Instead, they packed up their belongings, shut down their stations, and left in a cluster of excitedly chatting friends.

  “But that doesn’t do anything to solve the problem,” Bren called, just as the door was shutting on the last of them. She sighed. Well, at least she was off the hook about cooking. She’d just wait for Paula to get back and see what she thought about a team-taught potluck night.

  She went to cleaning out her station, completely forgetting about Rebecca until she heard the snap of high heels on the floor, coming toward her.

  “They’re right about one thing,” Rebecca said. “We do need to do something new. But a potluck isn’t the answer.”

  Bren paused, then wet a sponge and began wiping down her station. “I’m afraid I don’t know what is. I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried being nice and inviting her to join us. I’ve tried being firm. I’ve tried acting like I don’t care. Nothing works.”

  “Have you noticed anything peculiar about the woman? The one with the dog?”

  Bren chuckled. “I’ve noticed a lot of things. None of them good.”

  “A coat,” Rebecca said, and when Bren gave her a quizzical look, went on. “She doesn’t wear a coat. Ever. It’s what, forty degrees outside? It’s supposed to snow tomorrow. And she’s outside walking that dog in a flannel shirt. Sometimes in short sleeves only.”

  Bren blinked. She hadn’t noticed it before, but Rebecca was right. In all of her confrontations with the woman, she had never been wearing even so much as a light jacket.

  “You think she doesn’t have one?” Bren asked.

  Rebecca nodded. “It’s totally possible. We’ve done a lot of stories about the elderly who are in need during the wintertime but don’t ever reach out for help. It’s more common than you realize. She’s living alone in that apartment. Who knows what it’s like up there? Maybe she’s really poor, and what’s coming out as grumpy is actually a cry for help?”

  Bren felt a surge of sympathy for the old woman, imagining her apartment filled with ratty old things from decades long past—fat decades of wealth. She envisioned her wrapped in an old quilt, too destitute to afford much heat, eating soup out of a dented can, sometimes sharing her dog’s food because that’s all that was there. That could be her someday. Could be anyone, really. You just never knew.

  “Anyway. I don’t really know what the answer is. She seems pretty determined to shut the place down.” Rebecca cracked a tiny smile—the first one that Bren had seen out of her. “Would be a shame if she succeeded.” She went back to her station and began getting her things together. Bren saw her make a short notation in the notebook and stuff it into her bag.

  She couldn’t help herself. “Speaking of all the stories you’ve done, you aren’t really writing a scathing review of the class, are you?” she asked. She pointed at Rebecca’s purse, where the notebook had been stashed. “Because I’m not a real cook. If you listened to my husband, Gary, I have no business teaching a cooking class at all. I just like butter.” She chuckled at her own lame joke, which, even to her, sounded strange and disjointed. “You’re not also trying to get us shut down . . . ?”

  Rebecca shook her head, pressing her smile into a tight-lipped frown. She looked like she wanted to bolt, but seemed to think better of it, and took several lurching steps toward Bren, pulling her notebook back out of her bag.

  “My mother has Alzheimer’s,” she said. “Early onset. She’s only fifty-five. Some days she doesn’t even know who I am. She can’t remember a thing of the past, and what she does tell us, we never know if it’s real or imagined.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Bren said. “I didn’
t mean to . . .”

  Rebecca waved her off. “No, it’s okay. A lot of people look at me strange, because I am a reporter and I’m always writing in this thing. But the truth is, it’s just a diary. It’s habit to carry one of these around, anyway, because of my job, but I’m off the clock here. And I want to remember everything in my life—all the good things, at least—in case there’s a day that I can’t remember any of it. And in case I have kids someday, they’ll know what my life was like. They’ll know what is a real memory and what is imagined. It sounds silly when I say it out loud. But I’m writing a book to myself, just in case I should ever need to read it.” She rummaged through her purse, then pulled out the notebook and plopped it in front of Bren. “Go ahead, you can take a look.”

  “I don’t need to do that,” Bren said. “I’m so sorry I doubted you.”

  Rebecca opened it to a random page and read. “‘I’ve learned a lot about patience in the kitchen through this class. And maybe these are lessons that transcend the kitchen into real life. You have to work slowly and carefully or you could make a mistake. Yet somehow mistakes don’t seem like mistakes when you’re sharing them. The ladies in the class seem to thrive off of their burned crab cups. It’s like they’re sharing a trauma. It’s humanizing everyone. Mine came out perfect, and in a way I was hoping they’d burned, too, so I could belong.’”

  “Oh,” Bren said softly. “I didn’t . . . I don’t . . .You do belong. . . .”

  “It’s fine,” Rebecca said on a smile. She closed the book. “The fewer friends I have, the better off I am. I can’t imagine how it must feel to my mom to have lost so many friends. Or maybe she doesn’t know. I hope she doesn’t. I’ve kind of been avoiding that subject. Or all subjects with her.” She took a deep breath, let it out. “Anyway, so that’s what I’m doing back there. It will hopefully never be read by anyone. Or maybe it will. But either way it’s important to me to get it all down. Even though it seriously annoys your aunt.”

  Bren rolled her eyes. “Everything seriously annoys Aunt Cathy. Don’t take it personally. And whatever you do, don’t let her talk you into things. Like turduckens.”

  They both laughed.

  “It’s okay, really,” Rebecca said. “I kind of think it’s fun to annoy her. Makes the project even more worthwhile somehow. She’s colorful.”

  “Colorful is a good word for it,” Bren said.

  “So anyway, why don’t I bring matzo ball soup to the potluck? We could add a little dreidel spinning to our holiday cooking class, too, eh?”

  “Sounds like a great plan.”

  But after Rebecca had said good night and thrown on her coat and taken her things with her, leaving Bren to clean up, the self-doubt chased her down again.

  She put away the food and wiped the counters, and then turned off the lights, all except the strand of Christmas lights that ringed the front window. She sat on her stool in the dark and listened to “The Little Drummer Boy”—seriously, did they ever play anything else?—feeling fully and securely like a total failure. Now the class was taking over. That was really what the potluck was code for, wasn’t it? Saving the instructor.

  Even though she knew damn well she could cook an amazing holiday dinner, for some reason she just couldn’t translate it into the Kitchen Classroom. Or maybe she’d just been fooling herself all this time.

  She felt restless. Like she needed to go home and translate all the words on her telephone notepad and look up more, so she could sound worldly and unaffected when her kids called again. Or maybe she needed to go out and buy gifts—tons and tons of gifts, gifts for family and friends and complete strangers—and take them home and wrap them in the expensive heavy-duty paper. Or she needed to buy a tree to decorate and put the gifts under. And a second cat to snooze on the hearth in its romantic glow. A kitten, even.

  Or maybe run around the block or eat a chicken dinner or detail her car or appliqué a sweater.

  Just something. Something that would remind her that she was still here. That Christmas was only one out of 365 chances for success each year, that Thailand was just another country, that wild nights in Rome could happen to her, too, and, by God, that she could belt out “Last Christmas” in a basement just as well as the next guy. Something to prove, even just to herself, that she was alive and participating. That her life mattered and made a difference in this world.

  And that was when she saw it. The door tucked between the Kitchen Classroom and the Hole Shebang swung open with an industrious squeak, and the old woman stepped out. She set the dog on the ground and trailed after him. She coughed twice and turned to brace herself against a gust of wind.

  Rebecca was correct about one thing—they were forecasting a snowstorm. Bren could feel the snow on the air all day. The atmosphere felt wet and heavy and so cold, breathing in made your nostrils feel stiff.

  And yet the woman was out there with no coat.

  Bren sat forward on her stool, hiding in the shadows of the kitchen, wondering if she should do something. Rush outside and wrap the woman in her own coat, perhaps. Invite her inside for a cup of hot cocoa or offer to make her some soup.

  The woman coughed again, leaning hard against her cane. The cough sounded painful; even the little dog looked over his shoulder at her while he stooped to do his business. It was more than Bren could take.

  She went to the front door and opened it, hanging outside, her body immediately tensing against the cold.

  “Excuse me,” she called into the night air. The woman didn’t respond. “Hello?”

  The woman finally turned. A scowl immediately imprinted itself on her face. “What?”

  “I was wondering if you’d like to come inside for some coffee? Or if I can bring you a wrap of some kind?”

  The scowl deepened. “Why would I drink coffee at this time of night?”

  Bren gestured to the sky, and another gust of wind ripped through her, pushing the bangs off her forehead. “To warm up,” she said. “Snowstorm is coming.”

  “I can watch the news myself, thank you very much,” the old woman said. “I know exactly what’s coming.”

  Bren faltered. “I just thought . . . since you’re not wearing a coat . . .” She didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

  “Who are you, the fashion police? What if I like being cold?”

  “Nobody likes being cold,” Bren said, but her words were lost on the wind. She pulled herself back inside the shop and let the door close it out. Her nose tingled with warmth. Despite the sweet potato disasters that had occurred there, it still smelled sweet and comforting in the classroom. She looked on as the old woman turned back to watching the dog squat, coughs racking her body every few minutes. And then, sneakily, the hand that was holding the dog’s leash crept up the woman’s back and very sturdily gave Bren the bird.

  Bren gasped, and then laughed. That was one spiteful old woman. And stubborn.

  But Bren could be stubborn, too.

  No, Rebecca was right—a potluck was not the change this cooking class needed. Not at all. Bren found a piece of paper and a pen, crusted with cracker crumbs at the bottom of her purse, and bent over her counter, writing out a plan.

  She would e-mail everyone before the potluck. She would get everyone on board.

  And then she would see who was flipping the bird to whom.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Happy holidays, Bren,” Tod exclaimed as she walked into the Hole Shebang the next Tuesday on her way home from her very important errand running.

  “They certainly are, aren’t they? What very merry concoctions do you have awaiting me today?”

  Tod raised his eyebrows. “My, you’re in a jolly mood. Things going well next door?”

  “Not even a little bit,” she said, but he was right—she couldn’t pry the smile off her face with a crowbar. Her plan had been set into motion beautifully. To her surp
rise, and excitement, all of the students seemed to be on board. Tonight was the potluck. They were going to learn how to make tamales and root beer cake, and as a bonus they were going to do something nice for someone who honestly didn’t really deserve it. Bren felt like Oprah Winfrey. “But it’s all good. ’Tis the season for giving.” She practically giggle-squealed the last and had to talk herself down, reminding herself that maybe—just maybe—she was the wee-est bit too excited.

  “Indeed,” he said. “Well, we have here a mint jelly cruller. And this is a sweet potato fritter. Delicious. Better than apple by a landslide. Flying off the shelves. Oh, and if you want to really eat outside the doughnut box, you can try my breakfast special.” He pointed at a lumpy monstrosity on the shelf behind him. “It’s got scrambled eggs, sausage gravy, and hash browns inside a glazed exterior.” It sounded horrific, and Bren had begun to think that there just might be something seriously wrong with a man who could create something like that.

  “I’ll just take a chocolate long john,” she said. “Two, actually. I’ll take one home to Gary for a change.” It was a lie and she knew it. Gary didn’t like doughnuts. She would eat it in the car on the way home and then would need to spend an hour laid out flat in the recliner while her stomach tried to make sense of what she’d just done to it. She knew this from experience.

  But she didn’t care, because today was going to be a good day, no matter what Gary liked, or what it did to her stomach.

  After Tod had given her the doughnuts and she’d left the shop, she went directly over to the Kitchen Classroom, where Paula was standing at the head station, paperwork spread out before her.

  “Oh, hey,” Paula said when Bren came in. “I was just going over our new schedule. How do you feel about a class in January? Maybe Healthy Eating for the New Year?” She eyed Bren’s doughnut bag—Bren tried not to see judgment in her look—as she said this, but her smile never wavered.