When in Doubt, Add Butter

by Beth Harbison

  So I sat there, on the cold, hard chair in the ER, breathing shallowly as the blood pressure gauge tightened around my biceps, and trying not to look at the man sitting next to me, who was growing more important to me by the moment.

  When I looked back on it, I realized that the moment I saw him at the bar, something about him had struck me. I’d never gone in much for the ideas of fate and soul mates and things like that, yet as soon as I’d laid eyes on him, something inside me said this was the One.

  Then, of course, he’d disappeared and I thought I might never see him again, but maybe, on some deeper level, I knew even then that that wasn’t true. That he would be part of my life, in my head and in front of my eyes, for a long, long time to come. I felt I’d know that face forever.

  I still feel that.

  And sitting in that sterile, impersonal ER, something about his quiet, strong presence both reassured and disquieted me. I was glad he was there. Profoundly glad.

  As if reading my mind, he reached over and took my hand in his.

  I looked at him.

  “This will all be okay,” he said. “I can’t explain it, but I’m sure of it. It will be okay.”

  I tried to smile. Yes, deep down I thought he was right. But my brain always questioned my gut. “I hope you’re right,” I said, and twined my fingers in his.

  The triage nurse declared my blood pressure fine and went off to find a room they could install me in for the next—if past history was any indicator—four or five endless hours.

  When she’d left, Paul leaned closer to me. “Look, this is too right for everything to go wrong now. It’s like when I showed up at my door that day, and it was you. All along it had been you. And somehow, it wasn’t an outright shock. It was more like spending an hour on a math problem, and then getting the answer. And then the answer is really obvious, and you feel like kicking yourself.” He shrugged. “It was more like that.”

  It was the perfect analogy. “I know what you mean.” The electronic doors to triage swung open, and a woman in scrubs walked past. “That’s kind of how I felt, too.”

  “So the baby … I should have been shocked or maybe felt like my whole world was being shaken like an Etch A Sketch. But instead, it felt like … it feels right somehow. Something about a birth control failure, versus failure to use any birth control, makes this feel more”—again, he shrugged—“meant to be, I guess.”

  “I hope so.” I started to cry. I couldn’t help it. It felt like so much was at stake.

  “Hey, come on.” He pulled me closer to him and kissed the top of my head. “Don’t cry. Too much stuff had to happen just right to get us here. It isn’t all going to break now.”

  I closed my eyes against an onslaught of burning tears. “I hope you’re right. Please be right.”

  “Miss Craig?”

  I looked up. The nurse was back.

  “We’re ready to take you to your room.”

  * * *

  Six hours later, I was home, resting on the couch with the uncomfortable knowledge that I had an “incompetent cervix.”

  I mean, seriously, of all the insulting terms, incompetent?

  But the good news was that the doctor was going to be able to do a procedure to fix it. Everything was going to be fine, though I’d have to take it a bit easier than I’d planned to, and I had had the last wake-up call I needed in order to realize just how much I wanted this baby.

  Just how determined I was to have him or her, no matter what.

  I was going to make it work.

  No, we were going to make it work. One way or the other.

  I didn’t even really know Paul. But having him there, holding me and looking strong but worried—nothing could have soothed me more.

  “Thanks for bringing me in and waiting with me.”

  “I wouldn’t have had it any other way.” He swept a strand of hair from my forehead and looked very seriously at me.

  I nodded and looked at him, letting his presence comfort me. I took a deep breath and let it out carefully. It wasn’t until then that I realized there were tears in my eyes.

  I was in love.

  Paul gave a small squeeze to my hand and stroked my hair. “So,” he said. “How are you feeling now?”

  “Fine, I think.” I bit my lower lip. “But that really scared me. At the same time, it made me realize, even more, just how much I want this baby. And that’s no command for you to perform,” I amended quickly. “You can be as involved or as uninvolved as you’re comfortable being. But I want you to know that, no matter what, this child is loved.”

  He looked at me for a long time in silence. Finally, he gave a small shake of his head and said, “I want this, too. We’re going to have to figure out the logistics, of course. We can’t have an entire country between us, that’s clear.”

  “But—”

  He put a finger to my lips. “Don’t worry about that now. We’ll figure it out. I’m not going to let you go.”

  A tear went down my cheek, and I could feel them welling in both eyes now. “I’m glad.”

  I don’t know if I’d ever felt so genuine or honest.

  Or, honestly, so good.

  “So we’ll give it a go?” Paul asked. “You and me?”

  “Yes.” I tightened my grip on his hand. “You and me.”

  And baby makes three.

  Epilogue

  One Year Later

  Her name is Grace.

  She weighed eight pounds seven ounces at birth, and she was—and is—absolutely perfect. Barely cries, smiles and laughs all the time, and sleeps straight through the night. She has the light blond hair I had throughout my childhood, and she has her father’s eyes, a fact that makes my heart sing every time I look at her.

  Or at him.

  Which is every day, on both counts, because after two months of “trying to figure out what to do” while commuting between Seattle and D.C., we finally just decided life is too short not to take chances—especially on things that are so big and so wonderful.

  So I resigned from the jobs I had left and moved on out to Seattle.

  I haven’t regretted it for a moment.

  I do miss my weekly visits with Lex and Willa, of course, but I still see Paul on Tuesdays (and Wednesdays and Thursdays and you get the point), but I don’t spend too much time missing the weird energies of the Olekseis’ or the Van Houghtens’ households.

  Though it has to be pointed out, the Oleksei energy is coming, at least in part, from a pretty legit mental force. About a month after I left, Vlad made all the papers by predicting—and preventing, with the help of his burly sons—an assassination attempt on the Russian ambassador during a reception in D.C. You probably heard about it; it was all over the place. PSYCHIC SAVES AMBASSADOR with all the details of police who were too skeptical to believe it.

  By that time, I wasn’t surprised. Vlad’s accuracy in his predictions with me was pretty startling. Enough so that, as tempted as I am at times to consult with him about my future, I’m mostly nervous about knowing too much.

  Willa, on the other hand, has become a big fan of his. No, he can’t predict lottery numbers or the hand someone will play in poker—there are no crazy financial advantages to seeing a psychic—but his guidance has actually really helped her move toward her goals, though whether that’s because he’s right or because she believes it and moves forward on her own, I can’t say. Nevertheless, I stayed in town long enough to get her cooking her own meals, and it seems she really excelled at it. She is now within twenty pounds of her weight goal.

  On top of which, she convinced Lex to give more space and publicity to the plus-size department at Simon’s. He jokes that it brings in more people who want to nosh at the store’s satellite Filigree eatery, though I think he’s right.

  The best part of that is that it got Willa out from behind her computer and into the real world, dealing with people as the store’s unofficial buyer for that department. When I first moved, she and I played Scra
bble online quite a bit, as she was still homebound and I was bedbound. But I noticed that, as her ideas took root, she was on less and less, which I took as a good sign.

  When I saw her at a cookbook signing at Filigree—one of Simon’ Department Store’s bestselling items of all time, and they had the Bop It back when that was the Christmas gift of the year way back when—I might not have known it was her if she hadn’t been updating me with pictures all along.

  “You know,” she confided, “your recipe for Cajun Chicken Pasta? On page twenty-eight?” She nodded toward the book I’d just signed for her.

  “Yes?”

  “Totally works with skim milk instead of heavy cream.” She nodded proudly. “Not that I tried the cream version. I’m sure in a blind taste test that’s the one I’d prefer, but skim works!”

  I imagined the dish, using milk in the pan with the chicken fond, sun-dried tomatoes, oregano, and blackening spice, and could see where the milk would reduce into a nice thick sauce. “I’m going to have to try that,” I told her. “I’ve still got a few stubborn pounds to lose.” More like ten, but I knew I’d be doing a lot of running around as soon as Grace started to walk.

  “You look great,” Willa said. “Really! God, don’t think for a moment you need to lose any weight.”

  “It’s true,” a woman said behind her. “You do look great.”

  I smiled at the woman. “Thanks. I appreciate it.” I turned my attention back to Willa.

  “Maybe you were too thin before,” the woman said.

  Before? Before when? Who the hell was this woman? She had dirty blond hair (the color, not the quality of hygiene), a broad, lineless face, and she was wearing a patterned wrap dress and eating a small bag of Simon’s organic potato chips.

  Barbecue flavor.

  Willa stepped aside, casting me a puzzled look, and the woman moved forward and took a book out from under her arm. “You can just sign this to me. I’m not with Peter anymore, as you might imagine.”

  Oh my God.

  It was Angela.

  Angela plus forty pounds. Which made her approximately normal, by the way. She looked fantastic, if unrecognizable.

  I was grateful I didn’t have to ask her name. “I didn’t know,” I told her honestly, though I could imagine all kinds of reasons she might have left Peter. “What happened?”

  She looked surprised. But surprise registering in now bright blue eyes instead of the hollowed sockets she’d once had looked good on her. “You didn’t hear?”

  “I didn’t tell you?” Willa added, then glanced self-consciously at Angela.

  “No, what happened?”

  “My husband”—Angela straightened her back—“was caught with an underage prostitute in Georgetown.”

  “On the Exorcist Stairs,” Willa said with a nod.

  “Appropriately enough, yes,” Angela confirmed.

  The Exorcist Stairs are on M Street next to a gas station. The key scene where the priest falls down them in the movie The Exorcist both freaked us all out as kids and compelled us to go visit the steps at night.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said, gaping at Angela. “I’m sorry.”

  She waved the notion away. “I should have seen it coming a mile away. My marriage wasn’t working. My life wasn’t working.” She gave a dry laugh. “God knows my diet wasn’t working.” She ate a chip and raised the bag to me. “I’m a lot happier now, I can tell you that.”

  “There’s onion powder in those, you know,” I said with a smile.

  She shook her head. “I checked.” Then she gave a self-effacing shrug. “Some old habits die hard.”

  “How is Stephen?” I asked.

  “Incredible,” she said. “He’s doing great, despite the circumstances. I put him in the public school down the road, so now he has tons of friends in the neighborhood and he seems really happy.” She hesitated, then said, “Listen, I owe you an apology. When I saw that video of Peter and you, I … I don’t know, I went a little crazy. I couldn’t stand the idea of you being perfect to him, doing everything right, looking great, and outdoing me in every conceivable way. It was my fault you didn’t get more work at the club. I did everything I could to stop people from hiring you.”

  She looked so shamed that it was hard to be angry. I’d known it was her, and I’d long since realized my life ended up a million times better than it was before or would have been, even with triple the country club jobs. “I know,” I said to her. “It’s okay.”

  “I really want to make it up to you. Can I recommend you now?” She looked at the book, then at me. “I guess that’s a dumb question. You’ve gone way beyond the club now.”

  I smiled. “But thanks for offering.”

  “Tell me, where’s your little one? I heard you had a baby girl.”

  “She’s—” I looked across the room and saw Paul heading toward us with Grace in the football hold. He’d read a book called Hold It Like a Football … Just Remember Not to Spike It in preparation for the birth and now prided himself on his ways with the baby. “Here she comes now.”

  Willa and Angela turned to look, and I heard them both take in a breath.

  “She’s beautiful,” Angela said, and looked into my eyes for perhaps the first time ever in all the time I’d known her. “That’s the most important thing right there. That baby. The hot man with her is just icing.”

  Which she probably eats now, by the way.

  So everyone turned out okay, whether because they needed me (as in Paul and Grace’s case) or because they needed to take care of themselves (Willa and Angela) or their countrymen (Vlad). But the bottom line is that we all still had each other, for better or worse, if we wanted each other.

  Speaking of for better or worse, now I have a wedding to plan. Not my own—Paul and I got married in a civil ceremony the week I moved to Seattle—but Willa’s. See, as soon as she started going in to Simon’s most days, Lex and Terry (whose relationship remains unclear to me) decided to fix her up with Sam Frost, a guy who’d been working in the suit department since he was eighteen. He never goes near the computer, and the only thing he’ll watch on TV is the five o’clock news on Channel 4. But they make it work.

  Sometimes in life, all you need is a little hope, a lot of courage, and—oh yes—butter.

  Also by Beth Harbison

  Secrets of a Shoe Addict

  Shoe Addicts Anonymous

  Hope in a Jar

  Thin, Rich, Pretty

  Always Something There to Remind Me

  About the Author

  Beth Harbison is the New York Times bestselling author of Always Something There to Remind Me; Thin, Rich, Pretty; Hope in a Jar; Secrets of a Shoe Addict; and Shoe Addicts Anonymous. She grew up in Potomac, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., and now divides her time between that suburb, New York City, and a quiet home on the Eastern shore. Visit www.bethharbison.com.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  WHEN IN DOUBT, ADD BUTTER. Copyright © 2012 by Beth Harbison. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Cover photograph by Rita Maas

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Harbison, Elizabeth M.

  When in doubt, add butter / Beth Harbison. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-312-59909-6 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-250-01502-0 (e-book)

  1. Cooks—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.A564W47 2012

  813’.54—dc23

  2012007423

  e-ISBN 9781250015020

  First Edition: July 2012

 

 

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