by Sey, Susan
“There’s also the diamond wedding ring I’d planned to give you upon your retirement, and an open-ended plane ticket to the south of France. I know better than to rush you, but one day you’ll wake up and you’ll be ready. When you are, go. And be happy, Katie. I love you.”
Bel’s throat closed. She reached over and touched Kate’s knee, but the woman simply gazed at the far wall as if the room and all its inhabitants had ceased to exist. Bel looked up at Ford.
“Is that it?”
He laid the paper down. “That’s it.”
She glanced again at Kate, who didn’t appear to be even breathing. “Kate?” She stood and put a tentative hand on the woman’s shoulder.
“Could I have a moment please?” Kate’s voice was as composed as her face. “Alone?”
“Oh. Um, sure.” Bel turned to the assembled family but they were already on their feet and pelting toward the door. Evidently Bel wasn’t alone in her wish to avoid witnessing whatever came next between those two. But once she gained the hall, she paused. Glanced back and watched with a dull pulse of surprise as Kate—cool, aloof, no-nonsense Kate—toed off her Italian leather pumps and climbed into the bed beside Bob. She laid herself alongside him, taking meticulous care not to jostle the morphine drip, slipped her hand into his and pressed her face into his shoulder.
Bob didn’t open his eyes, but a smile ghosted over his dry lips. A smile so peaceful and resigned and grateful that it hit Bel like an unexpected punch. Tears sprang into her eyes and she all but fled down the stairs.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
An hour later, Bel was scooping pastry flour into her favorite mixing bowl at the island counter. Across from her, James pitted a small fortune of off-season cherries. “God, that guy’s fast.” He nodded at his iPad and Team Argentina’s star defender.
“Fast as you?”
“Well, I’m ten years older than he is,” James demurred.
“Ten years sneakier.”
“Well, yeah.” He grinned. “I’ll be taking this young sir to school shortly. But it still pays to know which way he likes to zig when a striker zags.”
Kate stepped into the kitchen, silent and pale. James leapt to his feet. “Hey, Miss Kate.” He wiped his hands on a dish towel. “You and Bob have a nice chat?”
“No. He’s dying.”
James shot a swift look at Bel. “I know it, ma’am. And I’m sorry.”
“He won’t make it to Thanksgiving,” Kate said calmly. “I doubt he’ll make it through the night.”
James lifted a brow at Bel. She shrugged back. She’d had the same feeling. They all had. And now that Kate had paid her respects, it was likely that Bob would just let go. She’d heard of things like that happening.
“I think Bob was pretty clear about his wishes,” Bel said carefully. “Thanksgiving is on whether he’s with us or not. And he expects you to be there.”
“I know.” Kate smiled and Bel had never seen anything so devoid of humor.
“You’ll honor the invitation then?”
“Of course. To do otherwise would be rude.” Kate walked briskly into the kitchen and flicked an apron off the row of pegs next to the stove. “Now, what are we doing here?” She lifted a brow at the sprawl of ingredients covering the generous island.
James caught Bel’s eye and looked a question. She gave him a tiny nod toward the door and he all but sprinted for it.
“Sour cherry pies with an almond-scented crust,” Bel told her as the door swished shut on James’ hasty escape. “Bob’s favorite.”
“Oh?” Kate slipped the apron over her head and Bel stared. How on earth did a woman share a man’s bed for twenty years without knowing what kind of pie he liked? “Heavens.” Kate eyed the mountain of cherries James had half-pitted. “How many people are coming on Thursday?”
“I’m not baking for Thanksgiving.” She met Kate’s gaze evenly. “I’m baking for the wake.”
“I see.” Kate’s didn’t flinch and Bel wanted to slap that serene composure off her face. “How many mourners are you anticipating?”
Bel shrugged. “Hell if I know. Bob knew a lot of people. I’m just going to bake until I feel done.” She jerked her chin at James’ vacated seat. “If you want to help, pit the rest of those cherries. If you don’t, there’s the door.”
Kate approached the mountain of darkly glistening cherries and took up the pitter. Bel checked her recipe, surveyed the mound of flour in the bowl, then made a vague attempt at mental math.
“Which recipe are you using?” Kate asked as her hands began the swift, economical ballet of cherry pitting.
“That one.” Bel nodded toward a stained and tattered index card under a magnet on the fridge. “We used it on the summer harvest show two years ago, remember?”
Kate squinted at it, then glanced at Bel’s bowl. Her brows shot up as she took in the sheer amount of flour. “Good heavens, you must be tripling the recipe!”
Bel shrugged. “At least.”
Kate shook her head. “Belinda. You know how touchy recipes can be about doubling, and this one in particular is—”
“It’ll be fine, Kate,” Bel said. “Trust me. I’ve done this before.”
Kate went back to pitting. “As you like.”
“Thank you. I like it fine.”
Bel grappled with ratios for a few more seconds but her brain just wasn’t up for the work out. So she tossed in some salt, cut in what felt like enough butter and an equal amount of shortening. A pinch of baking powder. She finished it off with a single drop of white vinegar and the merest dash of almond extract. Just until it smelled right.
Then she dribbled in a little cold water, folded gently until it came together, then set aside the wooden spoon to work it bare-handed. After a few minutes she dashed a stray hair out of her eyes with a floury wrist, then gave the dough an experimental pat. She hefted it out of the bowl and held it up to the light.
“Good,” she muttered to herself. “Nice texture, good marbling.” She offered it to Kate for a pinch. “What do you think of this? Too soft? I don’t want it to tear, but I need a good drape in the pans.”
Kate frowned at her. “If you’d simply followed the recipe as written, Belinda, you wouldn’t have to ask.”
Bel ignored her. “A little more flour, I think. A dusting.” She shook a fine sprinkle of flour onto her marble-topped pastry board and gently worked it into her crust, careful not to over-exert the dough. Too much handling developed the gluten fibers and the next thing you knew you were chewing your crust like a cow chews cud. It should melt, like angel wings, in your mouth.
And then she felt it. That perfect combination of give and spring under her hands, that elusive melding of resilience and delicacy. “There,” she said to Kate, beaming. “Perfect. It was touch and go there for a minute but—”
“This,” Kate said, her voice sharpened to an icy edge, “is exactly why you will never take over my show.”
Bel turned to stare, triumph forgotten. “Excuse me?”
“This.” Kate waved an elegant hand at the entire scene before her—the ball of dough on the counter, the flour streaked across Bel’s face, up her sleeves. The gluey crud under her fingernails and crusting the face of her watch. “You do this all the time.”
“I do what all the time?”
“Improvise.” Kate dismissed the whole of what Bel had just accomplished with a single, disdainful word.
“Hey, a perfect pie crust is nothing to sneeze at,” Bel said, stung.
Kate looked away from the lump of dough on the counter. “I’m sure it’s lovely,” she said. “But I don’t sell improvisation. I sell recipes. Exact, time-tested, bullet-proof formulas that women can count on to work every single time so long as they respect the recipe.”
“But, Kate,” Bel said, baffled. “No recipe is that good. Flours are like fingerprints. I mean, at first they all look the same but when you get into them, they’re so different. All those different strains of wheat, all the di
fferent grades of grind? Different tolerances for liquid, for acid, for heat, for fats? A recipe—I mean, it’s a great place to start, but eventually you have to trust yourself. You have to give yourself permission to believe what your hands are telling you above what the recipe says.”
Kate shook her head hard. “No. It’s better to accept small deviations in quality than to risk ruining the whole effort.”
“But why?” Bel spread her floury hands. “Why should we teach people to accept tough crust when all it costs to be wrong is a few cups of flour and a stick of butter?”
“It’s not about flour, Belinda. It’s about consistency,” Kate said coldly. “It’s about delivering a dependable product. It’s about trust.”
Bel gazed at her with dawning realization. All these years, she thought in wonder, all this time, she’d had Kate totally wrong. She’d assumed Kate’s beautiful manners, her exquisite taste and unshakeable calm were an outward expression of an inward serenity. A serenity Bel had envied with her whole soul. But it was just the opposite.
“This isn’t about your brand,” she said slowly. “It’s about control, isn’t it? It’s about imposing order on a disorderly world. A world of chaos and hurt and terrible danger. A world where—”
A world where cancer could defeat a guy like Bob.
But she didn’t say that. She didn’t need to. It lay between them like the Grand Canyon. Neither of them missed it.
She took a half-step forward. Good God, how had she missed this? Hadn’t she spent her entire life trying to accomplish the same thing? Trying to wring the risk out of an impossibly threatening world? How had she not recognized that same desperate effort in Kate?
“You’re afraid.” She put out a hand toward the older woman. “Oh, Kate, you don’t need to be—”
“Yes, I do.” Something tense and leashed vibrated in Kate’s voice, something that had Bel’s hand freezing in the air between them. Then whatever iron-clad control had held her together all these years in such prim, proper order snapped. A black rage seeped through the cracks and Bel could feel the molten heat of it on her own skin. “I absolutely do, and do you want to know why?”
Bel nodded, gazing at her in mute fascination.
“Because Bob’s dying. He’s dying, Belinda. He’ll be gone by morning. But all this?” She waved her hands in a tight circle, taking in Bel didn’t know what. Everything, she supposed. Hunt House. Her career. Her health and the thirty or more years she had left to enjoy it all by herself. “All this is still right here. I was right.” She fired the word like it was a bullet, a weapon she could wield against the grief. “I was right to choose it over his goddamn ring. I was right to stay here instead of flying off to the south of fucking France.” She gave a jagged chuckle and shook her head. “France. My God.”
Then her eyes went hot and narrow, and she took a menacing step toward Bel. “So you can sit here and improvise all you like. I prefer recipes, and I won’t apologize for that. Not to you, not to him—” She stabbed a finger at the ceiling, toward Bob and his death bed. “—not to anybody. I have nothing to apologize for. I made my choices and I’m satisfied.”
“Are you?” Bel asked softly. “Are you really?”
“Yes.” She jerked at her apron strings until they gave and she yanked the thing off over her head. “Good night, dear.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
As usual, Kate had been right. Bob didn’t see Thanksgiving. He passed away quietly and without drama on Wednesday morning, Bel holding one hand, James holding the other. Drew and Audrey took turns keeping Jillian otherwise occupied, and Will, in deference to Bob’s wishes, refrained from breaking out of rehab. Barely.
Kate paced the gardens between their houses, unable or unwilling to bear witness.
Bel served Thanksgiving dinner the following day at three o’clock, exactly as Bob had wished. They all sat down—Kate included—to a meal nobody wanted, capped with picture-perfect slices of sour cherry pie with the almond scented crust.
The next morning, Bel embarked on the business side of death. She wasn’t surprised to learn there was one. Everything was business in the end, wasn’t it? Kate would have told her that, and happily. But she was surprised at how grateful she was for the work.
Because, despite the solid anchor of James’ love, she still felt disconcertingly adrift. She’d let go of the old dream—Kate Every Day was off the table and she was okay with that—but she hadn’t fallen in love with a new dream yet. Wasn’t really ready to, if she was perfectly honest with herself. So she stayed busy and thanks be to Bob for the one last gift.
She spent her days sorting and filing, calling and emailing, making lists and checking items off them. And every night she baked. Christmas cookies, mostly. ‘Twas the season, after all. She baked cookies by the dozen, everything from humble Russian tea cakes to elaborately decorated sugar cookies to deep fried Norwegian rosettes. She grieved in her kitchen, and everything she baked tasted of love and sorrow. Which—to Bel’s mind—suited Christmas completely. She’d always thought the Jesus story was sort of a mixed bag when you got right down to it.
And when it was finally over, when she’d filed the last paper, signed the last form, and closed the last account, she brewed up gallons of the strongest, blackest coffee she could find. (Unless it supported a spoon at a perfect vertical, Bob hadn’t considered it coffee.) She bought half a dozen antique platters with gold edges and tiny roses, and piled them high with the most perfect cookies of her hundreds. She sliced into her sour cherry pies. Then she flung open the Annex doors to everybody Bob had ever known, met or worked with.
The doorbell rang for hours—Johnny Cash’s “Wayfaring Stranger” which Bel didn’t know but James assured her was perfect. She accepted hug after handshake after air kiss, many from people she’d never even met but who had loved Bob and needed somebody to console. Finally, when her throat was too tight to even murmur thank you so much for coming, she snatched up an empty cookie platter and escaped to the kitchen.
She was deliberating over the placement of the Russian tea cakes when James pushed through the kitchen doors.
“Hey, Bel.”
“Hey.” She smiled sheepishly. “I ran away.”
“No shame in it.” He ambled her way. “Some crowd.”
“Bob was a popular guy.”
He hooked a warm hand around the nape of her neck and comfort slid warm into her veins. He pressed his forehead to hers and she released her first full breath in hours. “How you holding up, hon?”
She shrugged against the now-familiar swell of tears. “I miss him.”
“Me, too.”
“Kate didn’t show.”
“Did you expect her to?”
Her throat was too tight to even sigh. “I don’t know. I hoped.”
The doorbell pealed yet again and James smiled. “Ah, the man in black.”
She sighed and pushed the platter of cookies into his hands. “Here we go again. Put those on the sideboard, would you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Bel excused herself through the crowd while James offered his platter left and right in her wake. She finally reached the door and pulled it open. Then she simply stared.
“Belinda!” Vivi sailed in, draped beautifully in black. Her hat was massive and airy all at the same time, a mournful wedding cake of lace and tulle. She flung her arms around Bel just like she had at the Fox Hunt Ball. “Oh you poor, darling girl! Look at you! You’re so gaunt.”
James handed his platter to a startled hockey player and arrived at her side within split seconds. “Hey, Ms. Pietrantoni,” he said with that easy charm of his. Bel’s lips were too numb to force out a single word.
Please, it’s Vivi.” Her mother gazed gravely at him but kept Bel’s cold hands. “She’s not eating well, is she?” She ran a dismayed glance over Bel’s neat black suit. “James, you must make sure she’s taking care of herself!” She blinked tear-brightened eyes. “I know I haven’t much influence over Bel
inda but she’ll listen to you, I know she will! You must promise me. Promise me you’re looking after her!”
“I am, ma’am.” He patted her shoulder. Bel stared helplessly, her pulse thudding ominously in her ears. She wasn’t going to pass out, was she?
Vivi drew in a shuddering breath, released it and looked around the packed great room. “Oh, dear. I’m not late, am I?” She offered Bel a tremulous smile but satisfaction was rich in her voice. “I’d hate to cause a scene.”
James eyed her hat. “I’m sure.”
Bel snapped back to herself. Oh, hell, no. This woman was not hijacking Bob’s funeral. Bel could tolerate a lot but that was beyond enough. So move, damn it. Do something.
“You won’t cause a scene,” Bel assured her. It was amazing how calm she sounded. How cool and rational. She took her mother’s elbow and drew her to the still-open door. “Because you’re leaving now.”
“Oh, but Bel!” Vivi gazed up with huge, hurt eyes, but Bel knew her mother. The hurt was a thin layer slapped over eager appetite. Vivi loved nothing more than a scene. “I know we’ve had our differences, darling, but you must know I wouldn’t allow you to walk through this tragedy, to bear your grief, alone!”
“Vivi.” James stepped forward, gently disengaged Bel from her mother’s grip. He folded her tiny hand in his and smiled warmly down at her. “Actually, I’m glad you’re here. I wonder if you could come into the study for a moment.”
Bel’s heart took a sudden unpleasant lurch. Déjà vu. “James, I don’t want—”
“I know.” He met her eyes evenly and she sucked in a sharp, focusing breath. Because what she saw there wasn’t I’m sorry or Grow up or even Come on, Bel. What she saw there was Trust me. Which she did, completely. So she just nodded and stood silently as James offered Vivi his arm.
Triumph was a split-second flash over Vivi’s beautiful face, covered almost immediately with sorrow and dignity. Then her mother sailed into the crowd on James’ arm like a grief-stricken prom queen.
He gave no signal that Bel could see, didn’t speak to anybody he passed. But somehow Bel found herself leading a parade into the study that included Drew and Audrey, Ford and Annie. Vivi sank gracefully onto the settee before the massive desk and Drew snicked the doors shut behind them.
