by Melody Grace
Summer whistled. “If this is your way of buttering me up, it’s working.”
Cooper laughed. “You saw through my plan.” He rested a hand on Poppy’s shoulder affectionately, and Summer watched Poppy tilt her head up to him and smile, her whole face lighting up.
She really was in love.
Summer felt a pang. She hadn’t looked at anyone like that in years—unless you counted her KitchenAid mixer. After the relationship with her ex, Danny, had ended, she’d been too gun-shy to try dating anyone in the culinary world again. And since she met precisely zero other men with her breakneck schedule, that left no time for dating at all.
“So what’s the plan for you two today?” Cooper asked, snagging a pancake from Poppy’s plate.
“I don’t care,” Summer answered. “As long as it has maximum relaxation. And the beach. Ooh, and lobster rolls.”
Poppy laughed. “How about all of the above? We could head up into Sweetbriar, I’ll show you around, pick up some snacks, and then we hit the beach.”
“I’m in,” Summer declared. “Let me go get my suit!”
They drove up the winding lane and parked by the town square. Poppy eagerly showed her around the quaint streets, pointing out the coffee shop, gift stores, and galleries. It was clear that she loved her new home, and Summer could see why.
“We could stop in at the pub and see if Riley’s around,” Poppy suggested, as they strolled in the sunshine. “I think you two would hit it off. He’s blonde and hot and very charming.”
“Thanks, but I’m more for the dark, mysterious type these days,” Summer said. Tall, dark, and British. “Besides, I’m only here for the weekend.”
“For now,” Poppy said with a sideways glance. “But I’ll work on that. Cooper’s not the only one with a secret plan. If I’m moving here, I’m going to need to see you more than once in a blue moon.”
“Well, now your plan’s not so secret anymore!” Summer looked around, taking in the lush green of the square, with its white gazebo and the spires of the church rising up into the leafy green backdrop. “Although, I see why you like it here. It’s so peaceful.”
“No traffic, no smog, no rude pedestrians shoving you out of the way on the sidewalk . . .” Poppy agreed. “Tempted yet?”
“Not unless there’s a Michelin-starred restaurant in need of a chef.”
“Hmm, I’ll have to work on that.”
They strolled over to the gift shop, and Summer was just picking out some cute napkins embroidered with tiny whales when her cellphone rang.
She checked the screen and grimaced. “It’s Chef Andre.”
“Don’t answer!” Poppy cried. “You’re off the clock!”
“I know.” Summer paused, guilty. “But what if there’s an emergency?”
She wavered, torn between freedom and duty. Duty won. She ducked out of the store and answered. “Hello?”
“Where are you?” Chef demanded. “Louis messed up the soufflés, that man is an imbecile. I need you back here, now!”
“It’s my weekend off—” she tried to protest, but Chef yelled right over her.
“There is no time off in my kitchen! You either get back here in time for service tonight, or you can find another place to work, do you understand?”
Summer’s heart dropped. “But I’m hours away!”
“Then you better come tout suite! Rapide!” Andre unleashed a torrent of French that she couldn’t keep up with, then there was silence. He’d hung up.
Summer slowly lowered the phone. Her glimpse of golden sands and lobster rolls disappeared on the salty breeze.
So much for a vacation.
“Let me guess, you have to go?”
She turned and found Poppy in the doorway with her shopping bags.
“I’m sorry,” she sighed. “That man is a toddler, he’ll fire me for sure if he doesn’t get his way—and blacklist me to all his chef friends. I can’t risk disobeying him.”
Poppy was disappointed, Summer could tell, but she gave a smile. “I understand. Another time, maybe. Fourth of July,” she suggested. “You could come for the long weekend. We’ll make s’mores on the beach.”
“Count me in,” Summer said, hugging her, even as she knew the odds were slim to none. Chef Andre always hosted a private party on the Fourth, full of big-shot diners, and she would be spending the night the way she always did: sweating over a hot stove, making two hundred individual mille-feuilles frosted in red, white, and blue.
“Come on, I’ll drive us back,” Poppy said, linking her arm through Summer’s. “And I’ll find the address of this great lobster shack on the highway. You can get one for the road!”
Summer packed up her things and said goodbye, then hit the road again in the delivery van. She looked out of the window longingly as the ocean sparkled along the shore, but there was no time to even stop to dip her toes in the water; she’d be lucky if she made it back to New York in time for dinner service even if she floored it the whole way.
Lobster rolls, on the other hand, were a must.
She turned off the highway, and tried to follow Poppy’s scribbled instructions, but she must have gotten turned around, because before she knew it, she reached a very familiar-looking crossroads. Summer paused, looking around. She could have sworn she’d driven this way before, on her way into Sweetbriar Cove. She reached for her phone to check the GPS, but the battery was dead—she must have forgotten to charge it overnight.
So, which way should she go?
They always did say you should take the road less traveled, so Summer turned right, driving along the road that dipped and wove past open fields and cute old cottages. She was supposed to be keeping the ocean to her right, so she made another turn, down a street marked Blackberry Lane, only to catch a glimpse of a ginger and white ball of fluff, sunning himself on some steps.
It was the kamikaze cat!
Summer pulled the van to a stop. OK, she was definitely lost now. She got out and looked around, trying to get her bearings.
The cat strolled over and rubbed against her ankles. “Oh, so now you’re playing nice.” Summer leaned down and scratched his ears, and was rewarded with a purr. “I should be glad you didn’t try to kill me this time.”
The cat stalked away, jumping up onto the low stone wall and sashaying around the back of the house.
Summer looked up and took the building in for the first time. It was a squat, two-story cottage with a stone facade and two large windows in front, papered over and dusty with age. The letters were faded and peeling, but when she came closer, she could make out the faint script, Fredricks & Sons, Pasties written on the glass.
It had been a shop, once upon-a-time. Summer put her nose to the glass and peered inside, but it was hard to make anything out, just a gloomy front room filled with boxes and old furniture piled in one corner. Summer felt a tug of curiosity. It looked like the place had been deserted for years, if the date on the yellowed newspaper was any indication, but it still looked like something out of a storybook: surrounded with overgrown blackberry bushes, roses growing wild over the low stone wall.
Summer looked around. The lane was empty: nothing but green hedges and the sound of gulls swooping lazily overhead. There was nobody to see her climb onto the low wall and follow the cat’s path around the back of the house.
Wasn’t she just thinking she should be more adventurous? And besides, it wasn’t trespassing if nobody was there to be trespassed against . . .
Summer hopped up onto the wall and followed it around the side of the house. The yard was so overgrown, it was hard to fight her way through the tangle of bushes, but soon she cleared the border, and found herself standing in the middle of a quiet wilderness, barely contained by a crumbling stone wall.
Summer looked around, delighted. She could see rosemary and thyme, apple trees, even the straggly vines of a tomato plant creeping up a broken-down trellis. Someone must have planted the garden carefully once, but years and nature had sent it
sprawling into a riot of flowers and weeds.
And lavender. God, there were bushes of it, spilling over from the flower beds, clustered by the walls, growing wild and conquering everything in its path. Summer inhaled the floral scent, and closed her eyes, and was instantly transported back to a little village in the south of France. The place where she’d learned everything she knew—and loved—about baking.
Every pastry chef worth their soufflé had trained in France. So when Summer decided to defy her mother and go to culinary school, she knew there was only one place to be. She packed up her fraying tote bag and took off for Paris, ready to learn from the best. She slept in youth hostel dorms, picking up shifts at restaurants around the city to pay for night classes at Le Cordon Bleu, and used her vacations to backpack all over the place. With a cheap EuroRail pass and an appetite, she was determined to taste it all: churros in Barcelona, linzertorte in Berlin. If a passing traveler told her about an amazing meal they’d had, she’d pull out a map, hop on a train, and be there within days, crammed at a sidewalk table and digging into a slice of gateau, or sitting on the harbor-front enjoying a bowl of mussels from the morning’s catch. It was how she found herself climbing off the bus in a tiny village in Provence one day, armed only with a scribbled address, and the breathless recommendation of a chef who swore the fresh pain au chocolat were the best he’d ever known.
He was right. One mouthful, and Summer knew she’d found her calling—and her new mentor, in the shape of Madame Celine, a short, round, brisk woman who’d been baking the pastries almost all her life, just like her mother and grandmother before her. She’d taken some convincing, but thanks to Summer’s stubborn enthusiasm (and a well-timed rainstorm that cut all transport going out of the valley), she finally relented and gave Summer a job as her apprentice for the summer.
It couldn’t have been more different from her classical training. At Le Cordon Bleu, they were clear: baking was science. Summer learned to precisely follow every recipe to the letter, but with Madame Celine, there were no recipes. She knew every dish by heart, would improvise on a whim, and any time Summer asked why she was adding marjoram to the apricots, or throwing extra egg yolks into the cake batter, she’d just shrug and say, “Écoute le pain.”
Listen to the bread.
In other words, trust your instincts.
After spending all her life struggling against the rules, it was a revelation for Summer to realize she could simply throw them out. Sure, it led to some disasters (curried chocolate, anyone?) but she soon found that beneath all the noise and distractions, her instincts were good. Somehow, she knew what a dish needed, and how the smallest tweaks could make the flavors sing.
Sugar and butter, eggs and flour: from humble beginnings, a great adventure could begin.
Now, Summer breathed in the lavender and remembered that summer all over again, all the adventure and possibilities that had lain ahead. She wished she could have stayed and explored the garden longer, but Chef Andre was waiting, and if she showed her face a moment after dinner service started, there would be trouble. Still, she couldn’t resist picking an armful of the vivid purple stalks to take with her, to use in a frosting, maybe, or a batch of Madame Celine’s famous butter biscuits, light as air. Then Summer fought her way back through the bramble, said goodbye to the cat, and climbed into the van with a sigh.
Her vacation was over. The real world was waiting again.
4
A week later, and Summer almost wished she’d pitched a tent and stayed right there in the lavender bushes, instead of returning to the fray. It was dinner service on a Friday night, and she was turning out pot au caramels as fast as the double-burner could manage, sweltering in the heat of the steamy kitchen as the sound of clashing pans—and clashing personalities—echoed around her.
“Two duck on three!”
“Fire table six again, it’s not rare enough.”
“What the hell? You said well done!”
Summer kept her head down and focused on not burning the cream. A low simmer, that was all you needed for the silkiest caramel sauce, otherwise the sweet, rich flavor took on a bitter edge, and the whole flavor of the dessert was ruined.
“Non, non, STOP!”
She cringed, ducking out of the way as Andre steamed past. The target for his rage today was the new porter, who cowered by the pile of carrots as Andre unleashed his anger in three different languages about the size of his slicing. “Julienne!” he screamed. “JUL-I-ENNE.”
He threw a handful of carrots in the boy’s face and stormed out. The kitchen didn’t miss a beat, they kept working like nothing had even happened, but the poor assistant looked like he was about to burst into tears.
“It’s OK,” Summer said, taking pity on him. Everyone else was ignoring him; they’d all been there, and they’d all learned just to suck it up and keep working.
Or, in Summer’s case, go cry in the wine cellar and then keep working.
“When he said ‘julienne,’ he really means extra-fine,” she explained. “He likes everything cut slimmer than you probably learned in school.”
“He never said.” The boy’s lip trembled.
“He expects you to read his mind,” she told him. “So you have to watch—every single thing he does, it’s for a reason. And one day, he’ll expect you to just take over without any warning.”
He took a deep breath. “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me, just julienne. Fast.”
He jumped to attention, and Summer turned back to her double-boiler—in time to see the milk froth in a rolling boil. Crap! Now she’d have to throw it out and start again.
She grabbed a pot-holder and hoisted it over to the sink, tipping it all down the drain. Lana, one of the sous-chefs, joined her to rinse a bowl of lettuce. “You shouldn’t let the newbies distract you,” she said dismissively. “They need to learn it on their own, just like we did.”
“And didn’t you wish back then someone had lent a hand?” Summer countered.
Lana shrugged. “Better to figure out you can’t hack it now. If you don’t have the skills, you’ll never make it. At least, not without connections,” she added, with a sideways glance.
Summer blinked, but she didn’t have time to come up with a witty comeback before Lana waltzed back to her station.
Lovely.
She knew what her coworkers thought of her. Her mother’s name loomed large, shadowing all her achievements, and every time she got a word of praise or a rare promotion, she could hear the whispers.
“Must be nice, having mommy call the shots.”
They all assumed Eve was pulling strings behind the scenes, or the chef was angling for an introduction, a chance to grab his own shot at fame. They didn’t know Eve had refused to even let her attend culinary school. “I know what it takes to make a great chef,” she’d told her bluntly, when Summer begged to go. “And you just don’t have it.”
At first, Summer thought she’d just have to prove herself to her mom. Show she was good enough, that she could handle the pressure. She got herself a job at one of the hottest restaurants in the city, doing scut work to learn the ropes. She cooked for her mother every chance she got, even spending time on the set of her TV show to be helpful, tweaking the recipes and suggesting new dishes for the cookbooks. Every time she brought it up again, she hoped that this time, her mother would see her potential. And every time, Eve just gave her that pitying smile and told her not to be foolish.
“You don’t understand the work it takes to build all of this,” she’d said, gesturing around at the lights and cameras and dozens of people working overtime to bring Eve Bloom’s brand of effortless perfection to life. “It’s not all frosting and Easy-Bake Ovens. Soon enough, you’ll get bored and quit. I only want what’s best for you.”
That’s when Summer had realized she’d never convince her mom to support her dreams. She’d just have to make them happen on her own. So, she’d taken her trip to Europe and then found a job he
re in the city with her new talents, putting in the long hours and working her way up every year, until finally Eve Bloom had seemed to realize two things. One, that her daughter was becoming a success, and two, that it made her look good.
Summer could pinpoint the shift right down to the minute. They’d been having dinner out together, on one of her brother’s rare trips back to town, when the head of the Food Channel had interrupted halfway through the meal. Eve had greeted him with a smile, ready to accept his compliments, but instead, he’d turned to Summer.
“I have to tell you, my wife is still raving about those hazelnut madeleines she had at Chez Andre last week. They were delicious.”
“Thank you.” Summer had flushed, surprised.
“Of course they were,” her mom had interrupted. “It runs in the family!”
Now, Eve didn’t miss a chance to boast about her wonderful daughter—or how she’d nurtured her talent all these years. Summer had stopped taking it personally. Her mom loved the spotlight and stole it any chance she got, which is why Summer happily kept her at arm’s length.
But of course, the rest of the kitchen staff didn’t know that. They probably pictured them having cozy dinners together, and testing recipes in Eve’s amazing kitchen (featured in Better Homes and Gardens). So Summer tried even harder to prove she’d gotten her shot based on talent and hard work, and nothing else.
Not that they’d believe her if she let the caramel burn again.
Summer got back to work and made it through the rest of the shift unscathed. She whisked, and stirred, and conjured sugar into caramel perfection, and by midnight, she was utterly beat.
“Coming for a drink?” one of the other sous-chefs asked, as they all grabbed their jackets and stumbled tiredly out the back doors.
Summer shook her head. Usually, they all went to the bar down the block to drink away the stress of service, but tonight, she was too tired to even make it that far. “I can’t keep my eyes open,” she yawned, buttoning her coat against the night chill. I’ll be lucky if I don’t fall asleep on the train.”
