“What’s the price of your silence?”
“Why, I don’t know.” She tilted her head, as if thinking. “Certainly I couldn’t be expected to squander an opportunity like this on something trivial. I’ll have to give it some serious thought.” She nodded solemnly. “Oh, yes. This needs to be good. I’m going to have to get back to you.”
“Take your time,” he told her. “I’ll be around for a few more days.”
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“I’m always hungry.” He started to glance around at the stacks of cookies.
“Uh-uh,” she warned him. “Don’t even think about it.”
“What did you have in mind?”
She went to the refrigerator and opened it. “I have soup. And corn bread.”
“What kind of soup?”
“Chicken rice and cream of broccoli.”
“Either is fine.”
“Really?” She looked over the top of the door at him. “I’d have expected you to shy away from the broccoli.”
“I don’t shy away from much.”
“Great.” She took a container out of the fridge. “We’ll have the chicken.”
She moved the cookie trays from the stove top and found a pan into which she spooned the soup. While it heated she cleaned off a spot at the table and set two places. Grady sniffed the air and looked into the pan, where chunks of chicken were warming in a fragrant yellow broth thick with rice.
“This smells homemade,” he observed.
“You get points for that,” she told him.
He shrugged. “Do I lose points if I admitted I sometimes make soup for myself at home?”
“Actually, that would earn extra extra points. I think it’s great when a guy can make stuff. It says a lot about him.”
“Like what?”
“Like, he can take care of himself. Guys who can’t do for themselves…” She made the thumbs-down sign. “And it says that he’s not hung up on some macho image of himself.” She smiled. “Too mucho macho…” Another thumbs-down. “Besides, a guy who can make his own soup will never have to depend on a woman-or worse, wait for a woman to do it for him, and that is very liberating, as far as I’m concerned. I really like a guy who does things for himself.”
“I feel the need to confess I only know how to make two kinds of soup.”
“Which two?”
“Potato, and beef with vegetables.”
“Good ones. Nothing to be ashamed about there.” The soup began to boil and she turned down the heat. “Seriously. I’m impressed.”
“Thanks, but you should know that liberating someone else never entered my mind. Winters are harsh where I live. You can be snowed in for a long time. There was a clear choice between learning how to cook and starving to death.”
“Whatever the reason, I like it.” She brought the pan over to the table and spooned soup into the bowls. “I’ve known too many men who expected women to do everything for them. From my stepfathers right down to my…”
She paused. “Well, let’s just leave it at that.” She placed the pan back on the stove, then returned to the table with a plate of corn-bread squares and sat across from Grady. “Did you teach yourself to cook after you went to Montana?”
“No, actually, our mom died when we were all fairly young. Our dad never seemed to get the hang of getting home in time to make dinner for us kids.” He hastened to add, “I’m not criticizing him. He was in the Bureau and passed up several promotion opportunities so that he could be home most nights, but he rarely made it by dinnertime and he wasn’t much for putting meals together once he got there.”
“So who cooked for you kids?”
“Sometimes one of our aunts came over, but most of the time, our older brother cooked dinner. Mia was too young when Mom first passed away. Mia never did like to cook.”
“I think she still avoids it as much as possible. Beck is pretty good, though, and Hal is even better.” She stirred the soup to cool it. “I learned to cook early because I grew up in a home where I learned that if I wanted to eat, most nights I’d have to take care of myself.”
“Did your mother work?”
“Sometimes. Mostly when she was between marriages.” Her smile was touched with a bit of irony. “Mom was never one to do for herself what she could get someone else to do for her, so she was fine with me taking over.”
“I see.” He saw that, to her credit, Vanessa wasn’t interested in following Mom’s example.
“She also liked to go out after work, and sometimes she forgot that she had a child at home.”
She grew quiet and seemed to be concentrating on the rice in her soup. They ate lunch mostly in silence after that, and returned to baking as soon as they’d finished eating. By late afternoon, they’d completed their share of the wedding cookies. Vanessa mixed up a batch of glaze and frosted a few cookies, which she left out on the counter to dry.
“I’ll try to stack them when I get back tonight to see if they stick together,” she told Grady as she checked the time. “Meanwhile, we’re due for the rehearsal in a little more than an hour.”
He glanced at his watch. “I better get back to the Inn. Andy was going to stop by for me at six forty-five.”
She grabbed several cookies from the counter, wrapped them in a napkin, and handed them to him with a smile. “For your service.”
“Thanks. I was wondering how I was going to manage snitching a few.”
“You’ll have to let me know how they measure up to your mom’s.” She walked along with him to the front door. “Thank you so much for giving me a hand today. If you hadn’t come over, I’d be up all night trying to finish my quota.”
“I was glad to help,” he said, and realized he meant it.
She unlocked the door and walked outside with him, pausing to deadhead a tulip here and there.
“Well, I guess I’ll see you later.” He paused at the end of the walk. “Thanks for lunch.”
“You’re welcome.” She straightened up, a handful of dead petals in one hand, and dazzled him with a smile. “Thanks again for your help.”
He nodded and began his walk back toward town, thinking that everything he’d assumed about her had been pretty much wrong. He chastised himself for being as bad as Mia, making assumptions based on incomplete information. He had to admit that, at second glance, he’d found nothing fluffy about Vanessa. She’d come across as independent and strong, if somewhat guarded, but a woman who stood on her own two feet. He couldn’t help but wonder what else he might find if he got the chance to take an even closer look. He almost wished he was going to be around a little longer.
Funny the way some things come back to you, he thought. Some memories come when you hear a certain song, some with the sight of something that reminds you of another place, and sometimes, like today, with the hint of something that takes you to another time. Until today, he hadn’t even realized how closely he associated lemons in general-and those lemon cookies in particular-with his mother and his childhood. Maybe it was because he’d lost her when he was young, but one of his most vivid memories was of them all in the kitchen when it was time to bake, with the three boys and Mia around the table, each with a job to do. Brendan was the oldest, so he always got to break the eggs. Andy got to measure the flour and sugar, Grady got to cut out the cookies, and Mia got to pick them up off the table and place them on the cookie sheet. There had been an innocence to those times, a closeness to each other and to their mother that had held them together for years after they lost her.
Mia remembers, too, he realized. That’s why it was so important for her to bask in those memories as her wedding day drew near, why she wanted to share that special treat with her guests, why she wanted to dwell on those days and surround herself with the best of her childhood. Before she left on her honeymoon, he was going to have to thank her for pulling him back with her, so that he could bask in them, too.
Chapter 7
THE outdoor wedding rehearsal-held on Thursday night rather than Friday because of a scheduling conflict with the officiant-had proceeded with out a hitch, from the procession up the aisle to the string quartet’s playing of Clarke’s “Trumpet Voluntary,” to the recessional Vivaldi’s “Spring.” Was there anything more perfect than violins playing at dusk on the shores of the Chesapeake, a lone sailboat silhouetted against the setting sun? Vanessa couldn’t think of anything that even came close.