Romance and murder are on the menu in USA Today bestselling author Jane Heller’s wild comic novel Three Blonde Mice. Three best friends go on a cooking excursion led by a famous chef, only to discover one of their classmates is very keen on practicing knife technique. They and eight other guests will learn how to cook farm-to-table meals at a chic farm-to-table retreat, with renowned TV/restaurant chef Jason Hill. Elaine is less than thrilled—especially because the program wasn’t supposed to include a surprise appearance by her former boyfriend, Simon, who’s still the love of her life but can’t commit to her. What’s more, after milking a cow and making cheese, she stumbles on evidence that one of her fellow agritourists is out to murder Chef Hill at the resort’s Bounty Fest finale. Three Blonde Mice serves up a crackling romance between Elaine and Simon, a twisty whodunit involving a screwball cast of suspects and a satire of current food fads and the farm-to-table chefs who perpetuate them.
The fingers hovered over the laptop’s keyboard, fidgeting and flexing, poised to begin typing. And then suddenly, propelled by the writer’s burst of inspiration or clarity of purpose, they were off, racing over the keys in a manic hurry. Within minutes, the following words appeared on the screen:
Dear Pudding,
Did you know I call you Pudding, by the way? No, of course not. The name came to me as I was watching your cooking video on YouTube. You were talking about how you’ve loved pudding since you were a kid—chocolate pudding, banana pudding, rice pudding, tapioca pudding, sticky date pudding with caramel sauce. I had this hilarious image of your body dissolving into a vat of thick, spongy, gelatinous pudding, sort of like the Killer Robot from Terminator 2 melting into liquid metal or the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters transforming into the gummy white goop that buries Manhattan. Listen to me carry on about movie villains. Too much time on my hands, I guess.
Anyway, I signed up to be a guest at the hotel’s Cultivate Our Bounty week just so I could get close to you, but since we won’t have quality time alone until the very end, I thought I should write a quick note to say how much I despise you.
Yes, despise you. Does it scare you to hear that? Are you shocked that someone doesn’t think you’re God’s greatest gift to the world? I’ll pretend to be your fan for the entire week, and you’ll probably buy my act, because you don’t have a clue. You walk around like you’re this important chef, someone whose passion in the kitchen we’re supposed to admire, but we both know you’re in it for the money and the ego. You’re all about having foodies slobber over you as a promoter of the farm-to-table movement—excuse me, the farm-to-fork movement. Or is it plough-to-plate, cow-to-kitchen, barn-to-bistro, or mulch-to-meal? I can’t keep track of your terminology anymore, can you? Bottom line: There’s only one movement you promote, and it’s your own.
You’re a fraud—100 percent con artist. You wouldn’t know authenticity if it hit you over the head with one of your overpriced cast iron skillets. You have the image of this do-gooder who’s all about the land and the farmer and the planet, when in fact you have no conscience, no remorse for your actions. Do you know how much those actions enrage me? Enrage me, as in pure, unprocessed, non-genetically modified rage. If you don’t get that, you will—as soon as it sinks in that your miserable life is nearly over. When that happens, your instinct will be to use this letter to protect yourself, but you won’t show it to anybody—not the police, not even the little toads who work for you, because you have too many secrets of your own and can’t risk the exposure. Pretty interesting predicament you’re in, wouldn’t you say?
I’m sorry about having to kill you on Saturday at the Bounty Fest thing. Not because you deserve to live—we’re all better off with you dead, believe me—but because killing isn’t something I do on a regular basis, and I really don’t want to get caught. There’s always the chance that some unlucky bastards could show up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I’d have to take them out too. Still, while I’d rather not commit multiple murders, killing you will be so satisfying after what you did that I’ll just have to shrug off potential collateral damage. Besides, any idiots who fall for your Cultivate Our Bounty bullshit deserve whatever they get.
The fingers sagged over the keys, depleted after their flurry of activity, but eventually directed the cursor to the navigation bar, clicked “file,” then “print.” Seconds later, the Dear Pudding missive materialized on plain white paper, ready to be sent to its recipient or, perhaps, delivered in person.
“Welcome. Welcome,” said the woman who was standing in the center of the room. Fifty-something years old, she had a weathered but pleasant-looking face and wore a Whitley-logoed T-shirt with a pair of blue jeans. Her gray hair was fashioned into two long, age-inappropriate braids. If she’d had a beard and mustache, she would have been the spitting image of Willie Nelson. “I’m Rebecca Kissel, Whitley’s executive director. I’m so pleased that you’ve chosen us for your agritourism experience and are here at our Welcome Happy Hour. We’ve got an exciting week planned for you, and the weather is supposed to cooperate, so I know it’ll be fun as well as educational. You’ll enjoy meeting our in-house staff as well as your fellow agritourists, but the highlight will be your interactions with the renowned farm-to-table master we’ve snagged for you: Chef Jason Hill, who personifies clean, sustainable food that’s as beautiful to look at as it is to eat. He’ll be your instructor this week as our artisan in residence and will preside over our Saturday Bounty Fest finale to which we invite our non-Cultivate-Our-Bounty guests as well as members of the community.”
She nodded at a long table set up across Whitley’s Harvest Room, a serene space that overlooked infinite pastures. It was painted in the palest yellow and decorated in a neutral palette of bleached oak flooring and oversized white-slipcovered chairs. There were also strategically placed white poufs—cubes that doubled as ottomans on top of which rested reading materials about the property’s rich agricultural history.
“Before you leave tonight,” she continued, “please stop by the hospitality table and pick up your personal earth-friendly, 100 percent recycled cotton Whitley tote bag. There’s one for each of our agritourists as well as one for Chef Hill—you’ll see your nametag pinned to your bag—and it contains maps of the property, a biography of Chef Hill, his recipes that you’ll be preparing, a copy of his latest cookbook, the schedule of events, and lots more. The tote bags are handy because you can repurpose them for the beach, for work, for groceries, for gardening, whatever you like.” She beamed, as if she were about to announce a cure for cancer. “You’ll really appreciate the bags after you’ve cooked with us this week. Just think how much fun it’ll be to bring your homemade fruit preserves, pickled vegetables, and raw nut balls to your friends and neighbors!”
“Speaking of nut balls, whose idea was this trip anyway?” I said to my best pals, Jackie Gault and Pat Kovecky, as we huddled together in a room full of strangers at the start of our week’s vacation. Well, more precisely it was a “haycation” because we were staying on a farm.
No, we weren’t camping out in some broken-down barn. Please. I’m a person who has standing appointments for twice-weekly blowouts. We’d booked the Cultivate Our Bounty package at Whitley Farm, a Relais & Chateaux resort in Litchfield, Connecticut. It boasted a restaurant headed by a James Beard Award nominee and guest cottages outfitted with four-poster king-size beds swathed in Frette linens and layers of down, and we were there to learn where our food comes from and take culinary classes so we’d be able to cook the stuff. We would be milking a cow and making cheese from that milk; selecting a grass-fed, pasture-raised chicken and then roasting it with herbs we picked in the garden; foraging among the weeds for elderberries, milkweed, and other oddities of nature and then turning them into edible menu items. From Whitley’s brochure: “Our goal is to increase understanding and appreciation of the land and the food it provides by giving our agritourists the opportunity to cultivate the bounty that sustains us while experiencing true farm-to-table cooking.”
“It was my idea,” said Jackie in her low, husky voice. “I thought the Three Blonde Mice deserved a week that didn’t involve a hit man and a wacko ex-husband.” She knocked back the last of her wine and heaved a grateful sigh, as if she’d been waiting all day for that glass. She preferred hardcore alcohol like bourbon and Scotch but would drink anything you put in front of her—too much of it lately, if you asked me. As for her “Three Blonde Mice” bit, it was the nursery rhyme nickname I’d given the three of us when we met seven years ago, and not because we were mousy. My hair was shoulder length and highlighted to a near platinum blonde; Jackie’s was cut short and utilitarian like a punk boy’s, spiky and strawberry; Pat’s was a maze of tight frizzy curls—the color of oatmeal with glints of gray.
“I think it’ll be enlightening,” said Pat, after a decorous sip of her wine. She held her glass with her pinky extended like someone drinking tea out of one of those itsy bitsy china cups. “A nice change from last year’s trip, that’s for sure.”
“I’m counting on it,” said Jackie.
We took vacations together every year, and the last one was a disaster: a seven-day cruise to the Caribbean on an enormous floating hotel called the Princess Charming, during which Jackie’s ex-husband Peter had hired one of the other passengers to kill her on the ship. Yes, kill her. (The would-be hit man was in the dining room with us every night. At the 6:30 early-bird seating, if you can believe it.) On top of that, she and Peter had been partners in J&P Nursery, a landscaping and gardening center in Bedford, a New York suburb frequently referred to as one of the most posh hamlets in America. The nursery serviced the fifty-acre estates of Wall Street hedge fund managers who viewed themselves as country gentlemen and therefore bought a lot of topiary. But when Peter turned out to be a crook, a cad, and a creep, and was carted off to the big house, the business became Jackie’s responsibility.
Pat gave Jackie’s arm an affectionate squeeze. “We won’t let anything or anyone upset the apple tart this week, don’t you worry.”
“Apple cart, Pat.” I always tried to restrain myself from correcting her, but, despite her privileged upbringing and Ivy League education, she was hopelessly susceptible to malapropisms and often spoke in sentences you’d expect to hear from a foreign exchange student. “I’m sure apple tarts will figure into our week here though.”
I polished off my glass of Whitley Farm’s Merlot-Petit Syrah. It was pretty decent for a blend produced in Connecticut, which was not, after all, California. In California, we’d be blathering about how a wine’s structure, balance, and aroma were a religious experience. Not that I was a wine connoisseur. I drank red mostly because it was packed with life-saving antioxidants, allegedly. Women my age—I’m on the diminished-estrogen-level side of forty-five and a borderline hypochondriac—need all the help we can get.
“Now that you’re all sufficiently lubricated, are you ready for our Whitley Mystery Challenge?” asked Rebecca, our fearless leader, as servers clad in yellow aprons that matched the walls stood at attention over by the table where our tote bags awaited us.
“Mystery Challenge?” I rolled my eyes. “I hate mysteries. They’re in the same category as surprises, and you know how I feel about those.”
“Elaine,” Jackie groaned. “Try to just go with the flow for a change.”
“Your servers are going to blindfold you,” Rebecca explained, “and then you’ll taste several of Chef Hill’s offerings that showcase Whitley’s commitment to sustainable food systems. You’ll smell and touch each bite, savor it, and explore the culinary experience. Afterwards, you’ll remove your blindfolds, and we’ll discuss what you were eating, and you can assess your palate’s ability to identify flavor profiles. This is how you’ll begin to cultivate your bounty and learn where it comes from.”
“Give me a break. Do we really need to know where our bounty comes from?” I said. “Personally, I think people who obsess about whether their salmon is sockeye or chinook are schnooks. It’s a piece of fish, not a priceless diamond, and all it does is swim through my intestinal tract and land in my toilet bowl. And foraging? Seriously? What if we get Lyme disease from traipsing through the woods, not to mention poison ivy? Oh, and The Huffington Post had an article the other day about a man who drank raw milk from a farm like Whitley and came down with Guillain-Barré syndrome.”
“Elaine.” Jackie groaned again, while Pat giggled.
Okay, I admit I was risk-averse and paranoid, anticipating danger, disaster, and death when no possibility of these things existed. Such traits could be amusing if you were a friend and irritating if you weren’t.
“You’ll end up liking this trip,” said Jackie, as a rosy-cheeked male server with a mullet headed our way carrying something that wasn’t food. “You’re just being your usual neurotic self.”
She was probably right. She and Pat knew me better than almost anyone. We’d met at a New York courthouse the day we’d all shown up to divorce our worthless spouses. Twenty minutes after our chance encounter in that musty, charmless lobby, we’d moved from consoling each other about our exes to celebrating our shared courage in shedding them, and then we’d ditched our lawyers and gone out for lunch—a long lunch involving a piano player who sang “Hey Jude” and kept extorting everybody to join in, which nobody did. Many more get-togethers followed, and the Three Blonde Mice became as close as sisters. It didn’t matter that we were very different in terms of personality and background. We genuinely cared about the friendship, and nurtured it.
“And while you may not want to learn all this farm stuff, I do,” Jackie went on. “A lot of my customers are installing vegetable and herb gardens on their properties, and I need to be knowledgeable about it. Besides, Chef Hill is kind of hot from what I’ve seen of him on TV.” She wiggled her hips. “Maybe I’ll get lucky.”
Ever since Peter had traded my tomboy, whiskey-voiced friend for a simpering girly girl named Trish who probably wore her pearls to bed, Jackie had been on the prowl for men who would validate her sex appeal, and her quest only intensified after their divorce. She talked incessantly about getting laid or wishing she could.
“And I’ll learn how to cook healthier meals for Bill and the children,” said Pat.
Pat’s husband was a gastroenterologist named Bill or, as I’d dubbed him, the God of Gastroenterology. He was a celebrity doctor, the guardian of the country’s collective digestive system, and he popped up on Good Morning America whenever there was a national outbreak of E. Coli. After a few years of letting his big, know-it-all personality overshadow her gentle, supportive one, Pat had decided enough was enough and divorced him. Eventually, he realized what a dope he’d been—it’s not every day you find a woman of Pat’s devotion and utter goodness—and came crawling back. They re-married, to the delight of their five teenagers—four boys, and a girl who had Pat’s squat, pear-shaped body and round, full face along with her sweet nature and shining blue eyes.
“I get that you both have your agendas for this week,” I said, “but being educated about the lifespan of a zucchini blossom isn’t my idea of a good time.”
Our server arrived, interrupting our back-and-forth. “Good evening. I’m Oliver, and I’ll be working with you for the Mystery Challenge.” He held up three black eye masks of the type used for either a good night’s sleep or a date with the guy from Fifty Shades of Grey, and slipped a blindfold over our eyes. “Now I’ll fetch your challenge items. Be back in a few.”
Suddenly, I was in total darkness, and I did not enjoy the feeling. Nor did I appreciate having my eye makeup smudged.
“It’s Oliver again,” said our server after we had stood silently for a few minutes, awaiting his return. It was as if losing our sight had infantilized us, rendering us mute as well as blind. “I’ve got a tray of food here—three different bites for each of you ladies. I’ll guide your hands to the bites and you can sample them. After your blindfolds come off, you’ll tell Rebecca what you ate. Ready?”
“Yup, me first, Ollie,” said Jackie. “I’m starving.”
“Okay, I’m picking up your right hand now and directing it to one of the bites,” he said.
“Hm. Slippery,” said Jackie. “The hors d’oeuvre, not you, Ollie.”
“Take your time with it,” he said. “Really savor it.”
I could hear Jackie chewing. She was a loud chewer even when she wasn’t savoring. “Very tasty,” she said. “I could wolf down a dozen more of these, whatever they are.”
“I’ll go next,” chirped Pat.
While my friends were playing Whitley’s little mystery game with Oliver, I lifted my blindfold just enough to sneak a peek at the tray of Chef Hill’s tidbits. Call me a cheater if you must, but I wasn’t about to eat just anything. My blood pressure was ninety over seventy for good reason. My cholesterol level was an impressive 160. And I weighed 130 pounds, which, for a middle-aged woman of my nearly six-foot height, made me a giantess with a model’s figure—if not the staggeringly beautiful face. Why was I such a healthy specimen? Because I was in control at all times. I mean what if something on that tray was a cow testicle or an octopus heart, one of those “chef’s specialty” items you see on restaurant menus nowadays, and I spent the rest of the week with my head over the porcelain throne?
Whew. Jackie’s slippery thing is just a deviled egg, I thought with relief when I had my 20/20 vision back. It didn’t look like the mayonnaise-and-mustard-with-paprika kind my mother used to make for company, but an egg was an egg. The second item was a piece of fruit—a peach maybe—with a dollop of cheese and some sort of herb or other. And mystery bite number three was meat—chicken, probably—sandwiched between two potato—
“Your turn, Elaine,” said Pat, interrupting my stealth mission.
I fake coughed, covering my mouth with both hands so no one would notice that I was reaching up and surreptitiously sliding the blindfold down over my eyes. And then I made a performance out of letting Oliver help me navigate the bites into my mouth, smacking my lips ostentatiously and emitting “ah” and “hmm” noises as if I gave a shit what I was eating and whether it was grown at Whitley or bought at the nearest Stop & Shop. “Wow, that was intense,” I said when I was done.
Oliver gave us permission to remove our blindfolds and thanked us for our participation.
“Now comes the test,” said Rebecca once all the guests had finished the exercise. She was still in the center of the room but was now holding a clipboard and pen. “Let’s find out who was able to identify the bounty. Anybody?”
My hand shot up. Why not have a little fun with these people, I figured.
“Yes,” said Rebecca, nodding at me. “The woman in the beige sweater. Your name?”
Obviously she had no fashion sense, as my sweater was not beige. It was lightweight summer cashmere I’d gotten at last year’s Labor Day sale at Bloomie’s and its color was oatmeal. “Elaine Zimmerman,” I said. “I believe I ate an egg stuffed with beets, apples, and bleu cheese, a wine-soaked peach with a smear of herbed goat cheese and a sprig of mint, and braised chicken served between potato crisps and topped with a lemon aioli.” I smiled and waited to be told that I had just aced the class, the week, the trip.
“You fucking peeked,” Jackie hissed. She pretended to look mad, but she was laughing. “You’re such a fucking baby.”
“I am not,” I hissed back. Jackie loved using the f-word in all its iterations. She was so earthy. “I was only ‘going with the flow’ like you wanted me to.”
“Not now,” Pat scolded. “You two can hatch this out later.”
“There’s nothing to hash out,” I said, compelled yet again to correct her.
“I appreciate your contribution, Elaine,” said Rebecca, scribbling my answers on her clipboard as the other guests murmured among themselves, no doubt astonished to have such a gastronome in their midst. “I think you’ll benefit greatly from your week here.”
“See that?” I whispered to my friends. “Willie Nelson thinks I’m good at cultivating my bounty.”
“Unfortunately, you didn’t identify any of the foods correctly except the hard-boiled egg,” said Rebecca, sending me into a state of sheer mortification. “And before I let the others give us their answers, let me boast about our eggs here at Whitley. They’re a product of our Rhode Island Red laying hens, which are fed our organic, certified soy-free meals so they’ll lay beautiful big brown eggs. During the summer, when there’s lots of sunlight, they lay about six per week per hen.”
“Fascinating,” I muttered. “Just riveting.”
I sulked while the other guests threw out their answers. I went into a complete snit when one of them, a young woman who looked like a walking juice cleanse, got every ingredient right.
“Don’t feel bad,” said Jackie, slinging an arm around my waist and squelching another laugh. “So the egg was stuffed with radishes, not beets. They’re both red.”
“And your peach turned out to be a pear, but they both start with p,” said Pat, with a not-very-straight face.
“You couldn’t even cheat your way through,” Jackie said. She and Pat could no longer contain themselves and were now doubled over, cackling.
I was about to point out that my friends didn’t try to guess what the mystery foods were when an extremely attractive man tapped me on the shoulder.
“Sorry to intrude, but I just wanted to say that I admire your courage for being the first to raise your hand,” he said as I took a quick inventory of his refined, almost patrician appearance. Those soulful brown eyes! That lustrous brown hair curling under his ears! That Cartier tank watch that cost way more than the knockoff I’d bought off a street vendor! The rest of his wardrobe wasn’t cheap either; his shirt, slacks, and loafers were straight out of an Armani ad. And—most appealing of all—there was no wedding ring. “Your braised chicken idea wasn’t that far off the mark. Quail can be hard to identify.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate that.” He had a jovial air about him, a good-natured, nonjudgmental demeanor. “I’m Elaine Zimmerman, and these are my friends Jackie Gault and Pat Kovecky.”
“Jonathan Birnbaum,” he said during our round of handshakes. “Nice to meet you all.”
“Do you work at Whitley or are you an agritourist like us?” asked Jackie.
“The latter,” said this Jonathan Birnbaum person, who, although Jackie had posed the question, continued to concentrate on me, which was both unnerving and flattering. “I came primarily for the cooking classes. How about you, Elaine? What brought you to Whitley?”
“The bounty,” I said without missing a beat. “Cultivating it, I mean. I have so much to learn, as you can tell from the Mystery Challenge. And I’m looking forward to the cooking, of course.”
“Perfect,” he said with a gleam in those brown eyes. “We’ll be in the trenches together all week, Elaine.”
Suddenly, things were looking up. Maybe Jonathan Birnbaum and I would embark on a torrid affair during Cultivate Our Bounty week. Maybe that affair would evolve into a meaningful relationship, one with stimulating conversations and stimulating sex and safety deposit boxes stuffed with Cartier jewelry. Maybe being dragged to Whitley was the best thing that would ever happen to me.
Of course, there was a slight complication. I already had a boyfriend.
“Home sweet home,” I said out loud upon entering my cottage. After depositing the tote bag of Whitley handouts in the corner near my emptied luggage, I sank into the armchair to the right of the king-size four-poster bed. Other amenities of my accommodations included a marble bathroom with a soaking tub and rainfall shower, a desk area that offered Wi-Fi, an iPod dock and a fifty-inch flat-screen TV—pretty swanky for a farm.
I was tired and therefore grateful for the early night, particularly since we’d be forced to get up at the crack of dawn the next morning to shovel cow dung or something. Still, the evening had ended on a high note. Jonathan Birnbaum and I had chatted for a few more minutes while Jackie scurried off to the bar and Pat scurried off to the restroom. (Before departing, Jackie had mouthed, “He’s hot,” the same thing she said about most men, although in this case she was spot-on.) Jonathan told me he was a partner at his late father’s law firm in Palm Beach, specializing in estates, wills and trusts; I told him I was a VP and senior account executive at Pearson & Strulley, the international PR firm where I’d worked for nine years. He told me he lived in a Mediterranean-style house with a pool and a tennis court across the street from the Intracoastal Waterway; I told him I lived in a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment in a doorman building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side across the street from Madonna. He told me he was an accomplished home cook. I told him I was an accomplished orderer from restaurants that delivered, which made him laugh, which made me laugh, and before I knew it we were chuckling like fools. He said he wasn’t expecting to “click with anyone” at Whitley and he was looking forward to the week. I said, “Me too,” and then we said goodnight. He was definitely hitting on me, my friends confirmed later, and I have to say I didn’t hate it.
I heaved a contented sigh, reached into the pocket of my white linen pants, and pulled out my cellphone to turn it back on since electronic devices were a no-no while the week’s activities were in progress. I had no desire to post selfies or food porn on my Instagram page, but it was torture for me not to be able to get e-mails and texts. I liked to feel needed.
I checked the phone. Nothing. Bah.
I was about to connect it to its charger and put it and myself to bed when it rang.
My heart did a little dance when I saw that the caller was Simon, the boyfriend I mentioned. He and I had broken up shortly before the trip, so he was not, technically, my boyfriend, but that didn’t stop my pulse from quickening every time I heard his damn voice,
“What?” I said in a not-very-cordial greeting.
“Hey, Slim. How’s it going in Farmaggedon?” said Simon, clearly trying to be charming in that way he had of turning everything into a joke. “Were you out tilling the soil or picking berries for that pie you’ll be baking for me?”
“I was at a party,” I said, determined to sound chilly yet irresistible, like a heroine from a classic movie, say Lauren Bacall.
“Look, I know you hate me right now, but I love you and I’ll prove it,” he said. “You’ll see.”
“I won’t hold my breath.” How dare he try to reel me back in? We were done. I’d ended it. And, trust me, it hadn’t been easy.
“Don’t you remember how good it was between us, Slim?”
Of course I remembered. That was the problem. I’d met Simon Purdys on the Princess Charming and, after a lifetime of mistrusting men, I’d allowed myself to trust Simon. We’d entered into a passionate romance after our shipboard fling, a serious, sappy romance of the type where you can’t bear to be without the other person for more than an hour and even an hour is a stretch. For a year it was miraculous and unexpected and beyond my wildest dreams, but not anymore. “What’s the point of this call, Simon?”
“To cheer you up,” he said. “You seemed pretty miserable the last time I saw you.”
“Yeah, because I was angry. People aren’t jumping for joy when they’re ending a relationship.”
I had shared the details of the breakup with Jackie and Pat, of course, and they both thought it was my fault. Some friends.
“Don’t be a fucking idiot. He’s a keeper,” Jackie had said.
“I wouldn’t give him up if I were you,” Pat had advised. “He’s a special, special man, Elaine.”
He’d certainly seemed to be. He’d been a well-regarded travel writer at Away from It All magazine when we met on the ship. He’d been thinking of resigning; he’d said he was tired of traveling so much. Then shortly after we got back from the cruise, his publisher offered him the editor-in-chief position, and he grabbed it, thinking a desk job would mean less time on a plane and more time for a life. Wrong. He was in nonstop meetings, buried under an executive’s workload. I could handle that, no problem, since I was a workaholic myself.
But then he hired—no, campaigned for—Mallory Ryan to join the team as editorial director of afia.com, the magazine’s web site. Like every other magazine, Away from It All had experienced flagging newsstand and subscription sales and needed its digital operations to pull in more eyeballs. Since Mallory was a tech genius with a reputation for efficiently bringing print media into the twenty-first century, and she was ambitious, stupidly gorgeous, and only twenty-eight years old (the horror), Simon had convinced his boss to open his corporate wallet for her. I wasn’t thrilled that my boyfriend spent many hours of the day and night canoodling with her about memes and gigabytes and platforms, nor was I wild about hearing Mallory this and Mallory that whenever we were together. (He wasn’t wild about my nicknames for Mallory either: “the Web Wench” for obvious reasons and “Mammary” due to her big gazongas.) I’m sure she was a delightful person, but the fact was this: He claimed to love me but hadn’t asked me to marry him or live with him or even leave a toothbrush at his apartment. Not in the year that we’d been together. Had she bumped me out of contention?
Or was he simply a commitmentphobe? He would tell me—I’m saying he himself would speak the words without any provocation from or prompting by me—that he wanted the same sort of coupledom that I did, but then he would go through periods when he would avoid the subject as if it had crab lice. It was a pattern, and it drove me nuts. He would get me all hopeful and excited about our future and then drop me on my ass if I tried to pin him down on the specifics, and I’d had it up to here with his flip-flopping.
“Well, we don’t have to get into things tonight,” said Simon. “I just wanted to wish you luck with all the farming.” He laughed. “Still trying to picture you as that pioneer woman on the Food Network. What’s her name?”
“Ree Drummond, and she lives on a ranch, not a farm. She’s married to a cowboy.” I’m sorry to tell you that I emphasized the word “married” because I couldn’t help sticking it to him that he and I weren’t.
“I meant that I know you’re out of your element up there,” he said, his tone softening. “I hope you’ll meet some nice people. Really, Slim.”
“As a matter of fact, I already did,” I said with a gleeful lilt in my voice, “and he’s extremely nice.”
“He?”
“Goodnight, Simon.”
“The land is divided into twelve plots, and we grow around 200 varieties of vegetables,” enthused Rebecca, the Willie Nelson look-alike. My friends and I and the seven other members of our group stood beside a row of red and golden beets. “Behind us is celeriac, chard, and kale, and down below we have cabbage and corn. At the top of the hill we have hops that are used by craft breweries in the area….”
Blah blah blah. It was 9:00 a.m. and the day was a scorcher already—not a hint of a breeze, not a single cloud in the sky. Just hot, muggy air that made my hair frizz, my body clammy, and my brain yearn for my meat-locker-cold office where flies didn’t dive-bomb my neck and the sun’s rays didn’t bore through my broad-spectrum SPF 100 moisturizer. I wondered how I would survive the week.
Don’t get me wrong. Whitley Farm was breathtaking—the stuff of landscape painters—but harvesting my own kohlrabi wasn’t high on my bucket list. I was more interested in getting into the presumably air conditioned kitchen.
“We also do a lot of inter-cropping, so we plant green manures in between actual food crops….”
More blah blah blah. I tried to look nonchalant as I scanned the group for Jonathan, and he gave me a big smile when our eyes met. Yes, he’ll be the bright spot, I thought, as Rebecca asked us to introduce ourselves and explain what had brought us to Whitley’s Cultivate Our Bounty week.
“We have one more agritourist coming,” she added. “He’ll be joining us in the kitchen after our foraging expedition. In the meantime, let’s have those of you who are here get to know one another, shall we?”
“At least the person coming later is a man,” Jackie whispered before the introductions. “There aren’t many in this group, and Elaine has already staked out the hot guy, so having one more gives me a fighting chance at some action.”
“I asked Bill to fix you up with that doctor,” said Pat, “but you didn’t like him.”
“The proctologist?” Jackie shuddered. “All he wanted to do was stick his finger where it doesn’t belong.”
“If the ladies over there are finished, I’ll go first. I’m Lake Vanderkloot-Arnold,” said a thirty-something who would have been pretty except that she didn’t look human. What I mean is she had the figure of a lollipop—all head and no body. I was thin for my giantess height, but she was as skinny as a haricot vert, with only the occasional ripple of muscle in her arms and legs. Her long dark hair was pulled back into a perky ponytail and she was dressed in Lululemon yoga wear. She bounced on the balls of her feet when she spoke, which suggested abundant energy and vivacity, but her face was drawn, her skin sandpaper dry, and her collarbones protruded from her pale blue tank top. In the daylight, I realized she was the one who’d guessed all the right answers to last night’s Mystery Challenge. “My life partner and I live in Manhattan—I volunteer at the Guggenheim, and he’s in commercial real estate at Cushman & Wakefield—and we came to Whitley because we’re true believers in the farm-to-table movement. We shun restaurants that don’t use the freshest, locally sourced ingredients and we bring our own food to dinner parties if we think the host is serving anything processed. We’ve been yearning to take our journey deeper by honing our cooking skills to reflect and honor the land. If you don’t honor the land and its bounty, you can’t really walk the walk.”
Okay, who in their right mind talked like that? And what cooking skills was she referring to? Her idea of a meal was probably a chia seed.
“I’m Lake’s husband Gabriel,” said the man she had called her life partner. He was as body-perfect as she was body-deprived, attractive in a slightly hawkish, predatory way. He had a long, angular face with a sharp nose and chin, and he wore his brown hair in a man bun, which, given that he worked in the corporate world, he probably trotted out only during his downtime. His heather-green cargo shorts and stretchy yellow shirt revealed taut, professional-athlete-grade thighs and abs that were so perfectly sculpted they looked like implants. “As Lake said, we take care of ourselves, and that means being vigilant about what we eat. I can promise you that nothing goes into this mouth unless I know where it comes from.” He pointed emphatically to his mouth in case we mistook it for his ear or eye.
I kept waiting for the Vanderkloot-Arnolds to laugh or make a snarky remark to show us they had a sense of irony or were just plain joking, but no. Again I had the thought that it would be a long week.
“I’m Connie Gumpers,” said a woman who gave us all a little wave. She was in her late fifties, short and chunky, with a muffin top she didn’t try to camouflage with a tunic like many middle-aged women in Manhattan. Instead she wore a too-tight Green Bay Packers T-shirt with her blue jeans and sneakers. There was something equally refreshing and low maintenance about her brassy blonde hair with visible gray roots, which hung at random around her ears. “My husband Ronnie and I live in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Our grandkids were begging us to take a cooking trip for our anniversary because they know their Gammy watches food shows 24/7.”
“She sure does,” said Ronnie, a heavyset man whose jeans strained to contain his bulk, and whose balding head carried the burden of three chins. He was sweating profusely, and I feared he might collapse in the heat. “Bobby Flay’s her favorite TV chef, but she also goes crazy for that judge on Chopped.” He turned to his wife. “What’s his name, Cupcake? The one with the tan and the fancy suits?”
“Geoffrey Zacharian,” she said. “He’s a dreamboat. But I love the whole bunch of them—Giaada, Ina, Rachel, Guy, and especially Jason Hill. I’ve followed him to other cooking demonstrations and now I’ll be seeing him again this week. Yay!”
“She’s a hoot, isn’t she?” Ronnie nodded at his wife affectionately. “Wonderful, wonderful mom and grandma. All those years I was building my building business? She took care of everything at home, kept it all running like clockwork. Now I’m retired, and we’re living the high life.” He paused to catch his breath. He was sort of wheezing. “She does her chef thing, and I let her drag me along for the ride. I say ‘drag me along’ because I’m not all that gung-ho on the healthy this, healthy that. Give me a four-cheese Whopper with a side of onion rings and I’m a happy man.” He chuckled. “I love to eat—so does Cupcake—but we do other fun things together too. We learned how to restore old clocks, took a course in woodworking, went with the grandkids to Comic Con, the convention where all the superhero actors go to plug their movies. And we spent a couple of weeks in Gay Paree.” He chuckled again, guiltily this time. “I guess I’m not supposed to say that anymore. Sorry if I offended anybody. Great people, the gays. The French too. They get a bad rap for being uppity, but they were friendly as all get out when we were over there. Now here we are doing the Cultivate Our Bounty thing with you nice folks because Connie wanted to see her chef and we’re celebrating our anniversary. Good, good times.”
I gave Jackie and Pat my cross-eyed look. We started laughing like naughty children, which prompted a “shush” from Rebecca.
The third couple wasn’t a couple at all, at least not in a romantic sense. They were a mother and son duo, and the son was Jonathan. “Beatrice Birnbaum,” boomed the deep-voiced septuagenarian—a stunning, erect-postured, commanding woman who removed her sunglasses and squared her shoulders before she spoke, and gave off the sense that she was not to be crossed, despite having a big, wide smile plastered across her face. She had the shiniest silvery gray hair I’d ever seen, lacquered and expensively cut, with bangs across her forehead and layers framing her face. “My son Jonathan and I live in Palm Beach, but we come north in the summer to visit family and friends. Jonathan’s an attorney who harbors ambitions of being a chef, of all things. I hope this week will disabuse him of that notion.” She maintained the smile even as her tone suggested utter disdain for her son and his “notion.”
We all glanced at Jonathan, who at forty-plus was old enough to make his own career decisions as well as stop traveling with his mother.
“Beatrice thinks I must be going through a mid-life crisis, and maybe I am, but there are worse things, right?” he said, with a jolly laugh that broke the tension and reinforced my interest in him as a potential romantic partner. I’d just have to wean him off his mommy. “The truth is, I’d really like to go to culinary school in my spare time and see what comes of it. Cooking farm-to-table food and feeding it to people seems like a creative and enjoyable pursuit.”
“It is indeed,” commented Rebecca. “A noble pursuit.”
“I have a genuine appreciation for the work that’s done here at Whitley,” Beatrice allowed, still smiling incongruously. “And there’s nothing I relish more than a meal prepared with the freshest ingredients and the utmost skill, but Jonathan’s father, my dear Arthur, built that law firm. He’d turn over in his grave if he knew his only son was thinking of throwing it all away in order to make beet-and-goat-cheese salads.”
As Jonathan winked at me as if to say, “Don’t pay any attention to her,” I decided to begin the weaning process immediately.
“I’m Elaine Zimmerman,” I said. “I’m a senior account executive at Pearson & Strulley, the international PR firm, and I don’t think I’m throwing it all away by taking a week off with my best friends, Beatrice.” Her smile faded, and she glared at me. “I’m a complete klutz in the kitchen, and I couldn’t tell you the difference between snap peas and snow peas, never mind whether that Belgian salad vegetable is pronounced en-dive or on-deev, but it’ll be fun to watch good cooks like Jonathan work their magic.”
“Thanks for the assist, Elaine,” said Jonathan, giving me a grateful, knowing smile, as if we’d just gone through an ordeal together. “Something tells me you’ll be out-cooking us all by the end of the week.”
“I doubt that,” I said, pleased that I had scored the compliment.
“Hi everyone,” said Jackie. “I’m Jackie Gault and I run a nursery in Westchester County. I’ve logged lots of time in the garden, but farming is new to me. I’m really excited to cook what Whitley grows.” She pumped her fist, just the way she did when her favorite baseball team won. She knew the names and stats of all the players, and could sit and stare at a game for hours. She deserved a boyfriend who would appreciate the jock in her. Isn’t that what men wanted? A woman who shared their interests? I’d shared Simon’s interests. We’d sent each other links to magazine pieces we liked and ran off to see buzz-worthy films as soon as they were released. We’d read the same books on our iPads and compared notes about them as soon as we were both done. A lot of good that did me.
“Hello, my name is Patricia Kovecky,” said Pat, who rarely used her formal first name unless she was feeling insecure in front of a group. “My husband is Dr. William Kovecky.” She lowered her eyes as she waited for the others to recognize that they were in the presence of Mrs. God of Gastroenterology. No one did. Again, I felt the need to jump in.
“Bill’s a regular contributor on GMA,” I said, jumping into publicist mode. “Brilliant gastroenterologist, which will come in handy if anyone eats dandelion greens and gets a bad case of the runs.”
Jonathan laughed. He really was a likable person, the opposite of his mother, and I was glad he wasn’t letting her spoil his trip. But Lake seized on my comment as if it were a major teachable moment.
“Dandelion greens are richer in beta carotene than carrots, and they provide valuable nutrients,” she said with the zeal of an evangelical.
“We use the tender young greens in mesclun salads and smoothies,” her life partner Gabriel added. “They should become part of your diet, Elaine.”
My diet was none of their business. Evidently, they were going to be a chore.
Pat cleared her throat. “I have five teenaged children, and my youngest, Lucy, put on a few extra pounds in the past year. I didn’t think too much of it until she came home from band practice one day—she plays the clarinet—and said two of the other girls called her fat. Well, you could have knocked me over with a fender when she told me that.”
I was about to say, “It’s feather, Pat,” but kept my mouth shut for a change.
“So I’m interested in learning how to cook farm foods that will help Lucy lose weight the healthy way.” She patted her tummy. “The same goes for her mother.”
“I’m Alex Langer,” said an attractive woman with flowing blonde locks, who was decked out in the style known as Boho chic. Her outfit involved an ivory top embroidered with butterflies and a matching bandana around her head, jeans with holes at the knees, gladiator sandals, and lots of interesting little chains and bracelets. The only deviation in her loose, laid-back look was the enormous rock on her left hand. I’m talking about a diamond that made my eyes bug out. She was about my age, I guessed, and showed the same signs of wear and tear, but she had two things I didn’t: an engagement ring and a man who was ready to commit. “I live in the city and I’m here for two reasons,” she continued. “I definitely want to improve my cooking skills. And I’m writing a screenplay about a chef, so this trip is research.”
A screenplay? Was this a PR opportunity for Pearson & Strulley? Ever on the hunt for new clients, I asked, “Is it your first script, Alex, or have you written movies we’ve seen?” In other words, was there a studio that needed an Oscar campaign? I didn’t work on those accounts personally, but we had an entire department that did.
“My first screenplay,” she said proudly. “In my real life, I’m a dental hygienist.”
Well, that part made sense. Her teeth were spectacularly white and straight. She probably got discounts on the braces and bleaching.
“My fiancé treated me to the week here,” she explained. “He would have stayed after dropping me off, but he’s got a business to run.”
“He sounds like a catch,” said Jackie with an envious laugh. “Does he have a brother?”
“He absolutely does,” said Alex. “We’ll talk.” She had a warm and friendly air about her—something this group sorely needed.
“Well,” said Rebecca, “I’m glad you all came to Whitley and hope the week delivers on your expectations, whatever they may be. We have lots to do today, so let’s get moving. After I finish the guided tour of the farm, you’re going to forage for wild edibles with Kevin, our gardener, and then spend the afternoon with Chef Hill, who’ll teach you how to cook what you pulled out of the earth and much more.”
“Jason Hill! Yay!” squealed Connie, who waved her arms in the air as if she were trying to beat back a colony of bats. “He challenged Michael Symon on Iron Chef a couple of years ago. He lost—the judges thought his rabbit risotto was too soupy—but I love him! The last time I saw him was when he came to Chicago, and he was the best!”
As Rebecca turned and began to lead us up a steep slope, toward a dense thicket of vegetation into which we would be foraging, Jackie grabbed me and said, “Is Connie a chef groupie or what?”
“She seems okay,” I said, “one of those comfortable-in-her-own skin people who follows her bliss, to pile on the clichés. Same with Alex.”
“Jonathan is such a gentleman,” said Pat, “and a very devoted son.”
“He’s probably loaded,” said Jackie. “I didn’t hear anything about a wife, by the way.”
“I bet he had one, but Mommy Dearest bumped her off so she could have him all to herself,” I said.
“Elaine.” Jackie groaned. “No murderers on this trip, remember?”
“What you’ll be seeing are the kinds of plants you’ll find around farms, around manure piles, around compost piles—agricultural settings where there’s disturbed soil,” said Kevin Koontz, Whitley’s forager-in-chief, a thin, serious man who wore a denim shirt, jeans, a wide-brimmed straw hat, and a handkerchief. If he’d been chewing on a blade of grass, I would have cast him in a dinner theater production of Oklahoma. “You might also find them among the weeds in your own garden or your neighbor’s. Here’s an example.”
As he yanked one of the weeds out of the ground, I wiped a gallon of sweat off my face. After what had felt like an endless hike, we’d stopped under a shady grove—a respite.
“It’s amaranth,” he said, passing around sprigs of a green-leafed plant I couldn’t tell from basil or a thousand others. “The leaves are incredibly nutritious, packed with vitamins and protein. That being said, it absorbs nitrogen, robbing oxygen from your body, so you can experience some toxicity if you consume too much of it.”
I raised my hand. “Toxicity?” Why were we paying so much money to forage for supposedly edible foods that could poison us?
“You don’t gorge on it,” said Lake. “You just use it in cooking the way you’d use other greens. Like sorrel.”
Sorrel schmorrel. I had a terrible urge to punch Lake Vanderkloot-Arnold in the face, but she was so emaciated I could probably just breathe on her and she’d fall over.
“I’m not trying to scare anybody,” said Kevin. “I just want you all to be aware that it’s not healthy to eat pounds and pounds of amaranth. If you watch sheep graze, you see that they’re foraging, eating a little bit of this and a little bit of that. We should follow their example.”
“That’s what my cardiologist tells me,” Ronnie said, followed by a loud belch, one of those burps that start out as a hiccup. “Eat a little bit of this and a little bit of that, have smaller portions and skip the visits to Olive Garden for their all-you-can-eat pasta.”
“You seriously go to that place?” Gabriel said, his expression registering pure revulsion. “Their food is antithetical to everything about farm-to-table.”
Ronnie shrugged. “It comes from a farm somewhere. And it sure tastes good for the price. I have a nice little nest egg, but that doesn’t mean I can’t try to save a buck when I’m hungry.”
“Lake mentioned sorrel, and we just happen to have some,” Kevin went on, bending down to pull more weeds out of the ground and pass them around. I noticed that Jackie was trailing right behind him, no doubt interested in him as a sexual partner.
“Sorrel’s a really good diuretic,” said Gabriel, who between the diuretics and the inevitable juices probably peed every six seconds. “Everyone should add it to their diet.”
“And here are highbush blueberries,” said Kevin, pointing to a tangle of plants I actually recognized. “Feel free to enjoy some while we talk.”
Everyone reached for the little purple berries and popped them into their mouths except me. Weren’t we supposed to wash fruit thoroughly before eating it?
Kevin led us deeper into the heart of darkness where he picked, discussed, and passed around samples of lamb’s-quarter, chocolate mint, purslane, and many other varieties of plants that we were to add to our culinary repertoires. I have to admit that I did find the foraging expedition educational in the same way that any sort of travel is broadening, and I was open to eating weeds if they were really so healthy, but I didn’t have a farm in my apartment, you know? I didn’t have a backyard either, or even those tiny containers of herbs that people put on their windowsill. I didn’t have plants, period, because they always withered and died from too much water or not enough, and I’d feel like a failure every time I carted a dead philodendron to the trash.
“Elaine, want to sample this one?” Jonathan asked, sidling up next to me and offering me one of the weeds.
“Sure, thanks,” I said. It tasted like the sort of bitter, too-tough-to-chew garnishes I always left on the side of the plate, but what I did enjoy was the way the tips of Jonathan’s fingers gracefully brushed my lips as he fed me. It was a very intimate gesture, and I would have blushed if I’d been the type.
“Did you sleep well last night?” he asked, his brown eyes boring into me with laser focus. I always heard that there were men who could make you feel as if you were the only one in the room (or in the woods, in this case), and Jonathan Birnbaum had that gift.
“Yes, I conked right out,” I said. “You?”
“I had a dream about you,” he said. “We were in Palm Beach swimming in my pool. You were doing the breast stroke, as I remember.”
“Sadly, the dog paddle is the only stroke I know.” So he was imagining me in a bikini or perhaps as a skinny-dipper—doing the breaststroke.
“At the risk of repeating myself, I’m really glad you’re here, Elaine,” he said. “Something tells me you’re going to make this trip a memorable week for me.”
“Oh, come on. You probably say that to all the women who come to cultivate their bounties.”
He laughed. “Only the ones whose bounties are worth cultivating.”
“Help! Help!” came a shout from behind us. “I fell!”
We turned to find the shout, and it belonged to Beatrice. She was lying flat on her back in the bushes, moaning. She must have slipped on a rock or a branch.
Jonathan hurried to her side with me in tow. Amazingly, every strand of her shiny silvery gray hair was still in place, even her bangs, and there was no evidence of blood or torn clothing. Still, she was in her eighties, and bones were brittle at that age. My mother had her original hips, knees, and teeth—her marbles too—but it was a crapshoot.
“Can you tell me where it hurts, Mother?” Jonathan asked. He lowered himself to the ground and sat next to her.
“Try not to move, Beatrice,” said Kevin, our forager. “Let’s be sure you’re not injured.”
As everyone gathered around and murmured their concern for a member of our newly formed group, Jackie whispered, “I love the way Kevin’s taking charge. He has a cute ass, too.”
“Ow,” Beatrice wailed, ignoring Kevin’s warning and grabbing and clinging to her son’s hand and twisting her body in his direction, nearly dragging him down with her. “I think it’s my back.”
“So you didn’t break a hip or anything?” said Jonathan.
“I don’t think so,” she said, grimacing and wincing and making every pained face I’d ever seen, creating quite the theatrical experience. “My back is sore.”
“It’s always sore,” he said gently. “You have arthritis, Mother.”
Pat whispered, “Do you think she’s faking? Lucy fakes stomachaches when she doesn’t want to go to gym class.”
“Anything’s possible,” I said.
“More than possible,” said Jackie. “She probably saw her son coming on to you, Elaine, and got jealous.”
Kevin told Beatrice to lie back down and then asked her to rate her pain level on a scale from one to ten.
“My back’s a ten,” she said between moans.
“I’ll call for the EMTs,” he said. “Once they get you to the hospital, the doctors will be able to diagnose—”
“I am not going to any hospitals!” Imperious Beatrice had quickly replaced Vulnerable Beatrice.
“It’s just a precaution,” said Kevin. “If everything checks out, they’ll let you come right back here.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “My son will make sure I’m all right. Help me up, Jonathan, would you, dear?”
He didn’t contradict her, as if he’d been through this routine before and knew it would be a waste of time. Instead, he held her hand and carefully pulled her to her feet, while we all stood there watching, a rapt audience.
Beatrice gave us a triumphant wave, like a soldier limping off the battlefield after having been wounded in combat. She arched an eyebrow when she lit on me and said, “My son will take good care of me now.”
Before Jonathan began their walk back to solid ground, he leaned toward me and said, “Welcome to my world. Please don’t let it scare you off.”
“I don’t scare easily,” I said. I was lying, of course. I scared easily and often, but there was something about the way Jonathan had handled his mother that impressed me. He was sweet and kind and did what she’d asked, but without seeming reduced or resentful.
“I’m counting on it,” he said with a wink.
“Wow, he likes you.” Jackie nudged me after they were gone.
“He does,” Pat agreed. “Now aren’t you glad you came this week?”
“We’ll see,” I said. “I only just met him, let’s not forget. But no matter what happens between us, it’s good to be in the country, ninety miles away from you know who.”
My friends didn’t answer, I assumed, because deep down they were still rooting for Team Simon—a fruitless enterprise.
Rebecca handed each of us a Whitley chef’s apron and instructed us to sit in the folding chairs arranged in two rows of five, facing the center countertop that functioned as a stage. I took a seat in the front row; Pat and Jackie sat on either side of me.
“This demo kitchen’s a lot nicer than mine,” said Jackie, who was renting the guesthouse on the estate of one of her longtime landscaping customers. She lived rent free in exchange for tending to the customer’s gardens, and the only downside was a kitchen the size of a closet.
“It’s nicer than most people’s,” I agreed.
One of Whitley’s red barns had been converted into a state-of-the-art facility with high-end appliances, lots of countertop workspaces, and a separate alcove for a long oak dining table with chairs on either side. The table had been set for eleven, so I assumed we’d be sitting down to eat whatever it was we were about to cook. I would have known exactly what the menu was if I’d bothered to sort through the Whitley tote bag I’d picked up at the Welcome Happy Hour, but I’d dumped it somewhere in the cottage and forgotten about it.
“Chef Hill, our artisan in residence, will arrive any minute,” Rebecca said. “He’s a busy man, and we’re lucky to have him whenever he gets here.”
“He’s so worth waiting for!” Connie said, flapping her arms again from the end of our row.
“I hope she doesn’t jump up and start screaming when he gets here,” Jackie muttered. “She’s like a teenybopper at a Justin Bieber concert.”
Jonathan, who was sitting directly behind us, leaned forward and whispered, nodding at Connie, “She’s very enthusiastic, isn’t she?”
I turned around and smiled at him. He smiled back. It was fun flirting with a hot guy in a cooking class, especially because I was newly on the market and hadn’t flirted in awhile. Men you hardly know are exciting in that there’s no stored data of the same inane arguments, no baggage to contend with. Well, okay, Jonathan had Beatrice, who was probably heavier baggage than a Louis Vuitton trunk.
“For those who haven’t had a chance to read his bio,” Rebecca stood next to the counter, tapping her fingers on it, unable to contain her excitement, “Jason Hill became a leader in the creative, clean-food, farm-to-table movement with the launch of The Grow, his flagship restaurant in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen. You each got a complimentary copy of his most recent cookbook, The Grow Eats, in your tote bag last night. His other two cookbooks are available for purchase in our gift shop. A devoted husband and father of two, Chef Hill is a frequent competitor and judge on television cooking shows and appears at food and wine events around the world. He’s the owner-chef of six outposts of The Grow, the cornerstone of his Planetary Empire Corporation whose mission is to cook and serve food that’s grown responsibly and sustainably, to support farm workers’ rights, and to make ingredient choices based on the environment as well as flavor. Currently, he’s scouting locations for his next eatery.”
“He needs to put it in Wisconsin!” Connie shouted. “Wouldn’t that be the best, Ronnie?”
He patted her considerable thigh. “Maybe we’d get a discount since you’ve been to so many of his talks.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” Pat whispered with an apologetic shrug. “The only TV chef I know is Julia Child.”
“Unfortunately, she won’t be coming this week,” I said.
“I’m thinking of basing my main character on Jason Hill,” said Alex, who was seated next to Jackie. “My script is about a chef who loses his restaurant to his young, ambitious sous-chef—only to find that the sous-chef is also angling to steal his wife. It’s All About Eve with a foodie twist.”
“Don’t give up your day job,” I wanted to say but didn’t, because Alex seemed like a decent person. “Sounds fascinating,” I said instead. “Have you always wanted to be a screenwriter?”
“Any kind of writer,” she said. “You should see all the novels and short stories I’ve started and never finished.”
“Maybe this script is the one,” I said. “If it sells, you can turn it into a novel.”
“I wish.” She smiled hopefully. “Then I can give up dentistry and write full-time. Removing tartar from people’s teeth gets old after awhile.”
I was about to share my own trials with crowns and root canals and receding gums, but I noticed that Rebecca was hurrying into the hall outside the kitchen. I assumed she was retrieving Chef Hill so she could usher him in with great fanfare. I turned away to resume my conversation with Alex when I heard an oddly familiar voice coming from the hall, a male voice, a voice that was apologizing to Rebecca for being late.
“I meant to get here earlier, but hey, circumstances beyond my control and all that,” the male voice went on, becoming more identifiable—too identifiable—with every syllable.
It can’t be, I thought. It really couldn’t be, even though Simon often used the fallback line, “Hey, circumstances beyond my control and all that,” when he was late. No. It was impossible, unthinkable, unconscionable that he would suddenly appear at Whitley Farm—as a Cultivate Our Bounty agritourist, no less. No. Just no. I must have been overthinking it.
“Not a problem,” Rebecca said.
“No, really,” said the voice. “One of these days I’ll show up on time. Being late is a weakness of mine, a character flaw.”
This can’t be happening, I thought. Yes, Simon was always late for things, but so were plenty of other people. On the other hand, he was probably the record-holder for being late, and I had the emotional scars to prove it. Take my birthday, for instance, which turned out to be the last straw for our relationship. He’d made a reservation at my favorite restaurant. He’d said we’d have a romantic evening, just the two of us, and that he’d bought a special present for me—a present that he’d wait to give me after we got home from dinner, a present that would have significance for us as a couple. I thought that he didn’t want to make a big show of proposing at the restaurant because it was such a cliché the way men slipped rings in champagne glasses and hid them in bread baskets and arranged for pastry chefs to embed them in the center of chocolate molten lava cakes. I really thought he meant business.
Our reservation for dinner on that fateful night was for seven thirty. I didn’t panic when he didn’t show up at my apartment at six thirty. I didn’t panic when he didn’t show up at seven, either. I didn’t even panic when he didn’t show at seven fifteen, although the restaurant was on the West Side and I lived on the East Side. And it was pouring so hard we’d never in a million years be able to get a cab. Oh, and the restaurant was one of those self-important places that charged your credit card if you bailed at the last minute. I reminded myself that Simon was habitually late and had been since I’d met him on the ship when he used to arrive at dinner every night at least ten minutes after the rest of us were seated. He was forever losing track of time, and I’d learned over the course of our many months together that his intractable tardiness was simply a personality quirk. I loved him in spite of his lateness is what I’m saying.
But when he walked into my apartment at 8:34, toting a heavily soaked, gift-wrapped package as big as a microwave, I was beyond livid. I was livid that he was late on a night that was supposed to be one of the happiest nights of my life. I was livid that our reservation was canceled and I wouldn’t be swooning over the restaurant’s pan roasted loup de mer with the crispy skin, the potato puree, or the lemon artichoke sauce. I was livid—and this was the most egregious item on the already egregious list—that the heavily soaked, gift-wrapped package as big as a microwave turned out to be a microwave. I mean, you can’t put a microwave on the ring finger of your left hand and go around modeling it for everybody now can you?
“I’m sorry you missed our welcome party last night and our foraging expedition this morning,” said Rebecca. “Come and join the others while we wait for Chef Hill to get here.”
I started sweating like some crazed menopausal woman off her HRT, and if volcanic lava could explode out of one’s nose and ears, it would have exploded out of mine.
“Really looking forward to these cooking classes,” said the voice.
“You’ll have a great time,” said Rebecca. “Follow me.”
He doesn’t have the balls, I thought as I heard the footsteps approaching. He has no right to crash my week with my friends. I’ve already begun to entertain the possibility of a relationship with Jonathan Birnbaum. I’ve moved on!
I ducked as they entered the kitchen. My right eyelid began to twitch too, one of those nerve things where you lose control of your body and can’t do a thing about it. I finally glanced up, only because I couldn’t spend the whole class with my chin tucked inside my rib cage, and confirmed that our latecomer for the week, the entire fucking week, was my former boyfriend.
Naturally, he looked stupidly handsome in his jeans and Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, the mesh slim-fit one with the breathable cotton, the one in that liquid-blue shade that accentuated his liquid-blue eyes. The one he’d worn on the ship last year when he’d made me fall in love with him. He had the nerve to wear that shirt of all shirts. But he could have worn one of Whitley’s tote bags and still looked movie-star handsome—George Clooney, Cary Grant handsome, only extremely tall, around six five, which made us the perfect couple, height-wise. He had dark, wavy hair with touches of gray at his temples, sky-blue eyes behind his tortoiseshell glasses, a straight nose, a square jaw, juicy lips, a lean, yet broad-shouldered body, the complete visual package.
He waved at me with a grin that should have been sheepish but was instead full of self-confidence and good cheer, and took a seat in the row behind me, next to Beatrice, who seemed to have recovered just fine from her “fall.” I heard him introduce himself to her and everybody else. He told them his grandparents used to have a farm up in Duchess County and as a boy he’d enjoyed spending weekends there. He regaled them with tales of collecting eggs from the chickens and feeding the baby goats with a bottle and watching Rudy, the rooster, wander into the driveway and nearly get run over by his grandpa Charlie’s tractor. So what if he’d told me the same stories and they were true? He had walked right into my vacation, my cooking class, my space, and charmed the crap out of these people; it was a total breach of breakup etiquette.
Keeping my gaze straight ahead, I reached for Jackie’s hand with my right, Pat’s hand with my left, and hissed, “Do you believe this?” When all they did was giggle, I realized I’d been set up. “You knew?” I hissed some more, searching their faces now. “You knew?”
Jackie leaned in and whispered, “He wants to show you he’s sorry. He asked us if it was okay to come and we said yes.”
I felt a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t turn around.
“Hey, Slim,” said Simon.
“You think this is funny,” I said still looking straight ahead.
“A little,” he agreed. “I can’t wait to see you cooking. It’ll be epic.”
Ha ha ha. I’d give him epic. An epic week of the cold shoulder.
I was relieved when Chef Jason Hill materialized in his chef whites with his entourage of four, each of whom was a young male schlepping a heavy, clanging bag of kitchen tools. He waved halfheartedly at us with the pained expression of a very famous person who resented having to perform in front of such a small audience.
Connie bolted up, threw her arms in the air and said, “He’s heeeere!” and Chef Hill didn’t so much as make eye contact with her. A compact man in his mid thirties, with tattoos that ran up his neck and down the exposed parts of his arms, he had a crooked, tough-guy nose, acne-scarred skin, a shaved head, and a goatee—not a heartthrob in the conventional sense but the sort of anti-hero that culinary stars were made of these days. He reeked of pomposity as he issued commands to the members of his staff, who proceeded to prep all sorts of food with lightning speed, as if their boss had a plane to catch.
While we students continued to sit in our seats, and Rebecca wished us an enjoyable class before fleeing, he barked more orders at the underlings and then looked up at us and said, “Hold tight, gang. Be right back,” after which he disappeared in the direction of the restroom. When he returned a few minutes later, his mood seemed to have lightened. Even from my seat I could guess why: His nostrils were dusted with the tiniest traces of a powder that wasn’t confectioner’s sugar, and he was sniffling.
“I think Chef Hill’s a cokehead,” I whispered to Pat and Jackie. “It would give new meaning to farm-to-table, as in a farm in Colombia.”
“But sodas are bad for you,” said Pat. “Even I know that.”
“She means cocaine, Pat,” said Jackie. “It’s just Elaine being Elaine.”
“It could be true,” I said. “The guy promotes clean food, but if he’s polluting his own body then he’s a phony.” I was about to defend my theory, but Chef Hill began our class by stepping out from behind the counter and walking quickly toward us.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” said Jackie. “He’s not nearly as hot in person. I’m much more into Kevin, our forager. Now there’s a guy I’d like to—”
“I’m Jason Hill,” he said with a rapid-fire delivery, as if the coke had somehow sped up his vocal chords along with his brain. “Hope all you people are ready to cook from the land today. Do you know how to get the best flavor out of food? I’ll tell you how: Get it from farmers who are local. That’s right. Get it from someone in the neighborhood, someone whose growing practices you respect. As a cook, you’ll be the curators of what tastes good, of what’s delicious, and the way to get ‘delicious’ is to get it fresh. Look, I’ll be honest. My family is the world to me. They keep me grounded. They’re my emotional and spiritual center. Feeding them clean, farm-to-table, dock-to-dish meals is the same as telling them I love them. So here’s the deal. I can show you people every recipe and technique ever created, but it all starts with freshness, with purity, with saving our planet by not dumping chemicals on what we put in our mouths.”
Chef Hill nodded at us to indicate his little speech was over, and Lake and Gabriel, clearly his acolytes, leapt to their feet and clapped vigorously, which made everybody else feel obligated to leap to their feet and clap vigorously.
“Thanks, thanks,” said Chef Hill, gesturing for us to sit back down. “Now, just so I have an idea what I’m dealing with this week, how many of you think you know your way around the kitchen, knife skills and all?”
Lake and Gabriel raised their hands and announced that they had their own set of knives at home with their initials on them. Jonathan raised his hand and said he found cooking to be a very satisfying experience. Alex raised her hand and said she enjoyed cooking but was intimidated by recipes with more than six ingredients. Pat lifted her hand and said she cooked for her children but that she often fell back on mac and cheese, sloppy joes, and Mrs. Paul’s frozen fish sticks. And Connie raised her hand and said she’d met Chef Hill before—several times, in fact—and bought all his cookbooks in both print and e-book editions, which didn’t qualify as knowing how to cook but got him to glance in her direction. Simon didn’t raise his hand but took the opportunity to lean over and say to me, “You should have told him about the turkey you roasted at Thanksgiving, Slim. Remember how you left the plastic bag of giblets in there and the plastic melted?”
Yes, hilarious. Good one, Simon. I’d like to roast your bag of giblets.
“I’m splitting you into groups by mixing up the know-hows and the wannabes,” he said. “Then I’ll assign everybody tasks—bang bang.”
“Bang bang,” I would come to learn, was Chef Hill’s catchphrase, the way Emeril became synonymous with “Bam,” and he used it as liberally as he used salt. He sent me, Jonathan, Ronnie, and Gabriel over to a table on which rested two long slabs of meat. They were pork tenderloins that looked like a couple of extremely large penises, pink and glistening under the recessed lighting.
I waved across the room to Jackie, who had gathered with Connie and Alex over what looked like salad and vegetable fixings, and at Pat, poor thing, who’d been exiled to the dessert station with Lake, Beatrice, and Simon, who thought I was waving to him even though I was doing anything but.
“Oh, boy, do I love this animal,” said Ronnie, salivating over the raw meat, which was probably rife with trichinosis.
“According to the background material we got for each recipe, these tenderloins come directly from Whitley’s pasture,” said Gabriel. “They’re grass-fed and low in fat.”
“I haven’t looked in my tote bag,” I confessed. “I don’t even remember where I put it. Is the recipe very difficult?”
“Not if you follow the directions,” he said. “Cooking is like working out at the gym: discipline, discipline, discipline.”
“You’ll be fine, Elaine,” said Jonathan with a reassuring smile. “If you have a question, just ask me.”
“Here I am,” said Chef Hill as he scuttled over to us, his shortness keeping him low to the ground like a crawling insect. “You guys are making the main course, which is pork tenderloin stuffed with prosciutto, pesto, and arugula. Now let’s get at this—bang bang.” He snapped his fingers and the members of his entourage rushed over with bowls of ingredients. “You first.” He nodded at me. “What’s your name, hon?”
Hon. Did this man not have as much respect for workplace protocol as he did for responsibly fertilized soil? “My name is Elaine,” I said, trying to keep the edge out of my voice. “I’m inexperienced in the kitchen, just so you know.”
“We’ll have you cooking like a pro, hon.” He motioned me closer to the cutting board. “You’re going to butterfly these babies after you cut off the silver skin—bang bang.”
I assumed he would demonstrate what the hell he was talking about, but he stood there waiting for me to do what I was told. When neither of us moved for several awkward seconds, Jonathan jumped in and took over, rescuing me just like I’d rescued him earlier. He picked up one of the six knives on the table and began peeling back the layer of fat on the two tenderloins.
“Yeah, that’s how it’s done,” said Chef Hill. “Perfect execution. Can you butterfly these too, guy?”
“Sure.”
Clearly, Jonathan was a ringer. With care and skill, he reached for another knife and, holding the blade flat so it was parallel to the meat, he cut across the pork nearly to the opposite end, and then opened the flaps as you would a book. Covering the tenderloins with plastic wrap, he pounded them with a mallet to make them thinner, and looked up at our chef. “Next step?”
“Next step is you get your own restaurant, guy,” he said, slapping Jonathan on the back. “You’ve got talent. Well done.” He pointed at Gabriel. “You’re up.”
Gabriel’s job was to spread a piece of prosciutto on top of each butterflied and flattened tenderloin, then make the pesto.
“No biggie, right, guy?” said Chef Hill, thumping Gabriel on the back. “All you do is throw everything into the processor and pulse.”
Into the food processor went shelled pistachios, figs, chopped garlic, basil, freshly grated Parmesan cheese, and olive oil. Gabriel mixed it all up, then stood back from the machine admiring his work.
“Now you again, hon,” Chef Hill said to me. He didn’t slap me on the back, but he did give me a little shove I didn’t appreciate. “Spread the pesto on top of the pork, then mound it with the arugula.”
Okay, Elaine. This isn’t brain surgery, I told myself. This is cooking, which is what people all across the world do in rooms called kitchens. I thought of my mother, who cooked but inattentively. I remembered when I was kid, and she was making me macaroni and cheese for dinner. She was stirring it on the stove when the phone rang. It was her older sister, my Aunt Rhoda. Theirs was a fraught sibling relationship, involving long periods in which they refused to speak to each other for reasons no one understood. My mother was so undone by the call that she forgot about the macaroni and cheese and pretty much incinerated it. Is it any wonder I never learned how to cook?
“Come on, hon!” Chef Hill snapped, checking his watch. “You’re holding up the works.”
“Sorry.” I made a mental note to go on Yelp, Urbanspoon, and TripAdvisor and trash Chef Hill for being a rotten cooking instructor.
I picked up a spatula and poured the pesto on top of the prosciutto laid out over the butterflied schlongs, and spread it around. Then I reached for the arugula leaves and deposited them onto the meat.
“See? That wasn’t anything to get all wigged out about,” said the cokehead.
“No, it really wasn’t.” I smiled, thinking of all the nasty things I would write about him online.
“You’re up, guy,” he said, motioning Jonathan toward the meat. “Since you’re the star in this group, how about you fold these babies up, tie them with the string, sear them nice and brown on all sides in the skillet, and finish them off in the oven while I go help the others.” And off he went in Jackie’s direction.
“I guess we’re free to eat the leftovers,” said Ronnie, who emitted one of his hiccup-belches, then reached into the bowl of pistachios and crammed handfuls of them into his mouth. When he’d emptied the bowl of nuts, he grazed on the arugula, getting most of it stuck between his teeth. “I think I’ll go see how Cupcake is doing.”
After Ronnie had waddled over to his wife’s station, Jonathan said, “Cupcake is probably thrilled that she’s breathing Chef Hill’s air.” We shared a laugh. “Not very warm and fuzzy, our chef.”
“No, but hey, you’re good with food, Jonathan,” I said. “You have a natural feel for it, and maybe you really should pursue it as a career. It’s never too late for reinvention.” Like I knew about reinvention. I wore the same pale pink nail polish color year after year. Never changed it, not even when women started painting their nails in blood reds and teal blues and pewter grays. I resisted change the way cats resist baths.
“You’re a very supportive person, Elaine,” said Jonathan. “I don’t get much of that from my mother.”
“What about the rest of your family?” I asked, instead of coming right out and grilling him about his marital status and/or sexual orientation.
“I’m an only child, and my mother’s dependence on me got worse after my father died. I’m all she has, and since my latest divorce—there have been two—she’s afraid I’ll leave Palm Beach and run off to some foodie mecca in Brooklyn.”
“Everybody says Queens is the new Brooklyn. Maybe you should go there and bring her with you.”
“God no.” He laughed. “I take yearly trips with her. I spend Sunday afternoons with her. I handle her financial affairs and put in appearances at her charity functions, but that’s my limit. I lead my own life.” He sounded relieved to get all that off his chest. “Tell me about you? Married? Significant other? Still on the market? None of the above?”
A loaded question, given the circumstances. “I was divorced—once—from a businessman named Eric Zucker. He runs a chain of funeral homes in the Tri-State area. Right after we were married, he started sleeping with Lola, the employee who applies industrial strength makeup to the embalmed corpses. According to my therapist, I had essentially married my father, who was always shtupping redheads behind my mother’s back. When I was twelve, he found one who—quote unquote—‘really rang his chimes.’ He abandoned us for her and never looked back.”
“Must have been tough to deal with on both counts,” said Jonathan. “If it’s any consolation, I’ve got my own war stories. We’ll have a drink and see whose are worse. What about now?”
“For the drink?” We were in the middle of a cooking class.
“No, what about now in terms of any significant other? Is there a boyfriend?”
“Oh, that,” I said as if Simon were no big deal and not watching us from a few yards away. “I’m newly single after ending a relationship.”
“Good,” he said. “So there’s a window of opportunity.”
“For what?” I said, fishing. I found Jonathan more than a little appealing, and there was no harm in getting to know him better.
“For seeing how this goes,” he said, pointing to himself and then to me. “It’s not everyday that I meet a woman willing to stand up to the formidable Beatrice Birnbaum. My ex-wives either cowered in her presence or avoided her altogether.”
“Hey, I’m a pushy New Yorker,” I said. “We mug the muggers.”
He laughed again. “I was born and raised in the city, but I’ve lived in Florida since I was ten, the year my father decided he hated winter. I miss it up here. I’d move back in a minute. Maybe we’ll fall in love and you’ll beg me to move back.”
“Tell me the truth: Do you say things like that to every woman you meet on vacation?”
“No, but I like pretending I do. It’s all part of my smooth-and-sophisticated act. Is it working?”
“It might be.” It was fun trading rom-com retorts instead of stuffing pork tenderloins. “Would you really move back to New York though? What about your—”
I couldn’t finish the sentence because a very loud “Goddammit!” bellowed from across the room.
“What now?” said Jonathan. We looked in the direction of the commotion to find that Chef Hill was grabbing his finger and hopping around as if he’d been set on fire. “At least it’s not my mother this time.”
It turned out that Jackie, Alex, and Connie had been assigned both the amaranth soup and the bulgur-wheat-and-wild-blueberry salad, and that somewhere along the way there had been an incident.
“Missed it,” Jackie said with a helpless shrug, when I was breathless to know what had happened.
“I did too,” said Alex. “I was folding the blueberries into the bulgur, and Jackie was making the vinaigrette. She was asking about my fiancé’s brother, and I was telling her he might be ready to date again after a bad breakup.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose, Chef Hill!” Connie was protesting, her pudgy cheeks scarlet, arms flailing. “I swear I didn’t!” She seemed on the verge of a psychotic break.
“Damn right she didn’t,” Ronnie said in defense of his wife.
“Well, I sure as shit didn’t do it to myself,” said the chef, who yelled for an underling to help. Blood was gushing from the forefinger on his right hand despite his having wrapped it in a kitchen towel. “She could have hacked me to death.”
I’m sorry to report that my first thought was not for the chef’s health and wellbeing. It was for my own. I vowed not to let a single molecule of the soup cross my lips, not when there was a possibility that his bloodily fluid had contaminated it, and not unless someone made a fresh batch after the cutting board had been scrupulously scrubbed.
“I was just trying to do my best!” Connie cried. “I wanted to please you.”
“You said you had knife skills, for Christ’s sake,” Chef Hill muttered, while a young man with a ponytail and black stainless steel studs in his earlobes wrapped a bandage around his boss’s injured finger. “I was demonstrating how to chop the amaranth because you didn’t have a clue and neither did the other ladies. But did they crowd me at the cutting board? No. Did they get in my space? No. Did they grab a serrated bread knife and start chopping amaranth where my finger was? No. I mean who does that?”
“Listen, buddy, she didn’t mean to hurt you,” said Ronnie, puffing out his chest with indignation. “She has all your cookbooks. She wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
“She’s just a little… eager,” Jonathan chimed in, proving once again that he was chivalrous. “Why don’t I start from scratch on the amaranth soup, since I’ve read the recipe for it?”
“Fine,” said Chef Hill. “I owe you, guy.” He slapped Jonathan on the back with his uninjured hand.
“You’re good to go,” the medic underling told his boss. “Looks like a superficial wound, no stitches necessary.”
“Just keep that one away from me,” Chef Hill said, nodding at Connie.
“It was an accident!” she said emphatically, her tone angrier now, less pleading. “It’s not like I tried to kill you!”