Blythe crouched over a shady patch of the backyard. After dampening it with water, she dug up a small sample with a kitchen spoon. She rubbed a bit between her thumb and index finger. Gritty. She tried molding a handful into a ball, and it fell apart. Amelia’s soil was too sandy, as she’d been warned. But the soil could be enriched, the problem fixed. She’d had the opposite issue in her backyard in Philadelphia—too much clay. And therein was the reason Blythe loved gardening; in gardening, unlike life, there was a solution to almost every problem.
She was going to be a grandmother! Oh, how she was dying to tell Kip. But Marin insisted that she not tell anyone.
“Not until I know more,” she’d said. Blythe would try to contain herself.
In the meantime, her thoughts kept turning to the day Marin was born. Kip drove her to Lankenau Hospital at four in the morning, and she remembered wondering if he would leave her in a few hours to go to the office. She asked him if he would, and he shook his head. “Is that what you think of me?”
Sadly, it was.
Her parents drove in from Michigan, and the Bishops of course were there. Kip was not in the delivery room with her, and in the clutches of labor pain, she preferred it that way. She couldn’t imagine him acting like a typical father-to-be did in movies, holding his wife’s hand and mopping her brow and saying, “Push! You can do it!” The very thought was worse than the contractions bending her insides.
After four hours of labor, Marin was born. Eight pounds, eight ounces, with a headful of dark hair and big gray-brown eyes. Blythe clutched her to her chest, and the tiny thing claimed her breast with an energy and confidence that flooded Blythe with a love she’d never felt before.
Kip rushed into the room. He had tears in his eyes. She was shocked, genuinely floored, by the raw emotion in his face. He kissed her, then gingerly kissed the baby.
“I love you,” he told Blythe.
Blythe cried, completely overwhelmed. Kip sat on the edge of the bed. He took her free hand, closing it in his own.
“We’re a family now,” he said. Blythe nodded through her tears.
Kip’s mother proclaimed she’d never seen a newborn with dark eyes. Blythe’s parents happily decided she looked just like the Welsh Madigans. Blythe, of course, knew otherwise. And in the first, and last, acknowledgment of the man who gave her baby life, she named her new daughter Marin, “of the sea.”
Blythe looked up; Amelia waved at her through the kitchen window. She was busy cooking away with Rachel, and Blythe was thankful they were too preoccupied to pay her much mind. She pulled out her phone and dialed.
Kip answered his cell on the second ring. Then she realized: it was a Saturday and he was not at the office.
“You back home?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “In fact, we’ve decided to stay the summer.”
Kip made a familiar, disapproving tsking sound. “This your idea, Blythe? I can’t see Marin making this decision.”
“And why not?”
“Because she is happiest when she is productive and working. She needs to get back to real life. Enough of this licking her wounds.”
She sighed. “You are so infuriating sometimes.” The truth was, even this aggravating conversation was of strange comfort to her. As irrational as it was, hearing his voice made her feel like everything would be all right. It always had. “If you’re so sure what’s best for her and disapprove of what’s going on, then come out here for a day. I need to talk to you, and, more important, your daughter needs you.”
“Don’t be melodramatic.”
She couldn’t hold back. Marin might not want her father to know, but he should know. And if that’s what it would take to get him out there, Blythe would tell him.
“Marin’s pregnant.”
A brief silence. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Rachel would not, as Marin had put it, waste her time and make herself miserable. No more hours spent pining after Luke Duncan. She’d come out there to get to know Amelia, and that was exactly what she was going to do.
Especially now that Amelia had invited her into her ultimate domain: the kitchen.
It was a foreign environment. Fran had told her one thing and one thing only about cooking: Don’t start. “Once you’re cooking for everyone, they expect it of you.” Her mother, Rachel’s grandmother Esther from Philadelphia, had been on call in the kitchen her entire life. “And what kind of life is that?” Fran said.
She repeated her mother’s only culinary wisdom to Amelia.
“I feel sorry for your mother that she would feel that way.”
“Oh, it’s fine. I’m just saying I really don’t have any cooking experience. My grandmother did cook a lot, but she lives on the East Coast and we see her only once a year for the Jewish holidays.”
“Where was her family from?”
“Russia. Poland. Eastern Europe. So her cooking was pretty meat-heavy—lots of brisket. And potatoes. And this stuff called kasha varnishkes.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
Rachel nodded. “I did.”
“I bet if you had it right now, you would feel like you were at that house. And you would feel like a child again.”
She smiled. “Probably.”
“Food is so powerful. It connects us to the past. It sustains us. It’s personal but also communal. So I am happy, deeply happy, to teach you a few Portuguese dishes. We have such a rich culinary tradition.”
“I love Mediterranean food,” Rachel said.
“Our dishes use the flavors of Mediterranean cooking—the olive oil, the bay leaves, coriander, onions, paprika. But it’s the way these flavors are combined that make Portuguese dishes unique. Our food is influenced by many cultures going back centuries: the Phoenicians, the Turks, the Moors.”
“Sounds amazing. I’m just warning you that I have zero technique.”
Amelia laughed. “It’s not a matter of technique. We cook com gusto—‘to your liking.’ The way I do it might not be the way a neighbor does it. Forget about right or wrong. I’ll show you the way my mother taught me and the way her mother taught her and so on. And someday, you might show your daughter.” Amelia pulled out a white tin box from one of the cupboards. She lifted the lid and showed Rachel what had to be a hundred index cards separated by divider tabs.
“You should look through here. Familiarize yourself. Let me know what interests you the most. It’s organized alphabetically but the recipe names are in Portuguese, so write things down as you go or you might lose track.”
“Nadine’s lucky she grew up with this,” Rachel said.
Amelia’s face clouded. “Nadine did not have much interest in the kitchen. Maybe she does now, living in Italy. I don’t know. But I did not get to share most of this with her—not the way I learned with my mãe.”
“Oh.” She didn’t know what else to say. She looked out the window and saw Blythe digging around in the ground.
“What’s Blythe doing?”
Amelia glanced outside. “She’s trying to figure out a way to grow a vegetable garden back there.” She turned back to the task at hand. “So. The first meal. As you have seen, we cook once a week for Thomas. Bart has two jobs—running the art gallery and directing the theater company. And Thomas has bad days where he can’t get out of bed.”
Rachel nodded. “Luke told me he’s really worried about him.”
“We all are. This town has been so afflicted by the AIDS crisis. But we have learned as a community how to make this a place where people can live with the disease. Painters can paint and writers can write and not worry about where their next meal will come from.”
“I want to help.”
“And you will. We’ll make a roast chicken for tomorrow night. And Thomas likes my homemade cheese. It needs to sit for twenty-four hours, so we’ll get that going and then move on to the main course.”
Rachel had never considered the notion of actually making cheese. Cheese was something that simply existed. She shared this thought with Amelia, who told her, “When I was growing up, making cheese was a weekly Sunday-afternoon activity with my mother. She took her cheese very seriously. When I first met my husband, Otto—your grandfather, by the way—and he came for lunch to meet her, he declined the cheese and I don’t think she ever forgave him.”
Rachel laughed.
“I’m quite serious,” said Amelia. “I’ll admit, it doesn’t look that pretty if you’re not used to it. But a good Portuguese man should have known better. It was a sign.”
Cheese is important. Noted.
“We only use three ingredients: whole milk, rennet tablets, and coarse salt.”
“What’s rennet?”
“Rennet causes milk to become cheese by separating it into solids and liquids—the curds and the whey.”
“But I mean, what is it? Is it a chemical?”
“No—it’s all natural. It’s an enzyme, usually extracted from the stomach lining of young calves.”
What? Oh no. This was a problem. No, she wasn’t vegan—she would eat dairy and eggs. But this was pushing it. Really pushing it. She would have to refuse the cheese, repeating the bad juju started by her grandfather decades ago. “Um, Amelia—I’m a vegetarian. I can’t…I just…”
Amelia shook her head. “What’s with all this vegetarianism? I don’t get it. If you ask me, women need red meat.” And then, maybe seeing Rachel’s look of agony, she relented. “You don’t have to eat the cheese. You just have to watch and learn. Deal?”
“Deal,” Rachel said, smiling.