Free The Inn at Lake Devine by Elinor Lipman

speaking to both parents daily.
    After four years in the country at UMass, two friends and I had rented rooms in an MIT fraternity that had lost its charter and had become something like a boardinghouse. In another century, it had been a narrow, elegant bowfront house on Commonwealth Avenue with a magnolia tree on either side of the stoop. I prepared meals gratis for my housemates, turning their weekly grocery dollars into crocks of soups and giant casseroles. I got better and more adventurous with cheap ingredients: gigantic packages of chicken backs and necks; beef from shinbones; lamb shanks; day-old bread, bruised fruit, turbot fillets flash-frozen in Iceland. By midyear, as my housemates were taking national boards and writing theses, I announced to my friends—and admitted to myself—that I had found my calling.
    I paid my cooking-school tuition from my wages as an assistant to the artist who designed Star Market’s circular. BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE , under a six-pack of ginger ale; 10¢/LB ., below a cabbage; GOOD THRU 11/9/73 , in the corner of a coupon, were my contributions. I had the right idea—that I belonged around large quantities of food—and for a while it seemed a drafting table in a supermarket’s corporate office was a step in the right direction.
    Within weeks, I found myself lingering at the deli counter where I picked up my lunch. There was nothing creative going on there, but I envied the short-order cook his quirky sandwich-making, knife-wielding mannerisms. He caught me watching, and teased me into confessing my restaurant dreams. It’s a profession, he said, not a trade. This was his day job. Nights he worked at the Café Budapest, where the mayor ate, he told me; where Red Auerbach and John Havlicek ate, and actresses from the Wilbur. And picture this, kiddo, as long as you’re considering rewarding careers: Their pastry chef? A college graduate who trained in Paris? She could bring tears to people’s eyes with her desserts.
    “Chips?” he asked as he bagged my turkey sandwich. He leaned closer and confided, “Restaurants are going to be the double features of tomorrow. By that I mean people will consider a beautifulmeal and a bottle of wine all they need for an evening’s entertainment.” He winked.
    “I’ll remember that,” I said.
    It took thirty weeks of training at the unaccredited Ecole les Trois Etoiles in Newton Centre, working alongside housewives who wanted to master the art of pâté brisé and take the occasional catering job with their husbands’ firms. With my executive-chef dreams, I was something of a novelty and a teacher’s pet. I completed ten weeks, signed up for ten more, took ten more again. The head of the school, M. Tardieu, was an imperious Alsatian, who would grab my rolling pin or my cleaver and finish what I had not so skillfully begun. Because he knew I was looking for a career instead of a hobby, and because he had five daughters of his own, he turned his exasperation into resolve. He called me his “valedictorian” in one reference letter—I’d stuck around long enough to be the best knife handler and saucier—and that word above his unreadable signature was enough to get me my first job.
    P ammy had disappointed my parents by marrying Danny O’Connor, of Jolson Terrace, one of the boys we’d chased off our street a dozen years before. He’d gone to Immaculate Conception through eighth, then switched to Newton South, where he and Pammy had gone steady for their entire junior and senior years. My parents were privately heartbroken, even though they’d never forbidden us to date boys outside the fold. Danny was no genius, just a polite young man with a head for agribusiness. At sixteen he had made deals with neighbors for whole seasons’ worth of mowing, raking, and shoveling. After high school, Pammy had gone to UMass, and Danny, though planning to make landscaping his life’s work, had gone to Framingham State. He dropped out with no regrets