Free The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister Page A

they left the class.
    “For you to take home,” she said. “A symbol of a long and happy marriage.”
    “Or maybe . . .” Helen looked at Carl, who smiled and nodded. Helen took the foil package and went quickly out the door. Lillian and Carl watched as she caught up with Claire at the front gate. The two women talked for a few moments, then Helen leaned in and kissed Claire on the cheek. When Helen walked back to the kitchen, her face was radiant, her hands empty.

Antonia
    Antonia drove up to the address written in her notebook and stopped, amazed. In a checkerboard neighborhood of craftsman bungalows and 1950s brick ramblers, the old Victorian house stood tall and splendid despite its obvious years of wear, the talcum-powder paint and tangled rhododendron bushes, the downspout hanging loose in the air like an arm caught in mid-wave. It was impossible to look at the house without erasing the years and the houses around it, to imagine it set in the midst of a vast track of land, gazing out across a long, rolling slope of green to the water and the mountains beyond. A home built by a man besotted, for a woman to whom he had promised the world.
    Around the house, arched gateways led to a series of flowerbeds and doll-size orchards, moss-covered stone benches, a circular lawn. Antonia knew the gardens had nothing to do with her work as a kitchen designer. All the same, she couldn’t resist wandering through them, one after another like fairy stories in a well-loved children’s book, even though it meant leaving her sodden shoes at the front door when she finally did enter the house.
    The sound of the door closing behind her bounced off the tall ceilings of the entry hall and up the wide, wooden staircase leading to the second story. Her clients would not be the first people to change the house, she observed as she looked about her. Black and white linoleum tile made a chessboard of the front hallway; the parlor to her right was a startling shade of fuchsia. But in the living room to her left she could see the thin strips of the original oak floors and a trio of bay windows framing a group of ancient cherry trees, their knobby branches twisting toward the sky. She crossed the formal dining room, adrift without its table and chairs, and into the kitchen that was the reason for her visit.
    It was a generous room, with yet another bay for a small eating table that seemed set into the garden itself, and space in the center of the room for a large, battle-scarred wooden prep table that claimed ownership with an air of long-standing occupation. But it appeared the former owners’ remodeling urges had extended to the kitchen as well. Judging by the fake oak cabinets and the orange Formica countertop, the avocado and turquoise linoleum gracing the floor, Antonia guessed a 1970s burst of creativity. Still, cabinets could be changed and the spaces were good. Very good.
    Antonia went over to the prep table, running her fingers affectionately along its worn surface, then looked beyond it to the other end of the kitchen, where a huge brick fireplace, blackened with age and use, was set in its own ten-foot-tall wall, flanked on one side by a mammoth six-burner stove and on the other by a window seat looking out to the raised beds of a deserted kitchen garden. Antonia walked to the fireplace and touched the soot gently with her fingers, bending her head to the opening and inhaling deeply, waiting for the smell of smoke and sausages, the sound of juices dripping and hissing on the hot wood below.
    The front door opened and she heard the eager voices of her clients as they walked through the house.
    “Antonia, are you already here?” Susan walked into the kitchen with a purposeful step. “There you are! Isn’t the house marvelous?”
    Antonia nodded and straightened up, wiping her hands surreptitiously on the back of her black pants before reaching out to shake hands with Susan and her husband-to-be.
    “I mean, it’s horrible.”