Free Recipe for Disaster by Stacey Ballis Page B

think is the most impressive—they volunteer time and not just money. They are as likely to be on a Habitat for Humanity work site in gloves and dust masks as they are sitting at the board meeting or dancing at the gala. Caroline discovered that the life suits her; she has time for her gorgeous garden, and a passion for cooking, and she’s learning Portuguese. She doesn’t miss the cutthroat world of multimillion-dollar real estate in the least. She makes us soup when we’re sick, and brings us vases of cut flowers from her garden, sources the perfect presents, plans fun evenings.
    “JE-SUS, Caroline, why do you make all this amazing food and then try to ruin my appetite with all your nipple talk?” I love the banter between them. They couldn’t be more different, but they’ve been friends forever. Their dads were colleagues and Caroline babysat Hedy when she was little. According to Caroline, Hedy idolized her. According to Hedy, Caroline was a geeky bookish teenager who couldn’t find a better friend than a feisty seven-year-old. But for only-child Hedy, it is clear that Caroline was always the older sister she needed, and for Caroline, the only girl with three older brothers, a little sister wasn’t exactly an unwelcome thing either.
    I met them at the same time, at a client meeting eight years ago. Caroline was the Realtor, Hedy was the interior designer, I was still relatively new at MacMurphy, and it was the first project I was managing on my own. We worked late, ended up going out for dinner; two bottles of wine later we were best buds. Marie is my oldest and dearest friend, and until I met Grant, the only person who knew my secret heart. We met when we were fourteen, the one summer I went to overnight camp. Joe had gotten a summer job in the North Woods, renovating an old barn to serve as a new mess hall and kitchen, and agreed to also serve as the camp handyman, in no small part so that I could attend for free, and I think in an attempt to get a bit closer with my mom for a cozy summer in the woods. Marie and I were in the same cabin, she was also one of the freebie kids, her fees paid for by some sort of fresh-air-fund program for city kids, and we were both sort of misfits, which bonded us permanently. We didn’t live far from each other at home, and although we went to different high schools, we always stayed in close contact, especially since we both remained in Chicago and lived at home for college. I brought Marie to the third girls’ dinner I had with Hedy and Caroline, and a perfect square was magically formed. It was like
The Craft
. But without magical hair-color changing. Or the nightmare of high school witchery.
    “Nipples are totally allowable. Even men have them.” Caroline waves off Hedy’s admonition.
    “Ooo! I did a man last week, my first one!” Marie is very excited about this. “He cried like a baby. And not because of the emotional psyche part like my women patients sometimes do, he cried because it hurt. The women never mention the pain. Isn’t that weird?”
    God bless her. Marie went to art school to be a painter, got fascinated with skin as a medium, and started doing all that trompe l’oeil body painting that was so popular in the 1990s after Demi’s famous
Vanity Fair
cover. She put herself through school mostly doing that for industrial parties and advertising campaigns, and then got hired to paint fake tattoos on actors for a biker movie that was shooting locally. She met her longtime live-in boyfriend John on the set; he was the consulting tattoo artist. Then seven years ago her stepmom, Leanne, got breast cancer and they couldn’t save her nipples. The doctor offered to tattoo new ones for her, and Leanne asked John if he could do it instead. He said he could, but that he thought Marie should do it, since her eye for realism and color and dimensions was so amazing.
    Marie spent six months practice-tattooing slabs of smelly pigskin with John training her, and then